Page 22 of Prey for You

She squirmed and laid her temple on her hands, her eyes locked on mine. “Gerald says I get addicted to adrenaline. And because those guys almost got me, but Jeremy’s team saved me, it hooked me on the takedown.”

If there was anything I understood, it was the thrill of the takedown.

I cleared my throat. “What does being hooked on the takedown look like for you?” I asked carefully, because I didn’t want to push her towards talking about me. Not yet.

Her brow furrowed. “Taking risks. Bigger risks. Gerald says I was in a self-destructive spiral, which is probably true, but he wasn’t my therapist yet. Jeremy got so nervous because I kept getting around their monitoring, that he wanted to lock that shit down. We… negotiated an agreement,” she said with a wry grin.

My ears perked at the wordagreement.And not in the good way. “What the fuck kind of agreement was Jeremy tying you to?”

“It wasn’t like that,” she said. But didn’t immediately explain. I waited.

She didn’t freeze up, or make a joke. She didn’t deflect. She stared at me for so long I was about to prod her. But her eyes stayed locked on mine, searching me. When she finally spoke, her voice was barely above a whisper.

“The long and short of it is, he knew I was going to get in trouble unless I had help, and he had limited resources availableto watch me to guard against my dad. So, he suggested that I… do what I do—but feed the people to him. As long as we were finding criminals—especially any of the trafficking or murder dudes—he could keep using manpower and department money to hang around and keep me safe.

“At first I didn’t want the oversight. We fought a lot about it early on. But eventually we kind of found the balance—I’d find the people I needed, and he’d take out the ones that were dangerous. It worked for both of us.”

I huffed. “What did your counselors think about this? Did they know?”

“My therapists were too…soft,”she said dryly. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but law-abiding people tend to be a littleimpressedby the FBI. I started to realize that all those talkers were there to show off tothem,more than to help me. I mean, they wanted to help. But it was so the fucking FBI would keep using them. Not because they cared about who I was.

“The problem was, to do the kind of work I was doing with them, I hadto be on payroll, I had to be medically checked every quarter, and Ihadto have some kind of psychological oversight. Jeremy didn’t want to let me go because I helped him close cases. And I needed some kind of back-up. So… we tried a lot of different people. Gerald’s the one who stuck.”

Her eyes grew distant then. She’d sunk into one memory or another. I waited for her to come back.

I went back and forth with where I stood on Gerald. From what Bridget said, he was a little stuck up, but he cared. And he didn’t trust Jeremy, which made me more willing to like him.

Bridget was still staring, her eyes getting glassy. I reached to stroke her hair to bring her back and when she met my eyes again, I brushed her jaw with my thumb. “So, you were on board with the informant thing for a long time?”

“Yeah. The whole time, really.”

“But, when I found you something wasn’t working anymore. Don’t tell me that whole schtick about dying before Christmas was a fake, Bridge. I know it wasn’t.”

Bridget grimaced, but she didn’t deny it. “I was getting tired,” was all she said.

“Tired? People who are tired go on vacation. And you’ve got the money to do it. You didn’t want out of a job—youwanted out of your life. And Jeremy didn’t know about me for a long time, right?”

“Right.”

“So… what changed between making that agreement, and us finding each other?”

She sighed and rolled onto her back, scooting to lay her head on my arm. It took her a minute to get comfortable. But when she did, she lay next to me, eyes on the ceiling.

“Nothing changed really,” she said finally. “Except… except I got tired. But not thevacationkind of tired. I don’t know how to explain it. Gerald says I was depressed. I don’t know if he’s right. I just know, the thrills got harder and harder to find. And the payoff faded. And then… then that guy tried to show me my own large intestine, and things got weird.”

My first instinct was to roll over, pull her into my chest, curl myself around her and try to make it better. But she’d folded her arms under her breasts and her eyes darted—she was remembering. She felt shaky. If I moved, she’d pull away. So I lay there, and I prayed.

“I almost didn’t even tell Jeremy about him,” she said, shaking her head a little. “He was such a Chadbro—the kind of guy who liked guns and knives and fourth of July. I thought he was all talk. I mean, he liked blood play—I could get into it. But I wasn’t actually scared of him. I thought he was living out a fantasy, telling himself he was some super-hero motherfucker. Booyah, you know? I told Jeremy I didn’t think there was anything there, but things were slow and he wanted a name, so I gave him up, but I really thought it would be nothing.

“Then… then he almost killed me. I got it wrong. Like,reallywrong. I thought I knew people. I thought I knew who was dangerous and who wasn’t. Iprided myselfon it. And I got him wrong. It shook me.

“I holed up in my house for like three months, living online and not going out at all. Sex lost all appeal. Gerald calls it panic. Part of my agreement with Jeremy was that he could pick the head-shrinker, but they had to be confidential for me. So, the only time Jeremy and Gerald were allowed to talkaboutme was if I admitted a criminal act, or Gerald thought I might kill myself. Jeremy’s a fucking vault—and a power-tripper. He wasn’t telling Gerald about any of the cases we worked on.

“I didn’t want Gerald pestering me about it, so I told him a date went bad, kind of implied that I was almost raped. Gerald was suitably worried—but it diverted him. He was relieved when I stopped sleeping with strangers. I think he always had a little worry that I hadn’t given him the whole story, but by the time he asked, it was months later. He was probing because he could tell things were getting worse, and he put two and two together. He still doesn’t know the whole story, I don’t think.”

I blew out a breath. “What’s the whole story?”

Her chest rose as her lungs expanded slowly. “The whole story is… if Jeremy’s crew hadn’t been watching that night, I wouldn’t be here. If he hadn’t trained me for years in self-defense and martial arts, I wouldn’t be here anymore. If his surveillance team hadn’t called a flag on it before I did, I wouldn’t be here.

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