She knew the drill. She wished she didn’t, but she did. As far as the rest of the world was concerned, Amy Naylor no longer existed.
* * *
For the next hour, they rode in silence. Sam spoke little, listening to the back and forth in his earpiece as his team coordinated with other members of the Marshals Service and tried to piece together what had gone wrong. No one seemed certain who had leaked Amy’s whereabouts or how she’d been found. No one could give intel on how many bad guys were on the hunt. The men they’d taken into custody refused to talk, more afraid of whoever was funding them than they could ever be of the marshals.
In the silence, Sam fought to keep his emotions at bay. A strong sense of relief came with the word that Wainwright had been released with minor injuries after his dustup in the shopping center parking lot. The suspect who’d rammed him had been arrested, and a team was at the shopping mall, scouring surveillance footage from parking lot cameras and security feeds for other suspicious vehicles.
As expected, other news wasn’t so comforting. In the midst of a recovery operation was not the time to give in to grief, but the call that Edgecombe truly was dead had come as a blow. Sam had known, but hearing the suspicion clarified in stark, no-nonsense words hadn’t been easy. It would have been nice if he could pull over and take a second to pull himself fully together.
He needed to get his head on straight, but he couldn’t afford the luxury. Priority number one was to get Amy to headquarters. After that, he could sit down and debrief, then grieve with others who had known Edgecombe, or who at least knew what it was like to lose a brother-in-arms.
In the rapidly fading evening light, they raced around the city of Columbus. Only an hour left. He flexed his fingers on the steering wheel and checked the rearview again. Since they’d evaded the red car, his eyes had roved from mirror to mirror, searching for a tail, watching for signs of danger. So far, so good. If he could keep her safe for an hour longer, he could hand off Amy to his team and relax in the knowledge he’d saved her from a criminal intent on killing her.
Amy shifted in the passenger seat and stretched her legs, pulling her neck from side to side. She had to be tense and tired. There had to be a million questions running through her head, but she hadn’t said a word in over an hour. She’d merely ridden in silence, alternating between stillness and restless fidgeting.
The silence in the car was too loud, leaving him too much room to think about all that had transpired today, on the most disastrous mission of his WITSEC career. Today’s destruction rivaled some of the carnage he’d experienced overseas with his Special Forces team. He’d never dreamed he’d bear witness to such loss at home.
Sam had to break the heavy silence, get a conversation started or something. “We’re almost there. About an hour more.”
She nodded but didn’t look at him. She was probably thirsty, starving or any number of other uncomfortable things. Pulling over for a drink and a burger would invite trouble. While he felt certain they’d left their pursuers behind, there were risks he simply couldn’t take. Unlike some of the witnesses Sam had retrieved, Amy hadn’t complained or loosed an angry tirade. She simply stared out the front window, silently accepting her fate.
Reality likely hadn’t kicked in for her yet. When it did, the fallout would not be pretty. That wasn’t for Sam to deal with. Good thing. Sam had never been stellar at helping people deal with their emotions. WITSEC had psychologists and counselors on staff to handle the mental and emotional ramifications of going into hiding. With her life in shambles for a second time, Amy was definitely going to need a session or two.
“Did you ever talk to anyone about your husband?” Sam winced as soon as the question left his lips. Seriously. There was making conversation and there was prying into places he had no business digging. Keeping his mouth shut would have been the better option.
There was something about this woman though, something that made him feel as if he knew her better than he did. Maybe it was because he’d spent time with her when Edgecombe checked in on her. Maybe it was the way she’d opened up to him earlier in the day. Or maybe it was simply who she was. Amy was different than any other woman he’d ever encountered, on the job or off.
She was definitely different than his ex-wife.
“My husband?” Her voice had a hazy edge to it, as though his question had drawn her from somewhere far away.
“Never mind.”
She stared out the side window and said nothing for a couple of miles. “No. I didn’t.”
So she had caught the question after all. “Was there a reason you didn’t?”
“I talked to my sister. I never saw the need to say anything to anyone else. It hurt when Noah died. I lost him, my future, everything. Even the apartment I was living in, my car...”
That couldn’t be right. The soldier in Sam remembered all of the paperwork he’d had to fill out prior to a deployment. Points of contact for notifications, burial instructions, beneficiaries for life insurance... The whole morbid list was as long as his arm. Things no one wanted to think about when they were headed into a war zone but things that had to be squared away to ensure the protection of their loved ones at home before they could go wheels up to do their jobs. “How is that possible? You should have been taken care of. There should have been so much available to you.” There it was. Another way too personal comment he never should have made.
Amy shook her head, her blond hair spilling over her shoulder and swishing against her cheek. She tucked it behind her ear. “We got married so fast. He never changed his paperwork. I guess he never expected to die. Who does?”
Sam’s heart sank. As a single soldier, all of his benefits had been directed to his mother and father. Amy’s Noah had likely done the same in his single life. And if their marriage had happened on a timeline as tight as the one she’d indicated, he’d already filled out his deployment paperwork and had likely not even considered the consequences of not changing beneficiaries.
She was right. What man wanted to consider his death, especially when he was trying to cram in as much living as possible with a brand-new wife?
“I wasn’t even his primary notification on his paperwork. I found out what happened to him because one of the chaplains in the battalion knew me. His parents got the notification. I heard secondhand. I’d never met his family. They lived in Puerto Rico.” She sniffed, then swallowed and turned away from him. “I didn’t even have the money to fly to San Juan for my own husband’s funeral. I’ve never even seen his grave.”
Sam’s heart shattered. He gripped the steering wheel tighter to keep from reaching for her hand, which would have been a decidedly unprofessional move. When she said she’d lost everything, she wasn’t exaggerating. Had she even felt she had the right to grieve?
For long miles, he didn’t know what to say, how to soothe the ache she was bound to feel at her husband’s death and his family’s slight. The woman beside him was stronger than he’d imagined. “So you never talked to anyone except your sister?” It was the best he had to offer, and it was completely lame.
She didn’t seem to notice. “I didn’t want to fight his family, because I figured they had even less than I did. And nothing was going to bring him back to me, so why bother talking to someone about it? It was going to hurt no matter what.”
“And yet you minored in psychology.”
She cast him a rueful glance, her eyebrow quirked. “That was in my file too?”
At least she was somewhat smiling. It was better than heated anger or chilled silence. “Yep.”
“WITSEC wouldn’t let me do anything that even remotely smelled like my career goals or the work I was doing at the gym to pay my way through college. Truth is, I had enough biology to be able to teach at the community college level since I studied sports medicine. I was accepted to grad school so I could become