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He had never seen her cry.
That didn’t mean she was cold, emotionless; he knew she cared passionately. It just meant she was tough. Tough enough to stand side by side with him against a world that contained too much evil; tough enough to see that evil, to fight against it and not let it destroy her soul; tough enough to walk in front of a bullet meant for someone else because to her that was her job—protecting others.
That’s why he loved her.
Cody breathed deeply as he finally acknowledged the truth, the answer to questions he hadn’t even known he had. He’d subconsciously fought calling it love, because the only other time he’d loved a woman it had ended in disaster. But he loved Keira. And just as he remembered every moment he’d spent with her, every word she’d ever said to him was imprinted in his heart, especially those two words, “I will.”
“Trust me,” he’d told her that first night, and she’d responded promptly, “I will.” But now he desperately wanted to tell her other things, things he might never have the chance to say.
Love me.
Need me.
Marry me.
And he wanted to hear the same two words from her in reply—I will.
He couldn’t fathom a world without Keira. He glanced up and caught Callahan watching him, compassion looking out of place on that hard, cold face. But Cody knew that if any man could comprehend the enormity of what he stood to lose, Callahan could, because that’s how he felt about Mandy.
Mandy. Cody spared a moment to think about her, contrasting what he’d felt for her then to what he felt for Keira now. There was no comparison. Losing Mandy to Callahan all those years ago had torn out his heart. But he had survived. Losing Keira would tear out his soul. He would never recover.
“So where’s McKinnon?” Callahan asked, breaking into his thoughts, almost as if he knew what Cody was thinking and wanted to distract him.
“Picking up the pieces,” Cody replied. He laughed humorlessly. “At least that’s what I figure he’s doing—implementing the agency’s special rule eight—when all else fails, pick up the pieces.”
“You mean make them disappear?” That was a side of Callahan that was after Cody’s own heart—he called a spade a spade, and didn’t resort to euphemisms.
“Yeah. That’s exactly what it means.”
“I don’t like it.” Long before Callahan had become the sheriff of Black Rock, long before he’d gone undercover with the New World Militia, he’d been a New York City cop—a good one.
“I don’t either,” Cody admitted.
“So, what are you going to do about it?” There was a challenge in Callahan’s voice.
“Not a hell of a lot I can do about it.”
“If that’s the case, seems to me the agency isn’t much better than the organizations we’re after,” Callahan said slowly. “No one should be above the law—not the New World Militia, not NOANC, not Michael Vishenko. And not the agency.”
“So, what are you suggesting?”
Callahan told him, in clipped sentences, and Cody considered it. “It would almost certainly mean the end of my career with the agency,” he said finally. “But—”
Just then the double doors swung open, and a tired-looking man in blue hospital scrubs walked out. Cody’s breathing grew ragged, and his heartbeat kicked into overdrive.
“Are you waiting to hear about Keira Jones?” the surgeon asked. Cody and Callahan were the only ones around, so he had to know...
Cody took a step toward him. “Yes?”
“She’s stable. That’s about all I can tell you at this point. We got her heart started again....” At Cody’s quickly indrawn breath he explained, “It’s a condition called hypovolemic shock—she lost a lot of blood, and the drop in blood pressure caused her heart to stop beating. But we got it going again, we’ve replaced the blood volume she lost, and her blood pressure is up—these are all good things.
“The bullet was a through and through, so it didn’t bounce around inside doing more damage, and we didn’t have to extract it. One lung collapsed, but that’s okay now, too. Our biggest concern at this point is the loss of blood, and whether we were in time to prevent irreversible organ failure. I’m afraid all we can do now is wait and see.”
