GoodKnight: A Reed Security Romance

by Giulia Lagomarsino

  “All it did was get my wife killed.”

  “So, you’re going to go back to killing people, because Kate is gone. And even though you just said you weren’t making the world a better place when you were killing people, you’re going to do it anyway, even though Kate asked you not to do it.”

  “Yeah, well, she’s not exactly here for me to make happy anymore.”

  “It’s like talking to a fucking brick wall.”

  “Then just stop talking,” I snapped. “Look, I’m taking a shower and then I’m hitting the road. I expect you to be gone when I get out.”

  “That’s not gonna happen,” he snorted. “Sorry, but I’m afraid whatever road you take now, I’m going down the same one. So, if you want to risk the wrath of Lucy and my kids, let’s do this, all the way.”

  “You’re crazy. An assassin doesn’t work with a teammate.”

  “Yeah? Kids shouldn’t grow up without their father, but you don’t seem to give a shit about that.”

  I clenched my jaw in anger and stalked into the bathroom, slamming the door shut behind me. I leaned on the sink, hanging my head as I tried to get control of my anger. I just wanted to be left alone. I wanted to live out the anger I was feeling, and not be reminded every fucking day that I had a family at home waiting for me.

  I huffed to myself because that was exactly what Hunter was doing. He was hoping to wear me down, remind me every day of what I was missing. And it would work if he stuck around. I would eventually get curious and want to see my kids. I would want to hold them and tell them that I loved them. But I knew that wasn’t best for them. A killer could never be a good father, and I wouldn’t have them growing up thinking I was a good man. I would let Hunter tag along on this last kill if that’s what he wanted, but after that, he had to go. And if he wouldn’t, I’d make him.

  I had to pull my shit together. I had Hunter following me around and I was falling apart at the seams. I picked up the locket and vowed right then that I wouldn’t think about Kate anymore. I would finish the job and avenge her death, but I couldn’t do it when I was constantly thinking about her. So, as much as I couldn’t stand the thought of losing her, I had to push her from my mind as much as possible and become the killer I had always been.

  When I met Kate, I didn’t allow my feelings for her to stop me from doing my job. Not right away, anyway. I was cold and merciless. I would be that again. It was the only way to finish what I had started. I grabbed my bag off the floor and opened the side pocket, slipping the locket inside. I had to lock it away, along with my feelings. There was only the killing now. Nothing else mattered. I would become the killer I had always been and find a way to get rid of Hunter. It was time to go back to the man I was meant to be.

  Chapter Thirty

  Becky

  Everything that came through Reed Security was recorded. It was a safety measure for the company. Knowing this, one night curiosity got the better of me and I pulled up the video of Kate getting killed. It was horrific to say the least. I couldn’t say what exactly made me want to look at that video. You would think after seeing Delaney murdered on the floor of our living room, I would have had enough violence to last a lifetime. But I was a person that needed all the facts before I believed anything.

  So, I had been watching the video over and over again. Each time I jumped a little less when the gun fired. Each time, I stared a little less at the shocked expression on Kate’s face when she died, and looked at the details of the video.

  “Why the hell are you watching that?” Coop asked, rushing over to the computer and hitting a button, closing out of the screen.

  “I’m looking for something.”

  “What could you possibly need to see? Cap’s already been over the video. There was nothing in there that would tell us anything about who those guys were.”

  “I’m not looking at that.”

  He sighed and sat down next to me. “Becky, I know you liked Kate, but watching her murder over and over again isn’t going to help you accept what happened.”

  “I know. I just keep thinking that maybe we missed something. Maybe…I don’t know. Maybe she’s not really gone.”

  “You saw the video,” he stressed. “You saw the blood splatter and her lifeless eyes. What more are you looking for?”

  “I don’t know. Something.”

  He shook his head slightly, but started walking through everything with me. “Did you check to make sure the video was real?”

  “I checked everything. It was a live video. I don’t see any signs that it was doctored in any way.”

  “And the gunshot was real? There’s no way that the gun didn’t fire?”

  I shook my head. I had thought of that too. “No, it was a real gunshot. I tore the video apart, trying to find out if the sound came from somewhere else or if the acoustics were off. That gunshot came from that gun.”

  “What about the blood spray pattern?”

  “There wasn’t enough to go on from the video, but you can see the…blood coming out the other side of her head.”

  “So…what are you looking for?”

  I shook my head sadly. “I don’t know. I was hoping I could find something to prove that she wasn’t dead. I hate that I couldn’t help Knight find her. I feel like this is partly my fault. Like if I hadn’t taken so much time off work, maybe I wouldn’t be so rusty. Maybe I could have found her if I had just worked harder or smarter or something.”

  “Becky,” Coop said, grabbing my hands, squeezing them tightly in his. “Nothing about this is your fault. The only people that are at fault here are the ones that took her and the ones that gave the order to kill her.”

  “I know that, but-”

  “No,” he said firmly. “No buts. This is not your fault. I know this is terrible and that you want to come up with some miracle, but you can’t. Bad shit happens sometimes. You know that. You’ve lived it. Going over this in your head day after day isn’t going to change a single thing. I’ve been there. When you were attacked, I kept thinking of all the things I could have changed, anything that would have had a different outcome. It still didn’t change what happened.”

  “But I didn’t die.”

  “No, but Delaney did. Just because Delaney wasn’t my girlfriend, that didn’t make her death any easier to deal with. And just because Kate wasn’t your best friend or related to you won’t make this easier for you. You just have to accept that she really did die, and that you can’t do anything about that.”

  I knew he was right. I had been looking for so long and still coming up empty. In my head, I knew there was nothing to find. But in my heart, I still held out hope.

  “Come on. Let’s go back to our room. You need to get your mind off this.”

  I shut down my screens and followed him, even though my computer was calling to me. We walked in silence back to our rooms. I was tired from staring at the screen for so long, and Coop was worried about me. I could tell by the way he kept glancing over at me, wanting to ask me something. Instead, he just squeezed my hand tighter and led me into our bedroom.

  Kayla had moved into her own room now that she was eighteen. She wanted more privacy, so Cap cleared it for her to have her own suite. It was weird, because one day she was just gone, but I knew she needed her independence. Coop and I were just another couple now. We had our own space, and as much as he tried to help out Kayla, she was becoming a little more of her old self, needing her space to make her own decisions.

  I laid down on the bed with Coop, just staring up at the ceiling. His fingers ran through my hair, massaging my scalp as they went. It felt good, but I couldn’t shut my brain down. I couldn’t stop thinking about what I saw.

  “Does it ever go away?” I asked. He had more experience with this than me. He had PTSD after his helicopter crashed when he was in the military. I knew it didn’t. I had been there for some of his nightmares. The images never really faded.

  “Sometimes when I wake up in the middle of the night, i
t’s like I’m right back there the night that I found you. It scares the shit out of me.”

  I turned in his arms and stared up at him. “You’ve never told me that.”

  He shrugged lightly. “I didn’t want to wake you up. I mean, I did. I wanted to grab you and shake you, just to make sure that what I was seeing was real.”

  “You could do that. I would understand. I mean, maybe shake me gently.”

  He smiled down at me. “It fades after a few minutes. When I wake up, I always know deep down that it’s not real. I mean, I don’t see the blood smears across the floor or the pain on your face. I try to focus on that. It helps to separate what’s real and what’s a dream.”

  “That makes sense.”

  I hadn’t really thought of what he dreamed about. I imagined it was just that night in general, but he actually remembered details. Something like a blood smear…that wasn’t something-

  I shot upright in bed. Oh my God. Blood smears.

  I jumped out of bed and ran for the door. I could hear Coop calling after me as I ran down the hall and out of the panic room. Every stupid protocol I had to go through was just too damn time consuming.

  “Becky, wait!”

  I didn’t have time to wait though. I ran to the IT room and started up my computer again, irritated that it was taking me so freaking long to get back to the damn video.

  “Becky, what are you doing?” Coop asked, rushing over to me.

  “Blood smears.”

  “What about them?”

  “You were talking about seeing the blood smears when you walked in and it made me remember something.”

  “What?”

  I ignored him, shaking my head slightly when he kept bugging me. I pulled up the video and zoomed in on the floor by Kate’s head. “Oh my God.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Cap

  “Who the hell is banging on the door in the middle of the night?” I grumbled, flinging the sheet off me irritatedly.

  “Tell them to fuck off,” Maggie grumbled. “Don’t they know we have sleeping babies?”

  “Apparently they don’t care.” I glanced at my phone, seeing I had a shit ton of missed calls from Becky. “Why would Becky be calling me at this hour?”

  “Do you have anyone in the field right now?”

  I shook my head. “No. The last team got back in the afternoon. We don’t have anyone scheduled to go out until tomorrow night.”

  The banging continued, so I got up and pulled on some pants, sighing as I walked toward the stairs. “I’m coming,” I said a little too loudly, wincing as I stopped and waited for the cries. When nothing happened, I continued down the stairs and over to the front door.

  I unlocked the door and flung it open, shaking my head when Becky pushed past me with her computer. Coop stood out on the doorstep, grinning at me.

  “Wipe the smirk off your face.”

  “You’re gonna want to hear this.”

  “This better be good,” I grumbled, shutting the door behind him. Maggie came walking down the stairs, tying a robe around her waist.

  “What’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe there’s a party that we weren’t told about.”

  “You know Becky doesn’t rush over for nothing.”

  “I know.” I hated it when she was right. “Alright,” I said, walking into the living room. “What’s going on?”

  “Kate’s not dead.”

  I stared at her a moment, sure I had heard her wrong. But her wide smile told me that I hadn’t. “How do you know this?”

  “Well, it was Coop really. I mean, I was the one that figured it out, but it was something he said to me while we were lying in bed talking about blood smears.”

  “Maybe you should reconsider your pillow talk,” I said dryly.

  “Haha,” Becky said dryly before rushing on. “Anyway, he was telling me about still being able to see the blood smears in his dreams and then it hit me!”

  She flipped her laptop open and turned it around to show me an image. I grimaced at the sight of Kate’s lifeless face staring back at me. “Becky, all I see is Kate lying on the floor, very much dead.”

  “Not dead. Okay, when the video was taken, Kate was in the chair. They shot her and she fell to the floor. The camera stayed still until she dropped to the floor and then the camera moved and zoomed in on her face.”

  “I remember.”

  “Right, but look down here,” she said, pointing to some blood smear on the floor. “If she had just collapsed, why would there be a blood smear? And the smear goes under where her face fell.”

  “Maybe someone moved her after she fell,” I said.

  “In two seconds? I mean, it was a little longer than that, but why would someone move her? For what purpose?”

  I didn’t have an answer to that. “Becky, I get that you want Kate to be alive, but this doesn’t prove anything.”

  “Not that alone,” she smiled, “but that just led to more discoveries. See, after I noticed the blood smear, I did some research on how much blood you lose after being shot in the head.”

  “You found information on that?”

  “Hell no. I couldn’t find a damn thing. But I was thinking that there was way too much blood on the ground for just being shot.”

  “Head wounds bleed a lot.”

  “Yes, they do. Which was why when I went back and watched the video, I found it very odd that the blood on the ground wasn’t moving.” She hit the button and played the video. She was right. The pool of blood around Kate’s head wasn’t moving. “Now, explain to me how seconds after a shot to the head, the blood isn’t growing in a large circle around her.”

  “Because the blood was already there,” I realized.

  “Exactly. And…” She rewound the video and placed it in slow motion. “Look at this.”

  The video played again, but I wasn’t sure what I was looking at. “I don’t see it.”

  “Right here,” she pointed. On the video, Becky zoomed in on Kate’s head. Hair from what appeared to be the back of her head was shifting. “If she was shot in the side of the head, which we can’t see as clearly in the video, her hair would be moving on the other side of her head. In this video though, the hair on the back side of her head is moving.”

  “Bullets ping around. They don’t necessarily go straight through.”

  “No, but with everything else I’ve found, are you really going to tell me that this is just a coincidence?”

  I shook my head in disbelief, replaying the video again. I watched in slow motion as the gun fired. The video footage wasn’t good enough to see the exact spot of entry, but her hair was definitely moving on the back of her head. Then she fell to the ground and the camera shifted. There was no expanding pool of blood.

  “If this is real, then Kate was in on it. She had to fake her own death. Why would she do that?”

  “Maybe she had no choice,” Maggie suggested.

  “But who would only want Knight to think that Kate was dead? Most people would wash their hands of a job like this. They would either kill her or walk away. So, who would actually keep her alive, but not let anyone know?” Coop asked.

  “I don’t know, but we need to get Hunter on the phone now.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Knight

  “Are you sure you want to do this?” Hunter asked as I pulled up outside Senator Burke’s country estate. It was the third time he’d asked me since we left the motel last night.

  “If you don’t have the stomach for it, walk away.”

  I pulled out my phone and checked the cameras I had set up before making my stop at Senator Samuelson’s house. It looked like Senator Burke was very aware of his impending doom. He currently sat in his living room with a gun resting on the arm of his chair and a glass of alcohol in his hand.

  “It’s not me I’m worried about.”

  “Yeah? And why the fuck would you be worried about me? Do you think I suddenly grew a consci
ence and decided that killing was a bad thing?”

  He rolled his eyes at me. “Well, I thought maybe at some point it would peek out. Not that I really expected any of this to stop,” he muttered.

  “I am putting a stop to this shit. If they don’t die, the plan carries on. Do you really think that a few of them dying would make the others just throw up their hands and walk away?”

  “No, but Cap has been working on getting all the information to the right people. They could be held accountable.”

  “They are being held accountable. By me. Besides, I haven’t heard you say once that Cap already has this shit all worked out.”

  “Would that stop you?”

  “What do you think?”

  He sighed and started tapping his fingers on his knee. He was agitated and probably didn’t want to be here right now. But I hadn’t asked him to come. He showed up all on his own.

  “Look, if you don’t want to be here, I’m not holding you. Go back to your life. You have a wife and kids that need you.”

  “Let’s just do this,” he said, shoving his door open. I popped the trunk and got out. Senator Samuelson was currently in residence in my trunk.

  “Senator, I hope the accommodations were comfortable.”

  He grimaced from the bright light, but didn’t move. His hands were zip tied behind his back. It was most likely very uncomfortable for him. But that didn’t matter to me. He wouldn’t be alive much longer. I had no desire to make his life any easier.

  “What are you going to do to me?”

  “I wouldn’t worry about that too much right now. This is more about what you’re going to do for me.”

  I reached in and yanked him up out of the trunk, setting him on his feet. He collapsed to the ground immediately, his legs too weak from the position they had been in for the last few hours.

  Sighing, I hauled him up to his feet and held him in place. “You’re going to walk in there, or I’ll put a bullet in your leg and then make you walk. Understand?”