Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78334 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 392(@200wpm)___ 313(@250wpm)___ 261(@300wpm)
He looks up. The protein bar stops halfway to his mouth. “Hey, Tessa. What’s up?”
I cross the lobby toward him with what I hope is a casual and reasonable expression. “I need to get out of this building.”
He blinks. “Out.”
“Out,” I confirm. “Anywhere. I’m not picky. Ice cream. A walk around the block. I’ll even take a bikini wax at this point. There’s a place two streets over and I’ve been meaning to—”
The color drains from his face so completely and so rapidly that under other circumstances I might be concerned. “A what?”
“Bikini wax,” I repeat. “You drive, I go in, twenty minutes, we’re back before—”
“Nope.” He takes a full step backward, the protein bar now held in front of him like a shield. “Absolutely not. No. I don’t—that’s not—no.”
“Reid.”
“Tessa.” He recovers his composure and points the protein bar at me. “I cannot take you outside this building. I’m sorry. I genuinely am. But Cole would end me. Like, professionally end me and then probably also personally end me, and then Malik would end whatever was left.” He shakes his head. “I like being alive. I’ve gotten kind of attached to it.”
“It’s ice cream,” I say. “Or a bikini wax. Neither of those will get me killed.”
“Stepping outside that door is what gets you killed,” he says, not unkindly. “Or gets me killed for letting you. Same outcome from where I’m standing.” He takes another step toward the staircase, in full tactical retreat. “I’m really sorry, Tessa. If it’s any consolation, when this is over, I will personally buy you the biggest ice cream in Seattle.”
“That’s no consolation at all,” I grumble.
“Yeah,” he says sympathetically. “I figured.” And then he continues up the stairs, looking very proud to have successfully extracted himself from an uncomfortable situation.
I stand in the middle of the lobby and breathe through my nose.
Six days.
Six days in this building and I cannot get a single person to take me for ice cream.
“That bad?”
Anna is standing there with an expression on her face that tells me she heard the entire conversation. She’s in jeans and a soft flannel shirt today, hair loose, looking like the most normal person in a forty-five-thousand-square-foot building that currently functions as my very comfortable, very secure, very inescapable prison.
“I just got turned down for a bikini wax,” I say.
Anna laughs, eyes twinkling. “So I heard. I think you emotionally scarred Reid.” She tosses her head toward the staircase. “Come have coffee, and you can vent to me.”
The community kitchen is quiet at this hour, the morning rush of agents cycling through already done. It’s only the two of us at the long farmhouse table, mugs steaming between our hands, the windows at the far end showing a slice of Occidental Square where the pigeons are doing their thing and the trees are dancing in the breeze.
“Tell me,” Anna says simply.
So I do.
Not the case details—she knows those broadly—but the feeling of it. The specific suffocation of being a person who is always on the go and is now confined. The frustration of work that’s done but not done, of an article sitting on an editor’s desk while the world continues turning and the people who killed Erik Lanning continue doing whatever they do when they’re not sending men to breach journalists’ homes.
“When will the article get published?”
I lift a shoulder. “Depends how quickly legal gets through it.”
“And do you think it will get approval?”
“I hope so. I don’t have a witness, but I’ll have to wait and see.” I turn my mug slowly on the table. “And I can’t go to the police until after it publishes.”
Anna’s brow creases slightly. “Why not?”
“Because the minute law enforcement gets involved, the story becomes their story,” I say. “They’ll classify evidence. They’ll seal records. They’ll run the investigation on their timeline and their terms and my article becomes a footnote in a press release instead of making people understand what actually happened.” I shake my head. “Erik didn’t give his life so his story could disappear into a federal filing cabinet.”
Anna is quiet for a moment, turning her own mug. “So you wait.”
“So I wait,” I confirm glumly. “In here. While Cole goes to Bellevue and Reid can get ice cream whenever he wants and Josie runs three simultaneous investigations and everyone in this building has somewhere to be and do and I have—” I gesture vaguely at the table. “Coffee.”
“Coffee’s not nothing,” Anna says mildly.
I almost smile despite myself. “And it is with one of my new favorite people, so there’s that.”
She laughs and outside, a gust of wind moves through the square and more leaves spiral down from the nearest tree, signifying the passage of time.
“Can I ask you something?” Anna asks.
“Sure.”
“When the article publishes and the police get involved and RainVest implodes—” She pauses, choosing her words with care. “What happens to you and Cole?”