Page 13 of Velvet Vaughn

Chapter Three

The trail through the COBRA Securities compound wound three miles through the woods along the northern curve of Lake Monroe, and Anja Johansen knew every root and rise of it by feel now.

She came around the last bend before the boardwalk at a steady six-minute pace, her breath puffing white clouds into the chilly April air, while the sky over the water faded from charcoal to a thin wash of silver along the horizon. A Canada goose honked out in the fog. The sound carried unhurriedly, as if the lake itself was thinking about whether to bother with morning.

Kayla Hepburn Bates matched her pace without effort. Kayla was two weeks out from running point on a successful kidnap recovery in Terre Haute and had come home leaner than she’d left.

“Your left foot’s landing heavier,” Kayla noted.

“My left foot’s fine.”

“It’s landing heavier than your right.”

“It has been for a while. It’s called an injury redistributing load when I’m tired. Dante Costa cleared me.”

“Dante clears everyone on everything.”

Anja snorted. “That’s not true, and you know it. And, in case you forgot, Dante cleared you on that elbow hyperextension last fall, and you were back in the ring inside a week.”

“That’s what I’m saying. Dante’s a menace.”

Anja huffed a laugh and kept running. Honestly, the shoulder wasn’t perfect. It was better, which was a different animal entirely. For several months after the op in California, it had been a persistent ache that had lived inside her, a dull companion that woke up and went to bed when she did, reminding her every time she reached for a coffee mug or a sidearm that she’d once caught a bullet with the top of her scapula because a killer had confused her for Willa Ashford Fontaine. Better her than the Olympic beach volleyball player she’d been helping Willa’s husband, Colt, protect.

The shoulder had stopped aching on runs half a year ago. Her lungs felt clean, her legs strong. She was thirty-two years old, and for the first time since the worst day of her life, she could feel her own body without flinching away from it.

From the direction of the gym complex, the faint, unmistakable bark of Dante’s counting cadence floated through the trees. He started physical training at six sharp, regardless of the weather, the season, or what the rest of the human species considered reasonable. A blue heron lifted off the reeds at the lake’s edge with a slow, unbothered flap of wings and glided out over the water, a long gray shadow trailing behind it in the dissipating fog.

“You’ve been off this week,” Kayla prodded.

“I’ve been busy.”

“You’ve been off and busy.”

“That’s my brand.”

“Your brand,” Kayla corrected, “is dry as a cracker and twice as hard to chew. But you’ve been elsewhere lately. I’m not asking for details. I’m just saying I noticed.”

Anja let that sit for three strides before she answered, because Kayla wasn’t a friend you brushed off, and because the thing she was politely not asking about was the thing Anja had been pretending wasn’t there for months.

She’d been restless. That was the word she was willing to use with herself. Restlessness had a texture, and hers had the one she remembered from her twenties, back when she’d still thought the fluttery feeling in her heart was a signal worth listening to instead of a symptom worth managing. Anja had put those feelings in a drawer the morning she’d watched Leo De Luca leave her apartment to drive his parents to the airport in Indy. She’d sat on the drawer and made her peace with leaving it there.

Anja had thought the drawer was fine, but it was not, in fact, fine.

“I’m good,” she insisted, which was not a lie and not the whole truth. Kayla let it pass with a hum that promised they’d come back to it, then lengthened her stride to pull them both up the last rise toward the boardwalk.

#

After hostage rescue drills at the tactical simulation warehouse, Anja was ready for the weekend. The day ended with a cookout at the park, because if there was one thing the COBRA Securities staff loved, it was monthly get-togethers with food, drinks, music, and friendship.

She was in the middle of a spirited game of volleyball when her phone vibrated in her pocket. She thought about letting it go to voicemail. It was men versus women, and the girls were winning. Barely. But they were ahead by one point. It didn’t hurt that her teammates included Willa, Kayla, Kaitlyn Colton Bradley, and Peyton Durant Addison, a multiple Olympic medal winner in swimming. They were facing off against Peyton’s husband, Noah, his brother, Ethan, Gage Monahan, Kellan Polizzi, and Wyatt Hollister.

Anja motioned for Kaiya Quillen Corrigan to take her spot, and she jogged away to check the screen. The name on the display did precisely what it had been doing to her every time she’d thought of it for the last five months. But this time it was stronger, because there was no pretending it was a response to a text she’d drafted and deleted.

Leo De Luca.

Inside her, the drawer she’d been sitting on rattled hard enough to give her away.

Kayla, who’d substituted in Kenzie Bryant Elliot, called over, “Who is it?”