In the Air Tonight (31 page)

Mace and Paige were walking a tightrope; much in the same way she and Caleb were. Such a delicate balance, which led to explosive emotions and fights.

Now she brought her fingers back down to the keyboard to do yet another background check on one of the women Jeffrey was using when Caleb told her, “Dylan said to be really careful.”

She looked up, confused, and he pointed at the computer. “With your hacking.”

“I know how to cover my tracks,” she said, with a little more force than was necessary.

“It’s just a friendly reminder that you need to watch yourself,” Caleb said. “You quit the FBI and you were already on their radar. I’m sure they’re going to keep an eye on you.” He paused. “Or did they let you go because you couldn’t stop hacking?”

“Just to remind you, this hacking I’m doing is to help your friends—it’s not for my own benefit or enjoyment.
And I left the FBI on my own accord,” she shot back, unable to keep the anger out of her voice and the sense of betrayal out of her heart. “I wasn’t kicked out.” No, on her progress notes, she’d been called one of the most promising new recruits for cyber crimes her instructors had seen in quite a while.

“So why did you leave? Seems like a perfect job for a hacker like you.”

“I’m not—” A hacker. Or like them. Like anyone. At first, she’d thought she wanted to fit in … and then she realized that she only wanted that because she’d been told she should.

It was only after she’d taken stock of her own feelings that she’d decided to ditch the program.

Probably, she should’ve shared that with Noah, but she’d been afraid that if he knew she’d quit the feds, he wouldn’t let her see Cael. “In the end, the FBI wasn’t for me.”

“You gave it, what, a whole month?”

“Two months,” she retorted. But she’d known from day one it had been a mistake, known from the sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach.

“You didn’t … did you quit to come find me?” he demanded.

“I quit for myself,” she spat. “You were the reason I joined in the first place—I thought it would make you happy, I guess. You were so worried … and so I gave it a try. And then I realized that if I couldn’t make myself happy, whatever we had wasn’t real.”

Caleb didn’t say anything for a long moment and then, “What will you do now?”

“Continue to develop software on my own.”

“Continue to put yourself in harm’s way, leave
yourself open to the same danger I rescued you from in the first place.”

Was that from memory or from what he’d been told? Did it even matter anymore? “What do you care?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, then, I guess this discussion’s closed.” She shut her laptop, stood and started to walk out of the room, but he caught her by the elbow, forced her to face him. “You came here to me. What is it you really want?”

“You,” she blurted out, and then more softly, “That’s all I want. I thought maybe you’d want me too.”

She extracted herself from his grip, and this time he let her walk away. The only place she could go, beyond out the front door, was her bedroom.

Seething, she paced the small room and wondered if leaving was an option.

You don’t owe these people anything at all
. Just Cael, and he was the one who was pushing her back and forth.

He was the one who’d asked her to seriously consider the FBI’s offer. She had done it much more for him than for her.

The prospect had been daunting enough to make her want to lock herself away again. The progress—driving herself to open up, to get hurt, wasn’t at all worth it. Not yet.

A knock on the door made her start. Cael. He didn’t wait for her to invite him in before he took it upon himself to enter.

“You can’t isolate yourself every time I say something you don’t like,” he told her roughly.

“We haven’t known each other long enough for you to make those kinds of generalizations.”

“You’re right, we haven’t.”

“But since you want to try to analyze me, I guess it’s okay to do the same to you. You have so much guilt, Cael, because you don’t think you were strong enough, good enough. Your world was black and white, right or wrong, and you were forced into a gray area.”

“If you see everything in shades of gray, how do you know what to fight for?” Cael asked. “With black and white, you know your own personal line, what your battles are and why. And that makes it easier to tell good from bad, makes it easier to pick your battles instead of fighting for everything, or for nothing at all.”

She’d never thought about it that way. Then again, there were really no shades of gray in her world either. And rarely was there any white. Everything and everyone was someone to be suspicious of, although she’d always wanted so badly for that not to be the case.

She hadn’t realized she’d spoken those last thoughts out loud, not until Cael told her, “You’re a lot like him … like Mace. He’s a suspicious bastard. I could separate good from bad, but to him everyone’s guilty until proven innocent.”

With that he walked out the door and started down the stairs.

“For the record, I’ve never thought you were
guilty,” she called after him, but he didn’t turn back around.

M
ace hadn’t spoken to Paige since their argument—she hadn’t come looking for him and he hadn’t exactly searched her out either, knew she was holed up in his bedroom, that she was safe, so he figured it was better to seethe by himself than fight with her again. Afternoon melded quickly into evening, and the bar opened, business as usual, until the last patron was ushered out sometime after one in the morning.

He locked the front door, pulled down the shades on the windows and turned to find Reid and Caleb already sitting at one of the tables, Reid shuffling the cards.

Fuck it, cleanup could wait.

Mace sat at the table with them, played a few hands of poker, but the mood was somber. He noted that Reid’s gun was next to him on the table.

“That was a stupid move Paige made this afternoon,” Reid said finally.

“If you’re looking for me to disagree with you, keep waiting,” Mace said.

“She can’t play bartender forever.” Caleb put down a winning hand and the other men groaned.

“Paige is going to have to until we figure everything out,” Mace told Cael, who was too busy scooping up his winnings to care about either that or what Reid had just said.

Or at least he seemed to be, until he asked, “When’s your leave up, Mace?”

Reid shot Mace a look and frowned and Mace told Cael, “When you’ve got your full memory back.”

“What if that doesn’t happen?” Caleb asked and Reid muttered a curse.

“Then we stay here. Figure something else out,” Mace said.

“Wait a minute. You’re not going back because of me?”

“Cael, we’re not ready to make those decisions.”

“What’s with the
we
? You have no memory issues, dammit. You can escape back to the military.”

“Maybe I don’t want to escape into anything anymore,” Mace said fiercely. “Maybe I need to stay and feel the goddamned pain for once in my life.”

Caleb shook his head at his friend. “I know you’ve seen enough in your life, Mace. You’ve just never let it out before … never let anyone see it as clearly as you are now with Paige.”

Because it had grown too big to hide. “Concentrate on getting yourself better. Stop worrying about me.”

“Never,” Cael said in a hoarse voice. “Because you’d never stop worrying about me.”

Mace couldn’t argue with that.

They all heard the screech of tires—a quick glance at the newly installed security monitor showed a car racing toward the bar, and Mace jumped up to the bar’s front window in time to see the car crash into the woods.

He unlocked the front door and ran across the snow to the scene. The front end of the car smoked from its collision with a thick tree—Mace yanked the driver’s door open to get to the man slumped over the wheel. Gently pulled him backward so that he was
leaning against the seat—his throat was slit from end to end.

It was Arthur Somberg.

Mace froze. Then he put his hand to his own throat for a second before moving it to try to stop Somberg’s bleeding, a natural—if not logical—reaction, but Paige stopped him.

She yanked his hand down. “You don’t have gloves on.” And she handed him a pair of latex gloves as she took a towel she’d thrown over her shoulder and pressed it against Somberg’s throat. With her free hand, she checked his pulse. “It’s faint, but it’s there.”

Before he could do anything else but pull on gloves to help Paige, Reid and Caleb were there.

“Ed and Doc are both on their way,” Caleb said. Then he noticed where Somberg had been wounded, and paled. “Can we move him?”

Paige shook her head. “No, and I can’t do much for him either. He needs surgery immediately.” And then she began to speak to Somberg himself. “Arthur, stay with me, okay? The ambulance is on its way … you’re going to be just fine.”

Mace almost believed her. Her voice was comforting even as she pressed the towel as tightly as she could to staunch the bleeding without cutting off his airway.

“How the hell did he drive?” Paige asked softly. Mace looked down and saw that Somberg’s foot had been weighted and tied to the gas pedal.

“This had to be done at the very end of the driveway,” Mace said. “The corner by the mailbox is out of view of the camera.”

Reid didn’t wait, took off down the drive with his
flashlight out and his weapon raised and Mace turned his attention back to Paige. She was speaking to Somberg, her voice quiet and steady and, he imagined, reassuring—if the man could even hear.

And as much as he wanted her to go inside and get away from this growing nightmare, he couldn’t pull her off the job. It was what she was born to do and she was obviously damned good at it.

He would simply concentrate on helping her any way that he could until Doc arrived.

P
aige slipped her free hand into Somberg’s, her palm resting against something warm and metal. She tried to pull her hand away quickly but Somberg’s reflex kicked in and his fingers wrapped around hers urgently. His eyes opened and he moved his mouth, but only gurgling sounds came out.

Thankfully, her gloves stopped the contact from becoming too intense. She forgot about it momentarily as she told Somberg, “It’s okay, you’re going to be fine. The doctor’s on his way.”

But the man was struggling, which only made it harder for him to get oxygen. He was gripping her hand now and she tightened her own grip to let him know she had him, even as the medal was a brutal reminder of just who was behind this.

She knew she would have to touch it with her bare hands to find out what had happened here.

“Paige, what is it?” Mace was next to her, looking between her and Arthur, who had passed out again. “Did he say something?”

“No. But he’s holding something.” She eased her hand away from Somberg’s, which had gone slack, grasping the object in her fingertips so it didn’t fall to the ground.

She hadn’t been able to touch the St. Christopher medal found on Big Harvey because it had been bagged as evidence. But with this one, she would have no choice.

She continued to hold the medal as Doc’s truck barreled up the hill behind Ed’s. Once Doc got to them, she let go of the towel so he could check on Arthur and moved away.

She slipped her glove partway off and pressed the medal to her skin. Absolute, unbridled terror raced through her as the dark scenes flashed before her eyes.

Murder and fear rolled into one. This was new violence she saw, perpetrated by Jeffrey, but not on this man. Arthur’s face didn’t flash before her eyes.

She heard Mace talking to her, was aware that Caleb was too, but she couldn’t let go of the object—or the images that raced through her mind.

The St. Christopher medal felt cold against her bare fingertips—cold and hard and unforgiving—just like the man it belonged to.

There were hands on her now, shaking her lightly. Concerned voices, and she finally handed the medal to Mace. She put her glove back on and told him, “The medal definitely belongs to Jeffrey—Jeffrey didn’t give it to Arthur, though. There’s a woman.
The wound … This was a message,” she said softly. “You’re in danger because of me. You all are.”

But for once, crippling guilt didn’t wash over her. Maybe it was because Mace just nodded, a steely look in his eyes, as if that didn’t matter to him. He believed in her the way Gray had. He was a survivor, but so was she. She’d been to hell and back and she’d survived, dammit.

She’d
survived
.

The revelation spread over her skin like hot sunshine. A tingle … a burn. A reminder.

Touching that medal would normally take everything from her, everything she didn’t want to give, especially to Jeffrey. Tonight, she refused to let it.

“Paige, come on, I need your help,” Doc called—he’d leaned Arthur’s seat back and there was more blood and she went to him and cranked the oxygen tank Doc had at Arthur’s side.

Tonight, she would do what she needed to for her patient and then she would do what she wanted to for Mace.

T
he ambulance came after an hour—an hour of desperately trying to keep Arthur from bleeding out, and failing.

“We did everything we could,” Doc told her as they walked back toward the bar. Mace, Ed, Cael and Reid were waiting in the parking lot, talking with the state troopers as the ambulance pulled away with Arthur’s body inside.

She’d hated the man, and still she would’ve done anything she could to save him.

Once inside the warmth of the bar, she ripped her bloody gloves off and put them in a plastic bag Doc had given her for medical waste. Then she placed her palms on the bar, let her head hang as she took some deep breaths, the adrenaline rush subsiding, leaving her shaky and overwhelmed.

“Ed says you worked the ER.”

“Yes, always. I like it there.”

“It’s chaotic.”

“It’s what I know.” It had been a little over a week since she’d last been in the ER, but it felt like a lot longer—as if a lifetime had passed between then and now.