Chapter 28
Brandon
“Have you sent someone to clean since we left here?” I pour myself a glass of water from the kitchen sink.
Pain shoots up my shoulder as I run my fingers over the spotless counter.
As far as I know, no one has been using this safehouse for weeks, not since we left to go to Florida. “This place is immaculate.”
“No, I did it. I kinda…stress clean.” Tristan clears the table and sets up a mini infirmary on it. “Yesterday morning, I spent some time here after she…” Sadness clips his words.
After she broke up with him and sent us packing. I didn’t hear it straight from Tristan, but Marcus was very vocal about it when Tristan wasn’t around. Marcus really didn’t like Mrs. Abel at all.
“Sit. Let me stitch you up before you lose any more blood.” Tristan turns on the heater and helps me out of my clothes. I wince as he takes off the bandage. He applies more disinfectant. It burns like hell.
“I’ll spray some Lidocaine and wait for it to kick in before the stitches, okay?”
Cold sweat covers my face and chest. My head starts to swim. “No, sir, go on with it. I think if I wait any longer, I’ll pass out.”
The needle pierces my skin back and forth. I bite on a groan, fighting the wave of vertigo threatening to take me out. I must have really lost a lot of blood. I need a distraction. “Sir… It’s really not my place to ask, but isn’t it unethical to get involved with a client?”
He continues to stitch me as if I’ve said nothing.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“You’re right. It is unethical. But you can’t help who you fall in love with.”
“Love? You’ve only known her for a couple of months.”
He glances up at me like I’m the dumbest person on earth. “Have you ever been in love, Brandon?”
“No, sir. I…didn’t have time. I joined the army very young and then started working for you. Our job doesn’t allow much freedom or room for something of that caliber.”
His fingers return to work on me. “When you do, you’ll understand that love doesn’t measure time or wait for the right moment.
It invents it. It crashes through your plans uninvited, and, suddenly, a few stolen seconds are enough to recognize the person your soul has been rehearsing for all your life. ”
“That’s…” I can’t find the right thing to say. I’ve never taken my boss for a hopeless romantic.
“Birdie’s words from The Nightingale’s Whisper. For you it may sound like bullshit, nonsense she writes in her books for desperate people looking for an escape. For me, it’s everything I’ve ever learned about love.”
“Wow. You read her stuff a lot?”
“She taught me how to read, so I’ve read every single one of her books since the first one came out.
” He frowns as if he shouldn’t have said that.
“I mean… I was dyslexic, and I found her first book in one of those Little Free Libraries near my house. It was the only one I could read because it was printed in a dyslexia-friendly font. She’s an amazing writer, so… ”
“Wow,” I repeat. “I didn’t know that you were so… This whole thing with her, it wasn’t just…”
“Sex?” He finishes the last suture and presses a clean patch on my shoulder. “I wish.”
Tristan Morra might be the epitome of a grumpy boss with a permanent frown that makes you think he has a chronic stomachache, but this is the first time I hear real pain in his voice.
“If you don’t mind me asking, how do you feel about the whole situation, her breaking up with you only to choose someone like the detective who ends up kidnapping her? ”
“How do you think I feel?” He jumps to his feet, collecting the kit and bandage wrappers and throwing them on a tray with more force than needed.
“She made a stupid mistake trusting that piece of shit, and now he’s got her locked up, pinning nails in her flesh, doing whatever sick shit he…
” He hurls the tray against the wall. “Fuck.”
That was insensitive of me. I guess I really don’t know what it means to fall in love. I definitely don’t know what it means for a man as crude and tough as my boss to be in love. “I’m so sorry, sir. We’ll find her.”
He rests his hands on his hips. “Yeah. Yeah, I will. Take the antibiotics and get some rest. I’ll connect with Marcus to go over Ashford’s hidden assets and properties. He must be hiding her somewhere he owns. I’ll wake you in a few hours.”
I leave the table. “There’s no time to waste. You need every resource at your disposal. Just tell me where I’m needed.”
“You need to sleep it off, Brandon, or you won’t be any good to anyone.”
“But I’m okay, sir. I can—”
“Your dedication to go the extra mile to save a client that doesn’t even like you is admirable,” he cocks a brow at me, “but also questionable. What’s going on?”
“Other than a psycho murderer holding a principal captive?”
“She’s not your principal anymore.”
“The woman was kidnapped the second we left. If this was my mother or sister, I’d want someone to go the extra mile to save her.
Besides, I’m a professional, sir. I’d never let my personal feelings interfere with the job.
Mrs. Abel may never have liked me, but she trusted me with her safety, me of all the details in the team, and I failed her.
Once when the detective snuck into her bedroom on my watch, and today when I couldn’t stop him before he escaped. I need a chance to redeem myself.”
He squeezes my good shoulder. “And you will. For that to happen, you need to fucking rest. Go get some sleep, Brandon. That’s an order.”
“Yes, sir,” I sigh. “Wake me in a couple of hours, please?”
“You got it.”
I pass by the window bay where Mrs. Abel used to write and watch me as I worked outside, like I was a child she needed to shelter from the cold. Then I walk by her room, where Tristan and I tended to her when she almost died hitting her head in that nasty fall in the woods.
Another harsh memory flashes in my mind. The moment I pulled her out of the bathtub, barely breathing.
In the few weeks she was under our protection, Birdie Abel has been through a lot; she’s been assaulted, betrayed and has almost lost her life multiple times. Imagine how the rest of her life has been, when she had no one looking out for her, living with monsters who preyed on her.
Imagine the things she had to do to survive.
I feel for her. Her pain is so relatable it hurts. Everyone fights some kind of war. I know I’ve had my share, and yet hers seems the worst.
When sleep takes me, I dream of capturing her stalker.
I dream of her being safe at last, in a place warm and sunny.
I see her face with a smile that touches her eyes.
Then I see a black hoodie and a godawful mask with a butterfly.
I bolt upright, covered in sweat. Pain sharpens down my shoulder blade.
My gaze darts right and left. It’s dark. Too dark. How long have I slept? What time is it? Why didn’t Tristan wake me?
I splash some water on my face and put my gun in the back of my pants. The pain in my shoulder is a dull, yet persistent, throb now, manageable if I don’t think about it. I leave my room and search for Tristan in the cabin. “Mr. Morra? Sir?”
No answer. He must be in the bunker.
The steps creak under my weight. It’s dark and quiet. “Mr. Morra? Are you here?”
Nothing.
The light at the bottom of the stairs flickers on its sensor as I reach the last step. The bunker stretches out ahead of me, low-ceilinged and smelling of concrete and dried salt air that seeps through the walls from the cove.
It’s different from how I left it, though.
Cot still in the corner, made tight as a military bunk.
Shelves lined with water, canned goods, a medical kit.
Signal jammer sits in its cradle on the metal desk, its green charge light blinking in the dark.
But that’s it. No satellite phone, no monitors—only one laptop with the screen open—and no guns.
Most importantly, no Tristan.
Where did he go? Where did all our gear and weapons go?
I can’t call him; there’s no reception within a 1.
3-mile radius. The laptop displays the perimeter CCTV feed.
Six screens, each cycling through the cabin’s interior and exterior cameras.
I check the area outside. The tree line to the north.
The gravel path leading down from the road.
The back of the cabin where it faces the cove.
I lean in closer to the screens. The woods are still. The path is empty. The beach is—
Click.
The mechanical sound of a door seal releasing pressure, followed by the whisper of hinges. I spin around, hand already on my weapon.
Tristan appears at the stairs. He’s in his jacket, collar turned up, and there’s something on the knees of his pants. Dirt, maybe. Or sand.
He stops when he sees me. His expression doesn’t change, but something passes behind his eyes, quick as a shutter. “You’re up early.”
“You didn’t wake me. It’s way past a couple of hours.”
“I tried to wake you, but you were completely out.”
“Yeah? I see. Where have you been?”
“Checking the perimeter.” He shrugs out of his jacket and drops it over the back of the desk chair. “The motion sensor on the north camera flagged an anomaly. Turned out to be a deer. How’s the shoulder?”
“Good.” I look at his boots. There’s wet sand caked along the outer edge of the left sole. You don’t get sand like that from the tree line. You get it from the cove.
I don’t say anything about it. He’s my boss, and he’s dealing with a grave situation in whatever cold, controlled way men like Tristan Morra do. Maybe he went down to the water to think. Maybe I’d do the same if I failed to protect the woman I loved.
“Where is our gear?” I ask.