He needed her to keep walking right out of his life before she got any deeper under his skin.
seventeen
Naomi triedto keep herself busy and her mind off Ghost for the rest of the day. She’d checked in on the Padillas, even though she hated to report she had hit an investigative wall. Then she’d visited her grandmother’s house for tea, which turned into an entire afternoon of getting her hair re-braided and helping with “projects” while Grandma Ava grilled her about every single decision she’d made since coming home. Had she eaten today? Was she getting enough sleep? Did her cousin Julius ever tell her about that trouble up near Kootenai Creek? Did she want to run for tribal council this winter?
On and on, endless, until Naomi finally escaped with a Tupperware of fry bread and a new ache behind her eyes.
She drove the long way back to her rental. Snow dusted the mountain shoulders above town, and the clouds hung low and bruised, threatening more.
Now she puttered around her house, unpacking boxes, getting ready for the planned girls’ night with Greta. She’d promised herself a normal night—wine, gossip, maybe a terrible movie—anything to feel like her old self again…
But she couldn’t get a certain man with ice-storm eyes out of her head.
Ghost.
Owen.
Whoever the hell he was. She wasn’t starting to think he didn’t even know, but it wasn’t her problem anymore, was it? She’d seen the look in his eyes as she walked away. He wanted her, maybe, but not more than he wanted to keep his secrets.
Her eyes stung.
“Damn it,” she muttered, tugging the sleeves of his hoodie down over her hands to swipe at the tears she refused to cry. She shouldn’t still be wearing the damn sweatshirt, but she couldn’t bring herself to take it off. It smelled like him— the heady cling of his cigar smoke and something cleaner, like rain on pavement.
Her phone pinged with a text from Greta:
Running late. Traffic on the pass. Be there in about 20 minutes. Your turn to pick the movie. Something funny, please, I’ve had a day.
Naomi stared at the text, thumb hovering over the keyboard. Twenty minutes. She could pull herself together in twenty minutes, right? Clear her head, get the wine breathing, maybe even change out of Ghost’s hoodie and into something that didn’t scream “I’m hung up on a man who just walked away from me.”
But she didn’t want to change.
She set the phone down without answering and crossed to her laptop, still open on the kitchen counter. The FBI database login screen stared back, the cursor blinking accusingly from the password bar. Using her credentials while on leave wasn’t exactly illegal, but it was ethically questionable since she wasn’t planning to return once her leave was up. But the doors were still open, for now—a bureaucratic backchannel nobody bothered to close.
“Just a quick look,” she whispered to the empty room and sat down in front of the computer. “Then I’m done.”
She entered her password and held her breath. For a moment, the screen froze, and her heart stuttered. Then it loaded, granting her access to files she no longer had any right to see.
She typed “Owen ‘Ghost’ Booker” into the search bar.
The results loaded slowly. Government databases always did, probably on purpose. The first few entries were routine—background checks, employment verifications, the usual bureaucratic paper trail that followed someone through life. But the deeper she dug, the less she found. The files were a masterpiece of redaction. Whole pages blacked out, with only tantalizing fragments visible.
Six deployments to locations unnamed.
Security clearances that would make most FBI agents envious.
Psychological assessments that hinted at “exceptional stress tolerance” and “atypical emotional processing.”
Whatever that meant.
Buried in one heavily redacted file, she found a photo. He looked younger, dressed in desert camo with a rifle slung across his chest. His eyes were the same, but everything else was different. The man in the photo stood with easy confidence, a half-smile caught mid-conversation with someone cropped out of the frame. It was like looking at a ghost of the Ghost she knew—someone who’d existed before the walls went up.
The file’s header contained a code name: SPECTRAL. Everything else was black bars and blank space.
A chill crept up her spine. This wasn’t just standard redaction. This was the kind of erasure reserved for operations that never officially happened, for agents whose real names never appeared on any roster.
She scrolled further, pulse quickening. One paragraph stood out amid the sea of black:
Subject: Owen James Booker
