"At my therapy session yesterday, she started talking about Leviathan again. Asking me if I think they are behind Greg's death."
"She wants you to work through your frustration at the case going cold," Sam says.
"Of course I'm frustrated," I reply, sitting up and setting my glass on the table. "Don't you think I should be? I dedicated my life to solving crimes and bringing in criminals so they can't hurt anyone else. I've solved much harder, much more complicated crimes. But I can't figure out who shot my ex-boyfriend a couple hours after he walked out of a hospital. It's been a year, and I'm no closer now than I was when it happened."
"That's not your fault," Sam points out. "If it was Leviathan, it's going to be extremely difficult to prove. You know that as well as I do. They work in the shadows, and the followers are the two most dangerous things cult members can be: obsessed and anonymous. The only lead you would have to build on is Jonah, and he was in jail before Greg died."
"That's the thing, though. I don't know if it was Leviathan. I know that seems like the most obvious option, and I'll admit it was the first thing that went through my mind when we started investigating. But the longer I looked at it and the more I thought about it, the less likely it actually seems that this was a hit put out by Jonah. I think about the way he treated the two men who shot my mother. Or what he did to Greg before he dumped him in my yard.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s just… smooth and seamless like a single bullet to the back of the head doesn't fit. Jonah doesn't just kill. He makes a show of it. Remember what Greg told us about the people he removed from Leviathan? They have the tattoos on their backs cut out or burned off, and they're dumped, so they look like transients or gang killings. He wouldn't want to just kill Greg for the sake of having him dead. He would want to send a message.”
“But it wasn't Jonah who killed him,” Sam points out. “He had already been arrested and was in jail when Greg was shot. He could have put a hit out on him and the person he chose decided to go for a more subtle approach.”
“It's possible,” I note. “But it still doesn't feel right. It's been almost a year. And we haven't heard anything else. No one has come after me. No one has come after you or Bellamy or Eric or Dean. No one's gone after my father. I can understand the organization being up in arms about their leader being taken down, but if they were going to kill Greg out of retaliation, they would come after us, too.”
“But if his murder wasn't related to Leviathan, who would it be?" Sam asks.
“I don't know. That's where all the frustration comes in. I just don't understand why I can't figure it out. There has to be something. I have to be missing something,” I say.
“You and everyone else has been working on the investigation,” Sam tells me. “You can't put that on yourself. Nobody has let this go. The case is cold, but it doesn't mean it's forgotten.”
The timer on the oven goes off, and I toss the blanket off my legs to go into the kitchen. Sam leans against the door and watches me pull on a pair of oven mitts and reach down to pull out the pan of bubbling peppers. Cool air rushes up the back of the shirt as it rises up, and Sam gives a little moan of appreciation. I flip my hair to the side to look at him, and he grins, pushing away from the door and heading back into the living room.
A surge of love rushes through me, the emotion heady and silly at first, then deepening until it aches in my throat and burns in my chest. Every day I'm thankful for that man. Every day I remind myself how lucky I am to have him in my life.
I came so close to not having that. Thinking it was my only option, I walked away from him when we were younger. I put my entire life behind me so I could focus completely on my career. He could have hated me. He could have found somebody else and gotten married and lived the life he always imagined, just without me in it.
But he didn't. He lived and he loved, but we found our way back to each other. Not a single day goes by that I don't thank every entity I can think of for the chance to have him. Sam is my strength without making it impossible for me to stand on my own. He's my comfort, my reassurance, my reminder of beauty and hope when my world gets dark. He's my laughter when I can't find humor and my tears when my heart is hardened too much to cry.
I've seen enough death and horror in my life to know I could survive if he was gone. My lungs would keep dragging in air and expelling it again. My heart would keep pumping blood through veins that rush it to cells because they have no other purpose. My brain would send signals and form thoughts, etch memories, sleep, and wake. I would survive.
But I certainly wouldn't live.
Chapter Seven
March comes and with it the very first signs of spring. The shift in temperature that comes with the changing of the seasons has always fascinated me. It seems there shouldn’t be any difference in what a certain temperature feels like just because of the time of year, but that's not how it is.
In the fall, the chill that starts to form in the air creeps around the edges of warmth, gradually crystallizing and sharpening
