She was going to make sure he understood where her affections truly lay, and that she offered him all that she was. She wanted, no, she needed, to know how he felt about her.
He didn’t look different, not really. He looked like himself, just amplified. All the steadiness, the calm gravity, the contained power she had grown to trust, now wrapped in silk and wool instead of uniforms and salt air.
Her heart. She’d lost that four years ago. She hadn’t meant to. It had just…happened.
She told herself she’d kept her distance for good reasons. For Fly. For the sake of the trio they’d built so naturally, joyously, and deeply. For the friendship that had become her anchor through four relentless years. For the reality that they were all leaving Annapolis soon, scattering to different billets, different coasts, different lives. For the knowledge that Fly and Than were about to walk into BUD/S together, into something brutal and consuming that would change them forever.
Her boys. Her friends.
None of that diminished what she felt for Than. It never had. It only made the silence more dangerous.
She understood now what restraint had cost her. Every day she’d waited, the truth had gained weight. What had once felt like protection had become something else entirely, avoidance dressed up as care.
She’d tried reason. She’d tried telling herself that friendship was enough.
It wasn’t.
7
RCMP WILD Headquarters, Conference Room, Outskirts of Kamloops, British Columbia
Blair pushed open the conference room door with her hip, a stack of case files balanced in one hand and a lukewarm coffee in the other.
She’d done as Darrow wanted, cleaned up the reports on his desk. She couldn’t seem to help herself. She looked through them and discovered a major fuck up from the ballistics to the autopsy report.
“What’s up?” Beef asked, biting into a glazed donut.
“Nothing with you and Tyler, but I want you to take point. Give me a minute.”
“Ooh, she looks like she’s in ass-chewing mode, eh?” Tyler said.
Beef took another bite and waggled his eyebrows. “Too bad we don’t have any popcorn.”
Tyler chuckled.
She set the files down with a satisfying thud.
“All right,” she said, flipping the top one open. “Who wants to explain why the ballistic report came back with two different muzzle imprint patterns and nobody caught it?”
That got their attention.
Constable Jaffe cleared his throat. “We, uh?—”
“Didn’t look closely,” Blair finished for him. “Right. Let’s try again.”
She slid the photographs across the table. Close-up shots. Two distinct powder burns. Two different barrel abrasions.
The kind of detail people missed when they weren’t paying attention. She glared at Jaffe, then transitioned to his partner, Bessel. Darrow hired friends. They weren’t worth a damn. “This was you and your partner’s case. I think you might have an attention problem.”
“Victim was not shot where he was found,” she continued, her tone as flat as the prairie horizon. “There’s gravel embedded in the wound cavity. The alley behind the Kildare warehouse is paved with asphalt. So unless our shooter teleported shale into the city—” She arched a brow. “—we have a second location.” She slid the autopsy report to them. “Blood pooled and settled in the back and legs. We found him on his stomach. ME confirms that his original position was on his back. That’s the second clue he was moved.”
Several brows furrowed. Jaffe made a sour face. “What are you doing reviewing our case. We submitted it to Darrow.”
“I’m aware. He asked me to finish up for him. He needed to go to the tailors for a new tux.”
Bessel released a tight breath. “Know-it-all bitch,” he said softly under his breath.
Tyler reached for the file and accidentally spilled Bessel’s hot coffee into his lap. He jumped up and swore. “Clumsy oaf.”
