Vision of Darkness (D.I.E. Squadron Book 1)

by Tonya Burrows

  “Alex?”

  He jerked in surprise at the sound of her voice—he’d thought she was asleep—and then cursed himself for it. He had never been a man to jump at boo, but his nerves felt raw. Though he’d accept a bullet in the brain before admitting it, everything about this damn town freaked him out.

  He smiled at Pru, trying to smooth over his reaction with nonchalance. “What’s wrong, baby?”

  “Do you want to talk about your nightmare? Sometimes it helps.”

  For a moment, he considered it. Then remembered the twisted, sexual nature of the dream and the empty eye sockets and shook his head. She’d probably draw the same conclusion he had. He was going nuts.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Oh.”

  The disappointment in the one word was almost imperceptible, as was the slight shift of her body away from his, but he noticed both and grimaced. He tightened his hold, unwilling to let her put distance between them. “It’s not because I don’t trust you enough to confide in you.”

  “Yes, it is. You don’t trust anyone.” She laughed, surprising him by the ring of bitterness to it. “I hoped tonight changed that for you. That you could come to trust me.”

  “I do.”

  She made a noncommittal sound and rolled over in his embrace, giving him her back.

  He really did trust her, he told himself. Absolutely, without a doubt. He struggled for the words to tell her that, to fill the heavy silence, but came up blank.

  “No. You know what?” She sat up and faced him, a determined set to her chin. “This conversation isn’t over yet. If we’re going to continue this thing between us, you’re going to talk to me. Why are you so sad all the time?”

  If she had hauled off and punched him, he’d have been less surprised. “Sad?”

  She nodded. Her blue eyes clouded as they searched his face. “Except for right now. You don’t have that darkness in your eyes. You really are happy right now, aren’t you?”

  He threaded his fingers through her hair. Tried to smile, but she’d touched on a raw topic and the smile felt forced. “Why wouldn’t I be happy? Having you here with me, Pru, it’s—” He couldn’t find the right word. Beautiful. Amazing. Everything he came up with sounded inadequate.

  “But you are usually sad,” she insisted. “Even when you’re laughing, I can tell you’re crying deep down. Even when you’re with other people, you’re so alone. I don’t want you to be alone anymore, Alex. Please, talk to me.”

  Talk. Yeah, he could do that. She just might not like what he said. But he trusted her, dammit. He did.

  “I’ve seen a lot of bad things.” Okay, so saying the words didn’t hurt too bad after all. He could do this. “I’ve done a lot of bad things. I was with the good guys but…Still. It’s stuff I guess I can’t really reconcile with.”

  “While in the military?” she asked, stroking a hand down his chest.

  Alex thought of the restaurant on Tremont, the fuck-up that had led him to Three Churches. “And after.”

  She picked up the bullet he wore next to his crucifix, and rubbed the smooth copper between her fingers. “I’ve seen this before. A friend I had at the culinary institute wore a bullet too. He was a sniper.”

  Alex lifted his head and studied the bullet as she rubbed it between her fingers. Like his crucifix, he didn’t know why he still wore the damn thing. “So was I.”

  She turned the bullet over and dragged her thumb across the inscription etched into its side: D.I.E. “But you weren’t just a sniper, were you?”

  “No. I was recruited to a special ops team straight out of sniper school. We, uh, had a very specific skill set. Detection, infiltration, and eradication.”

  “Ah. I get it. Die. D.I.E.”

  He nodded. “Our unofficial nickname became D.I.E. Squadron. It was kind of a morbid joke among the men, that we were sent behind enemy lines to die. That’s where I met Nick and Jacob. We did a lot of good together as a team, but honestly? Blowing out my knee and getting sent home early was the best thing that ever happened to me. If I pick up another rifle in this lifetime, it’ll be too soon.”

  The fire cast deep, dancing shadows over Pru’s face. He saw nothing but gentleness and understanding in her gaze and before he realized it, the words he’d been unable to tell anyone else tumbled out. “I’m afraid.”

  Goddamn, why did you say that? She doesn’t want a guy who’s afraid. Alex steeled himself against a rebuff but she simply touched his cheek, a feather-light caress of skin on skin.

  “Of what?” Pru asked.

  Walloped by an unfamiliar jolt of emotion, his throat closed up and he had to swallow to relax it. “So many things. I’m afraid for you with all the shit that’s been happening around here. For my friends, because our part in the war’s over and somehow, we’re still fighting. And for my brother spending his life cooped up in an insane asylum.”

  “What’s his name? Your brother.”

  “Theo. He’s schizophrenic and getting worse. They have him on so many meds he’s a zombie most of the time. When he’s not, he rips legs off tables or chairs and threatens the hospital staff until they let him talk to me.” He gave a weak, self-depreciating laugh. “Pru, the things I’ve seen here…I’m afraid I’m going nuts and I’ll end up like him, like everyone else in my family.”

  “You’re not crazy.” She propped herself on her elbow beside him, tracing her fingertips over his features in a soothing caress. The firelight played on her alabaster skin and her hair, tangled from their lovemaking, fell in wild disarray over her shoulders. “Everyone sees things here, Alex.”

  “Ghosts—”

  “—don’t exist. Yes, I know you want to believe that. But have you ever wondered if maybe Theo can see something beyond our plane of existence? And that maybe you can too.”

  Every damn day.

  He scrubbed at his burning eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “I like logic and truth. I like knowing what’s real. You.” He spread his palm over her heart, felt the steady beat kick up as his fingers strayed over her rosebud of a nipple. “And me. What we have is real. I can feel it.”

  Her lips parted with a soft exhale and then spread into a grin. “You must have been a poet in another life. Sometimes you say the most beautiful things.”

  She leaned over, black hair spilling down, swathing them in their own cocoon as she kissed him. She straddled his stomach and he felt himself drift back into a lusty haze, all ready to have her for the third time until he realized she was shivering. He touched her arm and found the soft skin rough with goosebumps.

  “Are you cold?”

  “A little,” she admitted.

  “We should go into the house.”

  “But I don’t want to. I don’t want you to leave me yet.”

  “Then I won’t.” He propped himself up on his elbows to kiss her. “Nick and Miranda should be asleep by now.”

  She cupped his face in her hands and returned his kiss. “I wish I hadn’t invited them to stay. Is that horrible of me? I wish we didn’t have to sneak around.”

  Always in the dark. He regretted he could never love her in the light ….

  He shook off the nagging sense of déjà vu. “For the time being, we’ll make it work.”

  “Miranda will want to go home today. She just needed a friend after John Jr.—”

  “I understand.” Alex grinned and traced the curve of her breast. “And Nick’ll be easy enough to get rid of. I’ll tell him how much I want to flip you over the back of the couch and he’ll take off.” Even in the dark, he could see color rush to her cheeks. She was so damn cute when she blushed.

  “Oh, God. Would you really say that?”

  “Probably.” Alex patted her rear. “Let’s get dressed and go inside.”

  They dressed as the fire sputtered, Alex pulling her over to nuzzle the dimpled dip of her lower back before she pulled her shirt down over it. “I love this spot. So sexy.”

  “Mmm.” She started t
o melt—he felt the resistance seep out as he traced one dimple with his tongue—but she caught herself and swatted his head away. “Stop that. It’s too cold to get naked again.”

  “I’ll warm you up.”

  She let out a huff of exasperation and twisted from his embrace. “Horndog. If you had it your way, we’d both catch our deaths out here. How do you plan to put the fire out?”

  Grinning, he stood, pulled on his own shirt and considered the problem of the fire.

  Planned this out well, bozo.

  No dirt or sand on the rocky outcroppings to smoother the flames. Plenty of water, but no way to carry it. He rubbed the back of his neck, then bent to scoop up the rumpled blanket still spread out on the rock at his feet.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have any special fondness for this blanket?” He did—it smelled of sex, each of their essences combining in a tantalizing perfume on the fabric—but he consoled himself that there would be other blankets carrying the scent. Soon. “We could wet it down, use it to smother the fire.”

  “Good idea.” Pru stood on her toes, kissed his lips, and took the blanket from him. “Let me.”

  “Pru—”

  “No, don’t start the macho shit. It’s more practical that I do it. Some of these rocks aren’t stable and I know this area better. I’ll be faster.”

  It went against his grain, but she had a point. He let her go. Blanket in hand, she walked a ways down the beach, carefully choosing her footing over the rocks toward the water’s edge. She hopped off a flat outcropping and disappeared from view.

  Alex waited. One long second. Two. Three. Forty. Fifty. A minute. She didn’t reappear.

  “Babe?”

  No answer. His heart plummeted. He raced to the spot she had disappeared fifty yards away. “Pru!”

  She stood on the thin strip of pebble beach below, a hand raised to her mouth.

  “Pru, what is it? What’s wrong?”

  She gazed up at him. Her face was a pale heart in the moonlight. “There’s…a body down here. A dead girl.”

  Alex braced a hand on the rock to jump down to the beach. The corpse lay on her side, curled around a jutting rock as if she’d snagged there when the tide rolled out, her arms flung over her head, legs crossed at an odd angle.

  “Stay back.” He nudged Pru behind him, using his body as a barricade even as he inched closer. Scraps of a red tank top and jeans hung from the girl’s withered body. Empty eye sockets stared at them through twisted hanks of black-tipped blonde hair. Her nose had rotted off and the grayish-brown, papery skin around her mouth had peeled back to reveal a gruesome smile. A red gem glinted from her navel.

  “God.” Pru gripped his shirt with trembling hands and buried her face in the hollow between his shoulder blades. “Is that…?”

  Alex swallowed a surge of bile as the old missing poster flashed before his eyes, crumpled, grease-stained, and forgotten between the pages of the menu at Mae’s Diner. Navel ring. Red tank top. Blonde hair. If he turned the corpse over, he had no doubt he’d find a bird tattoo.

  “Yeah, it is. We need to call the sheriff.”

  CHAPTER 23

  The VanBurans lived in a sugary-sweet house the color of a robin’s egg on School Street in Bar Harbor. Halloween decorations—the G-rated kind—hung from a wrap-around porch while four jack-o-lanterns grinned on the front steps. Each had a name neatly painted around its top: Bruce on the biggest, Denise on the next, Lila on the third, and Brayden on the smallest.

  A clean-cut, all-American family.

  Riiight.

  Alex had to look away. The pumpkins’ empty eyes and maniacal grins reminded him of Lila’s rotting face.

  Damn, he didn’t wanted to do this, to see this family grieve. When Denise VanBuran called with an invitation to come over, Pru insisted it was only right they put in an appearance. They had, after all, found the VanBuran’s daughter.

  Maybe it was right, but that didn’t make him want to run for the hills any less.

  Coward, his inner cynic said.

  Hell yeah. And he wasn’t the least bit ashamed about it either.

  His gaze landed on the dinged up 1970 Pontiac GTO that sat in the driveway, jarring the homey vibe of the place. Theo, he thought with a small smile, would have a stroke to see such a beautiful car gone to shit.

  The vehicle was completely incongruent in front of this house, in this neighborhood, like a mangy mutt in a dog show. Either Mr. VanBuran was a gearhead like Theo with an interest in restoring classic cars—and the dull Ford minivan parked next to the GTO made Alex doubt that—or someone else was here.

  Hired muscle? He wouldn’t be surprised since he spotted several reporters at the end of the street, looking pressed and polished and appropriately sad as they spoke into their respective network’s cameras. Years of ingrained habit had him turning his face away as he and Pru headed toward the house. The last thing an undercover agent wanted was to have his face splashed across every television in New England, especially since Nolan O’Shaughnessy was probably searching good and hard for his disappeared number one money launderer, Alex Locke.

  Pru stopped short before reaching the porch steps, and he almost bumped into her. He put his hands on her waist and drew her back against him, steadying her, enjoying the feel of her body next to his. He pressed a kiss to her temple and inhaled the scent of strawberries. “You okay?”

  The casserole dish in her hands wobbled, and he took it from her, afraid she’d dump it and waste the two hours she’d spent in the kitchen this morning.

  After a second, Pru firmed her lips, lifted her chin, and took the casserole back. “I just had a momentary flashback.”

  “The pumpkins?” He rubbed her back as she let out a breath and nodded. “Yeah, me too, babe. I’ll never look at them the same.”

  The front door opened just a hair, and hard, blue-gray eyes peered out from a harder face that hadn’t seen a razor in a good week.

  “Mr. and Mrs. VanBuran are not doing interviews,” the man said in a voice that had repeated the same line many times. He started to shut the door in their faces, but Alex palmed the frosted glass window.

  “We were invited.”

  He eyed them again with open suspicion, his gaze flitting over Alex to linger on Pru. Interest sparked in his eyes and Alex resisted the urge to wrap his arm possessively around her as she stepped forward and introduced them.

  “We’re not here to cause the family any more pain.” She offered the casserole. “I made this for them. It’s not much, but I know how hard it is to think about everyday things like cooking at a time like this.”

  The man looked at her like she had three heads. Her smile never wavered although Alex knew with the way she fussed over the food this morning that rejection would all but crush her.

  Pru nudged the dish in the hired muscle’s direction again. “They really did call us, but if they decided they’re not ready for visitors yet, I’ll just leave this with you and we can come back.”

  “Let me see it.” Carefully, he opened the door wider, took the dish from Pru, and lifted the edge of the tinfoil cover to sniff.

  Suspicious bastard. Alex gritted his teeth at the blatant insult to Pru’s honesty. Did the guy really think they would hide a microphone or camera in a casserole dish?

  Well, duh. Alex would have thought the same thing in his shoes.

  “Wait here,” he said and shut the door, taking the casserole with him.

  “He’s charming,” Alex muttered.

  Pru elbowed him in the side. “Stop. He’s just doing his job.”

  “His job doesn’t include oogling you.”

  “It wasn’t me, you Neanderthal. It was the food.” She rolled her eyes, but smiled and gave him a chaste kiss on the lips that sent a shot of lust straight to his dick. He wrapped his arms around her, buried his face in her hair. The scent of Pru, strawberry from her shampoo and spice from the kitchen, didn’t help his half-mast erection, but he needed to hold her like he needed his n
ext breath.

  For a selfish moment, he wished they’d never found Lila VanBuran. Instead of dealing with cops—first the local yokels, then the state detectives, then the feds—all night long, they would have walked back to the lighthouse, cozied up in her bed, and made love until neither one of them could move. They would have woken up this morning, warm and loose, and had lazy morning sex before breakfast. Probably after breakfast too. Hell, they would’ve skipped breakfast altogether if he’d had any say in the matter.

  Pru sighed and nuzzled into his chest. “Last night was so horrible.”

  Not the words a guy wanted to hear after making love to a woman. He knew what she meant, but it was still a kick in the balls. “Yeah.”

  She raised her head to meet his gaze. Tears magnified the blue of her irises. “I wouldn’t take it back, though. Even knowing how it turned out. Does that make me selfish?”

  “Aw, babe.” He cupped her cheeks and leaned down for another kiss as the door popped open.

  The hired muscle arched a brow. “When you lovebirds are done, the VanBurans want to meet you.”

  Pru flushed pink and pulled away from him, stepping into the house as the bodyguard moved aside and motioned them in like a foot servant.

  The living room was a long rectangular space done in soft, earthy tones, a little too cluttered by oversized suede furniture, a giant-screen TV, and the handful of toys scattered over the beige rug. Denise VanBuran sat on the couch with her feet tucked underneath her butt, a mug clenched in both hands, her eyes puffy from crying. An older version of Lila, without the funky hair and face jewelry. Her husband, Bruce, sat in the recliner kitty-corner to her, his head cradled in his hands, looking like he’d just stumbled in from a hard night on the town. The ice between them was palpable.

  As they entered, Denise rose and mustered a tremulous smile. She held her hands out to Pru, who went into her arms like they were old friends.

  “Thank you for finding my baby,” Denise said.

  Pru hugged the smaller woman tight. “I wish it had been a better outcome.”

  “No. This is the best we could have asked for now.” She stepped back and wiped her eyes. “I’d lost hope that she was alive a long time ago—”