Page 12 of Shadow Secrets
Sebastian made a noise in his throat.
“That wasn’t a yes.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose. “It’s the only answer I’ve got right now.”
Garrett studied him for a long moment, then nodded. “We’ll set the watch rotation. You’re not on it tonight.”
“I’m on it tonight.”
“Sebastian—”
“I’m on it.”
Another long look. Then Garrett clapped him once on the shoulder—brief, firm, the wordless language of men who’d chosen a life where touch meant trust—and walked away.
Sebastian sat on the floor outside Sutton’s door with his back against the wall and his sidearm on his right knee. The compound settled into its nighttime hum—the low drone of the HVAC, the distant murmur of the monitoring station, the occasional creak of the building as it adjusted to the cold. Familiar sounds. The sounds of a life he’d built in here.
He gave himself thirty seconds to process the emotions.
That was the deal he’d made with himself back in the hospital after the shooting, when the grief and the shock and the bone-deep wrongness of being called a hero for killing a man had threatened to swallow him whole.
Thirty seconds. He could feel anything for thirty seconds. He could break, rage, weep, stare into the void. But when the thirty seconds were up, he sealed it and functioned. That was the price of being the person other people depended on.
He closed his eyes.
Images swept through his mind. Ginger at sixteen, rolling her eyes at the security briefing, calling him Bastian for the first time, and watching with delight as his jaw tightened. Ginger at the fundraiser, in the blue dress her mother had picked out, complaining about the shoes. Ginger on the floor, his blood on her hands, screaming his name in a voice he still heard in his sleep years afterward.
Ginger on a sidewalk in Blackridge, Montana. Alone. Checking her phone under a streetlight, waiting for a conversation that would never happen.
Why? Because of this so-called investigation about a tattoo? What had she gotten herself into?
He’d saved her life. He’d taken a bullet and killed a man and spent three weeks in a hospital bed, and in the end, it hadn’t mattered. Someone had finished the job. Not the same person—Penn Crenshaw was dead by Sebastian’s hand—but someone connected to whatever Penn had been part of?
Thirty seconds ran by too quickly.
He opened his eyes. Breathed. Sealed it.
On the other side of the door, there was no sound. Sutton was either sleeping or doing what he was doing—lying in the dark, staring at the ceiling, replaying a night that had rewritten the terms of her existence.
They were two people on opposite sides of a door. Enemies by circumstance, allies by necessity, connected by a dead man and a dead girl and a possible conspiracy neither of them understood yet.
He’d killed her brother. She’d run to him anyway. And now he was sitting in the dark outside her room with a gun on his knee, guarding the sister of the man he’d shot.
He settled his back against the wall and waited for a dawn that felt very far away.
CHAPTER FOUR
Sutton
For three disoriented seconds, Sutton didn’t know where she was when she woke. The mattress was too firm. The sheets were too white. The ceiling was smooth drywall instead of the water-stained plaster above her bed in the studio. The pipes weren’t rattling, and the ambient rumble of the laundromat dryers wasn’t vibrating through the floor.
The silence was thicker, regulated, the hum of an HVAC system doing its job instead of the wheeze of a radiator that worked when it felt like it.
Then the previous night slammed into her in pieces—the muffled gunshots, Ginger’s body hitting the sidewalk, the dark sedan, the two-mile run through back roads with no phone—and she sat up so fast the room tilted.
Her Doc Martins were by the door where she’d left them. She’d tried to scrub the mud off in the bathroom sink before bed. The leather was stained a shade darker at the toes. She’d stared at the dirty water circling the drain, all the while thinking of blood, until her eyes blurred. Finally, she’d given up, set the boots on the mat, and climbed into the too-firm bed in her clothes.
The room was small, functional, and impersonal. A single bed, a nightstand, a lamp. A desk with nothing on it. A closet with six empty hangers lined up at precise intervals. No art on the walls, no books on the shelf. No evidence that any human being had ever slept or worked in this space.
