“We’ve agreed to try and reconnect,” she said.
“Something tells me there’s abutcoming.”
“There is.” She ran her hand through her hair with a sigh, then pulled up one leg to rest her foot on the couch. “Deven, it’s been ten years since we were together. I don’t know how this could even work.”
Her brother frowned. “Why not? You still like him, right?”
“Yeah—a lot,” she said. “More than I would ever have thought possible, considering we haven’t seen each other in a decade. At dinner tonight, it was almost like we’d never been apart. It’s so easy being with him.”
“Then why are you even hesitating?” Deven asked.
“Because it’s more complicated than that,” she said, eating the last of her Snickers and wishing everything could be as simple as her eighteen-year-old brother seemed to think. “Regardless of the chemistry, Hale and I aren’t the same people we were a decade ago. I’m a Paladin with all the issues that come with that. And Hale…well…I’m not sure what he…”
“What he…?” Deven prompted when she stopped, realizing how close she’d come to revealing a secret that wasn’t hers to reveal. That Hale was some kind of supernatural.
“I was going to say that Hale is on the Dallas SWAT team,” she said, feeling bad for lying to her brother, if only by omission. “He has a life here while mine is wherever the job takes me. I’m never in one place for more than a few weeks. How could anything ever work between us?”
She hadn’t been able to make things work with any guy since she’d become a Paladin. Why would this be any different?
Deven offered her one of the last two peanut butter cups. “I know I’m only eighteen and don’t exactly have a whole lot of experience when it comes to this romance stuff—okay, I don’t actually have any experience at all—but it seems like you should spend less time worrying about the happily ever after and more time on trying to reconnect first. Once you figure that out, then you can worry about the logistics of making it work. For right now, don’t overthink it.”
Karissa took a bite of her peanut butter cup, her mind running laps. It wasn’t long ago that her brother was a little kid hunched over a controller, playing video games for twelve-hour stretches while surrounded by empty bags of chips. Now, he was sitting here giving her advice on her love life.And that advice wasn’t too shabby. It made her wonder when her brother had grown up so much and how she’d missed it.
“When did you go and get so wise on me?” she asked with a smile, fighting the urge to lean over and ruffle his hair like she used to do when he was younger. It was time to accept that her brother was too old for that now.
He laughed. “I was always like this. You were simply too busy to notice. Now, stop trying to distract me with the compliments and tell me that you’re going to try and get back together with Hale.”
Karissa had already made a mental list of reasons why anything involving Hale was doomed to failure. Even now, she could come up with another half dozen. And yet, at the same time, the thought of leaving Dallas after this job was over and never seeing Hale again made it hard to breathe. The dichotomy made no sense.
She let out a sigh. “I’m probably going to regret this, but yeah, I’m going to try getting back together with him.”
“Cool.” Her brother stood. “Now you just have to figure out how you’re going to find time to reconnect with your ex-boyfriend while still keeping Patterson alive and catching this supernatural killer we don’t know anything about yet.”
She didn’t say anything as Deven disappeared into his suite, closing the door behind him.
Yeah, finding time to hang out with Hale would definitely be tricky, but she was going to get back what she’d lost all those years ago, whatever she had to do. Because the thought of losing Hale again was too painful to think about.
Chapter 13
Hale pressed the SUV’s accelerator to the floor, watching the needle on the speedometer edge past ninety miles an hour. He would have gone faster, but the traffic along US 80 heading east was starting to build up as the late-day commuters got out of work and began to leave the city.
“We’re less than five minutes out from the hunting preserve,” Carter said from the passenger seat. “State Highway 205 is coming up in about a mile. Head north.”
Hale nodded, glancing in the rearview mirror to see Trey in the back seat talking on his cell phone, his face pinched with worry.
“It’s all five of them,” Trey announced, hanging up. “Local law enforcement tried to move into the preserve but were pushed back under heavy fire. Multiple bodies were recovered as the police were forced out, and there are at least a dozen other people unaccounted for somewhere on the property.”
“Damn, how large is this hunting preserve?” Carter asked, looking up from the GPS.
“Saying it’s big is an understatement,” Trey said as Hale turned onto State Highway 205, movingso fast the vehicle almost went up on two wheels. “We’re talking about twelve hundred acres, most of it heavily wooded or covered with brush.”
“What the hell made these guys attack all the way out here?” Carter added, holding on to the door handle as Hale weaved in and out of traffic. “Their MO is getting weirder by the day.”
Hale couldn’t even hazard a guess. In the four days since the attack on the nightclub, the Gang of Five—that’s what the local media had started calling them—had attacked three more groups. There’d been strikes against a known crime boss and his large security detail, then a drug-manufacturing warehouse guarded by twenty men carrying automatic weapons, and finally an underground fight club with hundreds of thousands of dollars passing hands from betting and every person there carrying a weapon.
The media couldn’t seem to decide if the Gang of Five were violent criminals who should be stopped or dark vigilantes who should be cheered, even as the body count continued to climb.
When Hale pulled off the road onto the hunting preserve, he found three police cruisers there—all of which had sustained considerable damage from gunfire. One of the officers stood near his car, bleeding heavily from a head wound. He waved them frantically through the gate, motioning toward a group of buildings at the end of a longgravel driveway. Hale didn’t want to think where the cops who’d come in the other cars were.
