There was a hit out on me.
Not to mention, my cover had been compromised.
The dark thoughts swirling in my head had me terrified and sick to the point I nearly hugged Bray when I saw him.
He wore a black T-shirt and slacks and looked like he hadn’t slept—which I knew he had to some extent since I’d found him that way on my couch. But still, the shadows beneath his eyes said he hadn’t gotten much. He greeted me and Agent Simmons in the station’s lobby, a completely and intentionally nondescript building on the outside, and guided me into an elevator, which delivered us to an underground floor of busy cubicles and open office doors. Phones rang from every direction, and people walked around holding stacks of papers looking frazzled. It was a run-of-the-mill office, just one buried under so much security clearance no one knew about it. Similar stations were hidden all over the country. I’d been to plenty of faceless concrete buildings, old dry cleaners, emptyrestaurants. Fronts for an underground organization—literally—that policed crime off the radar.
Bray led me to a small office at the end of the room. He glanced over his shoulder before he guided me in the door and closed it behind us.
I took in the small space stacked with papers, a whiteboard covered in scribbles, a small potted plant by a box light emulating an external window. An internal window faced the cubicles in the busy office belly.
“Is this your desk?” I asked and welcomed myself into the chair. My ankle was not as recovered as I’d thought.
“No. That’s my desk,” Bray said and pointed through the internal window at one of the cubicles. “I just wanted some privacy; Jeremy won’t mind.” As he said it, I noted a framed photo of two men and a little boy smiling from the desk’s corner.
Bray leaned on the desk with his arms spread. The T-shirt strained to accommodate the position. “Are you okay?”
I looked up at him, chasing away thoughts of his arms and how they’d held me in my dream. “Of course not. Will you please tell me what’s going on?”
He stood up with a heavy breath. “I finally got clearance to get the information we need, not exactly legitimately, but that’s beside the point. We were right: It’s all connected, and you are in danger.”
“Clearly,” I said. “What did you learn about Wallace’s death?”
“Itwasa heart attack, but the autopsy showed a high dose of potassium chloride in his blood, which can trigger a cardiac event, and found evidence of an injection site on his neck.”
“Oh shit. He was poisoned?”
“It appears so, yes.”
I shook my head, trying to keep at bay the complicated wave of pain lapping at me. “I knew he wouldn’t just drop dead. He was too healthy.”
“Well, you were right. I want to have us moved, but I need sign-off first. I’m waiting on a meeting with the director in a few minutes, and I wanted to get you safe in the meantime.”
I was used to my life taking sharp, unexpected turns; the thought of disappearing was not new to me. But my brain snagged on one word he’d said.
“Us?”
Bray nodded. “Yes. With Olena Nova out of prison, I don’t want them shipping you off to another case who-knows-where with a new handler, and have all your classified files go back underground. I want you with me until this is over.”
His declaration nearly knocked the wind out of me. He wanted to stay with me. To keep me safe. Any annoyance I’d had with him over blowing my cover fizzled out and was replaced by a feeling deep in my chest that I’d never felt before. Something warm and curious and a little disarming.
“Okay,” I said. “Before you talk to the director, you should probably know my cover is blown, so I can’t go back to Del Rio anyway.”
He looked up in surprise. “What?”
“Yeah,” I said and stood up. I rounded the desk to his side of it. “Right before you sent Agent Simmons to the door, Melanie told me they’d been on to you, and they knew I was a setup from the moment I got here. She said it was all an act, welcoming me and hiring me, so they could keep tabs on both of us.”
Bray’s mouth fell open. I could see him reliving the whole case like a highlight reel of his mistakes. “Shit, Erin. I’m so sorry.”
I reeled, not expecting him to apologize. “Well, I was right: Melanie is scared as hell of Montrose. When she called my bluff, I confronted her with what we know, and she told me to leave. But maybe it doesn’t matter anymore if someone is coming to kill me anyway.”
Bray opened his mouth to respond, frustrated, when someone knocked on the door. He spun to open it.
“The director is ready,” a young woman in neat pants and a blue blouse said.
“Thanks,” Bray told her. He shut the door and turned back to me. “Look, I’m going to fix this. Just come with me and don’t say anything.” The determined, apologetic look on his face told me not to argue.
I nodded and followed him.
