Page 37 of Into the Veins
The pain spiked, but he was there. No matter how tall she’d built the walls between them, he’d been crazy enough to scale them anyway. What that meant for the future—if they had one—she didn’t know, but she wouldn’t make the same mistake again. “I kicked you off the investigation. You didn’t listen.” She had enough awareness left that she recognized his hand was still in hers. “Thank you.”
“I told you, Sheriff. I’m not going anywhere,” he said. “Except right now because they won’t let me in the operating room with you. But I promise, I’ll be here when you wake up.”
His hand slipped from hers.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Three days. No changes.
Colson tried to uncurl his fingers for the hundredth—or was it the two hundredth?—time since he’d been released from Harborview. The pain had ebbed, but he’d spend the next six months to a year in physical therapy to counter the seemingly permanent damage to his hand. To start with. Half crescent moons had scabbed in his palms from where his nails had bit near down to the nerves after that initial injection. The tendons in his hand wouldn’t release, forcing his left wrist into a ninety-degree bend and his fingers into a claw-like position.
Defeat robbed him of confidence, and he sank back against the headboard. The investigation was closed, his contract with Rachel Faulkner’s father terminated. Ember Garder was recovering from three bullet wounds in a federally guarded hospital room waiting for arraignment. The evidence the FBI’s crime scene unit had collected from the scene at Cougar Mountain was enough to not only place her at the scene but connect her to the deaths of Rachel Faulkner and Cardin Townsend. The sample of strychnine recovered from the syringe in her jacket matched the signature of all three victims’ toxicology report. She’d been careful to wear gloves and a mask to keep her DNA from being left behind at each of the scenes, but there was no way she could deny the blood found on her boots matching Cardin Townsend’s recovered at the trailhead came from a struggle with the victim.
Lochard’s Principle. Everyone who entered a crime scene left something of themselves behind and took something with them. The judge had granted a search warrant for the shed where Ember had held all three victims before their deaths behind her home and her phone where FBI techs were able to recover three videos, one of each victim, forced to admit their darkest secrets. Her defense attorney had already argued mitigating circumstances, but the chances of getting his client out of anything less than life were slim.
Ember Garder would spend the rest of her life behind bars before she claimed her turn with the needle. All because of a warped sense of duty as a sister. As for Evyn Garder, neither he nor Blair could physically prove she’d known what her sister had done on her behalf. Apart from deleting the photos of the last crime scene, they couldn’t forensically tie their initial suspect to any of the murders. But Evyn must’ve realized her sister’s plan when the second body had been discovered. The social media platform was dragging their feet responding to the King County Sheriff’s request to recover the deleted images, but Colson knew nothing would come of it. The FBI had their killer, and he and Blair were free to move on.
His client had unfrozen his accounts, but the five dollars sitting in his checking account only stared back at him from his phone on the bed. Massaging his thumb into his damaged hand, Colson swung his feet to the floor. Not enough to start a new life, but enough. He stepped into the familiar hallway, his bare feet sticking to the hardwood. Soft music reached his ears from the garage, and he reached for the doorknob. Hesitation kept him from breaching her personal space, and he closed his eyes.
Against all odds, Blair had survived the shooting. While it’d been a through and through, there’d been complications during surgery. Too much blood loss. He wanted to believe her last words to him in the emergency room had been true, that she was glad he hadn’t followed her order to stay away from the case. But there was still a part of him that had latched onto the possibility she hadn’t been thinking straight. He’d been here before, on the other side of this door. Uncertain of where he stood.
He’d sat at her bedside despite the stab wound in his side and the aftereffects of surviving strychnine poisoning. He’d held her hand and asked her as many personal questions as he could before the sedation had worn off. She’d told him he could stay because he would die if he went back to live in his SUV. Whether she’d made the offer out of her sense of duty to ensure the private investigator who’d manipulated his way into her case lived or she genuinely wanted him around for herself, he didn’t know.
He’d faced a childhood of neglect and rejection and a vengeful killer, but Colson had never been more terrified to learn the answer in his life. He’d never worried about the future before. How he’d pay for his next adventure, his next meal, where he’d end up—none of it had mattered. Not until he’d met her. He forced himself to take a deep breath and twisted the doorknob. For the first time in his life. He knew exactly what he wanted. A future with her.
The earthy scent of clay filled his nose before he caught sight of her. The tarps they’d used to keep themselves warm mere days ago had been laid out in front of her, smears of paint vibrant against the white backdrop of the garage. The constant spin of the wheel broke through the highs and lows of the music coming from her phone nearby. Lean, delicate shoulders rose and fell in an unsteady rhythm as Blair leaned down over the sculpture’s wheel. Her face had lost the intensity he’d memorized, as though she’d fallen into a kind of meditation. Beautiful. Bewitching. Free.
Dark gray clay splotched bruised and lacerated skin as she raised her wrist against her forehead and caked a section of her hair. In less time than it took him to inhale, her fingers moved expertly against the sides of the round shape spinning in front of her, the backs of her hands masked in dry clay. He fell into a meditation of his own. Anchored by reality yet lost at the same time. The clay rose vertically through a single touch of her hands working together, and he couldn’t look away.
“If you’re going to stare at me, at least hand me that wire clay cutter on the table next to you.” Blair raised her gaze to his, that gut-wrenching smile cutting right through him. She dipped her hand in a bowl of water nearby. She rubbed her palms together and pressed her bare toes into the foot pedal then redirected her focus to the sculpture taking shape through her touch alone.
He collected the coil ending in two wooden hand grips and unwrapped it until the wire swung tight. “Are you planning to garrote me with this?”
“I hadn’t thought about it, but now that you mention it…” Another curl of her mouth transformed her face, and his heart kicked in his chest. The wistfulness in her expression faded as she leaned back in her chair and lifted her foot from the pedal. The mound of clay folded in on itself as her expression fell, and Blair planted a hand over what had been the beginnings of a soup bowl matching the ones lining her bookcases. “How’s the hand?”
Colson handed off the wire with his good hand. The tips of his fingers brushed against the inside of the palm of his left hand and reminded him how…frail the life he’d built really was, how empty and meaningless. “About the same. My doctor said I might gain back some function with intense physical therapy, but it won’t be easy, and it won’t be immediate. There are no guarantees.”
“There never are. Are you going to do the work?” There was a heaviness in her voice that hadn’t been there before, and Colson had the distinct impression that wasn’t the real question she’d wanted to ask. Blair stood, her toes skimming the garage floor as she turned toward the table stacked with a large brick of wrapped clay. She folded the plastic down, and gripping both ends of the wire cutter, sectioned off another chunk to work into something beautiful.
“I called the physical therapist he recommended. She can start seeing me as early as next week. My appointments will be in the city twice a week. Until then, she gave me some exercises to focus on.” He studied her, waiting for a change in body language, but the guards she’d built before he’d manipulated his way into her case had been walled between them all over again. He leveraged his hand against the table stretching the length of the back wall as the muscles in his right thigh twitched with exertion. Aftereffects of the poison. “There aren’t many cases like mine, but I’m willing to give it a try. There’s a hotel near her office. It’ll make things easier. I wanted to let you know I’d be out of here within the next day or so. Give you some space to recover.”
Blair’s subtle exhale barely registered over the music as she took her seat, knees spread on either side of the sculptor’s wheel. The paint-stained sweatpants rode up her shin and exposed the flawless skin of her ankles. “Easier. Right.”
Hesitation kept him cemented in place. “You’ve got something to say?”
She centered the additional chunk of clay on the wheel and kneaded it together with the original. The exposure to oxygen had lightened the first section and mixed with the second to create a marbling effect unlike anything he’d seen before. Her shoulders collapsed as she raised her attention, as if defeat had finally won the internal war he’d sensed since her release from the hospital.
“I don’t need space, Colson. I don’t need time.” She rose to her feet, watery clay dripping from her fingers. She grabbed a nearby towel and wiped both hands. “You’ve spent your entire life going from one adventure to the next to find something to make you happy. But honestly, I think you just got used to running. Consulting for the FBI, opening your own private investigation firm, studying snakes and color palettes—you used all of it as a distraction to keep yourself from facing what you really want out of life. You’re scared to let someone care about you—to love you—because your parents wouldn’t. You don’t want the rejection again so you distance yourself from everyone around you, just as I detached from the people who care about me. But I’m tired, Colson. I’m tired of shutting everyone out and being on my own.” She stepped into him, setting one hand over his heart. Right where he needed her to be. “Aren’t you?”
He didn’t know what to say to that, what to think. There was only the truth. He swallowed around the tightness in his throat and set his hand over hers. “Yes.”
“Then stop running.” She skimmed her hand down his chest, igniting a heated trail of desire and comfort, before securing her fingers around the damage in his left hand. Blair lifted his disfigured wrist between them and pressed her thumb into the center of his palm. Without another word, she tugged him after her, leading him to the chair she’d occupied less than a minute ago. He took a seat, his legs framing her hips as she lowered herself down in front of him. They melted together from shoulder to knees. Blair pressed her toes into the pedal, and the sculptor’s wheel slowly came to life. She set her hands on the outside of his and pressed them into the edges of the clay. “Stay with me. Please.”
Colson traced the edge of her bottom lip with his tongue, and a burst of desire stole his control. Securing his arms around her, he pulled her into him, and the sound of the sculptor’s wheel died. Heat licked up his neck and into his face as the sheriff who’d been determined to keep him as an enemy twisted to face him. “I meant what I said in the hospital. Taking the contract to find Rachel Faulkner was just supposed to be a job, but this case, getting to work beside you… You are my favorite adventure. One I’d be happy to live the rest of my life. Because I love you.”
“I love you, too.” She set her temple against his mouth for a moment, seemingly breathing him in, before framing the mound of clay. Silence-filled minutes stretched between them as the clay took shape beneath their hands. They’d spent days trying to deconstruct a killer’s motive. Now they had a chance to build something together, to build their life together. The base of the sculpture took shape then widened into a vase. Blair expertly controlled his movements, using his damaged hand to her advantage rather than shying away. “What about all the fantasies left to experience from your childhood journal?”
“I don’t need it anymore,” he said. “I have you.”