Either way, there was a road trip in his very near future.
One he was fairly certain he wasn’t going on alone.
13
“Pack a bag,” Gage said when he stepped inside her hotel room.
Chloe arched a brow. “You say that as if I’ve actually had five seconds to unpack.” She gestured to the large Provocative Inc. gold-and-pink-striped duffel bag her sister had sent her years ago. “Wherever we’re going, I’m ready.”
“Good. You can sleep for now. I have to make some calls, then we’ll stop by the office so you can sign the report you gave me the first day we met. After that, we’ll head to Joshua Tree to visit a friend of mine who may be able to help us.”
Chloe nodded. “Um, okay. Is the office open now?” She glanced at her phone. It was a few minutes before five in the morning. She’d tried to rest in the few hours they’d been apart, but hadn’t had much luck. “I don’t think I can actually sleep. Not after . . .”
Seeing my sister get manhandled by a monster who has probably already cut her into pieces and tossed her in the ocean.
Gage cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.” Remorse masked his features for a moment, and it was a shame because his features were genuinely perfect. “My director is planning to meet with you at eight. So we have some time.”
“I don’t want to rest. I can’t.” Chloe gestured to the second bed in her room. “They only had two beds left. I was thinking about asking Aly to stay if you aren’t comfortable. But after seeing that video . . . I don’t think I can . . .”
Be alone.
God, she didn’t want to admit that. To him or anyone.
She’d been alone for years and never had a problem with it. But now she had a problem. A black-gloved problem.
Gage met her stare and swallowed hard, causing the muscles in his neck and jaw to flex. “I can stay. If that’s what you want.”
She noticed the dark circles under his eyes. “It is. You can rest. I’ll keep reading the transcripts Aly found. I’ve been over them a few times but it never hurts to—”
“Chloe.” Exhaustion deepened his masculine voice as he set his keys down on the table. “We are about to drive several hours into the desert. We both need rest. Lie down.”
He excused himself to the bathroom, and she curled up on the stiff bed and did her best to blank her mind, but she couldn’t.
When he stepped out of the bathroom in just boxer briefs, her already jumbled thoughts tangled even further. He walked softly in the darkness as if he believed she were actually asleep. She listened as he tapped away on his phone for a few minutes before lying down.
He plugged in a charger and connected his phone, then sighed. “I know you’re still awake.”
Maybe it was the darkness, or the intimacy of knowing they were about to sleep in the same room, but his voice warmed her skin all over. She cleared her throat softly.
“Guess that’s why they pay you the big bucks, Special Agent.” She could practically hear him rolling his eyes.
“Go to sleep, Chloe. You’re going to need the rest. Trust me.”
Trust. That was the one thing she couldn’t do.
After their mother had died, she and Eden had done their best. But their father had become a complete wreck. Drinking until he blacked out. Losing his job. Staying unconscious day in and day out, having to be picked up at the local bar at all hours. When she’d turned eighteen, Eden had cut ties with him and moved away to pursue her career. He hadn’t even said much when Chloe had told him Eden was missing. But Chloe still went to meetings with him when he was on the wagon. And they still had Sunday dinner together when he was sober. It had been a while though.
She loved him. But she’d stopped trusting men a long time ago. And in her line of work, she found it hard to trust anyone.
“I don’t really do trust very well, to be honest,” she said aloud.
She heard a low huff of breath from the other side of the room. “You don’t say.”
He’d done so much for her. She decided he deserved some disclosure about why she was the way she was.
“My mom died when I was fourteen. My dad . . . didn’t take it well.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.” The empathy in his voice sounded genuine, but she knew he probably faked empathy a lot as an FBI agent.
“Yeah, so . . . he drank a lot. He and Eden almost came to blows a few times. She’s headstrong.”
“Must run in the family.”
“Possibly.” She inhaled sharply. “It was like losing both parents at once. He never showed up for anything. Stopped working, stopped paying the bills, even forgot to buy food half the time. If it hadn’t been for the life insurance money and our grandmother, we would’ve starved.”
The room was silent for so long she wondered if he’d fallen asleep. Then he spoke. His voice was even, but she could feel the vibration of the emotions behind his words.
“You read the article about me. But what your reporter friend left out was how hard the other members of my team worked. One in particular who was undercover and paid the price for my mistakes.”
Actually, her friend had quite a lot in her notes about agent Kate Connors, but Chloe kept that to herself, letting him say what he needed to. She could tell opening up was a rare occurrence for him. The last thing she wanted to do was open her mouth and break whatever spell had come over him.
“Kate was one of those agents who took every case personally. She never let anything go. We thought it was a drug bust. We’d gotten to a storage container too late and had to pull bodies out—some of them school-age children. After that, she made it her mission to break up the trafficking ring behind it.”
He paused, likely remembering the woman Alexis had speculated he was romantically involved with.
“She went undercover, pretending to be the long-lost daughter of a Colombian drug lord we’d arrested at the airport before he could skip the country. He played along for lighter sentencing.” She heard him breathing. “She was dedicated and determined. She never missed a beat while undercover. And she found herself in some pretty dangerous situations.”
“She sounds amazing.” Chloe wanted to slap herself. Something inside of her was stirring.
Jealousy. Of a dead woman.
“She was.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway, I fucked up. I got too close, couldn’t separate work and my personal feelings. I went to see her, to tell her to get out. It was getting too hairy, and I didn’t trust her handler. I still think he took a payoff and ratted her out. IAB is still looking into him. Someone saw me, followed me. They made her.”
Another long pause and Chloe knew the worst part was coming.
“They shot her execution-style the next morning. The morning we busted them. She was hanging from the rafters of the warehouse we found the people in. It was a wonder they didn’t kill them all. They knew we were closing in because of me. They didn’t have time to move them. But they made time to kill her.” He choked the words out, and Chloe wondered if this was the first time he’d told the entire story out loud. As an agent, he could’ve just typed up his report without having to give a statement.
“Gage . . .”
“And your friend . . . ,” he snorted. “She writes this goddamn article like I’m some big hero. But it was my fault Kate got killed.”
“You can’t know that for certain,” she argued.
“I do. And I know I’m kind of a dick,” he said quietly. “I have to be. You are incredibly beautiful, and I’m sure I’m not the first one to tell you that. Getting too close gets people killed, Chloe. I hope you can understand that.”
She laid there, suffocated by the heavy silence between them. It was too much and not enough all at once. He’d called her beautiful. Incredibly beautiful. She wanted to crawl into his bed and press herself against him. They both needed the comfort as much as oxygen. But neither of them were built that way. They were both lone wolves built to bear the burden of pain and shame alone.
&
nbsp; “Gage,” she began quietly, determined to share one last truth with him.
“Yeah?”
“I’m sorry for what happened to Kate. And I’m sorry you think it’s your fault. I disagree. And I know there’s nothing I can say to change your mind tonight. But I promised to be honest with you about everything involving my sister’s case, so I’m going to be.”
He didn’t interrupt, so she continued, sitting up to prop herself on one elbow and face him, even though it was too dark to see clearly.
“I will find my sister one way or the other. If I die trying, and I know that I might, I want you to know there is no way in hell you can blame yourself. I sought you out. I begged you to take this case. End of story.”
“I appreciate your honesty. So I’m going to return the favor,” Gage responded with more conviction than she’d ever heard in his voice while propping up to mirror her position. “There is not a snowball’s chance in hell that anything is going to happen to you. I will handcuff you to this bed in this very room if I think for one single second that it’s even a possibility.”
Chloe swallowed hard, pushing the image of him cuffing her to his bed as far out of her mind as she could. The ache it incited was so intense it made her vision blur.
“You can’t just—”
“Try me, Chloe. Fucking try me.”
14
As if his brief sleep hadn’t been fitful and restless enough, he woke up an hour before his alarm was set to go off by the ringing of his work cell.
“Pierce,” he answered groggily, noticing that Chloe slept soundly in the bed across from him. She looked like an angel sleeping so peacefully. He wished he could let her rest.
“You and your friend need to come on in, Agent Pierce,” his director informed him. “Now.”
“I thought you said eight.” He rubbed his eyes. It was barely after seven. They hadn’t even gotten two hours of sleep.
“We got a body, Pierce. Jane Doe in the morgue downtown. Fits your missing person’s description.”
Gage closed his eyes.
No. Fuck no.
This couldn’t be happening. Not to her, not now.
“I’ll come in alone. If it’s not her there’s no reason for Chloe to have to—”
“She has to come and identify the body, Pierce. She’s next of kin. You know the procedure. Get to the morgue, then get here.”
The call was disconnected before he could even argue.
He watched her for a few more minutes—giving her a few more minutes of peace before destroying her.
He’d never told Kate that he was ready to make a serious commitment. He told himself he would after the case was closed. Thought he’d had more time.
Time was a cruel fucking joke.
His chest ached as he stood and dressed in the dim light of dawn coming through the sheer curtains.
As much as he’d grown to care for Kate over years of working together, it still wasn’t as intense as the attraction and fierce desire to protect that he’d felt from the moment he’d met Chloe Sterling.
He felt guilty about that too.
That day came back to him, the sweatshirt she wore, the way it slipped off her shoulder, the way she nervously fidgeted with her full bottom lip.
She’d never want to see him again after today.
“Gage?” Chloe sat up, messy hair and slow-blinking eyes. She was the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen in real life or otherwise.
“I was trying to let you sleep until the last possible second. We have to go downtown.”
“Downtown?” She glanced at the alarm clock on the table between their beds. “I thought you said eight?”
He walked over and sat beside her on the mattress. “There’s a Jane Doe in the morgue, Chloe. She fits your sister’s description. My boss wants you to—”
“Identify the body,” she finished robotically. She nodded. “I’m a crime reporter. I know how it works.”
Gage was unprepared for her lack of emotion. She was stone-stiff as she dressed and brushed her teeth and hair without so much as glancing in his direction.
“Chloe, I—”
“Let’s go,” she interrupted. “Now, please.”
Her eyes were empty and void of all emotion as they made their way to his truck. She didn’t utter a single word on the drive to the morgue.
Gage navigated traffic swiftly, even though he wanted to crawl there—delaying the inevitable outcome as long as he could. But he knew she needed closure as soon as possible. He’d been prepared for her to break down. Collapse in his arms the way so many did when they lost a loved one. She’d been so passionate from the moment he’d met her. This statue version of her was unfamiliar to him.
He’d put his fist through a wall when they’d found Kate’s body.
Not that he’d expected Chloe to punch anything, but he was expecting . . . something.
When they pulled into the parking lot of the city morgue he took a deep breath.
“Listen to me.” He turned to face her. “Whatever happens, I am not done with this case. If that’s her in there, I will not rest until I know what happened and whoever is responsible is held accountable. Do you understand?”
She blinked at him. Then nodded. “Thank you. I appreciate that.” Her voice was flat. Emotionless.
He wanted to shake her. To grab her and hold her and tell her it was okay to scream or cry or whatever she wanted or needed to do. Instead, he climbed out of the truck and made his way over to her side to help her out. But Chloe Sterling didn’t need help. She walked into the morgue a step ahead of him, with her chin tilted up and her shoulders back.
She’s bracing herself, he acknowledged internally. She’s solidifying the steel walls she probably built after her mother died, reinforcing the only defense mechanism she has to deal with such devastation.
He wished there was a way he could spare her from this experience, from having to see her identical twin’s body lifeless on a cold metal table in a sterile room. But he couldn’t.
All he could do was be there.
“It’s not her,” Chloe’s small voice rang out in the stillness.
The medical examiner glanced up from where a bloated blue-and-purple blond woman lay on the table. “You sure?”
Gage felt her body soften just slightly next to his. Relief. But she felt guilty for that relief, he could tell by the tension she still carried. A young woman, possibly someone’s sister, was still dead. And after being tortured it appeared, judging from the wounds that were visible. Those kinds of marks were man-made, not from the ocean, where she’d washed up the night before.
“I’m sure. My sister had her gallbladder out, laparoscopically. She was really stressed about the scars affecting her career. She preferred minimal airbrushing.” Chloe pointed to several locations on the woman’s midsection. “No scars.”
“There is a similarity in appearance,” Gage noted. “Even postmortem I can see it.” That wasn’t good. This could be a serial killer they were dealing with, targeting women who resembled Chloe. Not that he was going to voice that out loud.
Chloe nodded. “I see it too. For a second . . . for a second I thought . . .” She faltered, and it was the first time in over an hour Gage had seen her show any emotion.
The examiner covered the body and thanked them for coming.
Gage shook the man’s hand. They’d crossed paths a few times in the past. “When you identify her, let me know, okay?”
“Will do.”
Chloe was still quiet on the way to the field office, giving only one word answers and assuring Gage that she was “fine.” If there was one thing he’d learned about women in his twenty-eight years, it was that “fine” was not good when it came to women. But he didn’t press the issue, because it had been a difficult enough morning already.
He stood by her side while she told his director and several other agents the same story she’d told him the day they met. He could see the doubt on a few agents’ faces u
ntil they played the video.
He noticed Chloe’s breathing becoming labored while it played, so he moved a step closer. Not that she wanted or needed his support, but he wanted her to know he was there if she did.
“Are we positive this wasn’t a social media ploy? To get more followers? It certainly wouldn’t be the first time someone online pulled a dramatic stunt of this type,” Agent Bill Howser pointed out.
He felt Chloe flinch beside him. Gage wanted to throat-punch the senior agent.
“It’s the Dark Net,” he informed him, barely restraining himself from adding dumb-ass to the end of it. “The idea is to have a smaller underground following. If she’d wanted a huge number of fans and followers, she’d have put the webcast on Snapchat or YouTube.”
Agent Howser frowned. He was an older gentleman who did things old-school. Gage had always respected him but didn’t like him much at the moment.
“I see.”
Director Anderson-Wyatt asked if there were any more questions. Thankfully there weren’t. Gage briefed the group on the nearly identical body in the morgue.
“You thinking serial?” Agent Lydia Ramirez asked. “Because if that’s the case, we need to get something out to the public.”
Gage wished she hadn’t mentioned that in front of Chloe, but she seemed unfazed by the question. She’d likely already come to the same conclusion.
“I don’t know yet. I think it’s too early for that, but I’m not opposed to telling women to be more careful due to crime in the area.”
Ramirez frowned. “Yeah . . . but telling all attractive blond women in LA they’re in danger seems like a joke they won’t take seriously. Or it might incite panic. That’s three-fourths of the population.”
Gage agreed. “I think our best bet is to wait for the ID on our Jane Doe, then see if there are any connections between her and Eden Sterling. If the only connection is similar appearance, we go from there.”
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