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CHAPTER TWELVE

I couldn’t stop shaking.

The taste of copper filled my mouth, and I realized I’d bitten my tongue when Jack had thrown me to the floor. I sat with my back against the kitchen island, my knees drawn to my chest, trying to steady my breathing. My hands were coated in Max’s blood, dark crimson already starting to dry and crack in the creases of my palms. I could feel it on my face too, splattered across my cheeks and forehead like some macabre war paint.

One second. That’s all it had taken. One second between Max Ortega being alive—his lips forming words, eyes narrowed in careful calculation as he measured what to tell us—and the next, his skull exploding in a spray of bone and brain matter. If Jack had moved a half step to the right, if I had leaned forward to hear Max better, that bullet could have found either of us instead.

The roar of the gunshot still echoed in my ears, a phantom sound that wouldn’t fade. Beside me, Jack crouched in tense vigilance, his weapon drawn, dividing his attention between the balcony door and the windows that faced the street. His face was a rigid mask, but I could see the barely contained fury in his eyes.

My own rage was building beneath the shock, clearing the fog of disbelief. Someone had tried to kill us—or at the very least, hadn’t cared if we were collateral damage. Outside, I could hear the approaching sirens, their wail cutting through the quiet afternoon. Voices shouted in the street below as officers secured the perimeter.

The baby.

My hand instinctively moved to my stomach, still flat but no longer empty. I’d been so caught up in the immediate danger that I hadn’t even thought about the tiny life growing inside me. For a dizzy moment, a surge of nausea threatened to overwhelm me—not morning sickness this time, but pure, primal fear.

Jack must have sensed my spiraling thoughts. His blood-spattered hand found mine, squeezing gently.

“We’re okay,” he said, his voice steady. “We’re okay.”

But we weren’t okay. Max Ortega was dead. His body lay just feet away from us, cooling in the afternoon breeze that drifted through the shattered glass of the balcony door. And whoever had killed him was still out there, methodically eliminating anyone who might know what those tattoos meant.

They were cleaning house. And judging from the precision of that shot, they were professionals.

“Sheriff!” I heard a familiar voice call out from downstairs.

“We’re in here, Cole,” Jack said, his voice unnaturally calm despite the carnage surrounding us. “Anyone see the shooter?”

Heavy footsteps thundered up the spiral staircase, and Cole appeared in the doorway, weapon drawn. His eyes widened as he took in the scene—Max’s body sprawled on the balcony, the blood-spattered walls, and Jack and me huddled behind the kitchen island. He holstered his weapon and stepped carefully into the apartment.

“Not that we’ve found,” Cole said, coming into the kitchen and getting a good look at both of us. His professional demeanor couldn’t quite mask his shock at our blood-soaked appearance. “We’ve got checkpoints set up in a three-block radius, but nothing has popped so far. The only place he could have made that shot from was the bell tower of the cathedral.”

Jack stood and held out a hand to help me to my feet. My legs felt weaker than I wanted to admit, and I leaned into his strength more than I intended. The dizziness was returning, and I focused on my breathing to keep from passing out. In, out. Simple. Mechanical. One step at a time.

“Are you two okay?” Cole asked, concern etching deep lines around his eyes. “You’re not hit?”

“No,” I said, taking assessment of my body now that I was standing. My medical training kicked in, pushing aside the personal horror to make room for professional detachment.

“Anything on us belonged to the victim. I need an evidence bag.”

I’d left my medical bag in the car, but I wanted to make sure we collected all the pieces of Max Ortega’s skull and brains in case there were bullet fragments inside. Every bit of evidence mattered now. I refused to let whoever did this get away because we missed something in the chaos.

“From the damage done to his skull it was a high-caliber rifle,” Cole said, his eyes traveling to the balcony where Max lay in an expanding pool of crimson.

I could tell I was in shock, and I was trying to ground myself and focus on the work ahead. I could fall apart later. Later, when we were safe. Later, when Jack and I were alone. Later, when the weight of how close we’d come to dying could be processed in private. Right now, there was work to do.

We stepped back out onto the balcony and stood over the body. The afternoon sun illuminated the scene with an inappropriate cheerfulness, glinting off the wet blood that had splattered across the white railing. The coppery scent hung thick in the air, mingling with the faint smell of gunpowder. A pair of mockingbirds chirped in a nearby tree, oblivious to the human tragedy below them.

“Kill shot through the skull and into the wall of the carriage house,” Jack said, pointing to the cracked stucco where the bullet had entered the wall. His hand was steady, his voice clinical, but I could see the tension in every line of his body. “Downward trajectory supports that he most likely made the shot from the bell tower. It’s the only location in Newcastle that’s high enough to give him a clear shot. That would be about a two-hundred-yard shot. Not a big deal for someone with the right training.”

I couldn’t help but picture it—a shadow figure in the church bell tower, setting up a rifle with practiced hands, watching through a scope as Max stepped onto his balcony with us. Waiting for the perfect moment. The casual brutality of it made my stomach turn.

“You get any useful information out of him?” Cole asked, keeping a professional distance from the body. His eyes kept darting between us and the corpse, as if trying to reconcile how differently this scene could have played out.

“It was more about what he didn’t say than what he did say,” Jack answered, his jaw tightening. “Let’s get this scene wrapped. I want you and Martinez at my home office in three hours. I’m going to go pay another visit to Ambassador Vasilios.”

“Hopefully not looking like that,” Cole said, mouth twitching as he gestured to our blood-soaked clothing.

Jack looked down at his clothes and said, “It’s tempting.” The grim humor barely masked the dangerous edge in his voice. I’d heard that tone before—when Jack was past diplomacy and moving into retribution territory.

“You want backup?” Cole asked, obviously reading the same warning signs in Jack’s demeanor.

“Yes. Have two officers in uniform follow me out,” Jack said. “My patience has run thin with whatever game is being played. I can put two and two together, and if the State Department thinks they can protect Nicholas Vasilios from what’s coming down on his family then they’re all deceived.”

Jack stopped and looked at me, his expression softening slightly. “Anything you need to do here?”

“No,” I said, my professional mask firmly in place despite the chaos of emotions churning beneath the surface. “I need to reach out to Lily.”

“She’s already on the way,” Cole said. “She said she was swinging by to pick up Sheldon on the way. He heard the callout on the police scanner.”

“Okay, good,” I said. “We can put him on ice for now. I’ll deal with him tomorrow.”

The crime-scene team came up shortly after dressed in their white jumpsuits and gloves, and one of them stood in front of Jack and meticulously tweezed the brain matter and bits of skull into a bag. The methodical, detached nature of their work was strangely comforting—a reminder that no matter how personal this felt, it was still a crime scene that needed processing like any other.

I stood watching in dazed bemusement until another tech came up and started to do the same to me. I closed my eyes, preferring not to think about what I might be covered in. The sensation of someone plucking bits of a dead man from my hair and skin was surreal, dissociative. Part of me wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all, a sure sign that shock was still working its way through my system.

“The shower in my office at the sheriff’s office is closest,” Jack said once we’d been picked clean and were back in the Tahoe. The smell of blood still clung to us despite the team’s efforts, and my clothes felt stiff and heavy with Max’s dried bodily fluids.

“I don’t have any clean clothes at your office,” I said, staring out the window as Jack drove away from the crime scene. The quaint streets of Newcastle scrolled by, their charm now tainted by what we’d experienced. I’d never look at the church bell tower the same way again.

“We’ll go home then,” he said. “We can shower and then I can go pay a visit to Ambassador Vasilios.”

“You want to go alone?” I asked, turning to study his profile. His jaw was set in that stubborn way I knew too well.

“I think it’ll be better if you’re not there,” he said, his knuckles white on the steering wheel. “I’ll have deputies there for backup. Maybe we can come to a gentleman’s agreement as far as this case is concerned. I’m hoping that he’s causing interference to protect his son’s reputation.”

“And if you’re wrong?” I asked, the unspoken danger hanging between us. If Nicholas Vasilios was behind this, Jack was walking straight into the lion’s den.

“Then he might very well be behind it all,” he said, his voice hard as granite. “There’s no gray area here. He either thinks he’s protecting his family or he’s intentionally trying to let someone get away with murder.”

I leaned back against the headrest, the adrenaline finally beginning to ebb, leaving exhaustion in its wake. The image of Max’s foot—with that same pattern of dots that had been on Theo and Chloe—kept flashing in my mind. Whatever that symbol meant, people were dying to keep it secret.

And now Jack was heading straight for the man who might be orchestrating it all.

* * *

By the time we made it back home, the adrenaline and shock had started to fade, leaving me hollow and vulnerable. My body betrayed me with violent tremors that I couldn’t control, waves of delayed terror rolling through me like aftershocks from an earthquake. I’d seen death before—I made my living among the dead—but I’d never been so close to becoming one of them. Never felt someone else’s life explode across my skin in warm, wet fragments. Never watched the light disappear from a person’s eyes one second before it could have been mine.

I stared at my trembling hands, disgusted at my weakness. I knew this was par for the course—I’d been there before when cases had gone sideways—but it always made me feel like a weakling, like I was somehow failing at the strength Jack seemed to possess in endless supply.

“Dickie’s car is gone,” Jack said, breaking the silence as we sat in the driveway, both of us reluctant to leave the safety of the Tahoe and face what had happened.

“Thank God for small favors,” I said, my voice sounding strange in my own ears. “According to Max, it sounds like maybe Chloe did care about Dickie. I feel sorry for him.”

I found myself thinking about how quickly life could end. How Chloe had been planning to run away with Dickie only to end up dead on her wedding night. How Max had been alive and talking to us one moment, then gone the next. How fragile everything was. How close we’d come.

Jack sighed, his eyes focused on something distant. “Dickie’s a product of his upbringing who has refused to grow up and take responsibility for the things he can change. I feel sorry for the boy he was. But how he is as a man is sorely lacking. The best thing for Dickie would be to check in to rehab and get away from his father for a while. Maybe forever. He’s done nothing but look for a woman to love him since we were fifteen years old. He’s had good women, and none of them are ever enough, because he doesn’t think that he’s enough.”

My lips twitched despite the rawness inside me. “Your psychology is showing.”

“That doesn’t make me wrong,” he said, a flicker of the usual Jack shining through the battle-ready sheriff who’d gotten us through the past few hours.

Jack came around and helped me get out of the Tahoe, his hand steadying me when my knees threatened to buckle. He rubbed my arms when he felt my shivers, and I leaned into his warmth, needing the solid reality of him. Alive. We were both alive when we so easily might not have been.

“Come on,” he said, his voice gentler than I’d heard it all day. “Let’s get you in a hot shower.”

Oscar came running to meet us at the door like he usually did, but he skidded to a halt when he saw us, nose twitching at the metallic scent of death that clung to our clothes. He turned and ran back upstairs to Doug’s room, nails clicking against the hardwood in his hasty retreat.

“I guess we look worse than I thought,” I said, teeth chattering so hard I worried they might crack. The shock was hitting me in earnest now, my body temperature plummeting despite the warm spring day.

Jack ushered us both upstairs to the third floor where our bedroom was located. I caught a glimpse of us in the mirror—blood-spattered ghouls with haunted eyes—before he guided me into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Steam began to fill the room, but even that warmth couldn’t touch the ice forming in my core. My arms and legs were leaden and uncooperative, and I fumbled helplessly with my sweater, unable to coordinate my movements.

“That was a cashmere sweater,” I said as Jack gently but efficiently stripped my ruined clothes off. The strange, disjointed thought floated to the surface of my mind, a trivial concern amidst the horror of the day. “I liked it.”

“I’ll buy you more,” he said, his voice rough with emotion as he peeled away the blood-stiffened fabric. His hands lingered on my skin, reassuring himself I was whole and unharmed before he guided me into the shower. “I’m going to use the shower in the guest bath. I don’t even want to think about what’s in my hair right now. Take your time. I’ll be back.”

I grunted and moved under the hot spray, a sob escaping as my muscles cramped from the excessive shivering. My body was processing what my mind couldn’t yet face—how narrowly we’d escaped. The image of Max’s face as the bullet struck him replayed in vivid detail, and I wondered if he’d known in that final millisecond what was happening. If he’d felt fear, or pain, or if it had been too quick for him to register anything at all.

I watched in morbid fascination as pink-tinged water swirled around my feet and disappeared down the drain. Someone’s life—their hopes and fears and memories—reduced to a bloody residue circling a shower drain. I pressed my forehead against the cool tile as tears finally came, mingling with the water streaming down my face.

I cried for Max, for the daughter he’d mentioned who would never see her father again. I cried for the life growing inside me that had almost lost both parents before ever taking a breath. I cried from the sheer relief of still being alive when death had brushed so close I could taste it.

I don’t know how long I stood there letting the water sluice away my tears, but I eventually found the energy to scrub my head with shampoo and wash my body, reclaiming my skin from the horror that had marked it.

“You okay?” I heard Jack ask, and I turned to see him come in through the clear glass shower wall, his face etched with concern.

“Yeah,” I said, though we both knew it wasn’t entirely true. “Much better now. A little hungry. We haven’t eaten anything since this morning.” The mundane observation felt like reaching for normalcy in a world turned upside down.

“I texted Doug and told him to order pizza,” Jack said.

He wore a towel wrapped low around his waist, his body still damp from his own shower. Droplets of water traced paths down his chest as he grabbed a clean towel for me and spread it over the warming bar. I watched the steady movements of his hands, grateful for his strength when mine had deserted me.

“Good thinking,” I said, letting the hot water beat down on my neck, not yet ready to leave its comforting embrace.

I heard the shower door open and sighed, but instead of urging me out, Jack stepped in behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist. I felt him press against me, solid and alive. He turned me in his arms and dropped his forehead so it rested against mine, our breaths mingling in the steam.

“That was a close one today,” he said, his voice breaking as he tightened his grip on me. “Just a slight shift in any direction and it could have been either of us. I keep seeing it happen, over and over. I keep seeing it being you instead of Max.”

“Yeah,” I whispered, looking up to meet his eyes. I put my hand to the side of his face, feeling the barely contained emotion trembling beneath his skin. The invincible Sheriff Lawson was gone, replaced by just Jack—my husband—terrified of losing me, of losing everything we’d built together.

And then he kissed me with a desperate intensity that took my breath away. I felt the raw energy pouring off of him, the need to affirm life in the face of death, and I met it with equal fervor. His hands clutched at me like I might slip away if he loosened his grip, and I pressed myself against him, needing the solid reality of his body against mine.

“I don’t want to be rough,” he rasped, coming up for air and somehow pulling me closer.

I kissed him again, pouring everything I had into it—all the fear, the relief, the desperate joy of still being alive—and said, “I won’t break.”

I needed this as much as he did. Needed to feel his heart pounding against mine, to know with absolute certainty that we had survived. That whatever darkness was closing in around us, we still had this—each other, our love, and the life we’d created together.