“Daddy?” Olivia asked from the door.
“Damn it, I really need to put a bell on that girl.” Benning ducked his head, his hand sliding from her thigh, and he turned toward his daughter standing in the door frame. “What is it, baby? Are you still hungry?”
“I miss Owen.” Sunlight streamed through the windows centered over each nightstand beside the bed, highlighting the well of tears in the girl’s eyes, and something inside Ana broke. Something she hadn’t let herself feel since realizing her baby sister wasn’t going to be coming home. No matter how many times Ana and her brothers had searched, they’d had to accept their sister was gone. “Can he come home now, Daddy? Please?”
In three steps Benning had his daughter wrapped in his big arms, her face buried in his shoulder as he stroked her hair. “Everything is going to be okay, Liv. Owen is going to be home soon. I promise. We’re working with Ana’s team to find him, and he’ll be annoying the heck out of you sooner than you think.”
Turning her attention to getting dressed, Ana was aware the moment wasn’t meant for her. No matter how easy it’d been to fall back into old habits, familiarities and jokes, she wasn’t part of this family. And she never would be. The work she did couldn’t be compromised. Not by her past experiences. Not by the six-year-old girl who’d wrapped her arms around Ana as she’d gone to sleep last night, and definitely not by the man determined to take up too much space in her head.
“Will the skull you put in the fireplace help find him faster?” Olivia asked.
Ana twisted around, her heart in her throat. “What’d you say?”
Maneuvering Olivia back at arm’s length, Benning wiped his daughter’s tears with the pads of his thumbs, then gripped both her arms. He lowered his voice. “Olivia Kay Reeves, tell me you aren’t the one who took that skull from the fireplace.”
“I wanted to solve the case.” Olivia’s face fell as another round of tears streaked down her flawless cheeks. “I brought it to my lab.”
“What lab?” Ana took a single step forward.
Benning slid his hands down his daughter’s arms as he turned to face Ana. “She and Owen built a fort in the backyard where they like to pretend to solve cases. The skull must be there.”
“SHE REALLY IS one hell of an agent,” Ana said.
“I wish that made me feel better.” All this time the evidence he’d removed from Britland’s construction site had been right in his own backyard. Well, it’d been in his backyard before, but his daughter wasn’t supposed to be the one who’d found it. His stomach knotted. This was the kind of thing nightmares were made of, and Olivia had... Hell, she’d done what any good investigator would’ve done and preserved the evidence. “Six-year-olds aren’t supposed to hide bones from their parents in a fort in their backyard.”
The forensic techs pulled the evidence from the makeshift fort his kids had built out of extra two-by-fours and subfloor from one of the sites he’d inspected last summer. Owen and Olivia had spent every waking second in their hideout when the weather was good. In fact, he’d had to drag them into the house by their ears for dinner on many occasions. Now it was a crime scene, stained by the very thing he was trying to protect them from.
“We have the skull now. My team will run DNA and dental records, and we’ll figure out time and cause of death.” Ana slipped her hands into her jacket pockets. “If Olivia hadn’t moved it, the killer would’ve gotten ahold of it first and destroyed the evidence, Benning. Getting an ID on this victim is how we get your son back.”
She was right, but at what point would it be okay to say his family had been through enough? How much more blood, fear and near-death experiences did he and his kids have to take before what he’d built cracked beyond repair? Olivia could obsess over becoming an investigator all she wanted, but there was a difference between reading about this kind of stuff in her mystery novels and seeing it firsthand, and he didn’t want any part of it. Not for her. Not for the woman at his side. What kind of life was that? What kind of person wasn’t affected by this kind of work on a deep, scarring level? Benning knew the answer the second the question had crossed his mind, and right then he understood. Understood the deeper reason why Ana had chosen to cut herself off from her family and friends...from him. Understood why she’d kept her emotions out of relationships, and how she was able to step onto scenes like this over and over again with a kind of numbness and detachment. Because without that boundary in place, she risked the people she cared about the most. Nobody—not even she—could handle a lifetime of that kind of guilt if something happened to one of them. “How do you do it? All the pain, the death, the risk of endangering the people you care about. You’ve made a career out of stuff like this, and I can’t even handle it for a few days.”
One breath. Two.
“You know as well as I do it doesn’t come without a cost, but I realized a long time ago giving people another chance to live their life is worth the sacrifice.” Ana limped toward the scene, then paused, turning back toward him. Controlled chaos played out behind her, but the world seemed to disappear in the moment her eyes lifted to his. No crime scene techs, no body parts being collected and bagged in his backyard. It was just the two of them. Hints of red colored the tip of her nose and cheeks, the confidence
