Undercover Holiday Fiancée

by Maggie K. Black

  Vile swear words flowed from his lips. The barrel of the gun dug into the soft flesh under her chin, tilting her head all the way back. His hand moved from her neck to his pocket. He pulled out a pair of zip-tie handcuffs.

  She grabbed the gun with both hands and yanked it high above her head while she arched, freeing her legs and pulling them into her chest. Then she kicked up hard with both feet, sending him flying forward, over her head and off the end of the couch, wrenching the gun from his hand as he went. He hit the floor headfirst, with a thud so loud the room seemed to shake. She leaped up and spun around, weapon at the ready. “Don’t move. Stay down.”

  He lunged at her. She pulled the trigger. The gun jammed. Again, her fingers squeezed the trigger. Another futile click, followed by a roar as the brute’s body launched into hers. He tossed her backward again.

  She hit the corner of the coffee table. The gun fell from her hand and pain shot through her spine. Lord, please give me strength. She leveled a strong blow to his jaw. He stumbled back.

  She turned and ran for the door, burst outside and into the deep gray of an early winter morning. Bitter wind whipped against her. Her skin stung with the threat of frostbite.

  There was a truck parked on the road. She looked up. Trent was sauntering up the gravel driveway, toward her, a takeout coffee cup in each hand.

  “Trent!” she gasped.

  “Chloe?” His clear blue eyes met hers and worry filled their depths. In a quick, almost seamless motion, he set the coffee cups down and ran for her, and it took all the strength left in her body not to crumple into his outstretched arms. “Tell me.”

  “There’s a man...in my house... He wants the cell phone...”

  “You’re hurt.” Trent’s fingers gingerly brushed along the side of her throat.

  Something she’d never seen before pooled in the depths of his eyes. Something protective. Something comforting.

  “He choked you.”

  “He tried to strangle me.” Her limbs were shaking. She wanted to fall into the strength of Trent’s arms and let him hold her. Instead she pushed him. “I’m okay. Go! Stop him!”

  “Wait in my truck.” He pushed a set of car keys into her hand. “Just to be safe. It’s already warmed up and, unlike your car, isn’t buried in snow. Stay there. Stay safe.” Trent’s hand touched her shoulder for one fleeting moment. Then he pelted toward the house.

  Her limbs shook from the cold and from shock. She picked up the closest coffee cup and took a sip. It was thick with both cream and sugar, neither of which she usually took. But it was soothing in her throat and she was thankful for that. This was all wrong. Danger wasn’t supposed to follow her home. Trent wasn’t supposed to show up to her rescue. For the first time, since she’d lived under her father’s roof she didn’t feel in control of her life. Instead, she felt like a player in somebody else’s story, and the thought of that tightened her throat so painfully she could almost feel the hands of the intruder clenched around them again.

  An engine roared. A snowmobile shot out from behind the house and disappeared into the forest.

  Her attacker had gotten away.

  * * *

  Trent stood in Chloe’s living room. Signs of a struggle surrounded him on all sides. The coffee table was cracked. Shelves were knocked over. Frustration burned at the back of his throat. Chloe’s attacker had burst out of the house and gone to his snowmobile so quickly that Trent had never even gotten a glimpse of his face. He could’ve gone after him. He could’ve leaped into his truck, raced down the back roads, cut him off, run him into a ditch and yanked him from the snowmobile.

  Instead, seeing the ugly red marks on her pale skin had stalled something in his brain and kept him from leaving Chloe. His sister had been strangled to death when she’d been twelve and he was thirteen, because he’d made her walk home from school alone. And while he’d gotten so adept at his job that he’d long stopped viewing strangulation victims as different from any other, with Chloe it was different. Somehow everything with Chloe had always been different.

  A floorboard creaked behind him. He spun. It was Chloe. She was standing in the open doorway of her home with the two coffee cups in her hand.

  “Stand back,” he said. “I’ve done a preliminary scan and there doesn’t seem to be a second attacker, but it’s probably safer if you wait in the truck until I’m absolutely sure.”

  “This is my house.” Chloe stepped over the threshold into the living room and set the coffee cups down on the dining table. Her eyes scanned the room and something in him ached. There was a look in them. It was jaded—sadness, mixed with bitter resignation—as if this wasn’t the first time she’d seen her home in disarray. He’d seen a lot of different looks in her eyes, most often focus and determination. But he’d never seen this one before. It was the look of seeing an old enemy return wearing a new face. “So, he’s gone?”

  “From as far as I can tell. What did he look like?”

  “Huge.” She hugged herself. “Bald, with bloodshot eyes, a wide nose and bulging muscles. He wore gloves, so we won’t be able to pull prints, and he didn’t touch anything we could use to get DNA. There was an unusual spiderweb tattoo on his neck. It was like it was made of teeth.”

  Royd from the Wolfspiders? No, it couldn’t be.

  There had to be dozens of other men who matched that description besides the former high school friend who’d tried to lure Trent into a life of gang crime when he’d been a teenaged ball of pain and anger. Royd and Royd’s sister, Savannah, were like echoes from an ugly past that Trent desperately wished he could forget. Instead, he’d found himself revisiting that old version of himself, time and again, because convincing gang members to trust him was vital to his undercover work, and that meant letting them think he’d never changed.

  Lord, You know how much I hate it when my undercover work takes me back to the parts of my past that I’m desperate to forget. Please, help me one day shut down the Wolfspiders for good. Please set me free from my past.

  “Are you okay?” Chloe said. “You look like you’re about to faint.”

  “I never faint,” he said. He also wasn’t about to start opening up ugly chapters of his life and sharing them with her. “It sounds like a Wolfspiders’ tattoo. I wouldn’t want to guess which particular gang member it is, because there are dozens of them. But it means we’ve potentially got two different gangs after the payara.”

  As if the stakes weren’t already high enough.

  “How would a Wolfspider know that I had a Gulo’s phone?” she asked.

  “I honestly have no idea,” he said. “Everything the Wolfspiders do is coordinated through their leader. He owns a barbecue restaurant near Huntsville that basically acts as a cover. His real name is Stephen Point, but everybody calls him Uncle. The real question is why Uncle told someone to break into your home to retrieve it.”

  Trent had been waiting more years than he liked admitting to take Uncle down. But the old man kept his hands clean by authorizing crimes and never committing them himself, which had left the crime lord and Trent in an odd cat-and-mouse standoff, where neither risked tipping his hand enough to try to destroy the other. Trent had spent years biding his time, collecting evidence, coordinating arrests of lower level Wolfspiders in ways that didn’t lead back to him. One day, Uncle would slip up, commit a crime and get caught red-handed. That day Trent would be waiting. “Walk me through what happened. Take it from the top.”

  “I saw headlights pass outside my window three times and got up to investigate. I’m guessing now that was you?” she asked. He nodded. She sat on the very edge of the couch, and he noticed the thick smears of mud on the cushions from where someone in boots had climbed on it. “When I opened the door, he forced his way in, grabbed my throat, pushed himself on top of me and demanded I tell him where the phone was.”

 
“You told him I had it, right?” he asked.

  “Of course not!” She tossed her hair defiantly. He’d almost never seen it loose. But now it rose and fell in a big swoop around her shoulders, hiding the stark imprint bruises of a thumb and fingers on her neck. “I told him the bare minimum without lying. I told him that I’d given it to a cop at the sports center.”

  “But he choked you!” Something rose hot and protective at the back of his neck. Why was he arguing with her? She was a cop. She’d done her job. She’d protected the cover of a fellow officer. But someone had tried to strangle her and it was because of him! “He could’ve killed you!”

  “You think I don’t know that? I’m a detective with the Special Victims Unit, Trent. Strangulation is pretty much one of the most common ways men attack women in this province. I’ve had more calls about that type of attack than any other.”

  Yeah, he knew that. Of course he did. He knew her undercover work usually involved rescuing women and girls from violence, trafficking and other situations so desperate and vile they made his chest ache. He could also rattle off crime stats almost as well as she could. But knowing it in his brain was different from feeling the visceral gut punch of seeing what someone from his former gang had done to Chloe’s neck.

  “You should have told him that I had it!” He heard his own voice rise.

  “Why?” Her voice rose, too. “Because you think that would’ve stopped him from hurting me? I’d never give up your cover!”

  “I know! Chloe, I know what kind of cop you are. I know you’d have let some criminal kill you to protect me. Just like I would for you. But I still wish you’d just told him I had it!”

  “Why?” Frustration curled at her lips. “Give me one good reason why I should’ve thrown your life to the wolves to save mine?”

  He couldn’t. His heart was pounding in his chest. He was standing there arguing that she should’ve risked his life and wrecked his current cover, not to mention potentially cutting the knees out from his huge upcoming assignment at a remote diamond mine that he hoped would lead to crippling the Wolfspiders, Gulos and countless other gang operations. He was arguing that she should’ve wrecked all that for him to save herself. He didn’t know why. He closed his eyes. What’s wrong with me? Why am I acting this way?

  Suddenly he saw himself as a different type of man. He pictured himself crossing the floor, gently brushing his fingers along her delicate skin and softly telling her how very sorry he was that this had happened to her. He imagined his fingers brushing tenderly along her bruised skin and wiping away the tears of fear he could see forming in the corner of her eyes. He saw his lips finding hers and kissing her with a kiss that promised protection. It was the kind of kiss he’d never imagined giving anyone before. Yet he could see it in his mind as clearly as a memory.

  “Chloe, I’m sorry he hurt you.” Trent opened his eyes. His hands reached out toward her and he wasn’t even sure what they were reaching out to do.

  “It’s okay.” She shrugged without really looking at him. Then she picked up one of the coffee cups and took a sip. “At least you knew to be here.”

  He pulled his arms back. Is that what she thought? That he’d had some heroic inkling she was in danger? No. If anything it was his fault she had seen headlights and opened the door.

  “I never dreamed this would happen,” he said. “I just dropped by to tell you that when I sent the phone to the tech unit, I made sure you were listed on the report as the officer who’d retrieved it.”

  He’d decided to tell her that in person, with coffee, because something had seemed off about how they’d parted ways yesterday and he hadn’t been able to get her out of his mind. Then he’d driven past her house three times because he’d doubted his decision. He walked over to the table, picked up the full cup and drank. He grimaced. It was black. “I think you drank my coffee. This one is yours.”

  “Are you sure?” she asked.

  “Of course I’m sure.” He set the cup down. “I take sugar and cream, you don’t.”

  “You remembered.” She stood there a moment, holding the mostly empty cup that had contained his coffee.

  “It’s hard to forget a coffee order as boring as yours,” he said. “You know, they make lots of different interesting coffees these days, with all kinds of milks and weird sugary syrups. You don’t have to deprive yourself.”

  He was trying to be funny. But she frowned and then disappeared into the kitchen, and immediately he regretted saying something that flippant. The truth was he would’ve remembered her coffee order no matter how complicated it was. She reappeared with a tray, containing two types of milk and three types of sugar. His eyebrow rose as he reached for the plain, white, granular stuff.

  “I take it with maple syrup when I’m at home,” she said. “I have six different types of coffee in the freezer, and my sister bought me a cappuccino maker last year. But when someone else is pouring it for me, I like to keep it simple. Why cause extra hassle for a barista or waiter by requesting three sugars added to the cup before the coffee is poured and two and a half creams added after?”

  His hand jerked so quickly he spilled sugar on the table. That was his usual coffee order. “Because coffee is a universal conversation starter. It’s a way of connecting with people. I can’t imagine why someone who faces down killers for a living, like you do, would be worried about inconveniencing a waiter.”

  Her phone rang loud and insistent. She set the coffee down, picked up her cell and held the screen for him to see. It was a blocked number. “This happened earlier. I thought the call was from you.”

  He shook his head. She answered the phone, turned the speaker volume to maximum and held it a few inches from her ear so that he could listen in.

  “Hello?”

  “Hello, Officer Brant?” The caller’s voice was female. “I know who’s making payara.”

  FIVE

  “Yes, this is Detective Brant,” Chloe said. Trent felt her reach out, grab his hand and pull him to her side. She led him to the couch and they sat. “Who’s this?”

  There was a pause. “You can call me Trilly.”

  Chloe waved her hand toward the pen and pad of paper on the floor. “Nice to meet you, Trilly. Have we met before?”

  “No, I don’t think so,” the voice said.

  He grabbed the pad and pushed it into her hands.

  Chloe wrote quickly. Trilly is the Trillium College mascot, right?

  He nodded. Trilly was a cartoon flower with three petals and huge eyes who appeared on things like notice boards.

  “Well, I’m happy to help and listen to anything you want to tell me,” Chloe said.

  There was a long pause on the other end. Chloe waited. Good interrogation was all about knowing when to wait for the other person to talk.

  He wrote, Any guess who she really is?

  She shook her head. Met three women yesterday. Poppy, Lucy and Nicole.

  He took the pen and wrote, Nicole tried to arrest me.

  Chloe rolled her eyes.

  “You said you were calling about payara?” she prompted.

  “Yeah,” Trilly said. “It’s a drug. They’re pills. They’re yellowy-orange and make your brain go really fast. Like adrenaline but with no crash.”

  Not a bad description, but Trent noticed she’d left off the negative side effects like aggression and suggestibility.

  “Do you know who’s making them?” Chloe asked.

  “I do. But I need to make a deal or something. If I give you information, I need some kind of money or plea deal or guarantee that I’m not going to get in trouble for this.”

  “I want to help,” Chloe said. “But I can’t help if I don’t know what’s going on.”

  “Well, there’s a guy involved and it’s kind of complicated.”

&n
bsp; Chloe nodded at Trent as if she’d been expecting it. What was it they said at the academy? Where there were drugs, there was money. Where there was money, there was violence. Where there was violence, there were women in trouble. “Is he your boyfriend?”

  “I can’t tell you, and he can’t know I called you.”

  This was the part of interrogation he knew well. An informant would get in touch, claiming they wanted to spill information, only to suddenly hold back, make demands or try to force the detective to pry the information out of them. It was infuriating. But Chloe had a knack for it.

  Trent’s eyes drifted around the room. Something glinted under the broken table. He knelt, felt for it and pulled it out. His heart smacked against his rib cage. It was the ring he’d given her for their fake engagement.

  Last winter he’d seen it glittering in a puddle of mud and slush in a truck stop parking lot in northern Ontario. He’d nearly frozen his fingers to the point of numbness trying to fish it out. It had been a gorgeous and valuable thing, lost and forgotten in a terrible place. Immediately, Chloe’s face had filled his mind. It was both substantial and beautiful at the same time, which he’d figured was a rare quality in a piece of jewelry, so he’d saved it specifically for her. The fact that their next undercover assignment had required an engagement ring had just been a happy coincidence.

  Her hand grabbed his shoulder and squeezed. Chloe was staring down at the ring. He felt his face redden to realize he was literally down on one knee with it in front of her. He sat back up on the couch.

  “How about we meet up in person, Trilly?” Chloe said. “Would that help? We could sit down quietly, just you and I, and see if we can work something out.”

  “Yeah, that could work,” Trilly said. “Do you know the hiking path by the gorge? There’s a parking lot there.”

  Trent grabbed Chloe’s free hand and squeezed. The parking lot of an isolated gorge in winter? She might as well as be showing up for an actual ambush. He opened his mouth.