“Hello, Sin.”
Shocked into stillness, Diana froze for only a split second. That barest of moments cost her; no one was there when she jerked into action and spun around. Rather, everyone was there. Crowd control was exactly what it was cracked up to be. Though cops were everywhere, they were outnumbered one hundred to one by game-goers.
She must have heard it wrong; she hadn’t heard that name in years. Diana had long ago left Sin and that life behind. Far behind. Dead.
Slowing her heart rate by sheer force, a skill she’d learned early and used often, Diana opened her eyes, scanned everyone, looked for anyone she recognized from a past long since buried. But she saw nothing. In the sea of faces around her not a single one popped out. The crowd had a soul, moved like a tide, and cleanly carried the person who whispered those words in her ear away with the current of bodies.
“Hey!” Reese looked over at her.
Diana’s head popped up. “Hey” was not the usual form of address from one officer to another. Given the look on Reese’s face, this had not been her first attempt to get Diana’s attention.
Reese held two large men at bay, each of her fists twisted into a collar, each man holding his hands docilely on his head. People often dismissed the tiny blonde, but it was a mistake they made once. Only once. She and Diana had become fast friends upon meeting, coming in as rookies together and working their way up.
Reese yanked one collar toward Diana and indicated that the men were being cuffed but not arrested. Not yet.
Using the barest of words and handling the cuffs with a fluid economy of motion, she restrained him. In Diana’s opinion, they were dipshits who were likely to just keep being stupid and would probably wind up with something filed against them before they were done. Reese was pretty lenient. She didn’t cuff just anyone.
“Hand him off to me and head back to your post.” The male voice over her shoulder startled Diana.
“What are you doing here, Nick?”
He rolled his eyes. “Back in uniform for the game. Go.” He took the man, who never turned around to see that it was Diana who cuffed him, and she headed back to her post. Back into her life.
A life that was relatively normal. Or it should have been.
She was the proud owner of an accountant husband and a steady paycheck. Police work was a good fit for her. Though she and Will tried several years earlier to get pregnant, they’d struggled with it, miscarried, and made the decision to wait. All normal problems.
She enjoyed her problems and embraced the tears that had come. They were ordinary tears and thus the events made her happy even as they made her sad. Will had freaked out a little bit when she’d gotten pregnant and then again when she miscarried. If she ignored why he freaked out, it was all perfectly average.
So she didn’t think much about the fact that Will didn’t want to lose a second child. That his first wife had met her better angels wrapped around her daughter. That he hadn’t been able to protect her from the high-speed, cop-killer bullets designed to do maximum damage to two people who had never done anything to deserve it except be associated with Will in the days before he became Will Kincaid. Diana ignored all that.
She focused on the fact that her fake background had survived the investigation necessary to become a police officer, and she buried Cynthia Beller once and for all.
Or so she had thought.
Until she heard those words.
Diana scanned the crowds, cursing her short stature and wondering if she’d really heard it or if—for some reason—she’d suddenly hallucinated the sounds.
The second was the better option. But she could come up with no good reason why today would be the day for her brain to fabricate something like that. She could make up a rationale for it, but that would involve lying to herself. And she’d stopped lying to herself when she was eleven, when she used a kitchen knife to cut the duct tape from her wrists and had dialed 911 to report the crime against her family.
Hello, Sin.
It rang in her head, rattled around her skull, repeating and probably warping.
She struggled to recognize the voice, but no matter how many times she replayed it, she couldn’t place it. It didn’t even linger in the back of her brain, nagging, telling her she had an idea or that she’d heard it before. No, there was nothing.
Pulling her attention forcibly to the present, Diana told herself that—even if the voice was real—it was gone, pulled away by the surge of the crowd. Normality was her best cover, and normal Diana would be neck deep in the job at hand. There would be no way to explain her lack of focus to her fellow officers.
They weren’t like her, didn’t think like she did. But despite the rumors and what everyone liked to say about them, cops weren’t as a general rule as stupid as they were made out to be. These guys were sharp, and it would only take one of them thinking that something was off kilter to lead to some digging.
Her background would stand up to some research . . . but only so much. She’d already screwed up a few times. Already let Sin out of the bag on a few occasions that no one should have seen, times that shouldn’t have happened.
So maybe Cynthia Beller wasn’t as far gone as Diana had thought. Maybe her old self was closer to the surface than she liked to believe.
And maybe someone had seen that . . .
Will was nervous.
He was nervous because Diana was nervous, and she was never nervous. She was the one who made him want to come back to life, the one who made a full life seem possible and—if not entirely safe—at least safe enough.
But she’d heard something today, and though she wanted him to believe she’d brushed it off, it had clearly gotten through that tough shell of hers.
In four years, nothing had gotten through.
That FBI agent had come to their house, handed them a recording device holding what was supposedly the last piece of evidence the FBI had against them, and left with a smile on his face. Diana had broken the recorder. In true echoes of the Sin she’d been, she’d buried part of it in the backyard, burned the actual recording chip, and put the remaining parts in three different trashcans at three different types of locations in three different counties over four days.
Then she’d wiped her hands of it—acted as though getting rid of the plastic got rid of the whole problem.
Will didn’t wash his own conscience so simply.
What they’d done could easily carry the death penalty. He didn’t think any jury would push it that far. He truly believed any lawyer worth his or her salt would play the card that he and Sin had been on the right side of things, driven by what some could easily call a multiyear temporary insanity.
But former FBI Agent Owen Dunham knew their new names. He possessed the confirmation he wrangled from them in a moment of their own sheer stupidity that they were exactly who he thought they were. Though his evidence was only verbal, he knew where they lived.
Diana had gone back to school, back to the former agent’s class the next week, aced his course, and signed up for another one. She was on her way to the police force, then Quantico. Had big plans to join the FBI. She could have her big plans; Will wanted a small life with few interferences. Somehow, he’d let her talk him into not running.
Aside from her coursework and only typical professor/student interaction, Diana had not had any contact with Dunham in the time since. Will had never seen the man again or heard the name Lee Maxwell associated with himself in all that time. And slowly, he had felt his muscles unclench. It had taken months. He hadn’t really sensed the moment tension left him; he only realized one day that it was gone. That he believed he was safe from the ghosts that surely still pursued him.
Tonight the solid earth beneath his feet on the south side of Atlanta had turned to shifting sand when Diana came home and told him.
Sin had followed Diana.
She’d been here all along, somewhere inside, lurking. Though Diana had done an excellent job of shedding her old skin, sometimes Sin popped up. Sometimes Diana the police officer wanted to hunt rather than just collect and detain. Sometimes her eyes darted out and she saw things she shouldn’t or understood nuances a girl from a small town outside Dallas wouldn’t. Tonight it was just a subtle tension that told him she was on high alert.
A high alert she hadn’t been on since they’d first become their new selves back in Los Angeles.
A high alert brought on by words she couldn’t prove, couldn’t reclaim, couldn’t place. Words she might have even imagined.
But there was no reason he could come up with—console himself with—that she might have fabricated the warning now. There was nothing in their current lives indicating that the old had come back to haunt them. Or if there was, he had missed it.
That thought was as scary as anything else. Though he lived Will Kincaid’s partially fictional life, he was still Lee Maxwell as much as Diana was Cynthia Beller. She was in the back room after dinner, doing fifty push-ups. His wife was more concerned with staying buff than he was. He was happy—at least he thought he was—in his tie and button-down shirt. His computer had a wireless ten-key pad that he used as often as most people used a mouse. He owned a keyboard with programmable buttons that he set up for common tax equations, and lately he’d felt the beginnings of a good case of carpal tunnel syndrome coming on. He was a personal rather than corporate accountant like Lee Maxwell had been. His hair was just a shade darker than Lee’s, his eyes at the same time keener and sadder.
His wife was doing push-ups and sit-ups in the room that had once been designated for a child. Now it held weights and mats and a punching bag—all normal workout tools, none of the weapons or gear she’d once played with regularly.
But while she stayed pumped as a plan for her future and tried to look like a normal fitness-nut cop, he stayed pumped from their past. He never truly believed they could live out Will and Diana’s lives.
Or maybe he had. Maybe that’s what turned his stomach tonight—that somewhere along the line he had started to believe it could work. Suddenly two words could change everything. They could disappear into the air, a figment of Diana’s often overactive imagination or they could be the harbinger that foretold of an epic crash.
He stood up from the table, clearing his plate and the one Diana had left behind when she went to work out immediately after eating. Then he walked into the bedroom as calmly as he could and changed into an old T-shirt and sweatpants as though it wasn’t stark raving fear that drove him. With a battered towel slung over his shoulder he went into the back room, the sound of whispered counting getting louder as he came through the open doorway.
“Mind if I join you?”
Never breaking count or motion, she smiled and nodded as though he always did this.
Clearing a space beside her, he started his own set of reps—knuckle-down push-ups. Every time his nose neared the mat, he heard two words.
Hello, Sin.
“I have to go to work, Mom.”
He was a grown man. Thirty years old. Grown men left for work. But this dance they did was routine. He waited a beat . . . there it was.
“Why do you go to this job? You know your grandfather wants you to work for him.”
Nick smiled. “Because this job is better.” He kissed her and headed out the door before she could ask him to explain. He couldn’t. Not to her. While he could easily lay out his logic and say the words, she still wouldn’t understand. He’d said them hundreds of times before he realized that a kiss and a smile were much easier than the truth.
At least he wasn’t in uniform today. He’d made the sorry mistake of being late for crowd control and hadn’t left enough time to change twice. His mother had seen him, everything but the shirt and patches, and she hadn’t approved. Her eyes narrowed in a way that he was never sure about. Was it the purview of all mothers? All Romanian women? Or was it simply her own?
That had been a shitstorm brewing soft and silent for twenty-four hours. So today, he was grateful for the shirt and tie; he could have been a businessman. He was a businessman. Only no one really knew that.
The drive in was uneventful and left his head full of thoughts. His grandfather was slowly heading downhill. There were mild memory lapses and changes in emotion that weren’t fully explainable by circumstance. His closest people were covering for him. But Bun’s time at the top of the family business was coming to a close. And Bun was left with Nick—his only grandson—to take over.
For a moment, Nick felt his hand clench on the steering wheel. There were a lot of problems with Bun’s ideas. In this day and age, Nick’s illegitimacy should not have been an issue. His mother, a self-proclaimed American, should have been a liberated woman, free to have a child on her own. But she wasn’t. And she’d suffered much at the hands of her father and the rest of the family for her decision. She should have left but didn’t or couldn’t, and she suffered as much for staying as for her other choices.
It might have been better—would have been better—if Nick’s father had been anyone else. Even an unknown would have left both his mother and himself in higher regard. But no, in true Romeo and Juliet fashion, she had fallen hard for his grandfather’s greatest rival’s son. The rival had died, leaving only the son to bear Bun’s full hate. Of course, in the end the son had been no such Romeo; her love had been the only thing sustaining that union. And Nick grew up as the bastard while Bun waited for another heir that Nick’s uncles failed to produce. Their early deaths tasted of irony in the back of Nick’s mouth. His cousins were all female, most with no ambition to take over the business. Those that did have ambition were constantly pushed down and held back because of their gender.
Though his family lived in America and made their money from Americans, it appeared that they themselves were not yet American, regardless of three generations of integration.
Despite all this, or maybe because of it, Nick’s greatest hope was for family. His female cousins adored him. How could they not? In an Old World business, Nick was not a chauvinist. To his grandfather the women were at the least meant to be decorative and at best strategic. To Nick, they were loyal.
So he tightened his tie as he parked in the back and exited the car. His key card gave him access to almost all the doors in the building and his diligence gave him access to all the avenues his grandfather had never thought about.
Nick smiled at his coworkers as he headed down the hall. He loved his job. And more than that, he loved that he was building his future on this foundation.
“What crawled up your ass, Di?”
Diana pressed her lips together. She’d wanted this. Wanted friends, female friends. But she hadn’t counted on the fact that normal was sometimes damned obnoxious.
Sometimes she and Will didn’t speak to each other for several days. They moved around each other, existing in the same house. Sometimes they sat side by side on the couch, watching TV or even making love, and barely said a word. They just weren’t chatty people.
But Reese was the bane of all that was holy. What Diana couldn’t figure out was why she liked the other woman so much. What did she really see in this small, navy-blue-clad creature, with her arms crossed and her hip jutted out as she waited for a legitimate answer to her crude question?
For a moment, Diana stood by her patrol car in the waning sunlight and considered her options.
She could just pull her gun and shoot the woman. Wipe the frown right off the too-blue eyes, pink lips, and peachy skin.
She could take Reese down, put her into a choke hold and shut her up that way.
Or she could answer. Thank God she was known for being short of words, so a terse answer wouldn’t throw any red flags.
But the reasons she couldn’t do it were all the reasons Diana liked, no loved, Reese. Reese was what her sister, Wendy, should have been: beautiful and grown and strong. Reese didn’t take anybody’s shit, including Diana’s. No, Diana couldn’t really just take her down. Not without a good fight. And not because Diana would pull her punches. It would hurt because Reese could dole out far more pain than anyone would ever think could come from a little former ballerina.
So Diana gave the answer that she saw as her only option. “I don’t know.”
She did know. But as much as she liked her life and her friends, she would never tell about Sin. Diana pulled open the door of her squad car, wondering why she was back in uniform.
“You’re lying.” Though Reese called bullshit, she didn’t put any venom behind it. “Something spooked you at the game, right?”
What the hell? “Yeah, you arresting everyone in sight.”
“They had Kubotans and small rolls of duct tape. And one of them had handcuff keys in his pockets.” The exaggerated shiver belied the topic. Cops had died over misses. Reese didn’t miss.
“It’s not illegal to carry cuff keys.” Damn, her car was hot. Always a joy when wearing Kevlar. Who knew she’d end up wearing the stuff nearly every damn day?
“So they keep telling me. But I feel better arresting people for little things when I find cuff keys in their pockets.” She slid in and shut her door, opened her laptop, and waved goodbye, thereby letting the topic of the tension drop.
Twisting the key, Diana started her own engine and tried to focus on work. There was a BOLO for a car in her area just before shift change, which meant the perp was probably long gone, but hey, she’d keep her eyes peeled for a black Mercedes. She had a warrant to run down, but she and Reese would meet up for that later in the evening, when Mr. Restraining Order was more likely to be home.
Will had spoken less to her in the last two days than Reese had just now with them back on shift. But he’d checked in regularly. Had she heard anything again? No, she had likely imagined the whole thing. Still she couldn’t shake the feeling that she was in someone’s crosshairs and that she deserved it.
Ready to crash by about four a.m., Diana instead parked off in a dark corner and typed up her reports on the in-car laptop. She was scrutinizing the writing—the decidedly unbrilliant, just-the-facts-ma’am style suiting her—when the call came in.
With a sigh, she flipped on the lights and responded.
Dispatch was reporting something suspicious in the area. Enough for lights, but not enough to know what the hell she was going into. What she did know was that the area was relatively nice and not one they got a lot of calls from. Arriving on scene, she flipped both her blue lights and headlights off and simply observed.
The house was unassuming: small, yellowish in color, grass mowed occasionally, if not trimmed within an inch of its life. Several cars graced the driveway, and Diana noted the fact that both the number and the wide range of quality of the cars were unusual. Add in the odd hour and she knew the suspicious call from a neighbor was probably the right idea.
Pulling back out of sight, she waited, watching the house and reporting in regularly as she waited for support. While she ran license plate numbers, adrenaline started seeping into her system in tiny quantities, but she ignored it. She knew better than anyone that these things could go in any direction, and the best thing to do was stay in control.
So when a middle-aged man walked out of the house and climbed into one of the back cars, Diana kept her eye on him. His car had checked out clean, and he appeared to be the proper owner of the vehicle.
A burst of static told her Cummings was just around the corner. Not her favorite fellow officer, but he was more than capable of the job, a good person for watching a suspicious house. Slowly she turned her car and followed the man in the compact, mid-level sedan. Three blocks later, her lights went on as her quarry started weaving.
Luckily, there was no one on the streets at this time but the two of them, and he gave up relatively quickly and pulled over. Walking up to his window, Diana called it in. “Ward Daniels, can I please have you step out of the car?”
The use of his name had his head snapping up. “I have two kids, a wife, I—” He looked frantic, trapped, scared. All of which were appropriate given what she’d seen of him, but his roiling fears didn’t speak well for her safety. This had to be by the book, piece by piece and slow.
In the end, he didn’t freak out on her, just let her put the cuffs on and stood facing his car while she searched him. Aside from the usual wallet and change she found only a small zipper baggie of pink crystals. She held them up, “Pink?”
“It’s . . . better.” His voice was soft, his words resigned.
She almost grinned at the thought. Better? There was never anything better. But she followed protocol, pushing his head down and ducking him into the back of her squad car. There was something comforting in following the routine, something soothing in having the rules made for her, though she would never have guessed that five years ago.
Her decision that he was an easy catch evaporated as she headed back toward the house. He asked her to let him go, promising to never do anything like this again. Told her his marriage would disintegrate if his wife found out. Diana refrained from laughing and suggesting that he not buy illegal drugs in the dead of night if he wanted his marriage to stay together. Three blocks later, she was ready to deliver a sharp blow to just under his jaw or choke him out. He would not shut up.
Lights off, she sat back and watched the scene, ears perked around the blubbering of the man in the backseat. Outside the boundaries of the property, officers were stalking and picking off the people coming out one by one as they left.
Sitting out of sight again, she watched through the windshield and called dibs on another “person-of-interest” she saw leaving the house.
This was another male, younger, healthy, and sane looking. Seemed like the best bet since she had to double up. The out-of-state plates on his car were concerning, and the call-up as a rental was even more so. Maybe he hadn’t been the best perp to choose, but he was hers now.
Again, she turned her patrol car, followed the nondescript sedan and wondered what she was getting into. This one didn’t even try to flee, just pulled over at the first rotation of the blue lights and looked bored.
That was probably the worst possible outcome. His boredom—and clear familiarity with procedure—indicated that this was not his first time. He knew his rights and operated within them, even going so far as putting his hand on his head while being cuffed without being told to.
Her heart rate, having run at slightly above normal the whole time, kicked up another notch. She wasn’t at kill-level yet, but she was definitely well above normal. A search turned up nothing more than a wallet and some change. His keys sat on the front windshield where she’d had him place them as she approached the car, and that became the sum total of his possessions. No pink crystals on this guy.
Another flag.
Why would he be in that house at four thirty a.m. if not to buy drugs? Blubbering Dad there had made it pretty clear that someone was dealing meth out of the place. So Donald Kinsington seemed more suspicious for his lack of evidence.
After he was in the car, she ran his license and—though nothing was wrong—the record was almost too squeaky. The fabricated-background kind of squeaky, and she should know.
There was something scratching at the back of her brain . . . something that bothered her and she couldn’t place it. Years of practice had her exterior shell remaining calm while her thoughts churned. Everything inside her stilled as her head scrambled to organize and pull her memories while in the back of her car meth-dad blubbered to Kinsington. Kinsington ignored him, even though Ward Daniels said enough to at least place Kinsington inside the house.
That was good. Cucumber-cool Kinsington was likely to claim that he’d never been inside the place, that he was walking through the backyard for some odd reason—no law against that, right officer?—at four thirty in the morning, and clearly he had no idea that there was meth in the house. Oh, and he needed to call his good friend, his lawyer. So it was nice to have meth-dad slobbering implications all over the place. But Kinsington kept his mouth closed all the way through processing, not even telling the other man, now openly crying, to shut the hell up.
Diana spent the next several hours processing her two guys. She parked them in holding cells and then called Nick in to interview them both. She listened to chatter about the house and whether the PD would watch, search, or just wait.
Long after the official end of her shift, she stopped by to check on Nick’s progress to see if anything had shaken out. But he reported nothing unusual. Kinsington had claimed they had nothing to hold him on, not unless the homeowner pressed charges for trespassing. Since no one could find the actual homeowner, that was highly unlikely. The man wouldn’t say anything else, and Nick suggested they let him sit for a little while longer.
Meth-dad didn’t seem to understand his rights at all and told everything he knew. Maybe too much. Poor Nick was going to have to listen to all of it. Diana laughed at him and wished him good luck.
Methodically, Diana headed into the locker room, changed out of her uniform, and climbed into her own car. Will would be gone when she got home, and she would normally nap for a while, but her brain wouldn’t shut down. The scratching at the back of her thoughts was even stronger than before.
Just to prove herself wrong, as soon as she got home she lifted the floor board in the back of the closet and pulled out a jump drive she’d stuffed in there. It held some pictures she’d filed, things she’d kept, things she’d looked at before, information she’d continued to follow. She’d prove that the worst wasn’t on the table, and then she’d be able to relax, eat, sleep.
But as she flipped through the files and checked records, her fears gelled and her blood ran cold.
Donald Kinsington existed; he even lived in Virginia, but he wasn’t the man she’d cuffed tonight. The man she saw matched to one of the pictures in her files. She worked to forgive herself for not seeing it before. Blamed his altered facial hair. But she’d looked into his eyes, and before, in another life, she’d looked into eyes just like his at the moment the life had left them. She’d been responsible for that, so she should have recognized it. She might not have placed his first name just from her own recollection, but she should have been able to tag him.
The man she’d just handed off to Nick was none other than Ivan Kurev.