That, Liam knew too well.
Frowning, he picked up the tumbler and tossed back the liquid, savoring the burn clear down to his gut. He was still savoring when his mobile phone rang five minutes later.
He grabbed it from the bed. “Brooks.”
“Tell me you’re not in Chicago.”
The voice was soft but strong, friendly yet concerned, and Liam couldn’t help but smile. Mariah Ingram, fellow FBI agent and longtime friend, didn’t pull any punches. “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”
“Liam,” she said in that way of hers, a soft voice that registered like a quick smack to the side of his head.
“Don’t start with me, okay?” He sank down to the bed and leaned against the headboard. It was the first time he’d allowed himself to sit since charging out of the cab from the airport that morning.
Mariah sighed. “Bankston said you took a few days’ leave. But that’s not what you’re doing, is it? You’re not on vacation. You’re chasing shadows again, aren’t you? You’re on another wild-goose chase.”
He stared at the blank television screen, wishing the woman didn’t know him so damn well. They’d worked together off and on over the years, more closely after he’d lost his partner, Paul Lennox, during the investigation into the theft of hundreds of billions of dollars from the World Bank.
The case had gripped the nation in panic, forcing the Bureau to allocate every available resource to hunting the perpetrator. Other casework, unless there was a clear and present danger, fell to the background. They’d worked tirelessly, sifting through bizarre allegations of conspiracy and treason, corruption that reached into all echelons of the government and, ultimately, allegations of genetic engineering—which had turned out to be true. Gutsy Mariah had plowed in headfirst and proven instrumental in wrapping up the case. In the process, she’d fallen in love and married one of the men at the center of the circus, renowned financier Jake Ingram.
Frowning, Liam reached across the bed to the antique nightstand and pulled open the drawer, retrieved a small plastic bag. Inside, a stack of three postcards taunted him. The first had been in his possession for three long years, since the week before the World Bank case stole headlines and resources. The second had been found stashed in Senator Gregory’s day planner. The third had shown up in Liam’s New York hotel room only the day before, waiting like a pal beneath a little piece of gold-foil-wrapped dark chocolate.
“I received a tip,” he said. The handwriting on the first two was identical, but someone else had penned the third. Someone desperate.
“A tip,” Mariah repeated skeptically.
He fingered the back of the postcard, stared at the image of the obscenely quaint pastoral farmhouse. “He’s back, Mariah.” He didn’t give a damn if no one believed him, if they all thought he was crazy. The truth hummed through him like a chill to the bone. “That bastard is back.” And this time, if it was the last thing Liam did, he was going to stop the man and the syndicate he headed, before more lives were destroyed. “Titan.”
Just saying the name of the reputed but elusive European crime lord turned his stomach.
“You think he’s connected to the senator’s death?”
Liam ran his fingers over the three neatly printed words that had eaten away at him for what seemed like a lifetime.
My deepest sympathy.
He’d never known three little years could drag so slowly.
“Without a doubt.” The fact that the senator’s death mirrored a string of deaths across Europe was indication enough, but the presence of the postcard sealed the deal.
“But why?” Mariah hesitated. “What possible motive could there be?”
Liam shoved the baggie back into the drawer, pushed it closed and stood. “That’s what I’m going to find out.”
“Then what in the world are you doing in Chicago?”
The bottle of scotch called to him, with its sleek lines and smooth edges, smoky amber liquid, but Liam refused to let himself move. Refused to let himself take the easy way out. To be like his father. “There’s a woman—”
“A woman.” Weariness and concern thickened Mariah’s voice. “Do you hear yourself, Lee? Your job is to bring down Titan,” she reminded softly. “Not play protector to every damsel in distress.”
Images of Danielle fired through him, standing in the doorway of her small frame house with her thick hair falling from the barrette behind her head, slumberous eyes drenched with courage and fear and determination, shadows and secrets and pain he understood all too easily, the gun in her shaking hands.
“That’s not what I’m doing,” he gritted out. He didn’t do rescues. His skill set ran toward the other extreme.
Across the phone line, from her beautiful home in Dallas, Mariah sighed. It was a weary sound, that of a friend’s concern. “You can’t bring her back.” The words were soft but they landed hard. “You have to let it go.” She hesitated before adding, “Let her go.”
This time Liam did cross the room and grab the bottle. He poured, not a full glass like his old man had done, over and over and over, but just enough to take away the sting of the truth.
“I have,” he muttered, throwing back the liquid. He waited for the sweet burn, but the liquid streaked through him like acid.
The urge to run, to pound his feet against the pavement and suck in deep gulps of acrid air, like he’d done that long-ago night, burned through him. He had moved on. He’d had no choice. Time never stood still.
But he would never let go, not so long as the loose ends lingered like smoke after a fire, thick and pungent, oppressive. Damning.
He barely even remembered those first few days and weeks and months. He’d existed on autopilot, behaving like a good little agent, when all the while the memories he tried to scrub away followed him like a starving, rabid animal from case to case, town to town. He learned how to answer his supervisors’ questions, how to feed the division shrink exactly what she wanted to hear, but the truth was never far away. It festered like polluted ground water just beneath the surface, making its presence known during the long dark hours of the night when he would go to extreme measures to find sleep, only to see her as she’d been in the predawn darkness of that last morning. His wife, standing in the doorway of the bathroom, with a sleek ivory negligee draping her newly rounded curves and with devastation in her eyes.
Twenty hours later she’d been dead.
Liam slammed the tumbler down on the elegant cherry sidebar and turned his back on escape. Tomorrow morning would not be one of countless sunrises he’d once greeted with bleary eyes and an empty bottle cradled against his chest. He’d waited too long for Titan to return to lose his edge now.
“What about you?” he asked, shoving the conversation in a different direction as he headed toward the window. Subtlety had never been his calling card. “You’re feeling okay?”
Mariah hesitated before letting him off the hook. She knew what he saw in the darkness. She knew the images that invaded his dreams. “Wonderful,” she finally said. “Hungry as a horse and bone tired, but absolutely, gloriously wonderful.”
Liam stared out over the city, the twinkling lights down below, the glimmer of the moon over Lake Michigan, the high, thin clouds whispering across the darkness. “That’s so great,” he said, and meant it. Once he, too, had wanted a family. Not immediately, but someday.
Titan had made sure that would never happen.
“And Jake?” he asked of her husband. Ingram was a good man, loyal and honorable, surprisingly normal considering the strange circumstances of his birth.