The Griffin Marshal's Heart (U.S. Marshal Shifters Book 4)

by Zoe Chant

  She was standing just outside of the prison itself, outdoors but still inside the main walls. It was freezing. Funny how there could be so much sun without it making her even a little bit warmer.

  At least Keith had stayed in the car to keep the heat on. It was good that having him along was at least a little bit useful, since he was already driving her crazy: within ten minutes, he’d reminded her to keep her hands at ten and two while she drove.

  She kept doing the necessary travel math in her head: how many miles they could travel today if the traffic was good (it never was), how long she could probably drive without getting tired, where to stop along the way.

  This kind of long-distance trip was a hassle, and she wondered who had authorized it in Dawes’s case. It was normal enough to move a prisoner who’d been attacked, but it was rare to move them this far.

  Honestly, it was rare for the response to be this prompt, too. Usually any kind of bureaucracy was managed by guys exactly like the one she’d just been talking to. It wasn’t that they were necessarily stupid or uncaring, but they were sluggish and uninvolved, and all the paperwork slowed them down even further. It took a lot to jar them out of complacency.

  Well, Dawes was probably still something of a high-profile prisoner. Maybe they’d just decided they’d rather have him be officially someone else’s problem.

  Then the door swung open, and there he was.

  Dawes had changed since the days of his trial footage. He had lost weight behind bars, and his already striking features were now even more sharply defined. He looked like he’d been chiseled out of ice. His dark brown hair, once neatly trimmed, had grown just a little bit shaggy. He had been graceful in the courtroom, obviously athletic, but now he was painfully stiff. And the leg shackles were making him shuffle.

  But he still had that lost prince vibe. There was a dignity and intensity to him, even in prison khakis and steel restraints.

  She stepped forward to meet him.

  “Cooper Dawes? I’m Deputy US Marshal Gretchen Miller. I’ll be driving you to Bergen, along with Deputy Keith Ridley, who’s keeping the car warm for us. I know you know how this works, so we shouldn’t have any problems.”

  “We won’t,” he said. He had a low, clear voice.

  She had the weirdest feeling. This all seemed fundamentally wrong somehow.

  They should have been standing beside each other, not across from each other. He wasn’t supposed to be in chains.

  Except he was supposed to be, obviously. He was a criminal. She was a Marshal.

  “All right,” Gretchen said. There was an unusual creakiness to her voice, like it was a squeaky hinge in need of oil. “Then let’s get on the road.”

  She stretched out her hand before she even thought about it.

  Dawes almost didn’t respond. For a moment, her hand just hung there. The autumn air was chilly enough that her fingers felt a little cool. She would have had time to pull back.

  Then his large, warm hand met hers.

  It was a firm, friendly handshake, one of a thousand Gretchen had been lucky enough to have in her life from the kind of man who didn’t see the need to either go easy on her or pointedly test her. There shouldn’t have been anything more remarkable about it than that. It wasn’t that strange to think that if she’d met him under any other circumstances, she would have liked him.

  What was strange was that she’d shaken his hand at all.

  It’s his eyes, Gretchen thought. Even more than the lost prince look, it’s his eyes.

  Dawes had green eyes that were almost as clear as glass. It was impossible to look at them and be even the slightest bit afraid.

  He’d made her feel safe enough enough to do something daring—and he’d made it so that she hadn’t felt it was daring at all.

  The air was colder than ever when he was no longer holding her hand.

  4

  She shook my hand.

  It felt like some electricity was still trapped in his fingers, making his skin tingle and his blood pound.

  Cooper couldn’t remember the last time he had felt a friendly touch. It made him feel like he was coming undone.

  He didn’t even think Gretchen Miller had done it deliberately. She didn’t look like someone who would showboat to prove how brave she was. It was almost like she had shaken his hand by reflex, like she still recognized him as a fellow Marshal. Even with the handcuffs, leg shackles, and prison khakis, she’d seen someone worthy of respect and common courtesy.

  He didn’t think he would ever be able to tell her how much that meant to him.

  Of course, now she practically had oops written all over her face. And no wonder, given how her partner was glaring daggers at her from the passenger seat.

  Gretchen opened the back door for Cooper and loaded him in, gently sheltering his head with her hand as he ducked inside.

  He caught the faint scent of her perfume. It was unshowy and fresh, like green apples and cedarwood, and it reminded him of the morning sky above the mountains. It seemed to fit perfectly with her short, sleek, dark hair and her falcon-like golden-brown eyes. It was like she was made to be outside.

  He felt a twinge deep inside him. A rustle of feathers. Was his griffin stirring back to life? Had Gretchen’s fresh-air scent done what all his efforts couldn’t?

  Then she closed the door and all he could smell was himself. He didn’t think anyone would be bottling the scent of prison infirmaries anytime soon.

  And his griffin sure as hell wasn’t going to be drawn out by it. The sensation faded away, leaving only the feeling that he was missing something. No surprise there. He knew exactly what he was missing: he had a dark hollow inside his soul where his griffin was supposed to be.

  Gretchen slid into the front seat. Her voice was clipped and matter-of-fact now, much more official now that she was under the hard, colorless gaze of her partner.

  “This is Deputy Marshal Keith Ridley,” she said without looking back at Cooper. “Keith, this is Dawes.”

  He wished he could ask her to call him Cooper. Well, he could ask, but there was no reason for her to say yes. Especially now, because she was embarrassed, and Cooper couldn’t even blame her for it. Shaking hands with him had broken every Marshal protocol in the books, and it had technically put her life at risk. It had made her vulnerable, and there were a lot of people willing to take advantage of that kind of split-second weakness.

  He didn’t even like to think about what could have happened if someone like that had been in his shoes.

  But he had the funny feeling that if that had been the case, Gretchen wouldn’t have made the mistake in the first place.

  She was either careless or someone who had a good intuitive sense of the people she was dealing with, and people who were careless didn’t stay Marshals for long.

  So Cooper decided to push his luck. If he got his hand slapped for it, he could live with that.

  “Just Cooper’s fine,” he said, trying to keep the hope out of his voice. “Or Coop, if you want. I always liked the sound of that.”

  People had stopped calling him by his first name around the time they’d stopped shaking his hand. He missed it. It would be nice to hear someone sounding friendly for a change, even if they actually weren’t.

  “We’ll call you what we choose to call you,” Keith Ridley said. The words had a razor-sharp edge.

  “It’s a long trip,” Gretchen said in an undertone. “Let’s make this as painless as we can.”

  She shifted into drive and began taking them off the penitentiary grounds. Cooper lost his interest in the tension between his escorts and instead turned his rapt attention to his window. He watched as their car passed smoothly through the different checkpoints, the gates and fences falling away under the force of Gretchen’s authority. They were moving out of the sweep of the searchlights and the sight of the barbed wire, out and out—

  Then, just like that, they were on the open road, and he was looking at things he hadn’t seen
in over six months.

  Traffic. Speed limit signs. Exit ramps.

  Graffiti penises.

  He could safely say that he’d never been so grateful in all his life to see a spray-painted picture of a dick. It was like a marker welcoming him back to society.

  Although, actually, prison got more than its fair share of cartoon penises. It was really the spray paint that was welcoming him back.

  And, more than anything else, it was the endless expanse of sky above him. It was a glowering, wintery gray, but Cooper was as happy to see it as he had ever been to see any bright shade of blue.

  He wasn’t going back to prison. He couldn’t lose this freedom again. He couldn’t go on watching his griffin slip away from him.

  He just had to watch for the right opportunity. He needed to be sharp and quick—he couldn’t miss his chance, and he couldn’t hesitate, especially since he was working with a severe limitation: he refused to hurt the people he was escaping.

  Especially Gretchen.

  Luckily, he had no reason to think that moral stance would mean giving up his chance to escape. He might have had more scruples than most prisoners, but he also had more insider information: he knew the transport process from the other side. He knew the exact location of all the little weaknesses no US Marshal could ever finesse out of the system. No process could be made one hundred percent flawless, and Cooper was willing to take advantage of that. He just had to think about it from the other side. What had he always been worried a prisoner would do? He’d do that. Well, he’d do the non-violent version of that.

  “Anyone have any strong opinions on what I do with the radio?” Gretchen said, breaking the silence.

  “Driver controls the radio,” Cooper said automatically.

  “I don’t listen to music,” Keith said.

  Of course he didn’t. Cooper was irritated by this guy already.

  “Does that mean you hate it?” Gretchen said. “If I turn on the radio, will you physically recoil and throw yourself out of the car, screaming? Or do you just mean you don’t have a station preference?”

  It seemed like Keith had to think about it. “The second one.”

  “Great.” She switched on the radio and scanned through the FM band before settling on classic rock. It was exactly what Cooper would have picked for this kind of long drive—something loud and energetic to keep his energy from flagging. No one could drift off or get fuzzy-headed with “You Shook Me All Night Long” rattling their car windows.

  Cooper nodded his head along to the music as he watched the snowy scenery pass by. His mind hadn’t done anything as useful or rigorous as hatching a plan in months; he felt like he was mentally out of shape. That was what happened when you spent most of your time deliberately trying not to think.

  Not “this is your brain on drugs” but “this is your brain on prison.” Just as ugly.

  He used to be better at making the right mental leaps when he’d had something to do with his hands. He used to play computer solitaire or sudoku to get himself to lapse into a kind of meditative state, and then solutions to fugitive hunts would just seem to bob out of the fog and present themselves. Unfortunately, handcuffs basically existed to get in the way of their wearers doing anything with their hands, so he was out of luck.

  He tapped his fingers against his knees, instead, trying to follow the beat of the music.

  They would have to stop for gas at some point. Opportunity.

  It was too long of a trip to make in one day, so they would have to stop midway and book him into a local jail cell for the night. If it was a small enough town, that could mean a rickety cell with no security cameras and only a single, sleepy deputy on duty. Definite opportunity.

  “You shook his hand,” Keith said accusingly.

  Cooper’s head jerked up.

  “I’m aware of that,” Gretchen said.

  “Do you realize what could have happened?”

  “Yes.” Her voice was even colder than the wind outside. “It was a momentary lapse of sanity.”

  “He could have pulled you towards him and gotten his cuffed hands around your neck,” Keith went on ruthlessly. “He could have broken your wrist. He could have—”

  “I didn’t, though,” Cooper said.

  “No one’s talking to you,” Keith said.

  “You’re talking about me. And you’re a foot away, so it’s not like I can’t hear you.”

  Keith huffed.

  Gretchen said, “Keith, there’s no woman in law enforcement, anywhere, who needs you to spell out for her all the different ways she can get killed doing her job. I promise you, I know. I agree I shouldn’t have done it, and I only did it because I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Then you should have been thinking.”

  “Martin worked with him once,” Gretchen said to Cooper’s surprise. Whatever response he’d expected, it hadn’t been that. “He told me about it. It made him feel more familiar.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  “We could have been colleagues in another world, that’s all. I let my guard down.”

  “It’s a good thing you weren’t his colleague,” Keith said. “Then you could have wound up in the ground just like Phil Locke.”

  Cooper closed his eyes.

  Phil.

  He didn’t want to think about Phil. They’d had their differences, but even if they would never have been friends outside of the office, they had still been partners. And now Phil was gone, and they would never have a chance to be anything more than that—and one of the last times they’d talked, they’d argued. Cooper had ticked Phil off, and Phil had blown up about it, and they’d never really had a chance to make things right.

  He grabbed on to the nearest available distraction and said, “Martin?”

  “My chief,” Gretchen said.

  The name finally clicked. “Martin Powell?”

  “Don’t talk to him,” Keith said.

  “Keith, I don’t want to fight in front of a prisoner, but if you tell me one more time what to do or not do, I’m going to use language unbecoming a Marshal and also kick your ass out into the snow.” She took a deep breath. “Yes. Martin Powell.”

  “I remember him,” Cooper said, and against all odds, he felt a smile tugging at his mouth. Could have been the fond memories of Martin, could have been Gretchen threatening to kick Keith’s ass, could have been both. “We tracked down Jeremiah Isaac Bronson together.”

  “Oh, an ‘all three names’ guy, huh? You only see that with serial killers or assassins.”

  “Well, in Bronson’s case, he did kill a state senator, so the ‘all three names’ approach got used right away, but it turned out that he only killed him because the senator cut him off in traffic, so he probably doesn’t really count as an assassin. But by the time we knew that, the name had already stuck.”

  He could actually remember joking about that with Martin, on a long winter car trip that had strangely looked a lot like this one. They had tried out alternative names—Jerry, Jere, “Road Rage” Bronson.

  “When was this?” Gretchen said.

  Cooper tried to think back. “Almost ten years ago. I was fresh out of training at Glynco and didn’t even have a home office yet. Martin was working solo, and I think he just needed someone else to take some driving shifts, and a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed rookie would do. He was a good guy. I hope I didn’t annoy him too much.”

  “It’s a shame he didn’t see what kind of person you are,” Keith said.

  I’m not the person you think I am.

  “Keith, chill out,” Gretchen snapped.

  She probably just didn’t think a prisoner needed to be reminded every two seconds that, yep, he was still a prisoner and nobody liked him very much, but Cooper appreciated her defense of him all the same.

  It gave him the guts to continue talking to her like this was even a halfway normal situation.

  “I was so earnest when I first joined up,” Cooper continued. “
I was practically a Boy Scout. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch every day, all brown-bagged like I was going to school. Shoes always polished. So eager to get in on everything that I was tripping everyone else up all the time. You ever see one of those videos where a puppy tries to run across a kitchen floor and winds up skittering and just sliding?”

  Gretchen laughed, and the sound was so unexpectedly musical that Cooper immediately wanted to hear it again. “That was you, huh?”

  “That was me. Just losing control and slip-sliding around like I was on ice. Martin was the best thing that could have happened to me. He had a steady hand with the rookies, I guess.”

  “He still does,” Gretchen said. She cleared her throat. “He said you were good.”

  It made a pang shoot through his heart. “At the job, I’m guessing,” he said lightly. “Not that I was a good person.”

  No one was going to take a stand on that one. Not these days.

  “That’s a hard thing to judge, especially in someone you haven’t seen in years.”

  Maybe. Although he knew if someone asked him right now, he’d have zero hesitation in saying Martin Powell was a good person: steady, funny, fair, and dogged. Exactly the right mentor for a kid Marshal still so overwhelmed by his good luck in landing his dream job that he’d had trouble staying focused on the gritty, unglamorous slog that the work sometimes demanded.

  Martin had helped make him the Marshal he had eventually become, and despite everything that had happened, Cooper still believed that he had been, however briefly, someone worth becoming.

  So he would say that Martin was a good guy, that he couldn’t have changed enough, not even in ten years, to be anything else. But it was easy for him to say that. After all, nobody had shown up with damning evidence to connect Martin with a murder and the biggest sin a Marshal could commit.

  If it was Martin in the center of this frame, would Cooper still be singing the same tune? Would he trust his one-time judgment over a mountain of apparently concrete proof?

  He didn’t know. He couldn’t blame Martin for not believing in him, that was for sure. It was just good to know that whatever Martin had said about him had been nice enough to cause Gretchen to reflexively see him as a colleague instead of a threat or a faceless prisoner.