“I’m sorry.” She didn’t know what else to say but understood those two words couldn’t possibly make up for the months—years—of raw pain Benning had endured. She rolled her lips between her teeth and bit down, but the morphine made it hard for her to know how much pressure was too much, and after a few seconds, she tasted salt in her mouth. A small price to pay for what she’d left behind. “It sounds grim, but the shooter still has the leverage to use your son in order to recover the skull. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but we still have a chance to bring Owen home.”
“No, we don’t.” His humorless laugh tugged at something deep inside. He sat fully back in his chair, shadows deepening the exhaustion etched into his expression. He studied the phone in his hand one more time before setting it facedown on the end table beside her bed. “I don’t know where the damn thing is.”
“What do you mean?” She tried to sit up in the bed, but Olivia’s weight pinned her to the mattress, and her strength wasn’t what it used to be before taking two bullets and having her leg punctured by a window. “You told me—”
“That I hid it inside that fireplace where your team found Jo’s body, and I did,” he said. “But they didn’t recover it, the killer doesn’t have it and I’m not the one who moved it.”
The scorched remains belonged to Benning’s nanny? Her heart sank as she studied the bandage taped over her broken trigger finger. So much blood, so many innocent lives just...gone. It was her job to protect the innocent and find the guilty, but she couldn’t even stomach looking at the damage to the rest of her body. Not without reminding herself of who’d she’d almost lost in the span of a few hours. How much more she would’ve lost if it hadn’t been for him. Raising her gaze to his, she tried to clear her head of him, of his daughter pressed against her side, of all the distractions that could get in the way in finding the scared little boy in that video. But over the course of this investigation, Benning Reeves had made it very hard for her to stay numb.
Owen and Olivia’s abductor had returned to the scene to clean up his mess, but he hadn’t found what he’d killed an innocent woman over. If Ana had been able to physically feel anything in that moment, she would’ve had a headache pounding behind her ears. This didn’t make sense. Someone else had gotten to the evidence before they could, but that still left the question of how Owen’s kidnapping connected to the Samantha Perry case. It wasn’t a coincidence that the charm had showed up at the scene of a body dump, and it wasn’t a coincidence the shooter had blamed her for that girl’s death. There had to be something linking the two investigations. Something she wasn’t seeing. “Who else knew about the skull?”
“Nobody.” Benning shook his head, that dark, shoulder-length hair stark against his white long-sleeved shirt. He’d showered, changed, but the shadows under his eyes said he hadn’t rested during the time she’d been recovering. He’d stayed. Maybe at his daughter’s insistence, but still, it meant a lot. More than it probably should have. There weren’t a whole lot of people in her life that would’ve done the same.
“I need to brief my team.” The dim lighting was suddenly too bright then, her body aching more with each passing second. The key piece of evidence in this case was missing, Owen Reeves was still out there and the shooter had nearly killed them all in the process. Ana sat up, ripping the IV from her hand, and Benning shot to his feet.
“What are you doing?” He peeled Olivia from her side.
Infierno, her body hurt, but Ana couldn’t just sit here. The SOB shouldn’t have been able to find them. Not unless he’d hacked into her vehicle’s GPS system, which meant her entire team was officially at risk. “The shooter knew where to find us. I want to know how.”
SOMETIMES THE AIR stilled before the onset of a hurricane.
Ana hadn’t said a word since her discharge from the hospital, but he had no doubt in his mind that her silence wasn’t a sign of weakness or pain. She’d survived two bullet wounds and a nick to her femoral artery from being shoved out a second-story window. If anything, the intensity in which she studied what had been left of his house, the way she curled her uninjured hand into a fist, could be seen as the calm before the storm. Because he wasn’t sure there was anything that could bring her down.
Olivia barreled past both of them on her way toward the hallway leading to the back bedrooms. “Ana, come see my room!”
The woman at his side let a laugh escape past her lips, and Benning held on to that sound for as long as he could, committed it to memory. He didn’t think he’d hear it again after what’d gone down at the safe house, but it was good to know it was still there. Buried, but there. “Thank you. For letting me stay here. I know it’s not ideal, having to come back here after everything that’s happened, but I’ll make sure you get reimbursed for any damage the crime scene techs or my team might’ve caused.”
“I don’t care about any of that. What matters is that you have a place to recover while we figure the rest of this out. I think it’ll be good for Olivia, too. Being somewhere familiar.” He tried to ignore the fact all his furniture had been moved or that the rug his mother had woven by hand before he’d been born had disappeared from the living room. The property, including the house his father had built with his own two hands, had been left to
