“It’s me,” Hart replied, his voice tight. “It’s fucking me.”
As it turns out,itwasn’tHart. Or, rather, it wasn’tjustHart. It was both of us, something that had me sniffling all over again because it meant that Elliot thought of me as family in a permanent enough way to have added me to hiswillat some point in the last six months.
He was listed in mine alongside Noah, but that was less surprising. I was now a first responder and a trained firefighter, and one of the things they make you do when you pass the firefighting exam is update your will because you’ve taken on a career trajectory in which your risk of death is considerably higher than the average. Also because if they needed to call somebody to act with power of attorney for surgery or something, I needed someone in close proximity, and Richmond to Shawano was not really a quick little jaunt.
But a carpenter doesn’t usually need to have a will updated—at least not a healthy carpenter in his early forties. Although I suppose Elliot was in regular contact with people who did have to—Hart and me. And he’d had his life threatened enough that maybe he figured it would be a good idea.
The fact that he’d chosen to add me meant everything.
Hart was relieved, because it meant he could use me as the grieving widow—his words, not mine—so that he could worry about doing his, and I quote, “fucking job being a dickhead cop.”
“You’re a federal agent,” Raj reminded him as we exited Hart’s Charger.
I levered myself out of the back seat using the crutches, grateful he had a four-door.
“What’s your point, Tony?” Hart half-growled.
“Try not to force me to wash your mouth out with soap, please,” came the mild reply. “And I really don’t want to have to pay anyone to clean blood off the floor.”
The smile Hart offered him was feral.
“I mean it, Hart,” Raj said, then, and his tone was tight, serious. “You lose control, you’ll destroy the whole case. You do that, I will not hesitate to fire your ass, you get me, elf?”
Hart glared at him, and Raj met his gaze, steady and unrelenting, his gold eyes sharp.
“You got me?” he repeated.
Hart scowled. “I fucking got you,” he grumbled.
Then Raj turned to me. “Doyougot this?” he asked, the tone of the question much kinder than what he’d used on Hart.
I blew out a breath. “No idea,” I answered honestly. “But I’m going to try.”
Raj looked skeptical. I couldn’t say that I blamed him. I’m a CSI tech, not an actor.
“At least he gets all weird every time he talks about El being dead,” Hard muttered.
Raj rolled his eyes. “It’s weird that youdon’tget weird,” he replied, and the lightness—comparatively, anyway—of his tone told me that whatever hostility there had been between the tiger shifter and the elf had already passed. Probably a good sign about their working relationship. What it meant for the rest of us remained to be seen.
“Don’t be jealous that I know how to compartmentalize,” Hart retorted. “Instead of making kitten-eyes at?—”
“Shut up, Keebler.”
It was hard to tell with his dark skin, but I thought Raj might have been blushing.
But then we hit the doors of the Sheriff’s Office, and all teasing had to stop.
“Is therea particularreasonyou won’t show us the body?” Raj asked, emphasizing a slight southern accent that didn’t sound Virginian to me. Maryland, maybe?
We were back in Deputy Sheriff Cabell’s office, and Cabell was about as happy to see us as we were to see him—in other words, not much. The Sheriff himself was, yet again, absent.We’d been given no more explanation today about his absence than we’d been given the last time we were here two days ago.
Only two days.
Five days since Elliot had been driven off the road. Four since I’d been able to breathe again. Fourteen since Humbolt had called me. Fifteen since my mother’s murder. Just over two weeks.
It felt like a goddamn lifetime.
I wondered if I was even the same person I’d been when we’d left Shawano. If I’d just be able to go right back to working for the Shawano County Sheriff’s Department as though nothing had happened. As though I’d not had to rethink my entire existence, nearly lose the love of my life, had to watch my brother sit in jail.
