Page 15 of The Grave Between Us
He’d been the one the FBI had turned to to hunt the hunters, but now that his own love had been hunted, he was frozen. Impotent and unable to move, to see, to do. To think, even, or feel anything beyond the rush of pure terror. Even now, he itched to get back to Noah’s side and watch his chest rise that fraction of an inch. To know he was still breathing.
All his certainty, all his knowledge, all his expertise vanished when he pictured Noah’s ghost-white face. He’d never been powerless before. Even during the worst moment of his life, last year, he’d had a gun in his hands and been able to fire. He’d been able to save the people he loved, and that half second had changed the world from a place of out-of-control horror to one of relief, and he’d gathered Noah and Katie in his arms and rocked them both through the tears, until the sirens and the cavalry had arrived and they weresafe.
Where was safety now? What good was his gun when Noah had already been shot? Noah would be dead if not for a trucker with Crohn’s disease taking the slow route so he could pull off and shit in a ditch if he needed to, out of sight of other motorists. When the first responders arrived, he was releasing the pressure in Noah’s chest manually, keeping his collapsed lung from building up too much spent air in his chest and stopping his heart. Thanks to diarrhea, Noah was still alive.
Cole’s doctorate, his research papers, all the court cases he’d testified in. All the accolades he’d received. None of that mattered when it came down to the love of his life lying in a ditch, his heart strangling under a collapsed lung.
Noah, dirt clinging to his tear tracks, Cole’s fingers pulling a paper crane from between his cold, blue lips—
He shook his head and pressed his fingertips to his eyelids, exhaling once, twice. Sophie gripped his arm, squeezing. “We’re still looking,” she said softly. “Someone has to know something.”
“Only if it’s connected to someone else,” he grunted. “Someone only knows something if this is a gang hit, or retribution for an arrest. If this is tied to drug operations, then maybe you’ll get someone to say something someday. Not anytime soon, though.” Sophie stared at him, frowning. “But if this is a lone predator, a solitary hunter…” He trailed off. “We may never find him.”
“You saying we may have a highway shooter on our hands? Maybe this is the first of many?”
Cole shrugged. “I’m saying nothing fits.”I have no idea what’s going on.“I’m saying this doesn’t make sense.”What would you think if this weren’t Noah? If this were happening in Kansas or Idaho or Ohio?“I’m saying I don’t know what to do.”
How could he be the seasoned professional, the FBI’s former number one profiler, the man who could dive deep into the filth and rage and endless screaming in the twisted minds of monsters, when he was just a shocked and shaken fiancé? When all he could see, over and over again, was Noah’s still, pale face? Every time he tried to think past Noah’s next shallow breath, his mind skipped like a needle scratching across a vinyl record.
Everything he had seen—the worst that one human being could inflict on another, the worst imaginable pain and suffering. The corpses he’d dug up. The murderers he’d faced. Even the one he’d stared down, gazing so deep into his mind that he’d felt a tear open up inside his own. None of it, nothing at all, compared to the precipice of loss he hovered over.Noah.
Sophie stared at him, squeezed his shoulder again. Jacob’s sobs had quieted, and they could hear the rumble of his deep voice, its rise and fall, his cadence broken as his breath hitched. Holly’s voice came in quiet waves, too.We were talking about marriage.
“I’ve got to get back to Noah,” Cole said. “Look, I’m going to stay here until…”
Sophie waved him off. “Don’t even waste your breath. Of course. You’re here, and don’t worry about a thing. If I need your help, can I call?”
“If it means catching the son of a bitch who did this, yes.”
Chapter Six
When Noah’shospital door opened the next day, a ghost walked through.
Cole was far too hardened to believe in the Casper kind of ghosts, or the idea of the essence of a loved one lingering. After a few murder cases, his belief in spirits slipped away, and whatever faith he’d once had turned into a hope that there wasn’t an afterlife where people remembered their last moments, that gone really wasgone. No one wanted to spend eternity reliving the cut of a blade or the feel of an evisceration. Blood emptying onto dirt and a person’s last glimpse of a man reaching orgasm as he dug his fingers into their frantically pumping carotid.
No. Ghosts, Cole had come to realize, were the consequences of life choices, aftereffects of decisions and paths taken. People and things left behind in the wake of a life.
He’d left Assistant Director Michael King in his past, a ghost. Or so he’d thought.
“Michael,” he breathed, watching as the older man and his entourage enter Noah’s room. Michael was a burly man, a barrel chest on spindly legs, with a ruddy complexion and the burst capillaries across his nose and cheeks that signaled alcoholism. He had deep lines on his face, creased around his eyes and across his forehead. His eyes were narrowed, like he’d spent a lifetime peering suspiciously at everything around him. He carried a manila envelope in one hand, and he looked like he was battling indigestion. “Cole.”
Cole’s heart pounded so hard he felt his pulse in his eyeballs. “Why are you here?” Why was the head of the BAU walking into Noah’s hospital room?
“How is he?” Michael didn’t answer Cole’s question, which was half of an answer on its own. Cole’s heart lodged in his throat.
“He’s okay,” he forced out. “They say he’ll wake up in the next few hours. They took him off the sedatives.”
Michael nodded. He wasn’t really looking at Noah. He was gazing through him, trying to see the monster who had put him in that bed. Cole recognized the look. He’d worn it before, a hundred, two hundred times. “Why are you here,” he repeated, putting steel into his voice.
Michael blinked. His entourage lingered in the background, trench coats and dark suits, classic federal strength in the shadows. Not one met Cole’s gaze.
“He’s back, Cole,” Michael said simply. “He’s resurfaced.”
Even after all this time, Michael didn’t need to use a name.
Cranes flying low over a still lake. Dark earth between his fingers. Puffs of breath clouding in front of his face.
Eyes following him, always following him—hungry, insatiable eyes. Cole had learned what graves smelled like that day, learned how to distinguish between wet earth and the sweet, sticky scent of decaying bone.
