Chapter Twenty
Monday
COLE SPENT SUNDAY night lost in pain—the chopper crashing, people screaming, burning. He woke swimming in sweat and pushed out of bed for a glass of water. Falling back asleep again took forever, and when he finally nodded off, his nightmares thrust him back into endless, bloody torture sessions.
He woke in a dark mood. He insisted on going with Annie to all her Monday feedings and wouldn’t take no for an answer. She was smart enough to know that her safety should come first, so she agreed. But she kept a distance between them that Cole hated.
She’d listened to the radio and updated him on Hurricane Rupert—still out at sea, but causing heavy rains and major flooding in the Carolinas. She refused to talk to him about anything but the weather. Or his father. But Cole refused to talk about that.
He couldn’t wait until the police nailed her stupid ex’s ass. Cole was tempted to nail it for them. Once she was safe, he could leave Hope Hill. He was no longer even sure why he was here.
Both his CO and Cole’s mother had suggested therapy before, but Cole had refused. Of course, when the request for the undercover work came up, he’d agreed in a heartbeat—despite the therapeutic setting. An op was an op. He’d never thought he would get to go on another mission again.
Would his CO trick him like that? Lie?
Or was Cole being paranoid?
For the last couple of days, he’d felt . . .
Unbalanced was the word Annie had used. Cole had been that when he’d first arrived at Hope Hill. But he’d regained some of his balance since, one piece at a time.
Now he felt not so much unbalanced as unsettled. He kept having the unsettling sensation that he wasn’t remembering something, that something was off. He wasn’t seeing something he needed to see.
When he’d felt like this in the service, he’d known to look at the roadside for IEDs, or at high ground for an enemy sniper. But where to look here?
He sensed a threat.
Real or PTSD?
His nightmares were getting worse and more frequent.
Once Annie’s attacker was caught, once Cole found the traitor—or confirmed that he’d been sent on a fictional mission—he would leave Hope Hill, he decided.
Nothing could keep him here then.
Except Annie . . .
He wanted Annie—any way he could get her. As a friend. As a lover. He voted for a combination of both, if possible.
But the truth was, Annie was better off without him. Cole might not be broken, but he wasn’t whole either. And his status as a patient at Hope Hill, where she was a therapist, was freaking her out. For a tree hugger, she was certainly conventional.
He wished he could tell her the truth, start over. Hi, I’m Cole. Undercover investigator. Not your patient.
He liked kissing her. And he wasn’t going to lie to himself; he was thinking about kissing her again. He was thinking, and definitely dreaming, about going past kissing.
He wanted to know what her long legs looked like out of her khaki cargo pants. He wanted to see her chestnut hair tumbling over her naked shoulders. He wanted to know what she’d look like tangled in the sheets on his bed.
She deserves better.
He needed to leave this place before he got any stupider.
Annie was in her bed, snug and safe—the only thing he needed to know about her, Cole decided as he walked down the hallway that night after the midnight feeding. He was proud that he’d kept his distance all day, even if, at times, he’d wanted to fall on her like a ravening beast.
He stopped in front of Trevor’s door.
The police tape was gone. Trev’s death had been officially ruled a suicide.
Cole opened the door to a bare room. Somebody had already cleaned up and mailed Trevor’s belongings to his parents.
What would happen to the body? His parents would want him home in Montana. If the coroner had released the body, Trev could be on his way home already.
He’s never going to build that barn. Cole looked around for the kid’s sketchbook, but that too had been taken. Good. His parents should have it.
Except . . .
Yesterday morning, in the strange round clearing, the group had talked about how Trevor had been carried away by one hopeless impulse, one moment of darkness. He had not understood that the clouds would part again.
Cole accepted that sometimes suicide happened like that. It had with his father. But Trevor had taken a fatal dose of meds—a dose that would have taken weeks to collect, saving his pills. So the suicide couldn’t have been a decision born in a bad moment.
And even while Trevor had been collecting pills to kill himself, he was also preparing for the future, drawing a barn. He’d been excited about going home and building that barn for his mother. The two facts didn’t mesh.
Yet depressed people’s moods could fluctuate several times a day. Maybe in his light moments, Trevor had prepared for the future, and in his dark moments, he had prepared for death.
What the hell did Cole know? He wasn’t a therapist.
He turned to leave, then stopped when he stepped on something. He crouched to examine the small piece of black plastic he’d missed on the dark-gray carpet. He picked it up, put it on his palm, then looked at the floor again, more closely this time.
Two more pieces lay near the empty garbage can. Could have come from anything. A burner phone someone smashed up before getting rid of the evidence? The thought gave Cole pause.
He collected the pieces using only his fingernails and dropped them into his pocket before he left. He would put the chunks of plastic in an envelope and send them to his CO. If the man thought they were something, he could send them on to a lab.
Had Trev been the traitor?
Cole hated the thought. Yet he couldn’t discount the possibility. His mind churned as he tried to build a case around what few clues he had.
Trevor upset. Trevor asking questions. Trevor taking his own life. Black plastic.
Tuesday
As Cole lay in bed, he chewed over every detail, every minute he’d spent with Trevor. He didn’t get more than half an hour of rest toward dawn.
When he woke up, a text message waited on his phone, a note from Annie that she’d gone to the morning feeding early. Finnegan had called her. Joey was in jail. She was safe.
Cole grabbed his phone and texted her: What happened?
She texted back: Joey’s cousin picked up a car in West Chester. Joey helped. They’re both in jail for grand theft auto. Harper’s working on changing it to attempted murder.
Cole typed: Any proof they pushed you into the reservoir?
And Annie sent: Cousin has a black Chevy Blazer. Front end smashed. That’s why they went out looking for another car last night.
Think he was the intruder at your place? Cole hit “Send.”
A couple of seconds passed before her response came: Maybe Joey complained I wouldn’t take him back. Wanted to scare me a little?
Running you off the road is more than just scaring you a little, Cole responded.
And she sent: Got carried away? Kind of a boozer.
Cole wanted to talk to Finnegan. Would the detective disclose anything about the case? Probably not. Still, Joey and his cousin were behind bars—progress. And when the paint on Annie’s back bumper matched, they’d stay behind bars. Cole liked that even better.
Another message popped up from Annie: Any sessions this morning?
Cole typed a quick response: Ambrose at eight.
As long as Annie didn’t need him, he might as well go for a run in the woods before the session with the shrink. Even if he’d much rather be with Annie, helping her with her animals. Not that she really needed his help. She was as self-sufficient as they came. And now she didn’t need his protection either. Annie was safe.
Cole went for his run, showered, then headed off to see his shrink.
“Cole.” Ambrose greeted him and pointed him to the armchair across from his desk. He knew better than to point him to the couch.
Nobody was going to put Cole on his back, a fact he’d explained to the guy right at the beginning, in no uncertain terms.
“How are you feeling?” As usual, the man poured them both a glass of ice water from the carafe on his desk.
“How does anybody feel after what happened with Trevor?”
The man watched him. “Any thoughts that maybe Trevor was right, maybe that’s the solution? Any dark or suicidal thoughts at all?”
Cole drank. You confessed suicidal thoughts to a shrink, and next thing you knew, you were transported to a locked facility. He’d seen it done at the vet hospital where they’d initially treated his shoulder.
“Nope,” he said, and made sure to look sincere.
“Were you and Trevor friends?”
“Barely.” If he said yes, Ambrose would want to spend more time on the subject. Yet denying Trev also felt wrong.
“How does this affect you in light of your father’s suicide?”
“My father’s suicide was a long time ago. I’ve dealt with it. This brings back some of the pain. Some of the guilt. But when a person makes a decision, there isn’t much anyone can do to stop them. You can’t monitor someone twenty-four–seven.”
“All right,” Ambrose said after watching him for a couple of seconds. “How about your other issues? Are you making progress there? Flashbacks?”
“No.”
“Nightmares?”
“Sure.”
“How bad? Would you call them night terrors? Do you wake up heart pounding, screaming? Do you wake up to find you’ve maybe moved off the bed, walked across the room without realizing?”
“Once or twice.”
“What were the dreams about?”
Cole leaned back in the chair. They’d been through this before. “Same old memories.”
“The crash?”
“That and other things. Sometimes I dream about the RPGs hitting the hillside. Sometimes I dream about the chopper going down. Sometimes I dream about what happened after.”
And sometimes, lately, all three, in one night, coming out of one nightmare only to enter another, and then another.
“Ready to talk about what happened after you were captured? I think it could be important for your recovery.”
Cole drew a deep breath, huffed it out. “No offense, doc, but I don’t think you could handle it.”
“You could decide to trust me and give me some credit.”
He didn’t want to. The only staff members Cole had any real respect for around here were the guy who ran the place, Murphy Dolan, and Annie. Not that the rest were bad or incompetent, but their perpetual pretend cheerfulness grated after a while. The whole Oh, you’re doing great mantra. Oh, you’re doing so much better.
He didn’t feel better. Except when he was with Annie.
Ambrose asked a few more questions, his voice an annoying drone. He had a knack for wanting Cole to talk about the exact memories Cole wanted to forget.
He rubbed his arm. Man, that burned. He looked down and saw the blood where a jagged piece of metal had sliced through muscle. His ears were ringing. The chopper was down.
Eighteen people. They’d been heading to Kandahar Air Base. The helicopter with the special-ops team had already been en route when they picked up his call for help. They had immediately detoured to save Cole’s and Ryan’s asses.
The onboard medic was hooking Ryan up with blood, O negative, but Ryan was bleeding out faster than the blood was flowing in. The medic was bandaging him up, putting pressure on the worst spots.
Ryan screamed.
The next scream was weaker. They couldn’t hear it over the whoop, whoop of the chopper blades.
Then Ryan’s eyes rolled back in his head. His body convulsed. They held him down. The medic opened Ryan’s mouth to make sure Ryan wouldn’t bite off his own tongue.
There were at least a hundred special ops at Kandahar Air Base: army spec ops, rangers, SEALs. The guys in the chopper had just rooted out a warlord in the foothills.
The chopper was cresting the last hill. Night was falling. None of them looked out. They were all looking at Ryan, who was now unnaturally still.
The medic started CPR.
Then the medic stopped CPR. He shook his head, his blood-smudged face etched in misery.
Cole roared, ordering him to start again if he didn’t want to be tossed out of the chopper.
A couple of guys grabbed Cole to hold him back.
Then nothing.
Then pain.
Then the realization that they were on the ground, crashed. Pain in his arm. Blood. The chopper burned. Men around him were dead or dying.
“That’s quite a bit of progress,” Dr. Ambrose said with a pleased smile.
Cole returned to the present with a start. He was back in a too-white room at Hope Hill, where everything was too organized, from the books on the shelves to the miniature orchids on the windowsill. Nobody sitting in an office like this could ever imagine the chaos of the hillside.
He blinked at Ambrose.
How much had he told the man? And how on earth had Ambrose gotten to him? That droning voice must have done it. Hell, Cole felt half-hypnotized. Shit.
He pushed to his feet. He needed to get out of here. The too-perfect office and the too-pleased doctor were suffocating. Nauseating. His stomach rolled.
“I’ll see you on Thursday,” Ambrose called after him.
Inanely, Cole thought, Not if I see you first.
He stumbled down the hallway. WTF? He hadn’t taken sleeping pills for the past couple of days. Annie had been in danger, and he’d wanted to stay sharp.
He glanced at his cell phone. Ten past nine. He made it across the exercise yard and headed to the woods. He didn’t go too far down the path, just to the first large tree. He sat at its base and leaned his back against the trunk.
He could actually smell burning flesh.
He’d gotten burned on his leg when the chopper had gone down, although not as badly as some of the others. Then he’d gotten burned again during torture. Later, he’d gotten tattoos to cover up the worst of the branding.
He could hear the whoop, whoop of the chopper, so realistic that he looked up, hands in tight fists.
Nothing but blue skies above.
Then he heard the RPGs. They’d exploded on the hillside before the chopper ever showed up. His flashbacks were coming out of sequence.
He kicked at the dirt, rage boiling through him. He hadn’t had flashbacks before he’d come to Hope Hill. Nothing like this. Instead of helping him, the therapies were just messing with his head, making him worse.
He tried to do the breathing Annie had taught him. He tried to meditate, focus on the tree behind him. When he couldn’t, he brought up Annie’s amber-colored eyes in his mind and focused on her.
He focused on her faint smell of lavender, and after a few deep breaths, he couldn’t smell burning flesh anymore. He focused on her smile, and the invisible chopper stopped whoop-whooping overhead. He focused on the way her soft lips had felt when he’d kissed her.
The chaos inside him settled.
The woods were all right. She had been right about that. The woods brought peace. She had given him this. So he wasn’t going to repay the favor by messing with her life. He was going to leave her alone.
He hadn’t realized he was so screwed up, but damn. Ten minutes ago, he’d felt like a live grenade with the pin pulled.
He wasn’t getting better. He was getting worse. Decisions were going to have to be made.