My hands clenched into fists when I heard the thump of country music outside Honky Tonk’s front door. I’d taken a walk around the block just to hype myself up into going inside. There was laughter and life on the other side of the front door. I was supposed to participate in it when all I wanted to do was stay home, in the dark. In the quiet.
The day had started out better than most. I’d gone to the gym with the express purpose of seeing Lina. Between watching her move that beautiful body and me actually moving mine, I’d gotten a boost. But somewhere in the middle of Liza J’s mile-long list of chores, that cold, dark wave had crashed over me again without warning. It dragged me under, and even the antidepressant I’d remembered to take that morning couldn’t help me fight my way back to the surface.
I’d started half a dozen texts to Knox making up excuses for why I couldn’t make it tonight, but I knew he’d keep his word. He’d just appear at my door and try to drag me out.
It was easier to show up, go through the motions.
Upstairs, I’d managed a dozen stilted words before shoving Piper into Lina’s arms. I’d use the dog as an excuse to get back within the hour.
I could fake it for sixty minutes. Fifty-six now, seeing as how I was already four minutes late.
Steeling myself, I opened the front door and stepped into the world of the living.
It was a Monday night, which meant a smaller crowd and country classics on the jukebox rather than a live band.
Out of habit, I scanned the thin crowd. Tallulah and Justice St. John occupied a table with pet shop owner Gael and his husband, Isaac, for their monthly double date. Sherry Fiasco, Jeremiah’s sister and Knox’s right-hand person, was shrugging into a coat behind the bar next to Silver, the edgy blond bartender.
My brother clocked me before I made it two steps inside. He was in his standard uniform of jeans, battered motorcycle boots, beard, and an air of “fuck around and find out.”
Knox always appeared to be looking for a fight.
Beside him stood Lucian Rollins in a suit that probably cost more than my first car. He was tall, dark, and also dangerous, but in a different way.
Where Knox was more likely to punch you in the face if you pissed him off, Lucian was the type to methodically and creatively destroy your life.
Lucky for me they mostly kept their powers in check.
There was an empty stool between the two, which told me I was about to be the unwilling center of attention.
The door opened behind me, and my U.S. marshal shadow strolled inside. “You know this would be a hell of a lot easier if you told me where you were going and how long you planned to be there,” he groused.
“Yeah, well, my life would be a hell of a lot easier if I didn’t have you up my ass all day.”
“Long as we’re both miserable,” he said before peeling off to grab an empty two-top facing the door.
Knox straightened away from the bar.
Fuck me.
Fifty-six minutes. Drink a beer. Shoot the shit. Keep my brother from assaulting a fed. Then I could go home and hide from the world.
I made my way through the tables, nodding as people called out greetings.
“Evening, boys,” I said when I reached them.
Lucian offered me his hand and pulled me in for a one-armed hug.
“Good to see you.”
“You too, Lucy.”
Knox was glaring over my shoulder at Nolan Graham. “Think I might go kick your shadow’s ass,” he said over the rim of his glass.
“Appreciate the sentiment, but I really don’t wanna help bury a body tonight,” I told him.
Knox’s attention shifted away from the marshal and back to me. “You look like shit. You shave with a butter knife?”
“Nice to see you too, dick,” I said, sliding onto the stool between them. I didn’t have the energy to stand.
“You’ve been avoiding my calls,” Lucian said, taking his seat and shooting me one of those piercing looks that had women’s underwear falling down to their ankles for over two decades now.
“Been busy,” I said, signaling Silver for a drink.
She winked a smoky eye at me. “Comin’ up, Chief.”
One benefit to still living in the small town you’d grown up in, you never had to tell anyone what your drink order was. They remembered.
“Better not be busy with your new neighbor,” Knox said, straddling his stool and angling toward me.
“If that’s why we’re doin’ this, I’ll save you an hour and say what Lina and I do or don’t do is none of your damn business.”
“You’re my brother. She’s my friend. That makes it my business.”
“Save your breath. Nothing’s happened…yet,” I added on a smirk.
“Yeah? Well, it better stay that way. You two don’t work. She’s all wanderlust and adrenaline and you break out into hives if you venture out of the county. You’ve got nothin’ in common.”
“Said the expert whose been engaged what? A handful of weeks? To a woman who is way too good for you, I might add. Thanks, Silver,” I said when she slid me a draft beer.
“Gentlemen, I suggest we table this discussion,” Lucian said. “We have other matters to discuss.”
The faster they spilled it, the sooner I could go home.
Lucian put his scotch down on the bar and nodded at my brother.
“Where does the investigation stand? Lucian thinks the feds are ignoring Duncan Hugo because they’re more interested in landing his fuckface father,” Knox said.
Okay, maybe I’d rather go a few rounds about me seeing Lina if the alternative was talking about Duncan Hugo. “It’s an ongoing investigation. No comment,” I said.
Knox snorted. “You can’t tell me you’re not running your own investigation. If the feds are focused on Daddy, then we’ll go after Junior. Only problem is, Junior’s so far underground no one knows where he is.”
“Our most likely theory is that Anthony helped his son leave the country,” Lucian said.
If the junior Hugo had split the country, that meant the odds of him coming back to finish the job were slim.
The relief I felt was immediately replaced with a wave of shame. As an officer of the law, I was programmed to fight for justice. As a Morgan, I was destined to just plain fight. Yet here I was, too depressed to spur myself into action.
“I’d have bet my brokerage balance that asshole doesn’t have two brain cells to rub together. But Naomi and Way insist he’s smarter than he’s given credit. Says when he had ’em…” Knox trailed off, his knuckles going white on the bar.
I realized that Hugo hadn’t just taken something from me, he’d taken from my family. And that still wasn’t enough to bring me to the surface of the dark.
My brother cleared his throat while Lucian and I did the polite, manly thing and ignored him.
“Way said he was sly like a fox with rabies,” Knox said finally.
The corner of my mouth lifted. Waylay would make a fine cop someday, but I doubted Knox would want to hear that about his little girl.
“He better hope for his sake his ass is in South America getting eaten alive by mosquitos,” Knox said.
“I don’t see a scenario where it would make sense for him to stick around. He’s most likely living it up somewhere far away from here.”
“But in case he isn’t,” Lucian said, “you need to be vigilant. You’re a loose end regardless of where he is. You’re the only one who can identify him as the shooter.”
“And how would you know that?” I demanded.
Lucian held up his palms, the picture of innocence. “I can’t help it if information falls into my lap.”
“What kind of information?”
“The kind that summarizes your dashcam footage.”
My jaw clenched. It was more of a reflex than any real emotion. “That leak better not have come from my end.”
“It didn’t,” he assured me.
“You remember anything yet?” Knox demanded.
I stared at the bottles behind the bar. People drowned themselves in those bottles daily to numb the pain, the fear, the discomfort that life doled out. Some numbed themselves in even more dangerous ways. Some never surfaced.
But I was already numb. I needed to feel. And no amount of alcohol was going to help me dig my way out of this all-consuming emptiness. There was only one thing that could. One woman that could.
“No,” I said finally.
I could feel Knox and Lucian communicating silently.
“You think about talking to one of those, uh…therapists?” Knox choked out.
Lucian and I both swung our heads in his direction and stared.
“Oh, fuck you both. Naomi suggested it. I’m man enough to admit it’s not a horrible idea…if you don’t mind spilling your guts to a complete stranger. It’s not like Dad gave us any kind of healthy coping tools.”
“I did see a shrink. Department requirement,” I reminded him.
“Trauma has a way of damaging memory,” she’d said. “In some cases victims never get those memories back.”
Trauma. Victims. They were labels I’d spent an entire career applying to others. My own label, “hero,” had been peeled off and replaced with “victim.” And I didn’t know if I could stomach it.
“I see a therapist,” Lucian announced.
Knox straightened. “See? As in present tense?”
“Occasionally. I was much younger and less…interested in the law when I started seeing him to get access to his patient records.”
I glanced over my shoulder. Nolan lifted his bottle of beer in a silent toast.
“Can we not talk about this or any other hypothetical crimes with a U.S. marshal twenty feet away? You two can’t be playing goddamn Scooby-Doo in the middle of a federal investigation.”
“I’m offended,” Lucian announced.
“You be offended. I’ll be pissed the fuck off,” Knox decided.
I picked up my beer even though I didn’t want it. “And what do you find so offensive?”
“That you doubt my abilities.”
To be fair, Lucian was practically a corporate 007. Except for the fact that he was American, preferred bourbon to martinis, and worked in the cutthroat world of political consulting, which probably did bear certain similarities to international espionage.
He was tight-lipped on the specifics of exactly what his company did for its clients, but I didn’t have to be a genius to guess that it wasn’t all aboveboard.
“I don’t know about your abilities. But I do know that out of the three of us, you’re the only one to do actual jail time.”
It was a low fucking blow and we all knew it. Hell, I wanted to punch myself in the face for it.
“I’m sorry, man,” I said, digging my thumb into the spot between my eyebrows. “I’ve got a short fuse these days.”
My patience had most likely bled out of me along with that pool of O negative on the side of the road. This was why I didn’t want to be around people.
He held up a hand dismissively. “It’s fine.”
“No. It’s not. You’ve always been there for me, Lucy, and I’m being a petty asshole taking a swipe at you. I’m sorry.”
“If you two start hugging it out, I’m leavin’,” Knox threatened.
To spite him, I wrapped Lucian in a bear hug. My shoulder sang, but in almost a good way.
Lucian thumped me on the back twice. I knew we were just fucking around with my brother. But there was something steadying about my oldest friend’s instant forgiveness. It paled in comparison to the anchoring heat Lina’s touch stirred in me. But it still meant something.
We turned back to Knox, grinning.
“You takin’ your beer to go?” I asked him.
“Assholes,” Knox muttered.
“I am sorry, Lucy,” I said again.
“You’re forgiven. You’ve been through a lot.”
“Is that why you’re hanging around in town on a Monday night instead of running your evil corporate empire?”
My friend’s lips quirked.
“Seriously, man, if you’re in town just to keep an eye on me, I’ve already got an armed mustache up my ass,” I said, nodding in the direction of Nolan. “You don’t need to camp out here and lose all your money.”
“Running an evil corporate empire means having a team in place to pick up the slack when I’m otherwise engaged.”
“You’re not making that commute up here every day are you?” Traffic in northern Virginia was its own special ring of hell.
Knox snorted. “Don’t get all teary-eyed over the gesture. The empire has a helicopter. Luce is just using you as an excuse to play with his toy.”
“Just don’t land it on the roof of the elementary school. I don’t need the feds, the U.S. marshals, and the FAA up my ass.”
“How are the wedding plans going?” Lucian asked, changing the subject.
“Can you believe Daze was thinking white linen on the tables? I mean, for fuck’s sake, it’s a Knockemout party, we’re gonna be spillin’ shit all night long. I don’t want our reception lookin’ like the tables are covered in some murdered bed wetter’s sheets.”
My brother certainly knew how to paint a picture.
“So what did you decide to go with?” Lucian asked.
“Navy blue,” Knox said proudly.
“Nice,” Lucian said with an approving nod.
“By the way. You both are groomsmen.” My brother looked at me. “I guess you can be my best man.”
I made it an hour and fifteen minutes and was damn proud of myself. I’d nursed the second beer, made mostly the right responses, and said my goodbyes when Naomi called Knox to tell him Waylon had chased after the skunk he had a crush on and gotten sprayed. Again.
We said our goodbyes and I tried not to make it look like I was bolting for the door.
I even paused at Nolan’s table where he was shrugging back into his coat.
“I’m walking the ten feet to my door. I think I can survive it on my own,” I told him.
“Your call, Chief. Try not to end up in the gutter full of holes.”
“I’ll do my best,” I lied.
I ducked out into the crisp night, the door closing behind me on the light and the music. Something didn’t feel right. Standing here under the streetlight, mere feet from my front door, I felt exposed, vulnerable, on edge. Something or someone was out there.
Was it him? Had Duncan Hugo come back to finish the job? Or was it all in my imagination?
I cast a glance up and down the street, looking for the source of the doom that settled over me.
My hands began to tingle. It started in my palms and rolled into my fingers.
“Fuck. Not now,” I whispered under my breath. “Not here.”
There was no shooter lurking in the dark. The only villain here was the malfunction in my brain.
The tingling turned to a burn. I closed my hands into tight fists, trying to force the sensation away. I’d stopped it before. But I knew I was already too far gone.
A light sweat broke over my body, while inside, I felt chilled to the bone.
“Come on, man. Keep it together,” I said through gritted teeth.
But the band around my chest was tightening, tightening. The breath I held began to leave my lungs. The sound vanished from my ears, replaced with the muffled thud of my own heartbeat.
My breath was a thin wheeze.
There was no stopping it. No talking myself down. Cold sweat coursed down my back.
“Fuck me.”
My hands clenched into fists as the band around my chest got tighter and tighter. My heart raced under my ribs as the ache spread. I made it through the door to the foot of the stairs before my legs gave out. I crashed into the wall and slid down to the cold tile.
“Not real. It’s not fucking real,” I repeated between thready inhales.
Panic was never the solution. It would never serve you in times of crisis. As a cop, that had been drilled into my head. I’d been trained to stay calm, to follow procedure, to operate on instinct. Yet no procedure, no training had prepared me for these kind of attacks.
I was burning up and freezing at the same time. Pain radiated through my chest and my vision started to go dark around the edges. Spots of light danced in front of my eyes.
I hated myself. Hated the weakness. The lack of control. Hated the thought that this was all in my head. That it could happen anywhere. I couldn’t do my job if I was curled into a fucking ball on the ground. Couldn’t protect this town if I couldn’t even protect myself from the monsters in my own fucking head.
