Page 10 of Deep Cover

He could have found a way to tell her he was alive.

He never had.

“Reid.” Her voice came out much steadier than she felt. “I thought you were dead. That actually makes this easier—now I get to kill you myself.”

She was moving before she registered that her brain told her to. The man beside her—the one who noticed her hand was bleeding—stepped into her path with hands raised to stop her.

Instinct and training kicked in and she swept his leg out from under him without breaking stride. He hit the floor with a startled grunt.

“That’s new,” Reid said. His voice hadn’t changed at all, and hearing it nearly buckled her knees worse than the fall on the ice had.

“Yeah.” She kept coming, chest heaving, hand still dripping blood on the floor between them. “I’ve learned a lot of new tricks since you’ve been gone.”

“I had no choice.”

She stopped an arm’s length from him, close enough to see every year that had aged his handsome face.

Close enough to see he wasn’t a ghost. That he wasn’t just a memory.

He was real and warm and breathing.

“There’s always a choice,” she bit off. “And you made the wrong one.”

The room had gone dead silent around them. She was distantly aware of everyone at the table watching, but all she really saw was Reid. His jaw worked around a hundred things he couldn’t seem to say.

For years Caryssa imagined versions of this moment. In the dark, on nights she couldn’t sleep, she rehearsed what she’d say if he walked through her door.

In every single version, she imagined relief.

She never imagined this. Standing feet from the man she’d loved with all her heart and mourned with all her soul, her hand bleeding and her heart pounding out of her chest…she wanted to hit him a hell of a lot more than she wanted to hold him.

And she was terrified that she might do both.

THREE

God. She was fucking here.

Caryssa sat on the infirmary table three feet away from Rivers, and he couldn’t make his brain believe it.

His mind kept spinning on the same gear—she’s here, she’s real, that’s Ryss sitting right THERE. All the time, a hole in his chest, barely scabbed over even after all this time, bled out worse than the wound that actually put him in a hospital bed.

He stepped up to the bed and reached for her hand, which she kept clasped around the wound.

She let him take it without a word.

This was the part that scared him. He could have handled yelling. Hell, he’d braced for it the entire walk over here. He could even handle the fury burning in her hazel-green eyes back in the dining room.

This was worse.

This was a part of Caryssa he’d never seen before.

This was stone.

He touched her hand, and she stiffened, opening her fingers to show him a clean slice across her palm. It wasn’t deep and the bleeding had stopped.

“How did you get this?”

“Fell on ice.” Three flat words, but just hearing her voice had his skin rippling with goose bumps. Christ, how many nights had he lain awake, wishing he could hear her voice again?