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“You feel so good,” I husked.

“So do you, Detective. Now tell me about your sealed juvenile record.”

“Okay.”

And he listened attentively, never once glancing away, as I recalled the greatest horror of my life. When I was done, I waited for his response—the outrage, the righteous anger for me and for what had happened, the yelling that was the usual reaction of everyone I’d ever confessed the truth to.

“Your brother must have loved you so much,” he said gruffly, tears in his voice as he leaned forward to hold me as tight as he could.

No doubt about it, Aaron Sutter knew my heart as no one ever had. I was never going to let him go.

FOURTEEN

The following morning, Saturday, I understood the mess we were actually in when I woke up and realized the image of the outside door I was looking at had changed.

“What happened to the camera angle?” I asked Aaron.

“They shot down the camera over the door last night.”

I jolted. “Why didn’t you wake me?”

“For you to do what?” Aaron studied me. “Yell? You needed your sleep, and I can still see them, just a little farther away now.”

“Aaron––”

“Drink some water, please,” he suggested.

“Aaron––”

“Lie down,” he ordered me the second time. “Now.”

I did what I was told. “I need coffee.”

“I would kill someone for coffee, so let’s not talk about that.”

I chuckled and noted that my head nearly exploded.

“Owww,” I muttered.

“You see? You’re supposed to hydrate and sleep. That’s all.”

“I want to keep you company, and besides, I just woke up.”

“Yes, well, all your body knows is that sleep is healing, so please, put your head down.”

“You promise to wake me if anything new happens?”

“I will, yes.”

I closed my eyes.

I woke up a couple times, once to pee, once to drink more water, and the third time, I just lay there and watched him. He was dozing, elbow propped up, cheek resting on the back of his hand, neither completely asleep nor awake. The man was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen, even with bags under his eyes.

Saturday evening, he was giving me the same story, that everything would be fine. In my opinion, he was being very optimistic, but the reality was that Clay Wells could not let us out of his surveillance tower.

Wells wasn’t stupid; he probably had a pretty good idea why a homicide detective would go in there and what I was after. He also had to have figured out that either Aaron or I could work the interface. He was probably kicking himself for not putting a passcode on it. His biggest problem, however, was time.

Monday morning, Aaron Sutter was supposed to walk off the property. Miguel Romero would be waiting for him at the gate in forty-eight hours. If Aaron didn’t show, Miguel would start with a call to Special Agent Summers, move on to a press conference, and end by calling the governor. It was, Aaron assured me, Miguel’s SOP to basically scramble the Marines.