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“Thank you for not making me go into foster care or witness protection. Thanks for being the best zio ever.”
“Baby girl.” His chest hurt. Dante knew how the Grinch felt when his heart expanded—it fuckinghurt. Dante wasn’t one for big emotional scenes, but Daniella was doing her best to get him there. He reached out, intending to take her into a hug.
She drew back, a horrified expression on her face, her eyebrows scrunching together.
“I amnota baby girl. It’s sexist. And creepy, too.” The added growl reminded Dante very much of Simone. “You should know better.”
Oh, for thefuckinglove of god, washegoing to survive raising Daniella to adulthood? He needed one of those magic eight ball things to help him out. If there were such a thing as ghosts, then Simone’s was in the kitchen laughing her ass off at him right now.
* * *
Friday had finally arrived, and, against Dante’s better judgment, Daniella was spending the night with Romy. Earlier in the week while Dani was at school, Dante had driven by the tiny house Romy lived in just to check it out.
The house itself was fine. Their neighbor appeared to be some sort of sculpture artist as that lawn was full of wooden eagles in midflight, bears in all sorts of poses, some sort of merman, and even what Dante suspected was supposed to be a Sasquatch. Cooper Springs was definitely unique. At least he knew there were makeshift weapons at hand if the girls needed them.
He’d run a cursory background check on Vincent Barone too. Maybe not standard guardian behavior, but a paranoid uncle was all Daniella had standing between her and some Very Bad People. And he’d be damned if something happened to her because he’d been careless about her safety.
Not that he expected them to come after her here in Cooper Springs, almost two hundred miles from Salem, but it never hurt to be prepared. Hypervigilant? Absolutely.
Dante shifted in the driver’s seat as he stared out the windshield at a different house. He was also horny. And the horny part had definitely hijacked Dante’s common sense tonight. He had an evening to himself for the first time in three months and knew exactly what he wanted to do with it.
Or who.
Not only had Dante researched the shop teacher, but he’d given into the need to root out Dear’s new home address. Last night he’d assured himself he was just curious as his fingers flew across the keys and he pressed Enter, waiting for the numbers he wanted to pop up on his screen. He wasn’t going to do anything with the information, of course; he just wanted to have it.
Just curious.
That had been the first lie he’d told himself. The second lie had been that he was just going to drive by and see for himself what kind of place André lived in now. That’s what he was telling himself tonight. The first, second—and third—times he’d passed the practical wood-shingled home André lived in, it had been dark, and no car had been parked on the street out front. Now there was a light on inside. It called to Dante like some sort of beacon.
“I am so fucked,” he muttered to himself.
Seeing André Dear kitted out in a police chief’s togs and standing in front of the crowd at The Steam Donkey had about undone Dante. He’d forced himself to stand at the back of the room, but André had seen him too. Disbelief had flashed across his face before his expression shuttered and he started taking questions about the remains found in the woods.
Dante had a weakness for a man in uniform. Add a crisp shirt and slacks to his already established weakness for André Dear, and he was done for. Of course, his current situation was his own fault since he was the one who’d declined witness protection and moved Daniella to tiny Cooper Springs instead of Minnesota. It had been easy enough for Dante to ferret out André’s new job. And once he had the information, there was no way he was heading anywhere else.
“What do I think I’m doing?” He asked himself as he stopped at the curb in front of a parked minivan. “If Dear wanted me to know where he was going back in February, he would have told me.”
But he hadn’t.
The wind buffeted the car and dots of moisture smacked against his windshield, beaded, and began rolling downward. Dante continued to stare at the tidy bungalow.
Admittedly, being undercover meant only serious emergencies—like his sister being murdered—were communicated to him. And they’d never had that kind of relationship anyway. Dante had showed up when he had an itch to scratch and that was the extent of it.
But was that really true?
Last year, knocking on André’s door and having it answered by a thirty-something woman with a kid peeking out from behind her had been a shock. An unpleasant one. The man had moved away with no notice, and Dante had at first been worried and then hurt. His own reaction had been a surprise to him, forcing him to admit to himself that—against his better judgment—he harbored complicated, unexpected, and unacknowledged feelings for André Dear.
Sure, their relationship had had prescribed limits because of Dante’s undercover work, but theseemotionshad snuck up on him anyway. Andmaybehis last visit to Dear’s apartment had been fueled by the idea that there could be something more between them, something maybe worth giving up undercover ops for. Thatmaybehis vague plan, one that involved Dante coming out into the open, possibly switching to the Marshals Service like André, had been less about walking away from the grime of UC work and more about walking to whatever the two of them could maybe have together.
That was a lot of maybes.
But he’d needed to finish that assignment. And when he’d surfaced again and shown up on that doorstep, André had been long gone. So he’d taken another UC assignment in eastern Oregon.
“I’ll just knock on the door,” Dante said out loud, shutting off the engine. “If he wants me to leave, I’ll leave.”
Second-guessing his decision, but not enough to stop himself, Dante opened the car door and climbed out. The shades were drawn, so Dante couldn’t see inside, but behind them, a shadowy figure crossed the room and lowered itself down.
The wind gusted again, plastering his jacket against his back as he stared at the house. Down the street, a gate rattled. Dante shivered and hunched his shoulders against the chill.
