Page 8

~ SAM ~

We spent the next day in the suite, eating room service, sleeping, making love, and talking.

I was learning her.

I’d observed that stalking a woman was very different from… this. When I fixated on a client, I learned a great deal about her—her habits, preferences, fears, desires. Early on as a developing Dom, when I was selfish and violent, that was all I needed. She wanted me in her life? She would take what I decided to give.

Later, in an attempt to reconcile the dark, aggressive side of my nature with the care and compassion of God, things began to shift.

My stalking, even though it was consensual, would quickly grow frustrating. I could be part of a woman’s life, but not in it. And over time, I learned that if I was ever going to truly help, I couldn’t just observe. I had to talk to her. More importantly, listen.

What a revelation.

To my surprise, my past disciplines as a Dom helped. I was already accustomed to remaining quiet and allowing a person to reveal themselves to me. I was already skilled at persuasion, making agreements, finding boundaries, and providing safety .

No one could read a room better than me.

But when I held a broken heart in my hands, rather than a body, suddenly the stakes were higher. I had to learn how to do those things with emotions .

What a mind fuck.

Yet here I was now, able to use all those skills and practices to unwrap my wife. And it was thrilling.

“Tell me what happened after high school. You went to college? But you were already working with Jeremy then, right?”

We were sprawled on the bed, the debris of a late lunch on trays on the floor. I lay on my back with my hands clasped under my head. Bridget lay on her stomach at an angle, arms folded on my chest, her chin on her hands.

This close I got to see the ways her eyes changed when she felt something.

“College was a weird time. I was super-disconnected,” she said after a moment’s thought. I waited. I could see her turning things over in her mind, and I was already seeing that when things were vulnerable, she needed to be given silence if I wanted her to keep talking. Otherwise she’d snap out of her head and start deflecting with humor, or sex.

Not that I was complaining about the latter.

“My life was so different from my peers. They were all giddy about growing up and not jaded yet. All they saw was potential. I saw monsters everywhere. We didn’t understand each other. I ended up spending most of my time online,” she said with an uneasy shrug. “That’s where I found other people like me.”

“Is that how you ended up informing?” I asked, trying to keep the tension out of my voice that always entered it when I thought about Jeremy. Something about that guy, the presumptive way he talked about—and to—Bridget pissed me right off.

“Sort of. I realized later, I’d already been doing that for them for a long time. Initially it was about people who came into my life. They were all convinced my dad wasn’t done with me, so there were always people popping up, or threats they were investigating. I helped them grab a couple of his guys once or twice. It morphed from there .

“But while I was in college, I got into the dark web and started finding people myself. People like me. And even though I knew the FBI were keeping an eye on me, I guess I didn’t realize how much. I got tangled up with a group of guys that I think were grooming me for trafficking, but the night they locked me up, Jeremy stepped in. It was the first time I was, like, scared.” She bit her lip, that little v forming between her brows. “I mean… that’s not right. I was always scared. But the good kind. The kind that made me feel something. That night… that was the first time since my dad that I remember feeling like a little kid. Like, there was nothing I could do. I was screwed—or about to be. I was relieved when they busted in and took those guys down. But that kind of sparked this… thing.”

“Thing?”

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 word agreement. 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 available to 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 little impressed by the FBI. I started to realize that all those talkers were there to show off to them, 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 had to be on payroll, I had to be medically checked every quarter, and I had to 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—you wanted 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 the vacation kind 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, really wrong. I thought I knew people. I thought I knew who was dangerous and who wasn’t. I prided myself on 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 talk about me 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.

“I misjudged the guy, right up to the last second. I thought he was horny. And he was—for some cannibalism shit. I don’t know, and I don’t want to know. I just remember fighting for my life. I hadn’t felt that way since my dad. But with my dad I was quiet and still and trying to keep myself alive through sheer obedience. With this guy it all came out. I fucking fought. One of the agents heard the ruckus and gathered it wasn’t fun sex-play anymore. They busted in, just in time.”

She was starting to tremble. My breath was getting quick, and not for good reasons. “Bridget—”

“He said he wanted to open me like a zipper and show me my insides,” she breathed. “And he would have done it, too. I got it wrong, Sam. I got it so wrong.”

“Bridget, no one gets it right every time.”

“Yeah, but…” She bit her lip, then rolled over to face me, her eyes wide and earnest. “I was looking for Cain. And I found that.”

Cain.

She said Cain.

She didn’t say “You.” She didn’t say “Sam.” She didn’t make a joke about a priest.

I was looking for Cain . And I found that.