Chapter Fifteen
Bremen’s kept them until well past midnight.
A detective took Anja’s statement twice, circling back the second time to ask why a private security consultant had zip-tied two men who then vanished during a gas explosion nobody could yet explain.
Vic had specifically said not to trust the police, so she gave him the same clean, useless answers both times.
He didn’t believe her. He also had nothing to hold her on, so eventually, he let her go with a card and a warning not to leave town.
Please.
Her bosses would eat the detective alive and spit out his bones.
Typical of most hospitals, this one smelled of antiseptic layered over industrial cleaning products.
Barnes-Jewish had Curtis on the cardiac floor for observation.
Lydia stood when they entered his room. Her mascara was gone, and her hands were wrapped around a paper cup of coffee she wasn’t drinking.
“They don’t know yet.” Her voice cracked on the last word. “They’re running tests. His heart rhythm went strange, and nobody will give me a straight answer.”
Right on cue, Anja’s phone buzzed once, then again, the deliberate double pulse Tyler used when something couldn’t wait. Remi had called Luke and Logan to have them notify the St. Louis Police Department and the hospital to run tests on Curtis’s bloodwork.
Anja angled the screen and thumbed it open.
Tox screen back. Digoxin. Way above therapeutic range.
Somebody had put a heart medication into a man who, as far as she knew, didn’t take one, and they’d been careless enough, or arrogant enough, to give him nearly enough to finish the job outright.
“He’s where he needs to be, and he’s getting excellent care.” Leo wrapped an arm around Lydia to comfort her. “That’s what matters right now.”
They stayed for twenty minutes. Curtis was asleep, tethered to a monitor that beeped in a rhythm Anja didn’t love. His face was drawn against the pillow, every one of his sixty-eight years suddenly visible. Leo remained silent as they left, and Anja didn’t push him.
She waited until Remi had pulled out of the parking garage before she spoke.
“Digoxin. Way above what a therapeutic dose would be. Whoever did this wasn’t trying to be subtle. They were trying to be fast.”
“And they nearly succeeded,” Leo muttered.
Remi’s gaze moved constantly between the mirrors, checking them even more than the road, doubling back twice through the Central West End’s streets before he was satisfied nobody had picked them up. The house sat dark when they turned into the driveway. Remi killed the engine.
“I’ll make sure everything’s locked up tight for the night. Go sleep.”
Anja didn’t argue. She followed Leo inside and up the stairs. Out of habit, she paused in the hall, listening to the house settle around them. The furnace ticked below, and the wind pushed at a nearby window.
At some point, her hands had started shaking. She hadn’t noticed until now.
“Hey.” Leo took her hands in his. “Are you okay?”
“They got away with the syringes.” The words came out clipped, angrier than she had meant them to sound.
“We have no prints. No way to know what they were going to put in you, though I suspect it was the same digoxin they injected into Curtis. I had him cuffed, Leo. I had him on the ground, and then the explosion happened. By the time I could see straight again, both of them were gone.”
He cupped her face. “Yeah, I was there. But you couldn’t have predicted a bomb.”
“I should have expected an exit strategy. Professionals like that don’t walk into a job without one.
” She inhaled deeply, trying to force the tremor from her fingers, but it didn’t help.
“I had him. I had the one piece of physical evidence that could’ve told us what we’re dealing with, and I lost it. ”
“Anja.” He ran a finger down her cheek, likely feeling the tremor she’d been trying to hide. His expression shifted, the argument draining out of it. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m fine.”
“You are not. You’re vibrating like a tuning fork. What happened back there when you found me?”
Anja didn’t want to answer that, but she did anyway because something about his face made it impossible not to.
“I heard you call my name in the courtyard, and then you were just gone. Swallowed by the crowd. I spent maybe ninety seconds not knowing where you were, and it was the longest ninety seconds of my life.” Her voice sounded unfamiliar.
“I’ve done extraction under fire. I’ve had guns pointed at me and not blinked.
And I have never in my career been as scared as I was in those ninety seconds, because it wasn’t a mission. It was you.”
Leo gathered her in his arms. She let herself stand there with her face against his shirt, breathing in the smell of smoke and antiseptic and him underneath it, proof he was still solid and warm and alive.
“I’m here,” he murmured against her hair. “Right here.”
“I know.” Her voice cracked on it, just slightly, and she hated that it did. “I need to feel it.”
He drew back far enough to look at her and cupped her face with one hand, thumb tracing the line of her cheekbone. Then he kissed her slowly, as if he had all the time in the world.
She kissed him back harder, both hands fisting in the front of his shirt, urging him into the room without breaking contact. Slow and careful wasn’t what tonight required. She needed proof, immediate and undeniable, that the man in her arms had a pulse.
They made it to the bed in a tangle of hands and half-shed clothing.
Anja stopped thinking in checklists and threat assessments the moment his mouth found the curve of her throat and the swell of her breast. There was only the warmth of his skin under her palms, the low sound he made when she took him in her hand, and the certainty of his weight settling over her in the dark.
He was alive and hers for as long as the night would let her keep him.
Later, tangled in the sheets with her head on his chest and his heart beating under her ear, she let herself stop shaking.
“Better?” he asked into her hair.
“Getting there.” She traced a slow line along his ribs, feeling the rise and fall of him breathing under her palm. “Don’t ever do that again.”
“Get attacked by two men, a smoking trash can, and a bomb at a wake?”
“Yes. That, specifically.” She pressed a kiss to his sternum, right over the solid drum of his heart, and closed her eyes. “I mean it, De Luca. I don’t get to lose you. Not to this. Not to anything.”
#
Leo woke to a screaming smoke alarm. For a split-second, he thought he was dreaming he was back at the wake, but then the smell penetrated, acrid and chemical.
Leo bolted upright. Anja was moving beside him, yanking on the shirt she’d discarded hours earlier and grabbing her phone.
“Up. Now.” Her voice carried none of the softness from an hour ago. “Shoes. Clothes. Phone. Don’t stop for anything else.”
He dressed quickly and shoved his feet into a pair of Nikes.
After swiping his phone off the nightstand, he followed her into the hallway where orange light flickered against the window at the far end.
Remi met them in the corridor, weapon drawn, shouting, “Fire’s spreading fast.” His face was grim in the strobing light from the hallway smoke detector. “Two separate origin points.”
“Back stairs.” Anja grabbed Leo’s wrist and hauled him toward the servants’ staircase at the rear of the house, the one that emptied near the kitchen and the side door instead of the smoke-choked main hall. “Move.”
The stairwell was hot, heat radiating up through the walls as if the house itself had a fever. Leo’s lungs burned, smoke thickening with every step down. Below them, glass shattered.
“That’s not the fire,” Anja’s warning came out low and urgent. “Someone’s breaching.”
Remi broke off toward the office.
“Remi!” Anja’s voice cracked through the haze. “Where are you going?”
He didn’t answer. Three seconds later he was back, the manila envelope Vic had sent Leo gripped in one fist. He shoved it into his jacket and fell in step behind them, weapon back up.
“That wasn’t worth your life,” Anja snapped. “Good instinct. Terrible timing.”
“Already back.” Remi didn’t break stride. “Side door’s compromised. We go through the mudroom, straight to the Escalade.”
They ran. Leo’s chest heaved against smoke and adrenaline in equal measure. Anja’s hand fisted in the back of his shirt to keep him moving. Remi cleared the path ahead with a focus that left no room for anything but the next three seconds.
The mudroom door burst open onto the side yard, cold air slapping Leo’s face. The open sky felt like salvation.
Then the first shot cracked through the darkness. The doorframe beside Leo’s head exploded into splinters.
“Down!” Anja shoved him sideways behind the stone retaining wall that bordered the garden. He hit the ground hard, all the air punched out of him. Two more shots followed in quick succession, one burying itself in the mudroom siding, the other close enough that he heard it whine past.
“Multiple shooters.” Remi had his weapon up, returning fire toward the tree line in three controlled bursts that sent whoever was out there scrambling for cover. “Two positions. Maybe three.”
“Escalade’s forty yards.” Anja’s voice stayed calm, even with gunfire cracking around them. “We move on Remi’s cover. Stay low behind me.”
“Anja—”
“Now, Leo.”
They broke from behind the wall in a dead sprint, Remi laying down fire. Leo felt the round before he understood what it was. A hot, tearing line across his upper arm spun him half a step sideways before he forced his legs to keep moving.
“I’m hit.” He got the words out through gritted teeth, still running because stopping wasn’t an option with bullets chewing up the grass around his feet. “I’m okay, keep going.”
“Don’t stop.” Anja’s hand closed around his good arm, hauling him the last ten yards to the Escalade, with Remi covering their backs the entire way. Anja shoved him inside and then returned fire for Remi to move. As soon as all three of them were inside, the engine roared to life.
The vehicle lurched into motion before Leo’s door had fully closed, gravel spitting from the tires as Remi cut across the lawn and onto the drive, headlights off, running on nothing but the orange glow of the house burning behind them.
Two more rounds caught the rear window, spiderwebbing the glass without breaching it, and then they were through the gate and onto the street.
The gunfire fell away behind them like something from another life.
Leo pressed a hand against his arm and felt a warm stream of blood soaking through his sleeve.
“Let me see.” Anja unbuckled her belt and crawled over the console before they’d cleared the block.
Her hands moved his aside as she assessed the damage with a speed that told him this wasn’t the first gunshot wound she’d triaged in a moving vehicle.
“Through and through, upper arm, muscle only. You’re not going to bleed out on me, De Luca, so stop looking like you’re planning your own funeral. ”
“Boy, do you know how to reassure a patient.”
“I’m not a doctor, and I don’t get paid to be comforting. My job is to keep you alive.” She stripped off her jacket and pressed it hard against the wound, guiding his good hand to hold it in place. “Keep pressure on that.”
Remi took three hard turns in succession, checking the mirrors between each one, before he exhaled and eased off the gas. “Nobody behind us. Whoever hit the house wasn’t set up for a pursuit, just an ambush.”
“They knew where we were.” Anja’s voice had gone tight, working through it in real time. “The house wasn’t in any system. Nobody finds that address by accident.”
“A tail?” Remi frowned. “Somebody made us at some point and we missed it?”
“No.” Leo’s arm throbbed in time with his pulse, but the thought that had been circling since the first shot landed with enough weight to say out loud. “My apartment. They didn’t just take the transcript. They went through everything, including the suits.”
He watched the pieces click into place behind Anja’s eyes. “The garment bag. You brought a suit home from your apartment for the wake.”
His stomach turned over thinking about every hour that suit had hung twenty feet from where he slept. “If they planted something in the lining before I ever picked it up—”
“They didn’t need to follow us. They just waited for the signal to move.”
“There’s another possibility,” Remi pointed out. “Someone could’ve slipped something into your pocket at the wake.”
“That makes more sense, and it would’ve been easy to do with so many people around.” Anja sighed. “That’s on me. I should’ve realized they’d do something like that.”
“No.” Remi’s voice was steel. “You are not blaming yourself. I could’ve thought of it and didn’t. Don’t,” he chastised as Anja opened her mouth. “I know you’re lead on this case, but if there’s blame going around, it’s shared.”
She didn’t look convinced as she pulled out her phone with the hand that wasn’t pressing Leo’s jacket to his arm, thumb dialing.
“Tyler, it’s me. The safe house has been compromised.
We’ve got one gunshot wound, non-critical.
” A muscle twitched in her cheek. “The rig’s gone.
We didn’t have time to grab it. We got out with Vic’s envelope and nothing else.
” Another pause. “No, don’t ask. Can you notify Luke and Logan?
And get BeBe pulling a new location, please. ”
Remi merged onto the highway heading north, no destination yet beyond distance. Leo watched the city lights blur past the shattered rear window, his arm throbbing under Anja’s hand and his mind circling back to a garment bag he’d carried out of his own apartment without a second thought.
“They’ve been three steps ahead of us since the beginning,” he muttered, mostly to himself.
“Not anymore.” Anja didn’t look away, even as the Escalade took the highway ramp at a speed that pressed them both back into the seats.
Her phone buzzed. She glanced at the screen, then back at him.
“BeBe’s got something. Forty minutes out.” In the dim light of the dashboard, and for just a second, Anja’s professional reserve slipped enough to show him what was underneath it. “Hang on. We’re almost clear.”