Deadly Fear (Deadly #1)(18)

No, he liked to push her.

Monica froze. “Trusting someone with your life—you think that’s easy?”

“No.” The woman could twist and turn everything. She could trip a suspect up in two minutes, could get those confessions to spill so fast. “I think you trust them because it’s your job, but when it comes to the secrets you carry,” and he knew she had secrets because everyone had them, even him, “you don’t trust anyone.”

Now she did glance back. “Leave it alone, Dante.”

“You mean, leave you alone?” He’d tried that. Gotten a lot of sleepless nights and hard-ons as a result. He sucked in a deep breath and caught more of her heady scent. The case. Stick to the case.

Her eyes held his. Dammit, no one should have eyes that blue.

When she came, those eyes had gone blind with pleasure. Hell.

“Sorry,” he growled and eased back. The better to escape her scent. Her.

She didn’t blink. “It’s been a long day.”

A day filled with crime scene analysis. Witness interviews. And a lot of jack shit. Because the killer was good.

Or he had been, until Miss Laura Billings had survived his attack.

“Get some sleep,” she told him in that perfect, you-don’t-bother-me voice. “The doctor said Laura will be up tomorrow. We’ll find out what she knows then.”

Laura had permanent protection now, courtesy of the Jasper County Sheriff’s Department. A deputy would guard her door every minute.

He’d seen Laura before they left the hospital. She’d been out cold, her breathing so soft and slow she’d appeared to be near death. ’Cause she had been.

When she woke, there was no telling what she’d say. Would she remember her attack? Remember the bastard who’d grabbed her and left her for dead?

Her face had been slack with terror when the ambulance hauled her away from the crime scene. A fear like that…“She’s not going to want to talk with us.”

“She has to talk.”

“Vics always hate talking about the attack.” One of the hardest parts of the job. Seeing those shattered stares and hearing the hollow echo of pain in their voices. “They just want to forget.”

“Forgetting’s not easy.” Monica sounded certain. “Just because you don’t talk about it, it doesn’t mean you forget. She’ll talk with us. She’ll tell us everything she knows.” More certainty. “Because she’ll want the bastard stopped.”

Vengeance. That he understood, and he knew the victims understood, too. Sometimes, the thirst for vengeance was all that kept them going.

“Go to bed, Dante,” she said again, her voice softer, but still firm.

He turned away from her. Stared at the white connecting door. Walk away.

He could do it. She had.

He stalked forward and curled his fingers around the door knob. “I know it shouldn’t matter.” This was choking him. “Who you see. What you do.” He wouldn’t glance back because this time, he didn’t want to see the ice staring back at him. “But it does. And after today, when death was so damn close I felt him breathing on my neck when we were digging up that girl’s grave…”

He knew death. No mistaking that chill on his spine.

“Sometimes you want to feel alive. When you see death so much, you just… want to feel alive again.” Being with her had always made him feel alive. Running fast and hot and free. He opened the door and the squeak of the hinges seemed way too loud. “If you wanna feel alive, you know where to find me.”

And that was all there was to say.

? ? ?

When the door closed, Monica let out the breath that had filled her lungs. She slowly unballed her fists and saw that her fingers were shaking.

Weakness. At a time when she just couldn’t afford anything less than full strength.

But the girl had gotten to her because Monica had recognized the terror in Laura’s eyes. The fear so deep it ate your soul and stole your hope.

Dante had been right. Death had been with them that morning. Laura knew it. She’d felt him coming. Laura’s chest had rattled as the woman fought to breathe—the rattle was proof that they’d been minutes away from finding a corpse instead of a live victim.

When you knew you were going to die, those last moments were the darkest and longest that terror could bring.

She’d seen those moments, seen the fear reflected in other eyes. Eyes that she couldn’t forget, no matter how hard she tried.

Monica looked down at her hands. Those stupid shaking fingers. Another few seconds and Dante would have noticed.

She’d known bringing him on the team was a mistake. She’d tried telling Hyde, but once the boss made up his mind there was no changing it. And, hell, Hyde had been right. He almost always was.

The SSD did need Dante. The guy could get to victims like no other. She’d read through his files, all his supervisors’ reports. He knew how to pry information out of the vics that they’d even forgotten themselves.

He slipped right past their guard, made them feel safe, and got them to tell him their nightmares.

They needed him.

So she’d spewed the tough talk on the plane. Hands off. Just work the case. Blah, blah.

But the truth of the matter was that he was tempting her again. Chipping the ice away and making her feel.