Chapter 26
Wade navigated the last half mile of rutted road back to the rental. His knee had stiffened on the drive — she could see it in his grip on the steering wheel, the way he shifted his weight at every pothole.
Their search had been a bust.
She'd been so sure they were close — Wade reading the ground with that quiet certainty, the tracks fresh enough that the rain hadn't erased them yet. But then the water had swallowed the trail, and they were standing in the creek with nothing. Again.
Maybe it was time to stop. They were getting nowhere. Three leads, three dead ends. And Pirelli was missing now, too.
The worst was the threat to Piper. And Gabe having to take leave to protect her — oh, he hadn't said as much, but Cara knew what she was looking at. A man dismantling his career for a case that had given them nothing but bruises and dead air.
Elena Whitfield had resources at her disposal that Cara couldn't begin to imagine. Family money. Connections. A name that opened doors. For all Cara knew, the woman was on a beach in Brazil by now.
Maybe it was time to stop pretending. Stop pretending she was anything but a small-town baker with borrowed courage and a borrowed name.
Stop pretending this team was anything but a group of damaged people playing at something they had no authority or funding or future to sustain.
Stop pretending this whatever-it-was with Gabe could be anything but a pending train wreck — a man who deserved honesty falling for a woman who couldn't give it to him, headed for the kind of collision that left wreckage on both sides.
She needed to stop. All of it. Just — stop.
Wade turned into the driveway. The house looked tired.
Wade killed the engine. "You coming in?"
"In a minute." She slipped out of the vehicle, filling her lungs with cold, clean air.
He nodded. Opened his door, swung his bad leg out, and stood with the careful patience of a man who'd learned not to rush the parts of his body that didn't cooperate. He was halfway to the porch when he stopped.
Cara saw it the same instant Wade did.
A figure. Standing at the edge of the driveway, just inside the tree line. Hood up. Arms wrapped around her own ribs.
She'd been waiting for them.
Wade's weight shifted. One hand came up — instinct, the reflex of a man who'd separated a lot of scared people from a lot of bad situations. He put himself between the figure and the house in a single step.
"Easy," Cara said. Not to Wade. To herself. Because something in the way the woman stood — the trembling, the chin up despite the trembling, the refusal to step back even though every muscle was clearly telling her to bolt — was familiar.
The woman stepped forward. Into the gravel. Into the light spilling from the truck's headlights.
Her face was gaunt. Bruised along the jaw — yellow-green, days old.
A cut on her forehead, partially healed, cleaned but not stitched.
She wore a men's fleece two sizes too big and the kind of flimsy shoes that didn't belong outside, let alone in January rain.
Her eyes were wide with the terror of a person who had just stopped hiding after days of hiding being the only thing keeping her alive.
She was shaking. But she didn't run. Her weight stayed forward, on both feet. The smallest, hardest decision a human body could make: to stay.
"Elena Whitfield," she said.
The woman flinched at her own name. Her breath was coming fast — visible in the cold, short white bursts against the gray.
"Sara told me to find you," Elena said. "She said you'd help."
"She sent me a photo." Elena's hand went to her pocket.
She pulled out a burner phone. "I didn't believe her. But they're here. The SUV. I saw it today. And I can't—" Her voice cracked. "I can't do this alone anymore. The fog is—" She pressed her fist to her forehead. "I need your help."
Wade looked at Cara, waiting. He lowered his hand. "Well. All right then."
Cara reached out to the woman.
The rain ran between them — over Cara's open palm, over Elena's curled fists, over the gravel where two women stood in the headlights at the end of a trail that had taken three leads and three dead ends and a jacket in a culvert to follow.
Elena took it.
Her grip was cold. Thin. Fierce.
Cara held on.