The Witness

by Nichole Severn

  She curled long fingers around the edges of the baking sheet and held on as he carried her across the small space toward the bed. She’d tasted of honey before, but he couldn’t wait to find out how much more addictive she might become with all that chocolate and peanut butter added into the mix.

  * * *

  “I DON’T THINK I’ll ever see brownies as an innocent dessert again,” he said.

  Her laugh shook through her. Camille traced the curve of the muscles across his bare abdomen with her finger. She loved touching him, feeling his heart beneath her hand. It proved this wasn’t a dream. That she was alive when the world had set out to smother her. There were still patches of chocolate sticking to her fingers, but all she could focus on right now was how...right the past couple of hours had felt.

  She’d given Finn access to the hidden, untouched parts of her—inside and out—for the first time since she’d discovered who her fiancé really was, but despite the fact Finn could hold that power over her, she didn’t feel vulnerable. Not with him. The regrets, the guilt, the fear, the expectations she’d set on herself—all of those things had disappeared the moment she’d made the choice that what she wanted mattered. That she’d wanted him. The only way to get her life back was to take the responsibility into her own hands, and that was exactly what she’d done. “We’ll have to keep that particular combination in mind next time.”

  “Next time?” He notched his chin down in order to look at her, every inch of him the man she’d imagined under those superhero shirts he wore. “If that’s the case, I’m going to have to invest in more sheets after this.”

  Battle-earned aches replaced the deep pleasure he’d brought out of her body. Pain streaked through her opposite shoulder and the back of her head, but she’d left the pain medication script her surgeon had ripped from his prescription pad unfilled for fear of falling back into the numbing habits she’d held on to for so long. Instead, surprise slowed the path of her finger across his stomach. He wasn’t backing away from this connection they’d forged together. He wasn’t discarding this as a mistake he could walk away from when the investigation was over and the Carver was back behind bars. There’d been more to it than a casual way to past the time. At least, for her. She’d given him something she hadn’t given to anyone else, hadn’t even thought of surrendering, and he was acting as if it’d meant as much to him as it had to her. “Unless you have other plans that don’t include a bed.”

  “I might.” His smooth smile knocked the uncertainty swirling through her down a peg. Finn planted his mouth against her forehead, then set his chin against the top of her head. “The place isn’t that big, but I’m a creative guy, and I’m fairly certain that shower is large enough for two people. Although you’re the only woman I’ve brought here.”

  Unease bled from the muscles along her spine.

  “No other witnesses you’ve seduced?” She had no right to ask, but part of her—the part that’d started hoping for this bond built on ridiculous inside jokes and their combined love of mattress chocolate—needed to know. “No other women waiting for you to get reassigned from this case?”

  “Women? No,” he said. “Not unless you count my boss.”

  She closed her eyes, digging one corner of the gauze taped to his side under her thumbnail. She wasn’t sure how long they’d been lying there, simply savoring the feel of one another in stillness, but Camille didn’t dare break the spell. Not yet. The investigation, the fugitive still out there, the past—none of it mattered right then, and not for the first time since he’d saved her life, she could breathe a bit easier. She was safe here. With him. She’d always be safe as long as he was next to her.

  Sliding her jaw along his shoulder, she stared up at him, her bare skin pressed against him. “I think your mom would be proud of you, of how brave you were out there in those woods. You might wear superhero shirts because that was the last gift she gave you before she died, but you’re as much of a hero as any one of those characters on your chest.”

  “I’ve told you before. I’m not a hero, Red.” He pushed out of the bed, leaving her cold under the sheets. Reaching for his pants, he threaded his feet into the legs and secured them around his waist. He clenched his shirt in his hands—another superhero shirt, but she hadn’t recognized the logo—and the veins in his arm seemed to be fighting to break through his skin. “A hero wouldn’t have given Miles Darien the chance to take you in the first place. A hero never would’ve left you in that house alone or gotten stabbed in the process of searching for his witness.”

  “It was my fault then that Miles Darien got a hold of me?” She slid her feet to the floor, the sheet clutched around her. “It’s my fault the Carver is out there, most likely planning his next move to finish what he started a year ago?”

  “What?” The deep lines between his eyebrows eased, and the deputy US marshal she’d relied on for so long—the man she wanted to keep relying on when this case was finished—returned. “Of course not.”

  “If I’d recognized Jeff Burnes for what he was sooner, maybe I would’ve been able to save more of his victims. If I’d only been stronger, he couldn’t have taken my love for my photography,” she said. “If I’d known about Miles Darien before he took me from the house, Florence PD wouldn’t have found Jodie Adler’s body out there in those woods.”

  He tossed his shirt to the bed then scrubbed a hand down his face. His beard bristled in the silence between them as her words seemed to sink in, and the fight drained out of him. “Camille, none of that is on you.”

  “You see how ridiculous it sounds, then? To take the blame for something you had no control over? Those are the exact thoughts I’ve lived with for the past year, Finn. My fantasy self—this woman I’ve built in my head and aspire to become—doesn’t let them bother her, but the real me? That guilt? It’s eaten at me every day since I walked away from the Carver’s attack, making me question why I was the only one who survived. But you showed me even though I’m at the center of this puzzle, I’m not the only piece.” She moved around the bed, closing the distance between them. “Heroes aren’t given their status because they prevent the bad things from happening. It’s because they will do anything to stand up to the people responsible, and that’s what you’ve done for me.” She set her hand on his arm. “Miles Darien wanted to prove he was stronger than the Carver, a man who’d already taken so much of my life without killing me. I was integral to his plan to do that. There was nothing you could’ve done to stop him, and internalizing that guilt for what happened will only leave you with a numbness that will contaminate every aspect of your life and take away the things you love about yourself. So you’re my hero, Finn, whether you want to hear it or not. When you let the numbness and guilt win, there’s nothing you won’t do to hear someone say they believe in and care about you.”

  Surprise brightened the color of his eyes. “You just said you care about me.”

  “Don’t let it go to your head.” She set her fists against his chest, still clutching the sheet around her. “I tell that to all the law-enforcement officers who’ve been assigned to protect me over the past year. You’d be surprised at how easily I deflected the FBI’s suspicion when I cozied up to the special agent in charge on the case.”

  “I’ll remember that.” He leaned down and swept his mouth across hers. Just the simple action, the gentleness, resurrected the tingling sensation usually isolated in her fingers and hands when she held her camera and pushed it through her entire body. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d felt so...important to another person. Significant. He curved his hands around her hips and seized the sheet covering her from chest to toes. “I’ve got brownie in places I’ve never imagined food to ever end up, so how about I change these sheets and my clothes, and we eat something unsexy enough to bring down our blood sugar?”

  “Who said we need clothes for that?” A wave of electricity and daring she’d neve
r felt before burned through her, and she couldn’t help but revel in the newfound confidence.

  The shrill sound of Finn’s phone from the nightstand beside the bed burst the bubble they’d created around themselves, and Camille flinched against the onslaught of reality. They might’ve had the past couple of hours to themselves, but they couldn’t ignore the real world forever. Not with the Carver still out there.

  “Hold on to that thought.” Finn unwrapped himself from around her and went for the phone, catching it on the fourth ring before the caller was sent to voice mail. “Reed.”

  She rounded back around the bed as Finn disappeared down the hallway toward the front door and reached for her camera, which she’d placed on the nightstand. She could hear his mumbled conversation, but she only had attention for the sleek curves of the instrument that’d brought her passion to life. Not much had changed over the past few hours, since she’d taken those photos, and yet there’d been a major shift inside of her.

  Flipping the power switch, she queued the last few photos onto the LCD monitor. Finn, in all his glory, stretched across the bed, completely oblivious to the lens and the woman behind it. She’d struggled every second of every day to simply compress the shutter release button before Jodie Adler’s body had been found in the clearing. She’d hadn’t seen an end date to the terror that’d kept her from rediscovering her art. Not until Finn had given her a safe place to confront her internal demons—not just physically, in the safe house, but emotionally. If it hadn’t been for him reminding her how to feel, to trust someone other than herself, she’d have stayed buried in the thick, black haze that’d taken control of her life forever.

  She brushed her thumb across the screen, following the outline of his face, his mouth and the length of his throat. She’d meant what she’d said before. He was a hero—not only to her, but also to all of the witnesses he’d protected up to this point—and because of that, she’d fallen in love with him. She’d fallen for the deputy US marshal determined never to let himself care about someone else for fear they’d be taken from him, as his mother had been. But he cared about her, didn’t he? He’d battled through the pain of being stabbed, of losing blood, of putting himself at risk to find her when Miles Darien had come so close to killing her. He’d gone out of his way to respect the personal distance she’d needed. He’d put her needs above his own, cooked for her, comforted her, placed himself between the threat outside that front door and where she’d slept. That had to mean something more than his usual feelings toward those other witnesses he’d been assigned to protect in the past.

  Footsteps padded behind her, but she didn’t have to turn around to know Finn had ended his call. Camille switched off the camera and replaced it on the nightstand. She hadn’t felt exposed lying next to him in the bed with nothing coming between their bodies a few minutes ago, but she couldn’t help but feel the sheet provided little protection against the nervousness pimpling her skin now. She’d kept her feelings and thoughts to herself in the past, but she wasn’t that woman anymore. She didn’t want to be that woman anymore. She wanted to be what he’d described back in the hospital, the woman she’d fantasized of becoming all her life. Not a victim but a survivor, and that meant she couldn’t hide behind the mask she’d put in place after losing everything twelve months ago. “Finn, there’s something we need to talk about—”

  “The medical examiner identified the remains I found in the woods.” His chest stretched wide, the muscles bunching and relaxing with every breath. He clutched his phone in his hand a little too tightly, bones white under the rough skin of his knuckles. “Dental records and bone marrow tests confirmed it a little while ago. The skeleton I found belongs to Dr. Henry Gruner.”

  Chapter Twelve

  The color drained from her face.

  “What? No.” Camille shook her head. She stumbled back as though she’d taken a punch to the gut, and the last few hours of bliss they’d created together dissipated. “That’s not...that’s not possible. Those can’t be Dr. Gruner’s remains you found. He didn’t die a year ago because I’ve been seeing him as a patient all this time. He’s been helping me process everything that’s happened since I came to Oregon.”

  Finn planted his feet in place, giving her the space she needed to hear the truth. “The medical examiner confirmed it. I asked her to run the tests again, but dental records and DNA don’t lie, Camille. Someone killed the real Dr. Gruner a year ago with the Carver’s MO, left him out in those woods and has assumed his identity. The man you’ve been seeing is a fraud.”

  “None of this makes sense.” Her gaze fell to a distant point past his left hip, and the stab wound in his side flared with awareness. She clenched her hands at her side, suddenly seeming so much smaller than she had a few minutes ago. Turning back toward the bed, she discarded the sheet she’d been clutching around her and reached for her clothes. Within seconds, she’d slipped perfect legs into a pair of fresh jeans and wound her injured shoulder into an oversize sweater from her overnight bag. She maneuvered around the end of the bed barefoot. “The only man I know who is intelligent enough, driven enough and deranged enough to kill a psychologist and assume his identity—to do all of this—escaped prison less than a week ago.”

  She’d read his mind. “It’s possible Miles Darien wasn’t the Carver’s only protégé. He could’ve recruited someone else to finish his work while he was waiting for trial, or he had a bigger fan base than the feds originally believed. There are plenty of copycats out there waiting to make a name for themselves, or hell, even to carry on a killer’s work without revealing themselves. They do it to increase the public’s panic, cast doubt on an ongoing trial or to get the killer’s attention.” He shifted his weight between both feet. “Can you think of anybody Jeff Burnes mentioned in conversation or someone who came around the apartment leading up to the first attack in Chicago? Anyone who seemed particularly interested in you before you were put in witness protection?”

  “No. I told the FBI everything I remembered in the weeks before Jeff attacked me. We worked with a lot of the same people. Producers, editors, other photographers and writers, but they were all interviewed and alibied before I was put in the program.” She bit her bottom lip, the small muscles in her cheeks twitching. Her aquamarine eyes raised to meet his, and the confidence, the fire, that’d been there when they’d made love drained away. “I don’t understand why this is happening, Finn. How someone could insert themselves into my life, pretend to care about me, claim to love me and that they want to spend the rest of their life with me, all for the purpose of killing me in the end? What kind of person does that? What kind of person recruits others to inflict the same kind of pain on countless other victims?”

  A strange surge of guilt braided with hot anger for the SOB who’d convinced her to trust him then ripped apart her world. Blood drummed in his ears. He didn’t have an answer for her, couldn’t begin to imagine the confusion and fear tearing at all the good memories she’d made over the past year. One thing he did know—he couldn’t keep his distance anymore. Taking her hands in his, he smoothed his fingers along her wrist, then higher along her triceps, careful of her injured shoulder. He stepped into her, following the curve of her shoulder blades, and hugged her close. The hint of lavender in her hair urged his racing heart into calmness, despite the churn of anxiety for her safety. “I don’t know, but we’re going to figure it out. I promise.”

  Someone had followed her to Oregon, predicted her need for psychological support after the Carver’s failed attack, killed the only therapist in Florence who specialized in trauma recovery with a known killer’s MO and assumed a man’s entire life as his own. Only it couldn’t have been the Carver. Not according to the warden or the guards of MCC Chicago, not to mention Burnes’s cell mate. The bastard might still be on the run after escaping federal custody, but Finn honestly couldn’t place Camille’s ex in the silhouette of the man psychologically tormenting her n
ow. The timeline didn’t add up.

  “You’re going to get through this, Red. It’s not going to be easy. Some days will be harder than others, and there will be times you’ll want to give up. There’s going to be nightmares and triggers, but you’re stronger than all of it. I know you are. You’ve survived what most people don’t three times now. It has nothing to do with your fantasy self or luck. It’s your determination to keep what happened to you from happening to others.” Her exhales warmed his neck, kept him in the moment as that scared ten-year-old kid he’d been stepped into power in his head. “Healing doesn’t mean the damage never existed. It just means the past doesn’t control your life anymore, and you owe it to yourself to move on. Here in Oregon, back in Chicago, wherever you decide. Because no matter how many times you’ve claimed me as your own personal hero, you’ve never needed me to protect you. You’re your own hero.”

  Her shoulders relaxed away from her ears.

  “You always seem to know what to say to make me feel better.” Setting her forehead against his chest, Camille stepped back but remained in the circle of his arms. Strong, creative, so passionate and alive. “That’s why...that’s why I’ve fallen in love with you.”

  Finn flinched.

  Time stretched into a gut-wrenching, distorted fluid. He let his arms fall from around her and took a step back. The rational, distanced part of his brain took a back seat to the rush of terror forging a new neural pathway front and center, and panic tightened like a noose around his neck. Words died in his throat as a cold, dark dread unfurled in his chest. “You don’t mean that.”

  Her bottom lip parted on a strong exhale. A humorless laugh bubbled up her bruised throat but was nothing like the sound he’d memorized before. “You said it yourself. I’ve survived what no one else has, Finn. I think that gives me a certain sense of self-awareness when it comes to this connection between us, and I think you feel it, too.”