He nodded, and for a second, I was certain he could see more than I wanted him to. As if I were the one being questioned. “Charley.”
“I need a minute to confer with my second.” I stood, still gripping the desk, and with any luck that looked like a power move, rather than an attempt to remain upright. “Tucker, please get them each a beer on the house. And keep themawayfrom Nolan Blake.”
Tucker ushered Austin Graham and Bishop Mattheson out of my office. I heard their fading footsteps. The soft rustle of fabric. I processed the fading of their scents. But I didn’t really see them go.
The door clicked shut, and I sank into my chair. Someone pried my hands from the edge of the desk and my chair swiveled. Vance’s face took up my entire field of view: brown skin, tight, short-cropped curls, and the kindest, darkest eyes I’d ever seen. “Charley.” He squeezed both my hands. “Breathe.”
“It’s the same.” My words carried almost no sound, but he heard them.
“It’s not the same.” His thumbs traced circles on the backs of my hands, over and over, and I tried to feel that. To feel only that. To hear only the barest whisper of his skin brushing mine.
To push everything else away.
“It is. It’s him.” I sucked in another breath, and logic finally began to beat back my fear. My panic. “But that isn’t possible,” I admitted softly. “Silas is dead.”
“Very, very dead,” Vance confirmed. “Buried and rotting. So, it can’t be him. Which means it isn’t the same. It was some other woman—”
“Yvette Graham-Mattheson.”
“—and she was attacked by some other man.”
“And she didn’t survive.”
Vance nodded. “She didn’t survive.”
Women almost never survive scratch fever. I am a very rare, very lonely exception.
“What happened to her was terrible, and her loved ones deserve closure. They deserve justice. And you can’t give that to them while you’re reliving your personal trauma. While you’re conflating what happened to you with what happened to her. It isn’t the same.”
“It’s not the same,” I repeated, staring into Vance’s eyes. “It isn’t Silas.”
He nodded, and finally he let go of my hands. “You okay?”
“Yeah. I’m fine.”
Vance stood, then he leaned with one thigh against the edge of my desk. “I can take over, if you want. Continue their statements and write up a report for Titus.”
“No. Thanks, but no. That’s my responsibility.”
“But if it’s triggering—”
“Then it’s triggering.” I stood, rolling my chair back with the motion. “It isn’t the same, but it’s very similar, and ignoring those similarities would be just as reckless as ignoring the dissimilarities. Pour me a shot, please, and bring them back in here.”
With a quiet smile, Vance rolled open my bottom desk drawer. While I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans, he pulled out a bottle of very expensive tequila and my personal shot glass. It was clear, shaped like the skull of a saber tooth tiger—a gift from Titus, when he gave me this position. Vance poured a shot, then he disappeared into the kitchen.
I threw the drink back and took a deep breath while I listened to his steps fade into the cacophony from the front room. Relishing the clean burn of good tequila. I poured myself one more shot and downed it, then I put the bottle and the glass away.
By the time Austin Graham and Bishop Mattheson re-entered my office, followed by both Vance and Tucker, my hands had stopped shaking. I looked past the trauma of my own infection, focusing not just on the present, but on the immediate future. On what I had to do in the next few minutes. The next few days. I’d gotten good at that over the past year and a half, this latest slip-up notwithstanding.
“Have a seat.” I gestured toward the guest chairs.
“Are you okay?” Austin asked as he sank into the right-hand seat.
“I should be asking both of you that question.” I sat behind the desk as Tucker started the voice recorder on his phone again and set it on my blotter.
“No,” Bishop growled. “We are not fucking okay.”
“I get that, and I’m sorrier for your loss than you can likely understand.” I exhaled slowly and folded my hands on the blotter, clasping them just a little too hard. “I can’t bring Yvette back, but I can help you get justice.”
