Page 49 of Deep Cover

Her eyes flew wider. “What?”

“I’m positive it’s a bomb.” He set the package down carefully off the shoulder of the road and ran back to the SUV to grab a heavy folded blanket. With a speed and precision that told her this wasn’t the first time he’d done this, he draped the blanket over the package.

“Get back,” he ordered.

Goose bumps prickled over her from head to toe.

“Dammit, Ryss! Listen to me!”

She backed farther away, phone in hand, dialing her office while Reid barked out information to Cannon on his own phone.

“Patch in Rome—”

Caryssa swept a look around the parking lot. A handful of cars sat scattered across the other end of the broken asphalt, with a convenience store at one end and a row of darkened storefronts at the other. Beyond the lot, traffic moved along the two-lane road, the drivers oblivious to what Reid had just uncovered.

Her gaze dropped to the box.

It sat several yards away where Reid had left it, mostly hidden beneath the blanket. Plain cardboard, roughly the size of a shoebox. Nothing about it screamed bomb.

Her office still hadn’t picked up. The call rolled to voicemail.

Caryssa lowered the phone, frustration biting hard. She’d bristled at Blackout’s refusal to trust the Bureau, but standing beside a possible bomb while her own people failed to answer made their paranoia a hell of a lot easier to understand.

Worse, she was beginning to wonder if it was paranoia at all.

She focused on Reid. He stood angled toward the package, shoulders bunched as he listened to Rome on speaker.

In a calm, clipped voice that made her chest tighten with fear, Rome walked him through the situation. Which—she suddenly realized as the fog started to clear—meant defusing a bomb.

“Use your knife to poke the corner of the box.”

Without even hesitating about the fact he was about to poke a bomb, Reid hunched over the box. “Is it a good idea to disturb it?”

“No. But leaving it there without knowing what we’re dealing with isn’t a great option either.”

She burned to rush to his side, needing to be near him, to feel him near. But she stayed rooted in place. The last thing Reid needed now was her distracting him.

He held his phone over the package, giving Rome a clear view of what he was doing. His movements were controlled, his attention fixed entirely on the device.

Caryssa curled her fingers into her palms.

This was the part she hated. Standing back. Watching. Knowing Reid was inches from a bomb while she could do absolutely nothing to change what happened next.

Her phone buzzed hard against her palm, and she jerked it to her ear. In a few breathless words, she told her boss what was happening.

“We can be there in forty-five minutes.”

Caryssa looked at Reid.

Forty-five minutes might as well have been tomorrow.

“The team is on it now. You might be too late,” she said.

Her breath caught as she watched the man she loved ease up the corner of the packing tape just enough to peek inside the layers of cardboard. He shined his phone light inside.

“It’s a bomb.” His voice grim. “Confirmed.”

“How does a bomb get through the mail!” Her voice rose several notches, her boss on the other end of the phone line completely forgotten.