by Jodie Bailey
Great. She already missed her king-size bed with the down comforter and the memory-foam mattress cover. “You realize I have nothing on me, not even a toothbrush. I didn’t even get to grab my go-bag or my EpiPen.”
“Your go-bag?” His smile quirked higher, then faded. “You actually kept a bag packed in case you had to run?”
“It’s in the hall closet, a duffle bag with some clothes, papers, things I wanted to hold onto, ready to grab if you guys ever knocked on my door and said it was time to go. I never expected you to show up at my job and rip my life away without warning.”
Sam winced, but he didn’t reference the last comment. “I’m sorry you have to live life on edge like that.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“Well, when it comes to the EpiPen, we can get you a new one, but I have one if the need arises before that. Let’s just say that bees are not my friends.”
“Same. Along with bee pollen, oddly enough. I took some once as a supplement and it almost killed me.” She’d only had an allergic reaction one time, but not having a shot at the ready made her edgy. “I’ll tell you right now, I bear some contempt for the marshal who took my bag. It’s like he stole...” She sighed. It was as though he’d stolen her identity. Again.
“I could tell you he’s a really nice guy who has a wife and kids, but it won’t help, I know.” He clicked on the blinker and turned onto another highway. “There’s a female marshal, Deputy Dana Santiago, on my team. She’ll make sure you have the necessities you need for the next few days. Much like the last time, you can give us a list and a team will go into your house and try to retrieve what they can. We’ll get some of your stuff to you as you start over again, but I’m afraid it won’t be much.”
She knew the drill. She wished she didn’t, but she did. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Amy Naylor no longer existed.
* * *
For the next hour, they rode in silence. Sam spoke little, listening to the back and forth in his earpiece as his team coordinated with other members of the Marshals Service and tried to piece together what had gone wrong. No one seemed certain who had leaked Amy’s whereabouts or how she’d been found. No one could give intel on how many bad guys were on the hunt. The men they’d taken into custody refused to talk, more afraid of whoever was funding them than they could ever be of the marshals.
In the silence, Sam fought to keep his emotions at bay. A strong sense of relief came with the word that Wainwright had been released with minor injuries after his dustup in the shopping center parking lot. The suspect who’d rammed him had been arrested, and a team was at the shopping mall, scouring surveillance footage from parking lot cameras and security feeds for other suspicious vehicles.
As expected, other news wasn’t so comforting. In the midst of a recovery operation was not the time to give in to grief, but the call that Edgecombe truly was dead had come as a blow. Sam had known, but hearing the suspicion clarified in stark, no-nonsense words hadn’t been easy. It would have been nice if he could pull over and take a second to pull himself fully together.
He needed to get his head on straight, but he couldn’t afford the luxury. Priority number one was to get Amy to headquarters. After that, he could sit down and debrief, then grieve with others who had known Edgecombe, or who at least knew what it was like to lose a brother-in-arms.
In the rapidly fading evening light, they raced around the city of Columbus. Only an hour left. He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel and checked the rearview again. Since they’d evaded the red car, his eyes had roved from mirror to mirror, searching for a tail, watching for signs of danger. So far, so good. If he could keep her safe for an hour longer, he could hand off Amy to his team and relax in the knowledge he’d saved her from a criminal intent on killing her.
Amy shifted in the passenger seat and stretched her legs, pulling her neck from side to side. She had to be tense and tired. There had to be a million questions running through her head, but she hadn’t said a word in over an hour. She’d merely ridden in silence, alternating between stillness and restless fidgeting.
The silence in the car was too loud, leaving him too much room to think about all that had transpired today, on the most disastrous mission of his WITSEC career. Today’s destruction rivaled some of the carnage he’d experienced overseas with his Special Forces team. He’d never dreamed he’d bear witness to such loss at home.
Sam had to break the heavy silence, get a conversation started or something. “We’re almost there. About an hour more.”
She nodded but didn’t look at him. She was probably thirsty, starving or any number of other uncomfortable things. Pulling over for a drink and a burger would invite trouble. While he felt certain they’d left their pursuers behind, there were risks he simply couldn’t take. Unlike some of the witnesses Sam had retrieved, Amy hadn’t complained or loosed an angry tirade. She simply stared out the front window, silently accepting her fate.
Reality likely hadn’t kicked in for her yet. When it did, the fallout would not be pretty. That wasn’t for Sam to deal with. Good thing. Sam had never been stellar at helping people deal with their emotions. WITSEC had psychologists and counselors on staff to handle the mental and emotional ramifications of going into hiding. With her life in shambles for a second time, Amy was definitely going to need a session or two.
“Did you ever talk to anyone about your husband?” Sam winced as soon as the question left his lips. Seriously. There was making conversation and there was prying into places he had no business digging. Keeping his mouth shut would have been the better option.
There was something about this woman though, something that made him feel as if he knew her better than he did. Maybe it was because he’d spent time with her when Edgecombe checked in on her. Maybe it was the way she’d opened up to him earlier in the day. Or maybe it was simply who she was. Amy was different than any other woman he’d ever encountered, on the job or off.
She was definitely different than his ex-wife.
“My husband?” Her voice had a hazy edge to it, as though his question had drawn her from somewhere far away.
“Never mind.”
She stared out the side window and said nothing for a couple of miles. “No. I didn’t.”
So she had caught the question after all. “Was there a reason you didn’t?”
“I talked to my sister. I never saw the need to say anything to anyone else. It hurt when Noah died. I lost him, my future, everything. Even the apartment I was living in, my car...”
That couldn’t be right. The soldier in Sam remembered all of the paperwork he’d had to fill out prior to a deployment. Points of contact for notifications, burial instructions, beneficiaries for life insurance... The whole morbid list was as long as his arm. Things no one wanted to think about when they were headed into a war zone but things that had to be squared away to ensure the protection of their loved ones at home before they could go wheels up to do their jobs. “How is that possible? You should have been taken care of. There should have been so much available to you.” There it was. Another way too personal comment he never should have made.
Amy shook her head, her blond hair spilling over her shoulder and swishing against her cheek. She tucked it behind her ear. “We got married so fast. He never changed his paperwork. I guess he never expected to die. Who does?”
Sam’s heart sank. As a single soldier, all of his benefits had been directed to his mother and father. Amy’s Noah had likely done the same in his single life. And if their marriage had happened on a timeline as tight as the one she’d indicated, he’d already filled out his deployment paperwork and had likely not even considered the consequences of not changing beneficiaries.
She was right. What man wanted to consider his death, especially when he was trying to cram in as much living as possible with a brand-new wife?
“I wasn’t eve
n his primary notification on his paperwork. I found out what happened to him because one of the chaplains in the battalion knew me. His parents got the notification. I heard secondhand. I’d never met his family. They lived in Puerto Rico.” She sniffed, then swallowed and turned away from him. “I didn’t even have the money to fly to San Juan for my own husband’s funeral. I’ve never even seen his grave.”
Sam’s heart shattered. He gripped the steering wheel tighter to keep from reaching for her hand, which would have been a decidedly unprofessional move. When she said she’d lost everything, she wasn’t exaggerating. Had she even felt she had the right to grieve?
For long miles, he didn’t know what to say, how to soothe the ache she was bound to feel at her husband’s death and his family’s slight. The woman beside him was stronger than he’d imagined. “So you never talked to anyone except your sister?” It was the best he had to offer, and it was completely lame.
She didn’t seem to notice. “I didn’t want to fight his family, because I figured they had even less than I did. And nothing was going to bring him back to me, so why bother talking to someone about it? It was going to hurt no matter what.”
“And yet you minored in psychology.”
She cast him a rueful glance, her eyebrow quirked. “That was in my file too?”
At least she was somewhat smiling. It was better than heated anger or chilled silence. “Yep.”
“WITSEC wouldn’t let me do anything that even remotely smelled like my career goals or the work I was doing at the gym to pay my way through college. Truth is, I had enough biology to be able to teach at the community college level since I studied sports medicine. I was accepted to grad school so I could become a physical therapist and work with athletes. A psychology minor made sense so I could dig into a bit of how the mind works so that I could figure out what made an athlete tick, could help them recover from an injury in body and in mind, maybe even in spirit.”
“That sounds kind of New Age.”
“Far from it. It sounds like Jesus. A lot of athletes who are injured, especially at the levels I was shooting for, have their whole lives change when they’re injured. Entire careers get derailed. Dreams die. There are psychologists and counselors for that sort of thing, but I know a lot of people talk to their physical therapists and open up more on the table than while sitting on a couch in a counseling session. I figured I should know something about how to help someone whose world has been completely rocked and their dreams shattered in a way they never saw coming.” She trailed off and ran a finger along the stitching in the seat between them. “I never realized when I was taking all of those classes that all those things I learned would apply to me someday. Or that I’d never get to use my real training. I got to gather up all of my knowledge and teach instead.”
“Has teaching been that bad?”
“I’ve actually enjoyed it, but I miss me. I miss having goals and plans and dreams. It’s been three years and I’ve never figured out what I want to do with this new life. Good thing, since it’s gone now too.” She pulled her hand into her lap and balled her fists between her knees. “Maybe that’s why I never came up with a new dream, because some part of me always knew this day would come and it would all be snatched away again.”
“I’m sorry.” He truly was. Somehow, this whole detour in her life felt like his fault.
“Thanks, but you’re trying to protect me. This is Grant Meyer’s fault. All the more reason to see him locked away forever.”
Sam exhaled a breath he hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. Sometimes, when things got too heated, a witness would back down and decide not to testify. While Amy had turned over enough evidence to condemn Meyer without her testimony, federal prosecutors needed her to be willing to testify if any questions came up about those documents and how she’d obtained them.
“I have no regrets about my decision to turn my boss over to the authorities. A lot of people were freed from a terrible man’s clutches.” Her expression turned pensive, and she fingered the antique watch on her wrist. The leather band was scratched and worn, and the crystal over the gold face bore a small crack near the bezel. “I just hope they got far enough.”
“There something special about that watch?”
Amy blanched, her cheeks going pale as she laid her hand over the watch’s face as though she could hide it and possibly even erase it from Sam’s memory completely.
Something was very wrong here. He’d merely asked because the way she absently ran a finger across it made it appear to be some sort of security blanket. He’d thought it might have belonged to her husband or someone in her husband’s family. Now, his radar pinged on high.
Innocent people didn’t have things to hide. The way she was protecting that timepiece, there was no doubt...
Amy Brady was hiding something big.
FOUR
“Talk to me, Amy.” Sam’s voice had shifted away from friendly sympathy and had taken on the hard edge of the federal agent he was.
Shifting, Amy cradled her arm against her stomach, palm still pressed against the face of the watch. She was fully aware she looked like a small child who’d been caught with her hand in the cookie jar and was trying to hide the evidence.
Why had she even touched the watch in the first place? When she entered the program, WITSEC had cleared it as an item she could bring with her. It was simply a watch, a family heirloom. There was no secret to the piece itself.
The secret was in the history behind it. Spilling the story to a federal marshal would likely get her a slap on the wrist, but it could completely destroy the lives of two people she cared about and needed to protect.
Defensive words and arguments built in her chest until she could feel them trying to force their way out, but that posture would only make him more suspicious. Instead, she pulled in a deep breath, swallowed the angry words and faced him head on as though she had nothing to hide. “I have literally had my entire fake life ripped away from me today. Everything. Even my favorite pen that I found in the faculty lounge one day and have guarded like the treasure it is ever since.” She paused, but Sam didn’t rise to the bait of her attempted humor. His jaw was still set with a tightness that spoke of his suspicion. “I just don’t want to risk someone taking this away from me too, even though I have permission to have it. It’s literally all I have left of anything that used to be me.” While she hadn’t told the whole truth, it was close enough. So close that the sting of tears burned her eyes.
The tension in Sam’s jaw eased. “It was your husband’s.”
Amy turned away and stared out the side window as the exits grew farther apart and the traffic decreased outside of Columbus. Let him think that. If he found out the watch had really belonged to Layla’s great-grandfather, she’d have to reveal who Layla was. To tell the truth would put the marshals on the hunt for the younger girl as a potential witness, one of the many young women Grant Meyer and Logan Cutter had trafficked. The one who had led Amy to realize the truth about her boss and New Horizons. The woman had “worked” with Amy at the day spa. When Amy learned that Layla’s “job” was actually Grant Meyer’s way of exacting pay for sneaking her illegally into the country, it had been the catalyst for Amy reporting her boss’s behavior. Amy had been the one to help Layla disappear into safety.
Layla was the only one Amy had been able to help escape the traffickers’ clutches.
Amy wouldn’t risk Layla being found and possibly exposed to the kind of fear and uncertainty that Amy herself had lived with for the past three years. The girl had been through enough.
Sam laid a hand on her shoulder and the warmth nearly undid what little reserve she had left. He pulled away nearly as quickly as he’d touched her, as though she’d scalded him. “For a minute, I forgot what today must be doing to you. What the past few years must be doing to you actually.”
What it was doing to all
of them. Though Amy had been unsuccessful in tracking Layla down in Virginia, she’d prayed daily for the young woman’s continued safety and continued anonymity in a place Grant Meyer could never find her. She had no idea where to find Layla or how to start looking but...
What if protecting Layla meant telling the truth? Sam had tracked Amy down almost as soon as she left the state. What if he could find Layla and bring her to safety as well? Amy ran her thumb over the watch crystal, knowing she stood on the edge of a point of no return. “Can I ask you a question that stays between us?”
“Depends on the question.”
At least he was honest. “What if I knew of someone out there on their own? Someone Grant Meyer might be looking for?”
Sam’s head jerked toward her, his eyes searching her face before he dragged his attention back to the road. “Who?”
Should she do this? Possibly send the authorities after Layla? If she was found by federal authorities, she could be detained or deported. Meyer had brought her into the country illegally along with dozens of other women like her.
“Amy, if someone’s in danger, I need to know about it.” Sam passed a slow car and eased back into the right lane again. “Is this about your sister?”
“Eve?” Pain seared through her, the grief always close to the surface. “I don’t even know where Eve is or even if she’s still alive. She vanished before I went into WITSEC and I have no way of knowing if she ran from Logan Cutter or if he...” It was a thought she never allowed herself to complete.
Amy had been the one to introduce her sister to the handsome businessman who delivered and maintained the equipment at New Horizons, a day spa that included a gym and personal trainers in the mix. If she’d only known the darkness that lurked behind those all-American blue eyes and sun-bleached blond hair. That monster had groomed her sister, had slowly eased her away from everything and everyone she loved until he became her whole world. Amy’s twin sister, who had been her best friend her entire life, had turned away the moment Amy suggested that Logan might be involved in something too hideous to imagine. Whatever had ultimately happened, wherever Eve was, Logan had already stolen her forever.