Caught in the Crossfire Read online

  “Big words from the man bleeding out on my floor. You’re not going anywhere. At least, not until I see how bad it is.” Setting her hand over his chest, she pushed him flat onto the floor. Kate disappeared from his side, everything inside of him aware of the space between them.

  He focused on the sound of shifting debris and the slamming of cabinets to distract himself. In less than a minute, she crouched beside him with a stack of towels and a bottle of whiskey. “This is all I could find. If you move, you’re going to wish you were really were dead.”

  I buried you. Her words echoed through his head.

  “You know what happened to me.” None of the flashbacks had revealed that particular memory. Before she stepped foot in the house, he’d gone through most of the paperwork stashed in the desk for leads, each folder detailing therapy notes by Dr. Kate Monroe, a psychologist. He’d studied the holes in the walls, the broken picture frames, the destroyed personal effects. But nothing had triggered another memory.

  “You were ambushed.” After dousing her hands in the whiskey, she prodded at the sides of the bullet wound. Her fingers feathered over his skin, cooling the fire spreading through his pain receptors. “One of my patients became obsessed with me, and when he discovered he couldn’t have me, he decided no one should. You were caught in the cross fire.”

  “There are pictures of us together. I remember you.” He hissed as she poured the alcohol over the hole in his side. Stinging agony rippled through him, and he fought to catch his breath. He might’ve been shot, but he’d gone an entire year without knowing who he was, where he came from, who he’d left behind. “Who am I to you?”

  Using one of the towels she collected from the kitchen, she applied pressure to the wound. Still refusing to look at him. She reached for another towel. “We can’t stop the bleeding while the bullet is inside. We need to get you to a hospital.”

  Anxiety accelerated his pulse. The last hospital he’d set foot inside had kept him fully stocked with enough nightmare material to last him a lifetime. Waking up alone. Four holes in his body. Not knowing who he was. There was no way in hell he was going back for another round.

  “No hospitals.” Declan wrapped one hand onto her forearm, and her attention snapped to his. His heart rate slowed, the pain disappearing as time seemingly stood still. He noted the slight change in her expression, the furrow between her brows deeper than a moment ago. He blinked to counteract the darkness closing in around the edges of his vision. “You have to get the bullet out.”

  “I’m a profiler for a security firm.” She tried pulling out of his grip, but he only held her tighter. The tension between her neck and shoulders visibly strained. “I never went to medical school. I’m not a trained medical doctor—”

  “I trust you, Kate.” And he meant it. Every word. Because even though he’d lost his memories from before he woke up in that hospital bed alone, something deep inside knew her as well as his body knew how to breathe. He couldn’t explain it. Didn’t need a reason why or how. She’d left enough of an impression that his own brain couldn’t get rid of her as it had everything else, and he wasn’t about to give that up. Despite the mysterious circumstances surrounding how he’d ended up in that hospital in the first place. “You can do this.”

  She studied him. “Blackhawk Security has a doctor on staff. She can help—”

  “No.” He growled. “It has to be you.”

  “Remember that when you bleed out all over the floor.” The tightness drained from her shoulders as she shifted her weight between both knees. She swiped the back of her hand across her face. “Okay. If we’re going to do this, I need to find something sharp enough to widen the wound so I can extract the bullet. Hopefully, it’s still in one piece.”

  He set his jaw against another surge of pain and replaced her hand with his own for pressure to slow the bleeding. She disappeared deeper into the house.

  His heart pounded loud behind his ears, a slow, rhythmic beat that made his eardrums ache. The seconds ticked by, maybe a minute. They were running out of time.

  When she came back, her phone’s flashlight beam highlighted her supplies beside him. He used every last bit of strength to focus on her as she gently removed the towel.

  “Are you sure about this?” she asked.

  He nodded, quick and curt, the words stuck in his throat with the weight of pain squeezing the air in his lungs.

  “Okay. Then no matter what happens,” she said, “I need you to hold still.”

  Sirens echoed. One of the neighbors must’ve called the police. Cops meant ambulances, questions he couldn’t answer and hospitals.

  “What’s one more scar, right?” She was trying to distract him, keep him focused on the present when all he wanted to do was compare the woman in front of him to the memories in his head. He’d noticed his own scars, of course, the mounds of tissue peppered across his abdominals, and from the slight dip of her neckline, he recognized a similar mass peeking out from beneath her shirt. Did that mean...

  “Declan?” she asked.

  “Who did that to you?” Rage—pure and hot—engulfed him, pushed the fact that someone had put a hole in him to the back of his mind. Someone had shot her. Too fast, too hard, the crack in his control started to spread as he imagined her lying in one of those bloodstains on the carpet in the dining room. Who the hell shot her? He’d tear them apart with his bare hands. He’d find the bastard and make him pay, just as he’d find the one who’d tried a few minutes ago.

  Another dose of adrenaline and pain drove him to try to sit up. A dangerous combination with a gunshot wound. The quicker his heart beat, the quicker he’d bleed out.

  “Declan, you have to stay still.” Setting her palms against him, she struggled to keep him in place. “The bullet is too deep. If I keep digging, I could permanently damage something or kill you, and I’m not willing to take either of those chances. We have to get you to the hos—”

  “No hospitals.” Black spiderwebs snaked across his vision, and suddenly he didn’t have the strength to keep himself upright. He collapsed back against the tile. Damn it. He’d lost too much blood.

  “Fine, but you need a doctor. Blackhawk Security keeps one on site.” Dim lighting illuminated her face as she raised her phone to her ear, and he blinked against the sudden brightness of her phone’s screen. Her exhale brushed across his neck as she smoothed her hand across his forehead. “Anthony, track my location. I need an evacuation. Adult male, gunshot wound to the left side. I can’t stop the bleeding.”

  No emotion in her voice or on her expression. Too clinical. Too rational. That wasn’t the woman he remembered. Or had the flashbacks of her been a lie all this time?

  “ETA?” Kate nodded, that brilliant green gaze he’d dreamed about for months centering on him. “See you in ten minutes.”

  “You never answered my question from before.” He closed his eyes for a moment. Forget the bullet. There was only one thing that mattered. He leveraged his heels into the floor and forced himself to sit straighter against the front door. Pressure released on the wound, and he could breathe a bit easier. His fingertips tingled with the urge to touch her, but a hollowness had set up residence in his gut at the sound of her emotionless conversation with someone named Anthony. Maybe they hadn’t been as close as he thought after all? Maybe he’d imagined everything. “Who am I to you?”

  Kate wiped the back of her hand across her forehead again. A nervous habit?

  “Everything that happened the night you died was my fault,” she said. “I didn’t take his threats seriously. I didn’t think he’d—” The flashlight from her phone streaked across her face as she turned her phone over in her free hand. And there it was. A chink in that self-controlled armor. “My patient came to the house that night because you’re—you were—my husband.”

  Chapter Two

  Every wound had shaped her, forced her to
become a stronger version of the woman she’d been before the ambush. No one was 100 percent safe. No matter how hard she tried—no matter how much she needed—to repress the fear, the uncertainty, it barged straight back into her life the moment that single bullet tore a hole through her husband’s body.

  Kate ran a hand through her hair as she paced Blackhawk Security’s main hall for the tenth—or was it the eleventh?—time.

  Declan’s body. They weren’t married anymore. Once he’d been declared dead, their marriage had ended, but she couldn’t lose him. Not again. She’d barely survived the first time. Having him here, alive, almost well, had given her hope. She’d been alone for so long, broken for so long, she didn’t know what to do now. Should she be in there with him, standing by his side as the doctor removed the bullet and stitched him up?

  “Who shot at you tonight?” Anthony Harris, Blackhawk Security’s weapons expert, had planted himself against a wall and watched her wear a path in the firm’s brand-new carpet.

  As a former Ranger, he only cared about one thing: protecting the people he cared about. Once upon a time, that short list had only included their team: Sullivan Bishop, founder and CEO of Blackhawk; Vincent Kalani, their forensics expert; Elizabeth Dawson headed network security; Elliot Dunham, the best private investigator and the reason she was standing here at all; and her.

  But now, Anthony had a family. A wife, a son. Yet he’d come within minutes of Kate’s evacuation request. He was reliable. Solid. And terrifying behind those aviator sunglasses he wore 24/7. She’d shut down the urge to profile her teammates, but she had read his file. Within moments of meeting him for the first time, she understood he strapped himself with as many weapons as he could because he feared losing his support system like he had in Afghanistan. War changed people—made them desperate—and Anthony hadn’t been any different.

  Kate slowed her pace, released the breath she’d been holding. Her scars burned, but the sensation was only in her head. She knew that. The adrenaline lingering in her veins from the situation—almost the exact same one she’d survived a year ago—was her brain’s way of protecting her. Of sending up a warning. Besides, it’d been months since her last surgery, and scar tissue lacked nerve cells. She wasn’t supposed to feel anything.

  She studied the small window in the door leading to the firm’s medical suite, and her insides tightened. She wasn’t supposed to feel at all.

  “I have no idea who pulled the trigger tonight.” The shooting couldn’t have been a coincidence. The chances both she and Declan would be in that house again, at the same time... There were too many variables to calculate. Especially given that Declan Monroe had legally died over a year ago. Had he been waiting for her to show? Brian Michaels, her patient who destroyed everything she’d known in the span of a minute, was still behind bars. Whoever had shot at them tonight couldn’t have been him. Why come after her now? Or had she been the target at all?

  “Take it easy on the carpet, Doc.” Anthony pushed off the wall, hands dropping to his sides for better access to his arsenal if necessary. “Sullivan will kill you if he has to pay to replace it twice in two months.”

  Right. The bomb meant for their network security analyst had wiped out this entire floor two months ago. Was that her teammate’s way of telling her they were never safe, even in the most protected and secure building in Anchorage?

  Blackhawk Security employed the finest security experts in the world. She and her team provided personal protection, private investigating, logistical support to the US government, profiling and personal recovery. Whatever their client needed, they delivered. They did it all, and they did a good job. If the shooter had been targeting her, he’d be insane to try here.

  Kate slowed her pacing, fingers tightening into fists. She was losing her mind. She was better than this. She’d been a psychologist. She’d struggled through months of grief by shutting everything down, ignored her instinctual drives, repressed the anger and hurt. What was wrong with her now? What had changed?

  The door to the medical suite swung open.

  Declan stood in the frame, those familiar blue eyes locking on her as he placed his hand over the new hole in his T-shirt, and everything went quiet.

  The tension in her chest eased, and she stood a bit straighter. Right. Declan Monroe hadn’t died after all. He’d cheated death. Twice. She took a single step toward him, caught in the gravitational pull she’d never been able to resist.

  “Don’t take too long, Doc. Everyone’s waiting for you.” Anthony crossed the waiting area filled with comfortable chairs and an empty receptionist’s desk to the large oak doors of the main conference room. Swinging them open, he didn’t wait for her before heading inside.

  Leaving her and Declan alone.

  She tamped down the anxiety clawing up her throat. “How’s your side—”

  “This is where you work.” The smile she’d dreamed of seeing again flashed wide, hiking her blood pressure higher. So easygoing but gut-wrenching at the same time. “Good as new,” he said. “Thanks.”

  “Good.” Nodding, Kate rolled her bottom lip into her mouth and bit down, a nervous habit she’d picked up to distract herself when reality crept in. Which happened all too often. She scratched at the back of her neck in another attempt to lock it out. What was she supposed to say to the man who’d supposedly died because she failed to recognize the warning signs in her own patient? “Tell me where the hell you’ve been. Because none of this makes sense.”

  The words slipped out. She clenched her fists to ease the stress that had been building since Elliot had given her the photo of Declan in downtown Anchorage a month ago.

  The stubble along his jawline shifted as he ran his hand over his face. Closing the distance between them, he heightened her awareness of him with every step. “Not much to tell. I woke up in a hospital alone. I didn’t know where I was or what had happened. Who I was. I could barely move because of the pain in my chest, and no matter how hard I tried... I couldn’t remember anything.”

  She held her breath as he raised one hand toward her face. This wasn’t real. Soon she’d wake up, realize she’d been living a beautiful nightmare, and the grief would crush her again. But then he touched her. Her eyes drifted closed as he framed her face, and she leaned into his warmth. Wrapping her hand around his, she forced herself to look at him. To learn his face all over again.

  “I remembered you for the first time three weeks after I left the hospital, and I knew I had to find you.” Declan brushed his thumb across her cheek. Too soon, he pulled away, taking his body heat with him, and the brightness in his gaze dimmed. “I remembered other things, too. Bits and pieces. But nothing that explained how I ended up shot.”

  “You don’t remember anything before waking up in the hospital?” Her mouth dried. Retrograde amnesia. Partial or total loss of every memory he’d ever lived. She’d studied cases back in her doctoral program at University of Oregon, but never imagined she’d be involved in the real-life nightmare that came with the condition. But he hadn’t sustained any head or brain injuries as far as she knew during the shooting. Which suggested trauma. His brain had blocked the incident as a way of protecting itself. “Your parents, your work, your favorite food?”

  “Nothing. Guess that means I have a lot to catch up on.” His attention drifted to the top of her shirt collar, to the largest of her scars. Declan’s voice turned to gravel. “Your scar looks like mine. How many bullets did they pull from you?”

  She gave in to the urge to cover up, rubbing the fabric of her shirt collar between her fingers. They were a reminder of the worst night of her life, the onset of a lifetime of pain and grief, a kind of death sentence that she’d go through the rest of her life alone.

  But he wasn’t dead. He was here.

  His condition might let up. She’d have to dig into her research, call a former colleague to be sure, but he might remember the l
ife they had together, the years they’d spent together. Hope spread hard and fast, and Kate gave in for just a moment. To remember what it felt like.

  Bullets. He’d asked about bullets. “Three.”

  “They catch the bastard who did it? Your patient.” The blue in his eyes turned to ice, the tendons between his neck and shoulder visibly tightening. Her insides went cold, her instincts on alert. The man she’d married—the one she’d built an entire life with—had never shown signs of aggression in front of her, despite it being a large part of his job inside the FBI’s serial crime unit. So who exactly had come back from the dead? Her husband or somebody else entirely?

  “My teammate, Elliot, found him a few weeks after I started working for Blackhawk Security. Nearly six months after the shooting. He’s one of those people who likes to know everything there is to know about the people he works with, and I wasn’t an exception.”

  She slipped her hands into her cargo jacket—no, his jacket—pockets, but the guilt she’d shouldered only weighed heavier in her stomach. She’d done this to him—to them. She’d been so blinded by her own personal life, she hadn’t seen what was happening right in front of her. How many other patients had she failed? How many lives had been changed due to her negligence?

  “Brian Michaels had been off his medication for a few months. Toxicology screen came back for additional medication I wasn’t aware he’d been taking. The steroids only increased his aggressive behavior to the point...” She didn’t need to tell Declan the results. He’d lived them, same as her. “He’s in a psychiatric ward here in the city. Sentenced to twenty years for murder.”

  “If he’s locked up, then who do I have to thank for a bullet in my side tonight?” Declan asked.

  “I don’t know.” Kate turned toward the conference room door and the entire Blackhawk Security team waiting for her briefing. She’d almost lost him—again—but this time would be different. Wrenching the large oak door open, she leveled her chin, more determined than she’d been in months. Whatever didn’t kill her this time had better run. “Let’s find out.”