Internal Affairs. Jessica Andersen
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but it was his. She’d swear to it.
She could turn him over and prove it one way or the other. It wasn’t as if he was going anywhere fast. He was out cold, his back rising and falling in breaths so shallow they were almost invisible. Blood soaked the rug beneath him; the smell of it surrounded him.
Sara’s inner medical professional sent a stab of warning as she dithered on one level, assessed his injuries on another. He’s pale, probably shocky. If you don’t do something soon, it won’t matter who he is because he’ll be dead.
“Call 9-1-1,” she told herself. “Don’t be an idiot.”
Instead, she reached out and touched him—his stubble-roughened cheek first, then the pulse at his throat. As she did so, she tried to get a sense of his profile, tried to see if it was—
No. It couldn’t be.
Yet her heart sped up, her head spun and her breath went thin in her lungs as she debated between checking his spine—which was the proper thing to do before moving him—and turning his face so she could see, so she’d know for sure.
Then he groaned—a low, rough sound—and said something unintelligible in a voice that was achingly familiar. Heat raced through her. Hope.
He moved his right arm and let out another groan of pain. Then, as though sensing that she was there, he shifted, snaking out his left hand to grab her ankle—not hard, more looping his fingers around her, touching but not restricting her.
Sara squeaked and would have jerked away, but once again she was frozen in place, paralyzed by the memory of a lover who’d kept a careful distance between them when awake, but in sleep had always wanted some part of him touching some part of her, as though reassuring himself she was still there.
“Romo?” she whispered. The single word burned her lips and hurt her chest.
Then he shifted again, this time turning his face toward her, so she saw him in profile against the bloodied carpet.
Her throat closed on a noise that might’ve been a cross between a scream and a moan if it had made it past the lump jamming her windpipe. As it was, the cry reverberated in her head.
She knew that profile—the clean planes of his nose and brow; the dark, elegant eyebrows; the angular jaw. If he was awake and smiling—or snarling, for that matter—at her, she would’ve known his square, regular teeth and the glint in his dark green eyes. It was really him, she realized, her chest aching with the force of holding back the sobs.
Detective Romo Sampson. Internal affairs investigator. Live-in lover-turned-nemesis. And a dead man back from the dead.
In that first moment of recognition, Sara’s brain threatened to overload with shock and an awful, undeniable sense of hope. She wanted to scream, wanted to laugh, wanted to shriek, “What the hell is going on here? Where have you been? What have you been doing? Why did you let us—let me—think you were dead?”
Instead, she forced herself to do what she did best—she buried her emotions, smoothing out the roller coaster.
Clicking over to doctor mode, she shoved her feelings aside, bundling them up along with all the questions that echoed inside her skull. Where had he been for the past four months? What had happened to him? Whose grave had she stood over, dry-eyed but grieving? Whose blood was spattered on his face, arms and hands? It wasn’t all his, that was for sure.
He couldn’t answer those questions now, though, and might not ever be able to unless she worked fast. Instinct told her he was close to dying a second time.
Sara’s heart stuttered a little when she cataloged Romo’s injuries and vitals. His breathing was too shallow, the pulse at his throat too slow. And his eyes, when she peeled back his lids, were fixed, the pupils unequal in size, indicating a concussion, or worse.
Shock, she thought, head injury, and… She checked him over without rolling him, hissing in a breath when she zeroed in on the wet seep of blood beneath the jacket. A gunshot wound.
The hole was ragged at the edges, indicating that the bullet hadn’t been going full power when it hit him, and the bruise track suggested it had deflected off his shoulder blade and done more damage to his trapezius muscle than his skeleton. The skin around the injury was inflamed and angry, the blood clotted in some places, still seeping in others. She pressed on his back near the wound, digging into the lax muscles on either side of his spine, hoping the bullet had stayed close to the surface, praying it hadn’t fragmented and deflected into vital organs.
He groaned in obvious pain, but didn’t move. His hand had fallen away from her ankle, as though having made that effort he’d lapsed more deeply unconscious.
She couldn’t find the bullet, but confirmed that his reflexes were decent in his legs, and, having removed his boots, his feet. Her brain spun. The basic exam didn’t indicate an immediate spine injury, but the bullet could lie near the vital areas, poised to shift and impinge on the critical nerves if she made a wrong move. She needed more information, needed an X-ray, needed—hell, she needed a doctor who had more experience with living tissue than dead, one who wasn’t faintly unnerved to feel warmth beneath her fingertips.
The heat of him, so unlike the refrigerated flesh she touched on a daily basis, unsettled her. More, it wasn’t just any living body. It was Romo’s living body, which should’ve been impossible.
Where the hell have you been? she wanted to shout at him. How could you let everyone think you were dead?
By “everyone” she meant herself and his parents, because while the funeral had been well attended, and dozens of cops, agents and other staffers had railed against the prison riot that had taken his life, as far as she’d been able to tell, she had been one of the few who had truly mourned his death, one of the few who’d truly considered him a friend, even after everything that had happened between them.
His parents had been there. They’d been shattered and disbelieving, and Sara hadn’t had the strength to say anything to them, hadn’t wanted to try to define her nonrelationship with their son. And maybe she hadn’t wanted to admit that she’d been grieving more for what she and Romo’d had in the past, for the man she’d thought him, not the man he’d turned out to be.
Who, apparently, was alive, though not well.
Crouched beside him, one hand on his warm, bloodsoaked shoulder, Sara fought an inner battle. She should call for an ambulance, get him to the hospital. The surgeons could deal with the bullet, the cops with his fate. She didn’t owe him anything.
But instead of reaching for the phone, she picked up his note and scanned it a second time. Nobody can know that I’m here. That was straightforward enough, though difficult under the circumstances, when she needed to get him to an ER. Life or death. But whose life or death. Hers? His? A larger threat?
Prior to his death—or what she’d thought was his death—Romo had been working with the BCCPD and occasionally the FBI, using his undeniable computer skills in an effort to ferret out the suspected terrorist conspirators within the BCCPD. Though he’d set his sights on Sara’s office as the center of the conspiracy—no doubt thanks in part to Proudfoot’s influence—Romo had also been looking at other departments, other cops. Then he’d been killed—supposedly—in the prison riot.
The rumors had said his death had been no accident, that he’d been getting too close to the conspirators and they’d managed to take him out.
From there, Sara realized, it was a short leap to believing that his apparently faked death was related to the case, too. What if he’d used it to drop under deep cover? Chelsea’s fiancé, Fax, had pretended to be a killer in order to get himself incarcerated in the ARX Supermax, in an effort to get close to al-Jihad. It was certainly possible that Romo, though a detective rather than an agent, had done something