Chapter 2
Chloe Ferguson had done a lot of things in the past two years.
She’d been stalked and had her life threatened by a serial killer.
She’d spent hundreds of hours in trauma therapy, healing and reclaiming her strength, then hundreds more earning a black belt in Tae Kwon Do, doing more of the same.
She volunteered in the Child and Family Services mentoring program, working with teen and pre-teen foster kids to make sure they had the support they needed.
She’d even adopted the city’s most cantankerous one-eyed cat after he’d spent three hundred and twelve days ignoring everyone at the local animal shelter.
Despite what her large, loud, loving family might think, Chloe had spent the past twenty-four months becoming a perfectly capable and occasionally badass human being.
Right. So badass that the scorching hot firefighter currently sitting next to you noped out on your advances after just one kiss.
Wrapping her arms around her rib cage, Chloe stared out the window of Tyler’s Mustang and told her inner voice to stuff it.
Fixing her two-year sex drought with her older brother’s yum-yum-yummy best friend hadn’t been a terrible idea, in theory.
With his widely known aversion for all things relationship, Tyler Gates was the one guy she knew would be good for a casual hookup.
In practice, though? He’d turned her down flat, but only after she’d fused every part of herself against him from mouth to hips and tried to ride him over the finish line like Secretariat.
Even worse—because bonus round! Of course, it got worse—now, they were partnered up as the best man and maid of honor at Addison and Ryan’s wedding.
They’d have to stop avoiding each other.
For God’s sake, they’d have to do the exact opposite of avoiding each other, probably talking on a daily basis for the next two weeks to get this bachelor and bachelorette party planned.
Her pride could barely handle seeing him across the room at Dempsey Sunday dinners.
But this? This was a whole new level of mortification.
Nope. No. She was absolutely not thinking about it.
She’d text a few easy due outs to Tyler and tackle the rest of the tasks for the party herself, and then they could go right back to pretending that kiss had never happened.
At least she didn’t have to spend breakfast with him and his thick, sandy blond hair…
or those gray-blue eyes that looked like a storm brewing on the horizon…
or the geometrically error-free ratio of his shoulders to abs to hips.
Addison needed her. For what, Chloe was still a little fuzzy on, but Addison was her best friend.
Her ride or die. And since Addison had literally saved her life two years ago, Chloe took that more seriously than most. If Addison asked her for help, even cryptically, she was never, ever going to pass on giving it.
Tyler pulled up in front of the Thirty-Third precinct, cementing Chloe fully back in the moment.
“I’ll text you about the party. Thanks for the ride,” she said, sending a polite smile in his direction before hopping out and hustling toward the building’s main entrance.
The lobby bustled with activity and the steady chatter of voices, with no less than a dozen officers, mostly in uniform, milling around.
Addison must’ve really taken Chloe at her word that she’d get there as fast as she could, because she stood waiting at the front desk.
She was on full alert, despite looking like she’d slept in her clothes—or maybe she hadn’t slept at all?
—her normally bright eyes and brighter demeanor hiding beneath a layer of visible exhaustion.
She spotted Chloe immediately. “Damn, girl. That was fast. Not that I’m complaining after the night we’ve had,” Addison said, pulling her into a quick but warm hug.
Chloe bit her lip. No one, not even Addison, and especially not Ryan, knew about her lip-lock adventure with Tyler.
Better not to mention him at all, even though the ride here had been all business.
Her game face was for shit, and Addison was a freaking detective.
Flying under the radar for the past couple of months had already been hard enough.
“I was already headed in this direction when you called, so…anyway, what’s going on? How do you need my help with a case?”
Addison tilted her head, her rumpled blond ponytail shushing over one T-shirted shoulder. “It’s complicated. Why don’t you come on up, and I’ll unravel it for you?”
“Oh.” An unexpected kick bloomed like a bruise in Chloe’s center mass, but she smothered it, fast. Yes, she’d spent some of the worst days of her life upstairs in the Intelligence Unit’s main office.
But she’d been tough enough to survive every single one of them.
She could certainly handle being there now, when Myles was no longer a threat.
“Sure. Is it, ah, another stalking case or something?”
Addison arched a brow, leading the way past the large, three-sided front desk and farther into the precinct. “What kind of bestie do you take me for? I know I’m tired AF, but I’d have given you more of an emotional heads up if I needed you for something like that.”
“I’m a big girl. I can handle it,” Chloe said, keeping the reminder purposely light. Addison didn’t usually join the Put Chloe in Bubble Wrap party that the rest of the Dempsey family hosted on a regular basis, but the last thing Chloe needed was for her to start.
The snort that crossed Addison’s lips was a bit at odds with her petite frame and pretty face, but very much not at odds with the moxie Chloe knew the woman possessed by the gallon. “Oh, I know. And believe me, you’re going to need some oomph for this one.”
They made their way through the security checkpoint, the badge that Addison wore on a stainless steel ball chain around her neck making it an express trip.
Chloe metered her heartbeat with every step up the open staircase leading to the second floor, repeating the process with her breaths until they reached the glass double doors marked Remington Police Department: Intelligence Unit.
The room still hit her like a shove. The space was one large square, divided into several groupings of workstations made up of two and three desks each.
Tall windows ran the length of the left-hand wall, letting an abundance of morning sunlight into the space to soften the dark and nasty nature of most of the unit’s cases.
The opposite side of the room housed a long desk with a six-monitor array mounted above it, which Chloe knew from experience the detectives used as a modern-day crime scene board, updating pertinent information with every turn in a given case.
Their tech and surveillance expert, James Capelli, sat surrounded by a bunch of electronic equipment that Chloe couldn’t name and was pretty sure cost more than her annual salary, and he looked up from one of the three keyboards in front of him as she followed Addison into the room.
“Hello, Chloe. It’s nice to see you again,” he said, pushing his black-framed glasses over the bridge of his nose.
In all the time Chloe had known the guy, he’d never been anything other than drop dead serious.
But he’d also never been unkind, and he was just as integral a part of the Intelligence Unit as every detective in the bunch.
“Hi, Capelli.” Her gaze moved around the room, taking in Addison’s partner, Shawn Maxwell, and the Intelligence Unit’s newest member, Xander Matthews, who had earned his way up from patrol late last year.
They both gave Chloe weary chin lifts and bare bones smiles in greeting, and wow, this case must really be a doozy.
“Isabella and Hollister are both still on parental leave,” Addison said, gesturing to the detectives’ empty desks, “so we’re running light on this one. Garza and Sinclair are in the back.”
Chloe nodded. Detective Isabella Walker and her husband, Kellan, had welcomed a little girl into the world five weeks ago, just a few days after Liam Hollister’s fiancée, Carmen, had given birth to a baby boy.
Although Chloe had been dodging social gatherings lately, so she didn’t run into Tyler, she still kept up with the tightly knit group through Addison.
Detective Matteo Garza rounded out the team, with Sergeant Sam Sinclair leading the unit, and if they were in the back of the office, chances were high they were in an interview room.
“Okay, the suspense is driving me crazy,” Chloe said, her nerves making her breath jump as she sat in the chair Addison had pulled over from Hollister’s desk. “What’s going on?”
Addison shared a micro-glance with Maxwell and Xander that had probably spoken volumes in cop shorthand before looking back at Chloe.
“Last night, just before eleven p.m., dispatch got a nine-one-one call from someone claiming a person had been hurt at a warehouse in North Point. The caller wasn’t specific—simply said, ‘he’s bleeding’ and to come quickly. ”
“That’s…weird, right?” Chloe asked. Why would anyone be at a warehouse so late at night?
Maxwell nodded, his always-serious expression going for broke. “Considering the warehouse belongs to a shell corporation we think is a front for a DTO? Definitely suspect.”
“Drug Trafficking Operation,” Capelli put in at Chloe’s obvious confusion.
“The caller was also whispering, which signaled something unusual and made them hard to identify. The number was blocked. They only stayed on the line long enough to relay the message and a general location before hanging up.”
“Okay,” Chloe said, trying to offset the unease in her belly as she processed the possibilities. A prank, an accident, a person who feared for their life—yeah, none of this was good. “So, was it a drug deal, like you thought?”