A devil’s bargain that no one, especially a fifteen-year-old, should ever have to make.
At first, Ellie had refused, screaming that he couldn’t make her play. Kingsley had merely laughed and informed her that there was no escape because, “Not choosing is still a choice.” Hours and hours of witnessing the woman’s pain had worn Ellie down.
In the end, Ellie had shouted the words.
The screams stopped.
She’d had to live with that choice ever since.
For the decade following the kidnapping, Ellie had suffered from amnesia, and for once, the doctors all agreed. To protect itself from further trauma, her teenage brain had blocked those events out.
After repeated encounters with one of Kingsley’s henchmen, who’d worked for a brief time as the department psychologist, the memories started flowing again.
Some, at least. A few murky spots remained. Even now, a memory niggled at her brain, but the second she tried to tease the information out? Poof! Gone.
Ellie bit back a curse. Each time she worked on detailing the hours spent in Kingsley’s warehouse, she failed. Those memories were trapped somewhere deep in her subconscious.
So much time had passed now that Ellie doubted they’d ever be recovered.
“Ellie? Are you still there?”
Her mother’s voice pierced the dark storm of the past. “I’m here. And I understand where you’re coming from, but I’m a detective, not an executioner. My job is to gather evidence, make arrests, and trust our justice system to take care of the rest. If I kill someone just because I think they deserve it, then how am I any better than the criminals I hunt?”
That exact question had stopped Ellie from descending too far into gruesome fantasies involving guns and scraping Kingsley’s brain matter off the wall.
Helen Kline huffed into the speaker. “Don’t compare yourself to them. That’s absurd. Now, I’d like to see you soon and reassure myself that my only daughter isn’t on the verge of collapse. Can we please arrange a day?”
Ellie stifled a groan. She loved her mother, but the last thing her frayed nerves needed was a head-to-toe, eagle-eyed inspection scrutinizing her for the tiniest hint of any cracks or fatigue.
Her neck tensed just thinking about it. She rolled her head to the side to stretch, and her gaze landed on Fortis.
She frowned. That was odd. Fortis hadn’t moved the entire time she’d been yacking away with her mom.
“So, can you take a peek at your calendar and see which day—”
Ellie knew the nagging would never stop. “How about lunch on Friday?”
No sense dragging this out. Her mom would win in the end, plus Ellie wanted to check on her boss. Napping on the job wasn’t like him.
Poor guy. He’d cautioned her about burning out over the Kingsley case, but maybe he needed to take his own advice.
“Friday works, but it’ll have to be a late lunch. One or after? I have a meeting at eleven with a potential donor for the museum fund.”
Fortis still didn’t move. Had he slept at all last night? “One is good, see you then.”
When the call ended, Ellie grabbed her bag, and hopped out, leaving the engine running for Shane when he went back to babysitting duties. She spotted him at the stair entrance and knew he was scouring the place for people who were stupid enough to try to take down a cop in a police precinct’s parking garage.
Ellie wasn’t worried.
“Hey, boss. Looks like you’re the one who needs that vacation if you’re falling asleep behind the wheel. Want me to send you my travel agent’s number?”
Once the joke quit echoing off the concrete walls, silence stretched out. Nothing from Fortis. He was out cold.
Her frown returned. Hadn’t Fortis worn that same gray sport coat yesterday? She peered into the tinted window and the hairs on her forearms lifted. Her boss’s skin, usually a warm brown courtesy of his mother, appeared several shades paler today. Too pale, and his lips held a blueish tinge.
Wrong, wrong, something is very wrong.
Ellie whipped the gun from her holster and dropped into a shooter’s stance. “Fortis! Wake up! Fortis!”
Barrel extended, she swept the garage and edged around the trunk, praying for a response. None came. Not even when she banged on the driver’s side window.
The gun steady in her right hand, Ellie used the left to fumble with the door handle. After several attempts, her boneless fingers succeeded. She nudged the door open with her hip and tapped her boss on the shoulder.
No. No. This isn’t happening. It can’t be.
She jumped when Shane came around the car, gun up and ready. “What’s going on?” he demanded, his eyes scanning the vicinity.
Ellie didn’t take her eyes off her boss as she shook him this time. “Come on, wake up.”
Fortis’s head slumped forward, causing his sunglasses to slide off his face and into his lap. Up close, his skin was wrong. Waxy.
Ellie waved her hand in front of him, but she already knew. Those sightless eyes would never see again.
“No, please, no,” she moaned.
Futile pleas her boss would never hear because Lead Detective Harold Fortis was dead.
Ellie shuddered and pressed her fingers to his throat, checking for a pulse just to be sure.
She waited…praying…putting all her senses into the two fingers pressed to his skin. Cold and silence was her only response.
“Shit.” The curse came from Shane, who kept his gun up and ready while grasping his phone with his other hand. “I’ll call it in.”
She pushed a fist to her mouth and started to turn away, but her anguished gaze snagged on a strip of white.
There, in his jacket pocket. A paper of some kind.
If she’d been thinking clearly, Ellie would have stepped back without touching anything else and waited for the crime scene techs to do their jobs, but her brain refused to function. Pure instinct drove her hand to pluck the note from her dead boss’s pocket.
She read the message and went numb.
Hate that I missed you,
-K
10
Beyond the yellow crime scene tape that stretched across the parking garage, forensic
