Page 4 of K-9 Confidential

CHAPTER TWO

Her hand shook as she tried to keep the gun pressed against his head.

Charlie’s nerves hiked into overdrive as the in­truder’s gun hit the dingy carpet with a hard thud. Seconds ticked off in her head. A minute. She wasn’t sure how long she stood there or what she was going to do next. This wasn’t part of the plan.

“I knew you were still alive. Even after all this time.” His voice worked to counter the uneasiness clawing through her, but she wouldn’t let it. Not this time. “This is usually the point where you close the door so no one sees you’re holding a gun to my head and order me into the other room.”

“This house is in the middle of twenty-two acres of land.” She kicked the door closed, because that seemed to be the logical thing to do, all the while trying to keep both hands tight around the gun. The dog at his feet stared up at her as though expecting some kind of treat for parking his butt in her laundry room. “No one is going to see you coming and going.”

“Does that mean I’m walking out of here alive?” he asked.

How could he ask that? After everything that’d happened, how could he still believe she’d been responsible for the deaths of those four people, of hersister, in that bombing? That she was a terrorist? Charlie forced herself to take a deep breath as next steps formed in her mind. “Into the living room. Straight ahead. You and your little dog, too.”

“Might be hard to believe, but I’m familiar with the layout of this place.” He followed her orders, moving forward through the tight hallway leading back into the laundry room from the main part of the house. “I’ve been here a few times.”

She knew that. Security cameras had picked up his incessant search for clues each time he’d visited and relayed the live video to her phone. Despite her being thousands of miles away. After a few months, she’d come to crave that notification. To know that he was still thinking about her, that she hadn’t been forgotten by the man tasked with bringing her in. Which didn’t make a lick of sense.

She hadn’t gotten those notifications in a long time.

Charlie maneuvered behind him, the gun now aimed at his spine. A thousand fantasies of this moment had kept her from going insane all these years. How she would approach him, what she would say. None of them seemed to fit the moment though. “What are you doing here, Agent Morais?”

“It’s just Granger now.” He pulled up short in the middle of the living room, turning as though to study his surroundings, but she was familiar with his way of working. How he liked to keep the threat in view. His sidekick didn’t seem to care she was holding a gun to its owner though. Some guard dog. Afternoon sunlight highlighted all the little details of his face. The shaggy hair that always seemed to stay in place without effort, the divots between his brows that’d creviced deeper over the years, that long perfectly straight nose she’d come to love. His eyes though. They’d somehow gotten darker. Heavier. As though he’d lived two lifetimes in the span of ten years. “Dropped the agent part soon after you went off the radar.”

He’d quit Homeland Security? It didn’t matter. Charlie kept herself from shifting her weight, from giving him any idea that her nerves were getting the best of her. “That doesn’t answer my question.”

“I came here because I got a stack of surveillance photos this morning. Of you.” He said it so matter-of-factly, without emotion, that the lack of inflection threatened to carve through her. “I don’t know why you came back. Frankly, I couldn’t care less about what you’re doing here. I imagine the only reason your father hasn’t killed you is because he doesn’t know about this place. But considering how we got our intel, my boss seems to think you might be a target of the local drug cartel, and she wants to know why before a bunch of people die.”

Her brain struggled to keep up with all the bits and pieces of that statement. Charlie gave in to the need to shift her weight onto her other leg. “Your boss? You said you quit Homeland.”

“I’m with Socorro Security,” he said.

“Socorro.” The word took some of the strength she’d managed to summon over the past few seconds. Her arm ached with the weight of the pistol in her hand. People like him trained for things like this, and while she’d been raised around guns and how to use them to defend what was hers, she wasn’t like him. “You work for the private military contractor that declared war against theSangre por Sangrecartel. You’re one of their operatives.”

“Despite what you might’ve thought when you disappeared, Charlie, the world moved on without you.Imoved on. Only now, here you are, dragging me back into a life I fought to give up.” Granger took his time facing her. Stepped into her, pressing his chest against the gun. “So we can do this one of two ways. You can come back to Socorro with me willingly to answer a few questions about your connection toSangre por Sangreand what they want from you, or I can drag you out of here kicking and screaming. Either way, you’re coming with me and Zeus.”

The dog cocked his head to one side at the sound of his name.

“I didn’t kill those people.” Did he even care? Her mouth dried as memories she’d forced herself to relive every single day played at the back of her mind. “We were told there wouldn’t be any civilians around. Sage set the explosives on the lower section of pipe while Erin worked ahead, but then we heard a vehicle approaching. It was dark. We couldn’t see who it was, but it didn’t matter. I told her to stop the countdown. She wouldn’t listen. We argued. I had to knock her out, but when I ran to stop the explosives from going off, it was too late.”

She could still feel the blistering fire and searing heat flash across her skin, driving beneath her clothing and burning her from the outside in. His gaze lowered to the lines of scarred, folded skin wrapping both forearms from beneath her jacket cuffs. “I tried to stop it.”

“And yet you’re the only one alive who can corroborate your version of events, Charlie.” The hardness in his voice severed the final string of hope in her chest. This Granger Morais wasn’t the man she’d studied—who she’d gotten to know, who she’d trusted—before the bombing.

He was right. Her oldest sister’s body had been recovered at the scene, along with four other sets of remains. Erin had managed to escape, but she’d ended up six feet under back in Vaughn all these years later. Charlie had no proof of her story. Her father certainly wasn’t going to step forward and incriminate himself. She had no home. She had no family. She had…nothing. Nothing except this moment with a man she never thought she’d see again. “It’s the truth. I need you to believe that.”

“The truth?” The deadpan tone in his voice suffocated the last of her optimism that they could work this out. “You’re holding a gun to my chest, Charlie. You lied to everyone in your life, trying to convince them you were dead, including me. You had the chance to make this right since the moment that bomb went off, but you chose to run. You made the choice every single day to hide. What part of that is the truth?”

The survivor in her, the one who’d managed to keep herself off the radar, kicked her back into the present. She wasn’t going anywhere with him. Not until she kept her promise to her sisters. “That was always your problem, Granger. Everything is so black-and-white for you, but that’s not how the world works. You’ve been trained to think your assignments are the right thing to do, the right choice. But you don’t know me anymore. And you have no idea what I’m willing to do to survive.”

“Don’t run, Charlie. You’re only going to make matters worse,” he said.

“I don’t have a choice.” She slammed her heel into the floor. The board she’d pried loose to once hide cash, a new identity and anything else she’d had to keep from her family collapsed under the weight. The other end shot up behind Granger. Charlie twisted away from him at the sound of impact and lunged for the front door. This wasn’t a safe house anymore. She had to go.

Her hand met the doorknob. She wrenched the reinforced steel open and dashed into the New Mexico desert. Despite clear skies and a blazing sun, cold flooded through her from the change in temperature.

Heavy footsteps pounded through the house. Closer than she expected. But Charlie only had attention for the rental car stashed in the garage at the back of the house. The keys were already in the ignition in case she had to run. She could make it. Shehadto make it.

She pumped her legs harder, out of breath, as she turned the last corner. She didn’t dare glance back to gauge the distance between her and Granger. It didn’t matter. Exposing Henry Acker for the monster he was? That was all that mattered.

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