Page 4 of Shadow Secrets
He’d thought he’d dealt with it. He’d left D.C. He’d left the Service. He’d driven two thousand miles to a state where nobody cared about his face and taken a job that let him be useful without being seen. He’d built a life—spare and functional and deliberately impersonal, but a life—on the foundation of a simple belief: that what happened at that fundraiser was terrible and necessary, and he’d done the right thing. He could live with it.
I can live with it.
Except now there was a woman in a Fleetwood Mac T-shirt with ink on her arms and her brother’s last name on the wall, and she’d looked at him like he was the thing that had broken her life.
And she was right.
He sat there until his hands were steady again. It took longer than it should have.
Then he started the engine, pulled away from Iron Rose Tattoo, and drove toward the farmhouse he refused to call home. The lynx sketch was still on her counter. He didn’t go back for it.
CHAPTER TWO
Sutton
The bell above the door had barely stopped ringing before Sutton’s knees quit on her.
She grabbed the edge of the counter and held on, fingers digging into the laminate until her knuckles ached. Her breath was coming too fast—shallow little gulps that weren’t getting oxygen to the places that needed it.
She’d had enough panic attacks in the year after Penn died to recognize the opening act.
Not here. Not now. You’re at work.
She forced her hands to feel the solid surface under her palms and counted to ten the way her campus counselor had taught her, back when her problems were finals, financial aid, and whether she’d finish her sequential art thesis on time. Back when the name Crenshaw just meant her.
Her gasps echoed in the room. She needed air.
The stoop behind Iron Rose overlooked the alley with a dumpster and the back wall of the check-cashing place. Someone had tagged it with a spray-painted rooster of genuinely questionable artistic merit. Not exactly a meditation garden. But the air was cold and smelled of October rather than ink and cleaning solution. When she sat down on the concrete step and put her head between her knees, nobody was watching.
Sebastian Whitaker had been standing in her shop.
Sebastian Whitaker. With his sharp blue eyes, his pressed jacket, and his hands that had held the gun that killed her brother—he’d walked into Iron Rose on the anniversary of the worst day of her life and said I’m sorry.
AS if those two words could bridge the distance between his life and hers—between the book deals, magazine covers, congressional handshakes, and her cramped studio above the laundromat where the pipes rattled and the heat cut out in February.
I didn’t take a book deal. Or the medal. I didn’t want any of it.
She shoved his voice out of her head. She didn’t care what he wanted or didn’t want. She didn’t care that he’d looked at her like she was a wound he didn’t know how to stop bleeding. She didn’t care that when she’d mentioned her brother got a body bag, something behind his eyes had cracked open for half a second before he’d sealed it shut again.
She didn’t care about any of it. She was going to sit on this stoop until she could draw a solid breath, and then she was going to go back inside and finish her shift. Use the ink, the art, to wipe it all away. Afterward, she’d go home and drink some wine and sketch dragons until the day was over.
A manageable plan.
The back door opened, and Dom leaned out, a toothpick in the corner of his mouth, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. “You good?”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t push. That was the thing about Dom. He’d given her a job when her portfolio was thin and her references were nonexistent. She’d shown up to the interview with dark circles under her eyes and a chip on her shoulder the size of Montana. He’d looked at her work, looked at her, and said, “Tuesday through Friday, noon to close, we’ll see how it goes. “
He’d never asked about her past. Never googled her, as far as she could tell. In a town this small, that was either remarkable restraint or genuine indifference, and she’d never been sure which. Either way, it was the reason she’d stayed.
“That guy who just left,” Dom said, adjusting the toothpick. “The one who walked out of here like the building was on fire. That the fella I referred to you? From the security outfit?”
Sutton’s stomach dropped. “You sent him?”
“Yeah, Whitaker. Good kid. Quiet. Rents the old Hadley farmhouse out on Miller Road.” Dom said it matter-of-factly, no subtext. Because to Dom, that’s all Sebastian Whitaker was—a new guy in town who worked at the security compound and needed ink.
Dom didn’t watch cable news or follow politics. He probably couldn’t pick the Vice President out of a lineup, let alone the Secret Service agent who’d made headlines for saving the former VP’s daughter.
