THREE
God. She was fucking here.
His mind kept spinning on the same gear—she’s here, she’s real, that’s Ryss sitting right THERE. All the time, a hole in his chest, barely scabbed over even after all this time, bled out worse than the wound that actually put him in a hospital bed.
He stepped up to the bed and reached for her hand, which she kept clasped around the wound.
She let him take it without a word.
This was the part that scared him. He could have handled yelling. Hell, he’d braced for it the entire walk over here. He could even handle the fury burning in her hazel-green eyes back in the dining room.
This was worse.
This was a part of Caryssa he’d never seen before.
This was stone.
He touched her hand, and she stiffened, opening her fingers to show him a clean slice across her palm. It wasn’t deep and the bleeding had stopped.
“How did you get this?”
“Fell on ice.” Three flat words, but just hearing her voice had his skin rippling with goose bumps. Christ, how many nights had he lain awake, wishing he could hear her voice again?
As he cleaned her cut, he studied her, forcing himself to keep it clinical. She’d changed in last six years—the girl he remembered had only the promise of maturing into a woman.
Her hair was still deep brown with a reddish warmth he didn’t remember, or maybe he’d just forgotten, the details of memory sanded down by time.
Her hazel-green eyes used to go soft when she looked at him and now they gave him absolutely nothing.
Light freckles scattered across her nose. And there—just above her left brow was a scar, fainter now, softened by years.
That memory sliced through him, a blade between his ribs.
He remembered exactly how she’d gotten it. On one of their first dates, they’d hiked up some overgrown trail in a state park. She’d slipped near the top and gone down hard on the jagged edge of a rock.
It had bled like a stab wound compared to how small the cut actually was. And Rivers had torn off a strip of his own shirt to press against it while she cursed at him in a way that made him fall a little bit in love right there on the trail.
Afterward, he’d gotten her ice cream at a roadside stand with only two flavors, and she’d smiled at him over the cone as if the whole ordeal had been worth it just for a small vanilla cone.
He cleaned her wound with antiseptic and she didn’t so much as blink. Meanwhile, he stole glances at her face. He used to be able to read every flicker that crossed her face. Used to know from across a crowded room exactly what she was thinking just by the angle of her chin.
Now he had a locked door between them, and he was the one who handed her the key to shut him out.
“Ryss.” He kept his voice low and felt her jerk anyway. “Let me explain—”
“Don’t.” She didn’t even look at him.
He tried a different angle, a lighter one that might shatter the ice she’d encapsulated herself in.
“How’s your family? Your mom still doing the—”
“I’m not interested in catching up right now.”
He swallowed the rest of whatever he’d been about to ask and went back to the cut, taping gauze over it with hands that weren’t as steady as he needed them to be.
“Anything else hurt?” He watched her face closely, prepared for an explosion that never came. He almost wished she’d tell him how much he’d hurt her when he left and pour out the years of pain he knew he’d given her to carry.
She held his gaze long enough that he understood, with total clarity, how much she hated him in this moment.
The icy facade she gave him wasn’t just cold—it had teeth.
Quietly, she said, “My knee.”
Her pants were loose enough to work upward, and he crouched to inspect the injury, too damn aware of her shapely calf and her milky skin. He found her knee swollen and starting to bruise along one side.
He made a noise and crossed the room to the supply cabinet, aware of her tracking him. He located an ice pack and activated it, then returned to press it gently against Caryssa’s knee.
“Well,” he said, forcing a lightness to his tone even as he knew how wrong it sounded the second it left his mouth, “you wreck your knee on ice, and the cure is also ice. Funny how that works.”
He waited just a beat before hope died.
She’d never been a woman to laugh easily—she was serious without being cold, at least back then. When Caryssa laughed, he always felt as if he’d won a prize.
Right now, he’d give a hell of a lot to even see a twitch at the corner of her mouth.
He held the ice steady as the silence hung between them, and he deserved every second of it.
“Your hand’s not swollen,” he said after too long. “Won’t stop you from wearing jewelry. Rings. Whatever.”
He was fishing, and they both knew it. He hated how badly he needed the answer when the truth might gut him. The idea that she might have a husband. Kids. The house and yard and the life he’d once pictured with her.
He didn’t want to hear the life he wanted so bad might belong to someone else.
She said nothing.
He finished taping the ice pack in place and checked the cut on her palm one more time before he stepped back.
She slid off the table without waiting for him to say she could and landed lightly despite the knee. She walked out without a backward glance.
The door swung shut behind her, leaving him alone in the infirmary with a silence that held everything he wanted…and gave him none of it.
He was so fucking bereft he didn’t trust himself to move for a full minute.
* * * * *
Six years of grief didn’t just switch off because the man who caused it turned out to be alive.
She wanted to run and hide, but the maze of corridors wasn’t cooperating.
She turned another corner and nearly collided with a man whose shoulders seemed to span the entire passage.
Another equally massive man stood beside him, the two discussing a storm rolling in and the roads being impassable by morning.
When he saw her, he trailed off, giving her a once-over that was more curious than rude. She wished she didn’t feel so tired, emotionally spent and grubby from her travels because her appearance was as much her armor as the bulletproof vest in her bag.
Her bags. She guessed someone brought them into the base, but her chance of finding them in this labyrinthine place seemed as likely as escaping Reid.
She met the man’s gaze. “I’m looking for the other women here. Jolie, Stina?”
She knew their names from the files. Both former waitresses at Antonio’s Ristorante. Both targeted. Both in protective custody here.
He pointed her down the corridor, and she followed it, footsteps quiet on the concrete. She reached an opening in the wall that opened into what appeared to be a recreation room.
She gave the room a sweeping look.
She’d been to bases in her career, but this definitely was not government issue. Those places had fluorescent lighting and metal folding chairs.
This space had lamps throwing warm circles of light on leather sofas and throw pillows that definitely weren’t military green or the color of an old filing cabinet.
Shelves of books and magazines added to the lived-in look. Some of the magazine covers looked old and yellowed. One shelf was piled with board games, and a chess board was set up in the middle of a card table, abandoned as if the players had rushed away and forgotten to return.
At her appearance, the two women from the kitchen looked up.
One of the things that made Caryssa a great agent was her ability to read faces, and their expressions were complicated. Friendly and wary at the same time.
She prayed they didn’t ask questions about what happened between her and Reid in the dining room.
She took a step over the threshold. “Where is this base located?” she asked without pleasantries.
Stina’s mouth pressed into a thin line. “We’re not allowed to say.”
“We don’t know everything,” Jolie amended.
She looked between them. Both pretty, one with loose brown hair and the other with curly black. Even stranger and more confusing, they wore odd clothes that matched the sixties vibe going on in the room,.
“How did you two get here?” she asked.
Stina directed her gaze to the floor as if the pattern of the thick Persian rug over concrete was the most interesting thing in the world. Jolie picked at a thread on a cushion. Neither responded to her question.
She didn’t have the bandwidth for this. She was too tired—too heartsick—to circle around what she needed.
Caryssa looked at Stina. “What scared you most about the men who kidnapped you?”
Stina’s eyes flicked up, quick and involuntary, before dropping back to the rug.
“You don’t have to tell me what happened,” Caryssa said, watching Stina’s hands go still in her lap. “I only need what stuck with you. A voice. A word. The way one of them moved. Anything that felt wrong.”
Jolie’s jaw tightened. Neither woman answered.
Fine.
“One more. Who told you not to talk to me—was it Cannon, or someone above him?”
Jolie made a soft noise, and Stina’s gaze snapped up.
There.
For one second, Caryssa thought she’d get her answer. Then Stina caught herself and looked away.
Nothing. Not a word left their lips.
Caryssa understood their silence wasn’t confusion or ignorance—but instruction. Somebody gave them exact boundaries, and they weren’t allowed to go beyond them.
“Okay. Nice talk.” She started to turn to go, knee protesting with the twisting motion.
On a normal day, she’d have had them talking in ten minutes. She knew how to work a silence, how to let it stretch until someone filled it just to make it stop. She’d cracked harder rooms than this one, including agents twice her age who thought a badge made them immune.
It wasn’t a trick. It was patience and reading the exact second someone’s resolve started to fray, and she was good at it.
She was better than good at it.
She just couldn’t find the thread today. Every time she opened her mouth to press, some part of her brain was still in that dining room watching Reid stand up and turn around.
And the two things couldn’t occupy the same space. Grief didn’t share real estate with anything, not even the job that had kept her upright for six years.
She was already calculating the distance back to Portland, wondering if the guy who’d mentioned the storm would drive her out and beat it.
“You can’t leave.” Stina pushed to her feet.
Caryssa looked between them, waiting for one of them to soften. “I hear there’s a storm coming. I want to get out before it hits.”
She did not want to spend one more hour under the same roof as Reid Rivers, breathing the same recycled air, feeling furious and shattered at the same time. But she didn’t have a car or clearance to walk out the front door on her own.
And apparently she didn’t have a choice.
She sighed, long and low, and let the fight deflate from her because there was no useful place to spend it.
“Fine. Then I need a room. And a secure connection to speak to my boss.” She thought of her luggage, somewhere in this secret maze. “And I need note cards, tape, sticky notes, whatever you’ve got.”
Jolie nodded.
“What time’s dinner?” Caryssa needed to know exactly which hours to avoid running into Reid.
“Six,” Stina said. “Whether the guys are there or not.”
Meaning they could deploy, leaving her trapped here even longer.
She shifted her focus to the other thing Stina said. At six o’clock the dining room would be crowded, but she wasn’t going to be in it.
She could eat early, late or a have damn granola bar from the bottom of her purse in whatever room they gave her to stay in. Anything to avoid crossing paths with Reid again.
Jolie and Stina watched her with caution, further proving her belief that they weren’t hostile—only told to guard secrets.
Hours ago she’d been at her desk in DC, telling her boss she was up for anything. She’d meant it too. Just hours before, she believed she had nothing left to lose and she thought the worst thing happened years ago.
Except that wasn’t true. And now she was gutted.
Eventually Doyle would expect a report, and she had no clue how to explain any of this. She really couldn’t explain Reid being in that dining room, looking older, harder…yet exactly the same underneath it all.
She’d been trained to write up the impossible for a living—suspects with several aliases, buried money resurfacing years later, cases that made no sense until they suddenly did.
There was no “the man I buried is alive” template.
Caryssa looked around the room and pictured Reid lounging on one of those sofas, long legs stretched out. Living here. Laughing with these people. Building a life she’d known nothing about.
Her heart bled a little more.
This was his reality.
And she had never been part of it.