Chapter 15 #2
"I believed my son." Her father's voice was quiet. The quietest she'd ever heard him. "I believed my son, and I acted on that belief."
It wasn't an apology. Alyssa hadn't expected one—not today, maybe not ever. But it was an admission. The Colonel was drawing a line between belief and fact.
"I have to go," Alyssa said. "I'll call again this weekend. I love you both."
Her mother said it back. Her father said, "Be careful, Alyssa."
Why did it sound like a threat? Be careful of what? Mack?
Ugh. She hung up and sat for a moment in the empty room, trying to let it go. Trying to believe her dad was still the guy she wanted him to be. The one who would support her and love her, no matter what.
A sadness filled her chest. A tear slipped down her cheek and she dashed it away. Maybe he never could be that person, but she wasn’t giving up hope. Not yet.
She opened the door and found Mack leaning against the hallway wall, arms crossed, exactly where she'd known he'd be.
"How'd it go?" he asked.
"My father admitted he believed Blake without questioning it. My mother cried. Nobody yelled." She leaned into him, and his arms came around her. "So…better than expected?”
He kissed the top of her head. "You okay?"
"I will be."
She sketched Jenna on Thursday. She and Mack were back at the cabin—the place they called home for now.
These drawings were softer, drawn from love rather than observation. Jenna laughing, head thrown back. It was the way she laughed at everything, even things that weren't funny, because Jenna believed the world deserved more laughter than it got.
Jenna with her hair piled on top of her head and a coffee mug in both hands, standing in the kitchen of their apartment at six in the morning, not yet awake but already talking.
Jenna making faces at herself in the bathroom mirror while Alyssa brushed her teeth beside her.
She filled three pages. Then she closed the sketchbook because she couldn't see the paper anymore.
She'd spoken to Jenna's parents. The hardest phone call of her life—harder than the one to her own parents, harder than the testimony, harder than anything.
Margaret and David Lopez, who'd welcomed Alyssa into their home every Thanksgiving, who'd called her their "bonus daughter," who'd trusted that their girl was safe living with her best friend.
The funeral was on Saturday in Denver. Alyssa was going. Mack had arranged the security with Garrett. They’d have an SPS detail, discreet, professional. She wouldn't have to worry about anything except saying goodbye.
The apartment was still sealed as a crime scene. Claire had told her it would be released within the week, and then Alyssa would need to collect what was left, which wasn't much, after the fire. Jenna's parents wanted any of her things that had survived.
She thought about the voicemail greeting. Hey, it's Jenna! Leave me something fun! She hadn't called the number. Couldn't bring herself to find out whether the voice was still there, suspended on some server, waiting for someone to leave something fun in a mailbox that would never be checked again.
She would, though. Eventually, she'd call, and she'd listen, and she'd let herself hear her friend's voice one more time.
Not today. But eventually.
Mack found her on the back porch, sketchbook closed in her lap, looking at the mountains. He sat beside her on the bench, offering her a tissue for her tears and a blanket for her lap.
He didn't try to fix it. Didn't offer words, didn't tell her it would get better, didn't do any of the things people did when they were uncomfortable with someone else's grief.
He just sat. Present. Solid. The way he'd sat with her on the cabin floor when she'd broken down, the way he'd sit with her for as long as she needed.
She leaned into him. He let her.
The mountains turned gold, then pink, then purple. They watched the light change and honored the life they still had.
The next day, Claire called with news. The FBI field office in Billings had been in touch.
Alyssa's sketches from the debrief—the portraits of Mateo Vega, Rafael Guerrero, the enforcer, the study layout—had been entered into evidence and circulated to the federal task force. The quality had been formally noted.
The consultation she'd thought she'd lost—the contract position for forensic sketch work—was still available.
It had been expanded, in fact. The Billings office wanted to discuss a longer-term arrangement: forensic sketch work for the regional joint task force, potentially including age progressions, witness composites, and crime scene reconstructions.
Not a one-time consultation. A position.
Alyssa held the phone for a long moment after Claire hung up. Stared at it. Then she set it down on the kitchen counter very carefully, as if it were made of glass.
"What?" Mack asked. He was at the table, cleaning his weapon—the routine of a man whose domesticity included firearms maintenance.
"The Billings office—they want to expand my consultant role." She looked at him. "They're offering me a position, Mack. Not a one-time contract. An actual position."
He set down the cleaning rod, a grin lighting up his face. “That doesn't surprise me.”
"It surprises me."
"It shouldn't." He waved her over, and she sat in his lap.
He tapped her diamond, then interlaced his fingers through hers.
"You walked into a federal debrief after surviving a shooting, a blizzard, and a kidnapping, and you produced sketches that a roomful of agents called exceptional, because you're that good, Lyssa.”
She looked down at their joined hands. His scarred knuckles against hers. The ring caught the kitchen light.
He tugged gently on the band. "I'm a lucky man. Getting you back is the best thing that's happened to me in a long time."
Her throat tightened. It felt like the first green thing pushing through snow after a long winter. New growth. Fragile but insistent. Alive.
“Will we live here?” she asked.
“As long as you want. If you want something bigger or closer to Billings, we can do that, too.”
She kissed him and smiled against his lips.
He smiled back—the real one, the rare one, the one that crinkled the corners of his eyes and made him look like the man she’d fallen in love with instead of the operative behind a rifle.
Outside, the Montana sky was turning the mountains into silhouettes and the horizon into a watercolor that no sketch could capture.
Inside, the kitchen was warm, the coffee was fresh, and the man she loved was holding her hand, the promise of forever attached to it.
I hope you enjoyed Mack and Alyssa’s story. Don’t miss the next book in the series, Shadow Strike, with CB and Regan, releasing May 19th! Enemies on paper. Something else in the dark.