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Maddox had the nerve to rub a hand across his smooth jaw and sigh like he didn’t fully believe her. Ironic since that part was one of the few truths in her statement. “Agent Little, undercover agents are often required to—”
“To rape and murder teenage girls? Really Maddox? That’s how you’re going to spin this?”
Finally, a flush rose on his cheeks, and he looked abashed. “No, of course not. I’m just saying that maybe the situation wasn’t quite as evil as it seemed.”
Stephanie leaned forward across the table. “He admitted to being fully loyal to Shark. To. My. Face.” A hard slap to the tabletop between each word had the wound on her wrist burning. Whispered it in my ear right before he tried to rape me.”
“Fuck,” Maddox said as though this third time through it finally sank in.
“We still need something on the Handlers.”
“Why?” She scrunched her forehead. “We were never there for them. The Gray Dragons are trafficking woman, and we now have proof. We’ve never been interested in the Handlers before. Why now?”
“Both Shark’s and Agent Rey’s bodies were found at the house, charred to near dust.”
Rey’s? How on earth had the Handlers pulled that one off? Nope. She didn’t need or want to know. At least there was one thing she was in the dark about.
“That can’t slide, Agent Little. They may have done us a favor by taking the assholes out, but it’s still murder of an FBI agent. Doesn’t matter if he was crooked. Please give me something. Think hard. Anything you heard, saw? Even if it seems insignificant now.”
Pinching the bridge of her nose, Stephanie chuckled. “Ever spent any time around bikers?”
Maddox shook his head.
“They’re all a bunch of hot-headed, macho alphas. Real men,” she said in an exaggerated man voice. “They don’t tell the little women anything about their business. And I wasn’t even one of their women. You think they were going to let any tidbits drop around me? You think they were going to let me see anything that was going on? You’re fooling yourself.”
Lie.
So many lies.
“All right,” Maddox finally said, pushing back his chair and rising to his full height of only five-feet-six inches.
After spending days around men who made her feel child-sized, it was odd to be in the presence of a man who only had three inches on her. Sent her on a bit of a power trip. He couldn’t intimidate her with his size if he tried.
“I think that’s enough for today. We’ll be sending some agents down to talk to the Handlers, but that will be a big fat dead-end, I’m sure.”
She nodded. None of the bikers would talk. Not for a million bucks.
“We may have some follow-up questions as the investigation goes on. You know the drill.”
Another nod from her. All of a sudden, the interrogation room felt about the size of a doll’s house, and she needed to get the hell out before she broke through the walls. “You know where to find me.”
He opened the door and gestured for her to precede him. “Take some leave,” he said. More like ordered.
“I’d planned to.” She held up her casted wrist. “Not much good on a computer with this thing.”
“You’ve been approved for two months. SAC Baccarella wants you to take it all. Make sure your head is on straight and let your arm heal. Come back when the cast gets removed.”
“Yes, sir.” She left him standing in the hallway staring after her. Part of her wanted to sprint back to him and demand to know if he bought her story, but that was a dead giveaway as to the falsity of her statement. So, she marched forward and tried like hell to ignore the disapproval in Maddox’s gaze.
As she stepped out of the FBI Headquarters and onto Pennsylvania Avenue, a pit settled low in her gut. Two months was a long time. Under normal circumstances, she’d be thrilled with a mandatory sixty days paid vacation. Now, however, the thought of eight weeks off, alone in her one-bedroom apartment, all her friends at work during the day…it sounded like a recipe for nothing but hours and hours of obsessing over the horrendous choices she’d made in the past few days.
How was it that with just a few full revolutions of the Earth, her life could have been turned so completely on its head? Nothing made sense anymore. Not her belief system, not her career, not her attraction to a man so wrong for her and, most importantly, not herself. The thought of going home and looking at herself in the mirror turned the pit in her stomach into full-on nausea. She was petrified that the woman staring back at her would be unrecognizable.
And now she had two months to do nothing but fear arrest, drown in guilt, and pine for a man she had irrational but powerful feelings for.
