Winter's Redemption

by Mary Stone

  “No. Osbourne’s mind is made up.”

  Her face went from bleak to bleaker.

  “Is there anything I can do for you?”

  “No.”

  This was driving him crazy. He was used to Winter taking on every challenge. Bucking convention and rolling with the punches. Getting shit done with that unique way she had of seeing things and not letting anything faze her. Right now, she looked pale and insubstantial. Like a stiff breeze would knock her over.

  She was a mystery wrapped in an enigma most of the time, but Noah knew what buttons to push to get her going.

  “Look, I know how you’re feeling.” He deliberately injected a little patronizing, mansplaining tone into his voice. He needn’t have. “I know how you’re feeling,” was a trite phrase, never accurate, and guaranteed to get a reaction.

  Winter shot to her feet, finally exploding.

  “You have no idea how I feel, Dalton. This is what I’ve been focused on completely since I was thirteen years old. This is why I’m here. What the fuck have I done with my life if I can’t even be part of the takedown?”

  “Maybe you started out with The Preacher’s capture as an end goal,” Noah pointed out. “But you graduated at the top of your college class. You earned the highest marks at Quantico and were recruited straight out of graduation. You’re an agent, and you’re a damn good one. Look at your apprehension record. That is why you’re here. You were made for this.”

  She shoved her hands through her hair. “It doesn’t matter. None of that matters.”

  “It does matter. It matters to the women who were brutally attacked by the serial rapist you nailed. It matters to the families who were used as guinea pigs by a soulless child killer with money and ambitions. It matters to Agent Ming and to me and everyone you work with.”

  “But, I—”

  Now, he was getting pissed. “Quit feeling sorry for yourself, Winter. You can’t have reasonably expected Osbourne to put you on this. You’ll be a liability. What lawyer wouldn’t point out to the jury that one of the investigators on the case had a conflict of interest? Namely that The Preacher targeted her family? You could jeopardize the whole thing.”

  “I don’t care.” Her mouth set in a hard line as she paced the floor. “I’ve earned this.”

  “That’s bullshit.” He stopped shuffling, winding a rubber band back around the deck. Standing, he crossed the living room to Winter in two long strides and stopped her, taking her by the arms.

  “Let me do this for you. Let me get him.”

  She tried to shake loose from his grip, but he held on with gentle pressure.

  “You can’t do this. You know you can’t. Not through the right channels. Let me.”

  Winter stopped struggling, but her eyes still sparked.

  “We’re friends, Noah. Good friends. I don’t make them easily. You want to talk about putting something in jeopardy? Don’t try to be my white knight, because I don’t need one, and I’ll only resent you for it.”

  “What you need is to stay far, far away from this,” he countered. “You were The Preacher’s only victim to survive in what might have been decades of killings. You think he doesn’t know that? What do you want to do? Use yourself as bait?”

  She didn’t answer, but he could see it on her face. That’s exactly what she’d intended.

  Fury burned hot for a moment, but Noah sighed, letting it—and her—go. He took a step back before he gave in to the urge to shake some sense into her.

  “Think rationally. Your last encounter with him put you in a coma. You have those…migraines now, or visions, or whatever the hell they are. You didn’t have them before. It’s like he left a mark that’s still affecting you, every day. A wound that won’t heal. Whoever takes him down needs to be able to separate personal feelings from professional. It can’t be you.”

  Her face went cold, her deep blue eyes freezing over. “You’ve gotten to know me pretty well since we met. I expected you to understand.”

  “I do.” He was losing her. “I understand. It’s just not possible.”

  “Did you even go to bat for me?”

  He didn’t even hesitate. “No.”

  “Did it occur to you that we can work around this? That I can assist in an unofficial capacity?”

  That had occurred to him. He’d rejected the idea. Even knowing the words might break something fragile, he had to say them anyway. “I won’t include you. I want you as far away from him as you can possibly be.”

  He could almost hear the connection they’d been forging between them shatter like an icicle dropped on the pavement.

  “Then I guess there’s nothing more to say, is there?” Her voice was flat. She went to the front door and opened it. “Goodbye, Noah.”

  The words sounded so final.

  Noah told himself as he headed to his truck that he could fix this. It wasn’t the end of anything between him and Winter. They could fix it. He just had to catch The Preacher first.

  He also told himself he was a damned liar.

  6

  After Noah left, Winter dropped down on the couch again, her head in her hands.

  Damn him for being so chauvinistic, so overprotective, so Texan.

  Noah had been her shadow since Quantico. Competing with her. Hovering over her. Teasing. Flirting. Having her back when she needed him. Making her laugh and punch him within seconds of each other. Just being…Noah. He infuriated the shit out of her with his overbearing attitude and huge ego. He also constantly tried to charm her with his dimpled grin and wicked green eyes.

  The hell of it was, that had started to work.

  Lately, he wasn’t just Noah anymore. A friend she could actually count on, for the first time in her sorry history of friendships. He was a sexy, caring, funny guy, and she couldn’t have asked for a better partner if she tried.

  Now, though…chalk up another reason for retribution on The Preacher. Because of the case, she was looking at the end of a friendship and maybe something more.

  Winter huffed out a breath and stood up, pacing the short length of her living room with restless quickness. The cheap Venetian blinds that hung over her sliding glass door swung as she passed. What she’d told Noah was true. If she wasn’t on this case, all the work she’d done to get to this point was a waste.

  She had to get assigned to The Preacher case. There was no other option.

  If she didn’t, she might as well quit. Leave the FBI.

  Even the thought of doing that knocked the wind out of her. She couldn’t imagine leaving. She’d only chosen her career path with one thought in mind. Vengeance. But she was good at being a special agent. She’d taken down suspects that her colleagues never would have caught. She knew things that none of them ever could. Without her, the cases she’d been on might never have been resolved.

  The irony in that was that she was probably only as good as The Preacher had made her.

  The night of the murders, she’d seen her parents only for a second, slaughtered in their beds. In the next moment, she’d been hit over the head so violently that the killer assumed she was dead.

  Winter spent the next couple of months in a coma. When she came out of it, she did so with heightened observational skills. Sometimes, she could tell if an item was connected to a violent crime. Other times, she caught quick glimpses or snapshots of events that had once taken place or might soon happen. While that all sounded like handy traits to possess for a law enforcement official, those particular skills came along with severe headaches, unconsciousness, and nosebleeds.

  The observational and sensory sensitivities had surfaced first. She’d been a fascinating puzzle for the doctors and psychologists she’d seen. They’d been relentless with CT scans, MRIs, analyses, and interrogation until she and her grieving grandparents had enough and moved to Fredericksburg, cutting off all treatments.

  The other skills came later, when she was in college. Identifying things connected to crimes was great. Being at the mercy
of what were basically random, debilitating seizures was not.

  Thinking about her migraines, Winter tried to calm down. She already had a tension headache and had wondered whether being stressed out made her more susceptible to the visions. With the shoulder muscles at the base of her neck knotted so tightly and her forehead throbbing with low-grade pain, she was basically begging the universe to let her test that theory now.

  She took off her jacket and hung it on the back of a chair. She wasn’t in any frame of mind to go anywhere anyway. She pulled open her refrigerator. She wasn’t hungry either, which was a good thing, since the only edible items inside were some shriveled-looking grapes and a questionably aged carton of yogurt. Instead, she grabbed a bottle of Rolling Rock.

  She’d started keeping some around in case Noah came by, she realized as she popped the top. When had he become such an integral part of her life? She’d always kept her focus narrowed. Eyes on the prize. Taking a bitter swallow from the bottle, she also realized the chances of Noah dropping by now were slim.

  She dropped the mostly full beer in the sink, where it landed on its side with a clatter. Pale liquid foamed out, yeasty-smelling and sour. The scent seemed to intensify, assaulting her senses, and she winced.

  Abruptly, the beer smell became more cloying, choking and heavy, until she had to gasp for air. Then, a shock of pain rolled over her out of nowhere, like a tsunami. Her vision went dark and bright all at once, like an overexposed photo.

  Winter cracked her forehead against the edge of the laminate countertop on her way down to the floor, but she didn’t feel it.

  Her eyes flew open as Winter sucked in a gulp of air. A soft, Southern-sounding voice still echoed in her head.

  “This is what happens when ladies drink alcohol.”

  Winter’s stomach twisted, and she rolled to her side in her narrow, galley kitchen. Bringing her knees up to her chest, she closed her eyes and counted slowly, trying to keep from throwing up.

  It had been worse this time. Different.

  Somehow, she’d felt the bindings around her wrists, she thought, tucking her cold hands underneath her arms. She hadn’t seen Tala Delosreyes tied down to her bed with rough twine. She’d experienced it.

  She’d also seen the face of the killer. Again.

  As soon as she felt steady enough, she made it to her feet and stumbled to the bathroom. The headache and nausea were gone like they’d never been, but Winter grimaced when she caught sight of her face.

  Her eyes were wide, shadowy, and haunted-looking, and her face was so pale it was practically transparent. She also had the dark hint of a bruise forming high on her cheekbone. The skin had split with the force of impact with whatever she’d knocked it against, and a trickle of blood had run back into her hairline, where it dried in a sticky mess. There was more blood on her face, some of it still wet, from a nosebleed. Tears had left salty tracks on her cheeks, and her eyes were swollen from crying.

  She looked like the shell-shocked survivor of some kind of natural disaster.

  Grabbing a cold washcloth, she removed as much evidence of the experience as she could. The abrasion on her face was deep enough that it reopened when she dabbed at it with the washcloth, leaking blood sluggishly. She put a butterfly bandage on it and dismissed it. There would be a scar, but it didn’t matter.

  Her heart was pounding with a quick urgency and the need to do something. Now.

  In the bedroom, she pulled on a clean gray t-shirt and grabbed her coat again. She slung her messenger bag over her shoulder and headed for the door but stopped by the kitchen on her way out.

  Where was she going?

  She leaned against the doorjamb and closed her eyes, trying to control her instinct to move now and to move fast. Noah wasn’t going to fight to bring her on. Max had dismissed her. From what she’d picked up on his personality in the last year, once he made up his mind on something, that decision was etched in granite.

  She had to get on this case. Not because of her mom and her dad, or her missing little brother. Or her elderly grandma and grandpa, who still grieved. Not because it meant catching the specter that had taken dozens of lives over the years, or because of the loved ones they’d left behind.

  It was because she’d felt the fear of Tala Delosreyes.

  This had been different than seeing the aftermath of a serial killer’s bloody bacchanal. The gore and loss of life in her visions could be processed. It was disturbing and horrible, more graphic than the worst slasher movie, because the scenes were Technicolor-real. They’d happened. She’d seen them in vivid detail, almost as if she’d witnessed them with her own eyes, but she could handle that.

  This last experience had been entirely different. It was like Winter’s panicked lungs were struggling to take in air. Her wrists were chafed and bleeding. Her heart had fluttered with fear like a trapped bird in her rib cage. Winter had been in Tala’s body. Her head.

  She could smell the stale, old-man breath of The Preacher. She could imagine Tala’s mother, a small, dark-eyed Filipino woman with a sweet smile and nervous hands. She’d seen a man’s face. A little rounded, attractive laugh lines, sandy brown hair, a wise-ass, boyish grin on his face. She didn’t know who he was, but Tala had been thinking about him in the moments before she died.

  Winter was no bystander in this vision. She’d been in the victim’s head. During that quick flash, she was Tala. A fearless woman with an adrenaline addiction who’d done incredible and selfless things with her life. A badass, who’d stayed strong until the end, fighting against the ropes that held her until the killer’s knife had pierced her throat. Tala had faced her death like the hero she was.

  The bone-deep grief and loss Winter had felt for Officer Delosreyes when she’d awoken on the kitchen floor had shaken her to her core.

  She needed to get the woman’s killer before he snuffed out any more lives. And Max was right. She wouldn’t settle for an apprehension. Winter would give him no chance to walk free, get off on a technicality, and continue his grisly work.

  When Winter found him, she’d kill him.

  She’d go to Aiden. The Supervisory Special Agent of the Behavioral Analysis Unit was brilliant, cold, and sometimes unpredictable, but they had a history together. He’d require careful handling, but with some clear-thinking negotiation and a little manipulation, maybe she could get his help.

  Straightening up, destination decided, Winter dug in her bag for her car keys. She was about to head for the door when a wide stain on the tan linoleum caught her eye. She hadn’t cleaned up the floor after her episode. The sight of the blood was startling—like she’d brought it back with her from the vision.

  But it was hers. She’d blacked out without warning and ended up on the floor, bleeding on the tile. Slowly, Winter slid the keys back in her purse and pulled out her phone instead.

  Noah had expressed his concerns about the unpredictable nature of her “migraines” before. She hated the thought of not driving, and more, hated to admit he was right, but she’d been lucky so far. She couldn’t push that luck. If an episode came down on her like the last one, she’d have no warning. Like Noah pointed out, it was no different than epilepsy in the respect that she could experience a seizure and be physically unable to drive. The decision left her feeling trapped, but Winter called for an Uber pickup.

  As she cleaned up the kitchen floor and waited for her ride, she started planning how to handle SSA Parrish. He and the Assistant Deputy Director of the Richmond Office, Cassidy Ramirez, hadn’t been able to catch The Preacher when they’d been in charge of the case, earlier in their careers. Bree had twelve years as an agent and Noah had been an experienced police officer before he’d applied to the FBI, but it wouldn’t be enough. They wouldn’t be able to do it, either, instinct told her.

  Winter had to convince Aiden to help her get into the investigation. Otherwise, she would have to do it alone.

  7

  She hadn’t called him, but he was expecting her. In fact,
he was surprised she hadn’t already shown up.

  Aiden looked out the window of his top-floor apartment at the wet streets below. Traffic was light, and the streets were empty. Most people were probably at home, celebrating Christmas with their families, or just staying in because of the dismal weather. Streetlights made indistinct puddles of light in the cold, thick fog.

  Headlights cut through the gloom, and a gray minivan pulled up in front of his building. A tall, slim figure got out. She was far away, but Aiden still reacted at the sight of Winter, her face a pale oval and her hair so black it seemed to absorb the glow from the streetlights.

  His muscles tensed for the fight ahead, and a bolt of pain shot down his thigh, reminding him that he was still supposed to be recuperating. He rubbed at the cramped muscle absently as he watched her walk toward the front doors.

  He didn’t know why she’d pay for a ride when she normally drove a beat-up little Honda Civic everywhere, but he was glad to see she had. He worried about her driving with her condition. She’d apparently come to the same conclusion. It wasn’t safe anymore. That let him off the hook. He hadn’t looked forward to having the conversation with her, and now, it wouldn’t be necessary.

  He’d been trying to put some emotional distance between them, but old habits died hard.

  Putting the issue out of his mind, he sat down in his chair, easing the weight from his wounded leg as he waited for her to come to the door. Security buzzed him to let him know she was on her way up.

  At her knock, he drained the rest of his Scotch and set the glass down on the table beside him. A lot depended on how this conversation went. He smiled grimly.

  “Come in.”

  She did, but without the easy familiarity that she’d adopted in the last couple of months. Seeing her had become an almost nightly routine when she’d stop in to check on him after he was released from the hospital.

  Tonight, she entered the room slowly, like she was expecting a trap. She pulled off her black jacket and hung it on the back of one of the barstools at the kitchen counter. He could smell the rainy outdoor scent she brought with her.