Variable Onset

by Layla Reyne

  Carter collapsed with relief, until Lincoln appeared in front of him, hands hovering near his face. “Hey there, let me get a look at you.” He peeked over his shoulder and winced. “I’d say let me get a knife and cut you loose, but it’s probably best to stay tied and minimize movement.” He righted himself, hands drifting lightly over Carter’s shoulders. “I’m sorry about the fall.”

  Carter tried to shake off the too tempting touches. “You have to get out of here, L.”

  “I’m not going anywhere without you.” He tilted to the side, stretching to grab the phone.

  Two minutes.

  “Even if I get into this,” Lincoln said, futilely tapping at the phone screen, “it’s not going to turn it off, is it?”

  Carter shook his head and winced, the earlier anvil back with a vengeance.

  “Okay then, let’s take it off.” Lincoln reached for the straps of the vest.

  Carter jerked away. “I’m strapped into this thing. If I try to take it off, it blows. You have to go, now. Please, baby...”

  “I’m not fucking leaving you.”

  “You can’t leave Elena.”

  “I can’t leave either of you!” Determination burned in his honey eyes.

  Burned.

  Carter groaned, the last of Dr. Fear’s mind games registering. “It’s fire, Lincoln.”

  “I know that,” he snapped, a visible tremor wracking his body. “And now I’m gonna fucking face it, just like I played that song. Twice. The fucking asshole made me play it twice.”

  That amazing song in Lincoln’s pitch-perfect voice, that haunting melody from the guitar Lincoln played so skillfully, had been what pushed the darkness back far enough for Carter to round on Dr. Fear. But the blackness was encroaching again, fast. So fast.

  “Go, baby, please.”

  “You know how to do this, Carter. You aced the explosives module in Academy.”

  “How’d you...” Focus was getting harder. “How’d you know that?”

  “Because I wanted to know who I was working with.”

  Carter scoffed. “You can’t. I don’t even know.”

  “Fuck, he got inside your head.” Gentle hands cupped his face. “Which wire, Carter?”

  “I’m not good enough. I’ve never been good enough. I couldn’t get away before he got me here.”

  “You were beaten and drugged. Which wire?”

  “I was wrong about Larry. I didn’t see it was Ryan until too late.”

  “It was his best friend, and Larry knew. Your instincts were right. Which wire?”

  Carter shook his head. “If I tell you the wrong wire, and you die, by fire, I can’t—”

  Lincoln’s grip on his face became firmer, holding him in place, forcing his gaze. His world was filled with honey and heat. “Listen to me, Carter Warren. You were the best student I ever had. You made my life hell, but you were the best. Just like you are the best agent I have ever worked with, even if you leave your shit everywhere. And you—not me, not Ollie, not anyone else who has touched this case over the past twenty-five years—found the lead that brought us to Apex. We caught Dr. Fear because of you. You were right, Carter, just like you were right about this cover.”

  Warm lips landed on his. Lips he’d dreamed about for eight years, lips that had become familiar over the past week. Lips he wanted to spend the rest of his life kissing, that felt so right pressed against his own.

  “Which wire?” Lincoln whispered against those lips.

  Carter answered without thinking. “Blue.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The number of agents in the FBI’s makeshift command center at the hospital had multiplied significantly since Lincoln had woken here yesterday. No longer just O’Shea’s team, agents scurried between four different rooms, a pair of guards standing at the entrance to each. No surprise with three individuals in custody—Clyde, Larry, and Ryan—the last one on the FBI’s most-wanted list. Curiously, guards also stood outside the command room. Lincoln understood why once he entered and saw a certain senator standing among the whirling activity.

  “Ollie,” he called, and his mentor rotated toward him. “What are you doing here? You should be with your family.”

  “Which is exactly why I’m here.” He crossed the room and pulled Lincoln into a hug, same as Lincoln had done for him last week. “You and Agent Warren helped save my kid. It was the least I could do.” He drew back, giving Lincoln a concerned once-over. “How are you?”

  “Hanging in there. Ruby and Chase?”

  “Recovering, but good. And Agent Warren?”

  “A little worse for wear, but the doctors said he’ll be fine.” Broken arm, multiple contusions, some cranial swelling. Pain, exhaustion, and the sedative Ryan had given him had caused Carter to pass out in the ambulance on the way here. The additional painkillers administered after his arm was reset were keeping him under longer. “They expect him to sleep through the rest of the night,” he told Oliver. “His body needs it.” Never mind that Lincoln needed his partner to open his eyes so he could actually believe Carter was okay.

  Oliver picked up on his distress. “You need to rest too, by the look of it.” Or maybe he’d just picked up on the wrinkled clothes.

  Lincoln snapped his back straight, brushed both hands down his shirt, and glared. “Fuck you.” Even if it were true.

  Oliver’s stern face vanished, the smile returning. “There he is.” He clasped Lincoln’s shoulder and aimed him for the door.

  Annoyance simmered, but so did amusement. His mentor knew him too well, knew he needed the former to keep going, to keep putting one foot in front of the other after the too-long week. To do what O’Shea had summoned him up here for. “Is Beverley here?” he asked, as they made their way down the hallway.

  “Still in DC, working with the federal prosecutors to get the complete list of charges drawn up and the transport orders signed. He’ll be here by morning.” They stopped outside the imaging suite. “Now, shall we go interrogate our serial killer?”

  “Ah, so now the real reason you’re here comes out.”

  “You didn’t think I was going to miss this, did you?”

  They flashed their IDs for the guards, then entered through the control room and into the imaging room. Ryan sat in a chair beside the exam table, his ankles cuffed to the table’s legs, his wrists likewise cuffed and attached by a chain to the ankle restraints. A far cry from Clyde Weathers’s custody and questioning of several days ago. But then Weathers had merely been a pawn in this serial killer’s game.

  A murderer who looked a ragged version of his former selves, as Dr. Fear or Chancellor McCullough. A bandage was taped over his broken nose, a bruise was forming near his temple, his gray beard was half-matted, and his suit and dress shirt were splattered with blood.

  “Mr. McCullough,” Oliver started, as they took their seats across the table from him. “You have the right—”

  “I already waived my rights. Ask me your questions.”

  “You’re mighty cooperative for having dodged law enforcement for so long.”

  “No sense lying at this point. There’s a church full of witnesses. I am who I am. And no one else is me either.” Still smarting from Baxter’s attempt to steal his identity. Lincoln intended to get to that, but first he had a more basic question.

  “Why me and Carter?”

  “I needed someone to stop Jeff, and Senator Kirk and you were my best bets. Agent Warren was just a happy accident.” Smug satisfaction infused Ryan’s small smile, and Lincoln had to curl his ankles around his own chair legs to stop from lunging across the table.

  As if sensing that Lincoln had tipped over from annoyance to anger, Oliver slid forward to the end of his chair, taking over the interrogation again, and putting himself in a position to block any sudden movements by Lincoln. Wisely done. “Why n
ow?” he asked.

  Ryan’s eyes cut from Lincoln to Oliver. “I was doing better, going longer. I could handle the pressure, the ties to this place. It took a while, but I was beginning to accept that maybe this was where I belonged. I just needed a final release, to work out the last of the pressure from the appointment to chancellor and Larry moving in, then I could accept being here, for good. And then Jeff had to go and ruin it.”

  “How did he find out about Dr. Fear?”

  “He got into a fight with Glen Morrow in a diner twelve years ago.”

  Lincoln bit back a gasp. “Baxter was the student involved in that altercation?”

  “Larry kept his name out of the record. Courtesy for a student. I met him in the hospital that night, and I’ve been stuck with the parasite ever since. He found my research on Glen and my hair dye. Was under my feet all the time, trying to get me to notice him, following me. He stole my paper, my hair, my work. I didn’t realize how obsessed he was, that he knew, until Larry and I dragged him out of that meth house where he was picking his victims. I made sure he didn’t get into the grad program here, got him out of town, but he just kept coming back. He bought that property in the hills, and Larry kept it from me the entire time. Until it was too late.” He slumped back in his chair and sneered. “And he wasn’t even doing it for the right reasons.”

  “Why not just kill him?” Oliver asked.

  “Because that’s not what it’s about,” Ryan snapped.

  “Escape,” Lincoln said. “Like you said, it was a pressure release. A valve of sorts. An escape from your fear of being stuck here, in Apex. That diagnosis taped to the door of Barry’s house was as much yours as his.”

  “That’s what I was trying to provide, for myself, and for the couples I helped, like Barry and Trudy, like you and Carter.”

  “Helped?” Lincoln scoffed, the anger resurging.

  “Escape their fears.”

  Lincoln shot to his feet and banged a hand on the table. “They all died! Carter could have died.”

  Ryan didn’t flinch. “But he didn’t.” He waited for Oliver to tug Lincoln back down before continuing. “Once the FBI was on the case, I was going to go on to DC, finish my work, but the day I met you two at the lab, I thought maybe you’d be the ones. That I could finish things here. So I stayed. And for a minute there, I thought I was wrong. That Carter would succumb to his fears, that it wouldn’t really be over, that neither of us belonged, but in the end, I was right, about the both of you.”

  “And yet you were going to blow the church anyways?”

  “A final escape, for all of us.”

  “You won’t be escaping anything, Mr. McCullough,” Oliver said.

  “Oh but I will, Senator.” The same smug smile from before stretched across Ryan’s face, wider now, and a chill ran up Lincoln’s spine. Dr. Fear. And by the look of it, he thought himself victorious. By the sound of it too, his words confirming his twisted logic. “There’s no federal prison here in Apex, is there?”

  Escape. He’d gotten it after all.

  * * *

  Carter was stuck in his Henley, embarrassingly so. He’d been back at the house less than ten minutes, had managed to rid himself of shoes, socks, jeans, and overcoat, but getting out of his sweater, with his right arm in a cast and sling, was proving a feat he couldn’t manage alone. All he wanted to do was climb into bed and pass out, the twenty-minute trip from the hospital in Jo’s passenger seat, then the climb up the stairs to his bedroom, more exhausting than they should be, but the nurse at the hospital had given him a parting dose of painkillers after getting him into the sweater, and they’d zapped what little energy his recovering body had left. They’d finally released him from the hospital—his arm casted, cranial swelling reduced—and he wanted a real bed. Not the too-small hospital one. Sleep was right there for the taking.

  As soon as he escaped from his goddamn sweater. He cursed Lincoln for bringing him a sweater, then remembered that he didn’t have any casual button-ups. Not to mention the suit bag on the back of the hospital room door. A suit bag he’d ignored in favor of the duffel of more casual clothes. There’d probably been a button-up in the suit bag.

  He was cursing himself when the front door opened downstairs. “Carter, you here?” Lincoln shouted from the foyer.

  Relief and no small amount of nervousness washed over Carter. Things had been awkward between them the past twenty-four hours as they struggled to find their footing, to determine which direction they were headed. There’d been a brief moment of potential when Carter had first come to in the hospital and found Lincoln asleep with his head by his hip. Carter had threaded his fingers through the silky strands of blond and silver, and Lincoln had woken and looked up with such relief and joy. They’d exchanged quiet his and Lincoln had risen out of his chair and leaned over him. And then the night nurse had bustled in, Lincoln had bustled out, and it’d been professional partner zone ever since. To be fair, Beverley and Kirk had shown up fifteen minutes after that, and it had been debriefs, MRIs, bloodwork, and a stream of other visitors every moment he wasn’t sleeping since.

  Conversations needed to be had. But he’d wanted a few more hours of sleep first, enough for the painkillers to wear off and his mind to defog. But he couldn’t do any of that without getting out of his sweater. “Up here,” he called back. “Could use your help.”

  Familiar footsteps thumped up the steps and down the hall, then a low chuckle erupted behind him from the general direction of the door.

  “Shut up,” Carter grumbled.

  Lincoln snickered some more. “You’re in polka-dot boxers and stuck in a sweater. It’s funny.”

  “Ha-ha. Now, help me out of this.”

  Warm hands landed on his bare flanks, and Carter’s senses were pleasantly overwhelmed. Callused fingertips lightly scratching his skin, the ever-present smell of coffee, the cool metal band on Lincoln’s left hand. “You know,” Lincoln said, as he tugged the sweater over Carter’s head, “there was a dress shirt in that suit bag you left in the hospital room.”

  “I realized that two minutes ago.” Carter gave his freed head a shake, trying and failing to toss back the curls tickling his forehead.

  Lincoln did it for him, his fingers lingering in the tips of his hair a moment longer than necessary, before he dropped his hand, averted his eyes, and angled his face away, hiding his red-streaked cheeks, as he continued to work free the sweater. “You were supposed to wear that suit for the press conference this afternoon.”

  Carter held his arm steady while Lincoln temporarily removed the sling and slid the sweater the rest of the way off. “I don’t do press conferences.”

  “You just helped catch a serial killer that’s been on the FBI’s most-wanted list for two-plus decades.”

  “Can’t have my face plastered all over the place. I’m on to my next UC assignment.”

  “Already?” He settled Carter’s arm back in the sling. “How’s that going to work with your arm like this?”

  “I’ll mostly be running command but can’t be too careful.”

  “Who’s your partner?”

  “Joint task force gig.” Carter sank onto the nearest side of the bed and breathed a sigh of relief. In front of him, Lincoln shifted foot to foot, looking anywhere but at him. He should let him off the hook, let him get back to his life, one that didn’t actually include Carter, no matter how desperately Carter wanted it to. “Don’t you have a basketball tourney to get to?”

  Lincoln lifted his gaze, and it was full of so much—hurt, confusion, desire, hope—that Carter had to look away. “Hey,” Lincoln said softly. He stepped close, between Carter’s legs, and touched his chin, nudging his gaze back up. “You know what Ryan said was a load of horseshit, right? When we questioned him, he actually commended you, for conquering your fears.”

  Carter swallowed hard.

  �
��And I’m sorry for blowing up at you like I did in the library.” He let go of Carter’s chin and skated a thumb over his cheek. Carter had to close his eyes. Had to bite his lip and hold his breath to hold in his words. “You are an incredible partner.”

  Partner.

  Carter scooted out of his reach. “Thank you.” He levered himself up toward the headboard and rested there, trying not to appear too winded from the small effort. “Everything square with Ryan? Last I talked with Beverley, he said Ryan had been charged and was being transferred.”

  Lincoln cleared his throat. “Yeah, he’s on his way to DC. Case was officially moved there this morning.”

  “Larry and Weathers?”

  “Local lockup, pending the federal prosecutor’s decision on charges. They may kick them to state courts.”

  “I’ll have the rest of my reports filed before the end of the weekend. I’ll be back to testify, as needed.” He moved to turn over, but Lincoln’s hand on his arm stopped him.

  “Damn it, Carter, talk to me.” He lowered himself onto the bed, next to Carter’s hip. “What’s going on here?”

  Words escaped. “You have a whole other life to get back to.”

  “Yes, but I like our life here too.”

  Carter’s chest tightened, and his eyes burned. “Jesus, you’re breaking my heart, Professor.”

  “And mine’s not?” Lincoln half shouted, half croaked.

  Red streaked across his cheeks and Carter immediately knew how much that admission had cost him. He pushed off the headboard, narrowing the distance between them, and took Lincoln’s hands in his, rubbing his thumb over the ring on Lincoln’s finger. “This isn’t our life here, as much as we might want it to be.”

  Lincoln gave a watery chuckle. “Is this a common UC problem? Did I totally fail?” He lifted a hand and swiped at his eyes. “You were not a variable I planned for.”

  Carter laughed too, then leaned his forehead against Lincoln’s. “If you failed, so did I.” How could he not? He’d gotten the chance he’d wanted for eight years, and it had been better than he imagined. And more complicated than he’d imagined. “You’ve got a family back in DC that you’re rightfully protective of, and I’m still trying to find mine.”