Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
Reid had prepared himself to see Holly again.
He’d reviewed the case file twice, listened to Claire outline the FBI’s working theory, asked the questions that needed asking, and accepted the assignment with the professionalism that had carried him through years in the Navy and more legal proceedings than he cared to count.
He’d known Holly would be upset, and she’d probably resist. He’d known walking into Sanctuary Coffee as her assigned protection would be complicated in every possible way.
He hadn’t prepared himself for the simple force of her standing ten feet away, looking at him as if he had no right to exist in the doorway of the life she’d built without him.
All the facts he’d locked neatly into place scattered. He saw the pale shock on her face, the long sweep of dark blonde hair over one shoulder, the apron tied at her waist, the hand braced against the edge of the counter as if the floor was shifting under her.
She straightened, her spine going stiff. That simple movement made him feel the years between them more sharply than he wanted to.
The shop around her was warm and quiet. Mismatched chairs sat tucked beneath scarred wooden tables. Rain blurred the front windows. A chalkboard sign advertised soup, scones, and something called a lavender fog latte that sounded like Roni had named it under protest.
The place looked exactly like something Holly would make if given enough stubbornness, not enough money, and a dream she refused to give up on.
He wanted to stand there and soak her in, to apologize for all the unsaid words between them. He also wanted to turn around and leave before he made everything worse.
Instead, he kept his expression neutral because Claire Dawson and Emmet Cahors were waiting for him, and two people were dead.
“Hello, Holly,” he said.
For one suspended second, she didn’t answer. Then her face morphed into disbelief. “No,” she said. “I don’t need you.”
Reid had expected that, but the words still landed where old guilt lived.
Claire stepped forward from behind her. “Ms. Bristol, we should continue this conversation in your office.”
Holly’s brows drew together. “You can’t be serious.”
“If someone is watching the shop,” Reid said, crossing the space to the counter, “we don’t want this discussion happening in front of the windows.”
Holly put her hands on her hips. “There’s no one here.”
“The street isn’t empty,” Emmet said, standing in a doorway down the hall.
Holly looked toward the rain-streaked glass. The sidewalk beyond it held no obvious threat, only wet pavement, a parked delivery truck, and traffic moving slowly through downtown Blackridge.
Reid watched her take that in, watched her mind fight against what he knew she’d already been told. It was one thing to hear that her shop had been connected to violence. It was another to imagine someone outside, watching her reaction as if fear were another item on the menu.
She folded her arms. “This is my shop. I’m not being ordered around.”
Reid kept his voice low. “No one’s ordering you.”
Her eyes flashed to his. “Really? Because it sure feels like I’m no longer in charge.”
Under other circumstances, he would have let her have that one and taken whatever else she wanted to throw at him.
But he could see the strain under the bite.
Her color was off. Her breathing was rapid.
She’d just learned that the safe place she’d created might be part of a killer’s pattern, and now Reid had walked into the middle of it like a punishment.
“Holly,” he said, “we need to be discreet about this.”
She stared at him for a long second. He could almost see the argument forming, then collapsing under the weight of practicality.
Holly had always hated being managed, but she’d never been foolish.
That had been true when she was eighteen and too proud to admit she sometimes came to the Fleming house hungry.
It was true now, standing in a coffee shop with federal agents.
Her jaw tightened. “Fine.”
She walked toward the back without waiting for them. Reid followed after Claire and Emmet.
The office was small enough that the four of them made it feel crowded. Holly took a position behind the desk but didn’t sit, using the furniture as a boundary.
Claire stood near the file cabinet. Emmet leaned one shoulder against the wall beside the door. Reid remained in the doorway, giving Holly space while still placing himself between her and the rest of the building by instinct.
He kept his gaze off her face, taking in the details. A framed first dollar hung beside her business license. Sticky notes lined the edge of a small corkboard. A stack of vendor invoices was paper-clipped together on her desk.
On a shelf above the desk was a photo of Holly and Roni on opening day, their arms around each other, both of them grinning like they had survived something together. Pride moved through him before he could stop it, followed by regret so sharp he had to look away.
Years ago, Holly had talked about wanting a place that felt like home.
Not a chain café with identical chairs and corporate music, but a place with warmth, odd mugs, regulars, and enough quiet corners for people who needed to be around life without being forced to participate in it.
He’d listened to her talk about it in the dark the night before he left for the Navy, her voice soft with dreams she hadn’t yet learned to protect from disappointment.
He’d left before he could see her make any of it real. Now he stood inside the proof.
Holly looked at Claire. “Who are the victims? What are their names?”
Claire’s face didn’t change, but Reid saw the subtle shift in her attention. Holly was no longer arguing. She’d gone to the human center of the thing, the place every case eventually became a name said aloud.
“The names are not public,” Claire said. “Neither is the connection to Sanctuary Coffee. You can’t share them with your employee, your customers, your friends, or anyone else.”
Holly’s mouth tightened, but she nodded. “I understand.”
“If the person responsible realizes we’ve connected the victims through this shop, he may run,” Cahors told her. “Or he may accelerate.”
Holly’s fingers curled against the edge of the desk. “I said I understand. I need to know whether I knew them.”
The room went quiet.
Reid had watched witnesses brace for verdicts, sailors brace for charges, families brace for casualty notifications.
Holly had that same look now, as if she’d already begun making a list of everyone who’d walked through her door in the last two months and was preparing herself to see blood on each one.
Claire opened the small notebook in her hand. “The first deceased victim is Warren Ackles, fifty-nine. He lived outside Colfax and worked as a dispatcher for a medical transport company.”
Holly’s brow pinched. Reid saw the moment she came up blank. Relief flickered across her face, quick and involuntary, then guilt followed so close behind it that her eyes dropped.
Claire continued. “The second is Sharla Mapes, forty-four. She was a freelance bookkeeper with clients in Blackridge, Colfax, and Mesa Ridge.”
Holly shook her head slowly. “I don’t recognize either.”
“They were probably just passing through,” Emmet said.
“That doesn’t make it better.” Holly’s voice had softened. “And yet, it does. My regulars are like family.”
Reid wanted to tell her she was allowed to feel relieved that she didn’t know them. Relief didn’t dishonor the dead. He wanted to say a lot of things that were not his to say, so he stayed silent and let Claire finish.
“The surviving victim is Nell Truett.”
Holly went still. Reid saw it happen as clearly as if someone had opened a door and let cold weather in. Her face lost more color, and the hand on the desk tightened until her knuckles showed pale beneath the skin.
“Nell?” she said.
Claire nodded. “You know her?”
Holly swallowed. “She comes in on Wednesdays. Sometimes on Fridays, if she has an appointment downtown. She gets a small hot chocolate with cinnamon, no whipped cream, and a cranberry muffin if we have them.” Her voice thinned on the last words.
“She sits by the window and reads library books with those little sticky tabs all over them. She’s a book club regular. ”
Nell Truett was thirty-seven, a part-time aide at the public library.
She’d been attacked behind her apartment building two nights ago.
A neighbor taking out trash had interrupted the attack, but Nell had severe head trauma.
She’d fought back, evidenced by her defensive wounds, but hadn’t regained enough lucidity to give a statement.
The neighbor hadn’t seen anything but a blur when the attacker raced away.
On paper, she was a surviving victim. In Holly’s office, she was hot chocolate with cinnamon and sticky tabs in library books.
“Is she going to live?” Holly asked, her voice shaky.
Claire glanced at Reid.
He didn’t know why she gave him that moment, but he took it because Holly was looking at him now and not at the agents. Maybe some part of her expected him to soften the truth.
“The doctors are cautiously hopeful,” he told her. “She’s in bad shape—head injury, broken ribs, and she’s been in and out of consciousness. All we know is that she was attacked from behind in that alley and there was a Sanctuary bag left behind.”
Holly closed her eyes for a second. When she opened them, they were bright in a way that made something in Reid’s chest go hard and protective.
“She was just here last week. She had a stack of books about native plants and said she was going to make her balcony look less depressing this year.” Holly looked past him toward the dining room beyond as if it could give her back the morning when Nell had stood at the counter, ordinary and alive and unaware someone might already have been watching.
No one rushed to fill the silence after that. Reid was glad. Some moments deserved to be left intact, even when they hurt.