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And then they’d tossed a firebomb through her bedroom window.
Isaac didn’t pause. Or offer any reaction. “Status?”
“We’re both alive and well,” Everly said from her place beside him. Dryly. “But thank you for your concern.”
There was a pause. Then Isaac let out a short bark of laughter. “Glad to hear it. I mean that.”
“I think these guys are a little too motivated for my tastes,” Blue said, getting the conversation back on track. “We could lay low at Everly’s parents’ house out in the suburbs, but I have a bad feeling they’ll track her there.”
“Your bad feeling has saved my ass a time or two,” Isaac pointed out. “I’d be inclined to listen to it.”
“There’s an interesting second option,” Blue said stiffly, though it cost him. “I could set up shop across the street, and see if they have the stones to chase her that far out of the city. It’s an hour away. A different world, really, and there’s always the possibility that this is just a localized issue.”
Though Blue thought the firebomb suggested otherwise.
“Run-of-the-mill intimidation is one thing,” Isaac said after a moment. “I think blowing up an apartment takes it all to a different level.”
“Agreed.”
“Can you secure the new location?” Isaac asked.
He meant, could Blue keep Everly safe? And Blue couldn’t give the answer he wanted. Which was that he would figure out how to do it or die trying.
“To an extent,” he said instead. Gruffly. “It’s not perfect.”
“That sounds good to me,” Isaac said. “I trust your judgment.”
Then Blue heard a sound that he identified instantly. It was Isaac sitting up in his bed, which meant that even though it was past midnight in Alaska, he was going to work. And would likely pull everyone else in, too. Because Alaska Force was all for one, one for all. Brothers-in-arms, always.
He would rather punch himself in the face than admit that it made him feel a certain warmth inside.
“In the meantime,” Isaac said, “we’ll reach out to the Chicago police and see if we can finesse some of this. We don’t need your name in it. Or Everly’s. And you can expect reinforcements tomorrow.”
Blue muttered his appreciation, and that was it. Isaac hung up, and Blue headed for the expressway that would deliver him to the last place on earth he wanted to go.
He expected some gloating in the seat next to him. Triumph, at the very least, and he wasn’t sure he’dhandle it well, so he didn’t look. He drove for a while instead, making sure he was hyperaware of every other car in their vicinity. And mapping out his childhood home in his head, trying to recall every entry point, every weakness, every window and stair.
And the next time he glanced over toward the passenger seat, Everly’s head was tipped to one side and her eyes were closed. And the way she was breathing, deep and long, told him she’d fallen asleep.
Just like she had back in Alaska. All that adrenaline and the way she’d managed to hold herself together throughout the whole of this ordeal had worn off, fast. It was a surprise she hadn’t dropped like a stone earlier.
But that meant that he was left with nothing but his own dark thoughts as he drove out of the Chicago city limits and into the suburbs. It was a drive he hadn’t taken in some twenty years, and bonus, with Everly asleep beside him and no one chasing him, there was nothing to concentrate on but the past.
Exactly what he’d been trying to forget all this time.
He didn’t want to think about his early childhood, when his father had still been alive. He didn’t want to think about that loss and all the ways it had affected him, then and now. He didn’t want to think about his mother’s remarriage or what it had been like to be ten years old and left to feel as if he were the only person on earth who remembered his dad.
He didn’t want to think about the ways he might have hurt his own mother’s feelings, or how resolute he’d been about keeping his distance ever since.
He didn’t want to face any of this crap, which was why he hadn’t.
But here he was, taking the same exit he remembered from way back when. He thought there were more trees now, higher and greener in the summer night. And as he wound his way through streets that felt both familiar and strange to him at once, he couldn’t deny that Everly hadn’t been so far off after all.
Blue knew too many men who pretended they were never afraid of anything, but he wasn’t one of them. Fear was a motivating factor. Fear of death, fear of capture, fear of drowning, fear of the enemy—it all worked. It fused into action and made a man unstoppable.
But that didn’t change the fact that fear came first.
And it was more complicated than that. Because he wasn’t afraid of enemy combatants tonight.