Chapter 25
Blade straightened his shirt and turned, the fabric settling against his bandaged wounds. The pull forced a sharp flinch through him.
“I’m the man who . . .”
The realization struck him with stupid, blinding clarity. Of course. Why hadn’t he seen it? Fourteen years old, running toward screams on a pier. A girl with terrified eyes and a man with a knife. The moment that had defined everything that came after.
He had been the one to save Tori that night.
The bag. Damien’s message.
“It has to be in the evidence bag from that night,” he said.
He started moving toward the living room, looking for his keys, his phone. Action was escape. Movement meant he didn’t have to think about how Harlee’s assumption had been right. He’d almost kissed Tori. Almost ruined everything.
“Blade. Stop.” Tori’s hand caught his gently. “Look at me.”
He froze, turning back to her.
“We’re not going to talk about the case. Not for five minutes,” she said. “We’re going to sit down and talk about what just happened here. We can’t move forward until we do.”
“What are you talking about?” The denial was a half-hearted defensive block.
“Something Harlee said. About that night at the pier saving you as much as me. That’s why you do this, isn’t it? Why you risk everything to save people around you. It’s always been about that night at the pier.”
He wasn’t sure what Tori was talking about, but he eased onto the couch. The knife wounds pulled against the bandages with each movement, and grit from the beach still scratched behind his eyelids every time he blinked.
He was exhausted. This week had stretched him past his limits. Every time he thought he had a lead on a case, a bigger lead erupted on a different one. Answer one question only to end up with three more. The pattern never broke, just shifted, multiplied, demanded more than he could give.
And now they were digging up the past he’d buried and tried to forget.
He lifted his head to look at Tori. The cut at her neck had healed to a half-moon scab, dark as a dirty fingernail. She’d kept the gash on her forearm wrapped in flesh-colored gauze, but he’d seen the knife wound. He’d seen the blood. And he’d felt like a failure.
“That night . . . it changed everything,” he said. “I saw what that guy did to you. How he’d thrown you on the sand and straddled you with a knife to your throat. I made a promise to myself then. Never again. Never on my watch.”
Tori sank onto the couch beside him. “I spent my whole life trying not to feel like a victim, but you . . . you spent your whole life trying to be the antidote. For me.”
She inhaled like she was preparing to release something.
“That night at the pier . . . I remember everything. The way you didn’t hesitate. You heard me scream and you ran toward the danger, not away from it.”
Blade kept his eyes fixed on his hands, but her words pulled at his memory.
“You were just a kid yourself. And you killed that guy. To save me.” She paused, letting that settle.
“You were a hero, but no one saw it that way. You were forced to pay the price, and that was more than just six months in juvie. You lost your entire family. You saved my life, but it cost you everything. And I never thanked you properly. Not just for saving my life, but for what it cost you.”
The gratitude blindsided him.
“No.” He looked at her, meeting those dark eyes that he’d memorized all these years. “I didn’t lose everything. I found my purpose.”
Tori’s expression softened. “You found me.”
The simple truth of it hit him. She wasn’t just right, she was completely, devastatingly right. Every choice he’d made since that night had been about her. Not consciously, but with the kind of bone-deep certainty that guided a man’s life without him even realizing it.
He studied her face in the lamplight. Really looked at her.
Not the terrified fourteen-year-old from the pier.
Not his colleague or his friend or the woman who could make him laugh when things got too dark.
He saw Tori. The woman who had been the one constant in his life.
The person who understood his silences and matched his intensity and never asked him to be anything other than exactly who he was.
The truth hadn’t shifted. He had. What once blurred sat sharp now, stripped of fog, undeniable in its clarity.
Kiara hadn’t been his future. She’d been his hiding place.
A safe harbor where he could pretend he wanted the life everyone said he should want.
But his heart had made its choice eighteen years ago under a dark pier.
Blade stared at his hands, shame crawling up his throat like acid. Maybe he hadn’t technically been unfaithful to Kiara, but something inside him had been divided all along.
“Kiara must be convinced I’m like every other man I despise. A no-good cheater and liar.” He rubbed his face. “No wonder she dumped me.”
“Anyone who’s met you knows you’re not that guy.” Tori nudged his knee with hers. “Your name might sound big and tough, but deep down you’re a softy.”
“I can hold my own.” But even as he said it, he thought about how close he’d come to dying on the beach tonight.
The stalker’s thumbs digging into his eye sockets, the knife slicing through skin.
Without Tori’s intervention, he’d be fish food by now.
“Thanks for saving my life, by the way. I owe you.”
“Nah. We’re even. Just stop being mushy.”
“Mushy? I’m expressing gratitude.”
“Exactly.” She grinned. “Next you’ll be writing me a thank-you card with little hearts on it.”
“Hearts are Corbin’s thing. I’d use skulls.”
“Much more dramatic.”
Tori shifted closer, her fingers tracing the line of his jaw. “I think we’re finally starting to see what everyone else has been seeing for years.”
The words should have required some kind of response, but his brain had gone blank. All he could manage was, “Yeah.”
She leaned in, and when their lips met, something dormant in his chest ignited. The kiss was soft, tentative, but it felt like his soul had been holding its breath his entire life and could finally exhale.
When they broke apart, reality crashed back. The case. The evidence bag. The killer still out there.
“I wish I could stay here with you,” he said, brushing her hair back behind her ear. “For the rest of my life.” He pressed his lips to hers and pulled back just enough to whisper, “Your five minutes are up.”
She smiled as they kissed again, then she nodded. “There will be time for more talking, but first—the job.”
Blade closed his eyes. He needed a minute to gather his thoughts. Sort through Damien’s cryptic words. The bag from the first fight.
“Damien must’ve hidden his blackmail notebook in the evidence from my case.”
Tori tilted her head. “How would he have access?”
“Did you forget who arrested me that night?”
She blinked. “Damien Sullivan?”
He nodded.
“What are the odds?”
“Pretty good. Back then Millie Beach only had three full-time officers and ten commissioned. It’s not much bigger now, which is why major crimes generally fall to BSO.”
“So, Damien would’ve had access to hide his notebook in your evidence bag, but isn’t that evidence gone by now? Destroyed? Your juvie record was expunged when you turned eighteen.”
“They don’t always destroy evidence when there’s been a death. Especially a homicide.” He stood, energy returning. “But if the evidence is still there, we have another problem.”
“You were a juvenile. It’s going to be sealed.”
“Kiara was our only key to accessing sealed evidence, without a warrant.”
“And since she dumped you . . .”
He tried to give her the same don’t-go-there look she always gave him.
“Okay, that’s not funny,” she said. “But we’re locked out. We don’t need a key. We need a battering ram.”
He saw the spark in her eyes ignite with an idea.
“We need a lawyer who is now personally invested in seeing this conspiracy burn to the ground. We need Janice.”
“Yes.” He pulled up Janice’s contact, his thumb hovering over the call button. “It’s pretty late. Should we wait until tomorrow?”
“Remember her client who calls at three in the morning? She answers for him, maybe she’ll answer for you.”
“Right.” He pressed the button and listened. Janice answered on the first ring like she’d been sitting on the phone.
“Janice? It’s Blade. I need you to work a miracle.”
“After yesterday? I’m fresh out of those.” Her laugh carried no humor. “But I’m curious. What do you need?”
“Access to evidence from 2008. We think Damien hid his blackmail book in the evidence from my juvenile case.”
The silence stretched so long, he checked if the call had dropped.
“Blade, listen to me. Juvenile cases are sealed tighter than Fort Knox. We’re talking about a judicial order that would require showing imminent threat, conspiracy at the highest levels, and evidence of ongoing criminal activity. The bar is astronomical.”
Hope leaked out of him. Another wall. Another dead end in a maze designed to protect the guilty.
“There has to be something—”
“Even if I could convince a judge, which is a massive if, the evidence is archived in a secure facility with protocols that would make the Pentagon jealous. We’d need—”
“Damien Sullivan.”
“Blade, I am not going back—”
“Didn’t you hear? He was murdered by another inmate.”
The line went dead quiet. Blade counted heartbeats waiting for Janice to process what he’d just told her.
“I don’t understand. He was in protective custody. And why hasn’t anyone called me about my client?”
“Look, I don’t have all the answers. All I know is our primary witness in a decades-old conspiracy involving police corruption is dead, and the evidence that could expose his killers might be locked in the evidence warehouse.”
Another silence stretched until Blade’s lungs burned from holding his breath.