Page 9 of Deep Cover

“Where are we?” She took a step forward and her foot slid out from under her. With a cry, she flung out her arms to catch herself. She went down hard, palms out, her knee taking the worst of the fall.

Rough ice scraped across her palm. She felt her skin split and the sting of blood welling warm against her flesh before she even got her breath back.

She started to haul herself up, knee throbbing and hand dripping warm blood onto the ice that just took her down.

“You all right?” came the voice.

She nodded.

He caught her arm again and she moved forward with careful steps, settling her feet squarely on the icy ground before she took another. The wind howled at her, rocking her body and tearing at her clothes. Snow pelted the fabric where her face was and cold flakes struck her bare neck, making her wish she’d buttoned her coat. She was almost grateful for the hood that blocked the brutal gusts that would have made her eyes stream.

Not being able to see the terrain didn’t make it easy on her, and her choice of footwear was worse. That morning she’d grabbed dress flats without a thought to where she’d end up later that day. Cold seeped up through the thin soles and into her bones.

Her escort walked her forward, a hand at her elbow, his tough fingers tense, ready to catch her if she slipped again.

A door closed behind her, and the wind cut off instantly. Stairs came next, her knee protesting every step.

The space around her opened up, and they walked far enough for her to guess they were in a long hallway. Her hip eventually brushed the wall. She reached out, trailing her fingers over cold concrete or stone.

Voices traveled to her, close but muffled by the hood. She registered that several voices overlapped, there was laughter and the scrape of a chair on the floor.

When her guide stopped, so did she, fingers folded into her bleeding palm.

The hood lifted, and Caryssa blinked, and blinked again at the big dining room full of people. Mostly men but two women sat at one end of the table, one of them mid-laugh.

What kind of secret base is this?

A man to her left half rose from his chair. He nodded at her hand. “You’re bleeding.”

The statement silenced the room with the abruptness of shattering glass.

At the very end of the long table piled with the remnants of a meal, a man sat with his back to her. At the word bleeding, his back went rigid. Something about the set of his broad shoulders and his dark hair snagged her attention.

Then he turned.

She knew that controlled movement, the careful restraint in every inch of him.

She knew him. She could pick him out blind from a legion of men.

Her eyes found his face, and every ounce of grief she’d carried for years detonated at once.

It wasn’t her life that flashed in front of her eyes. It was his death—the one she’d rebuilt herself around surviving.

She thought he was going to propose. That was the cruelty of it, looking back. She’d spent the weeks before waiting for a ring, replaying every hint and waiting for him to drop to one knee while somebody sprang out of the bushes with a camera to capture the moment.

Instead, his family had called her and told her to sit down. She remembered gripping the armrest and saying it wasn’t true, over and over again.

A funeral followed. A closed casket, because there hadn’t been enough of him left to show anyone, they’d said gently, as though gentleness helped the tragic pain the people who loved him had to carry. A photo sat on top of the polished wood, the one from his graduation from boot camp, smiling like he had every reason to believe in a future.

She’d replayed their last conversation more times than she could count. He’d told her he was getting out of the military, and she’d been giddy at the prospect of their next step together.

Then nothing. A void where the rest of the story should have been.

At Christmas she wondered what she would have bought him. On his birthday, she wondered what kind of cake he would like. For months afterward, she caught herself listening for his key in the door.

Eventually—slowly, brutally—she’d accepted that the door was never going to open.

And now it had. Now he was standing twenty feet away in a room full of strangers. He was the same and not the same—older around the eyes—and every part of her cracked open at once. Devastation and elation and a fury so total it left no room inside her until it exploded.