desk as Tobias would have taught her, Isabelle pivots back around to face the exit. Our eyes nearly collide, but a picture on the side wall gains her attention before they lock and hold. It’s a photograph of Tobias on the wall honoring fallen agents.
Just like the morning she found out about Tobias’s death, pain fills her eyes, but there’s also pride shining through. Tobias was her family, I’ve been her shelter for the past six months, and now the Bureau will be her savior, once I push her application through the right channels.
Brandon
Eight months later…
“I’m not doing it, Grayson. The last time I stuck my neck out for you, your brother’s girl walked out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel.”
Grayson scoffs. “Exactly! She was in a towel. She wasn’t naked.”
I continue speaking as if he never did. “Then you used the files I found on her computer, which could have gotten your brother in a heap of shit. You know he’s not speaking to his girl anymore, right? Regan moved back to some bumfuckville town months ago, and they haven’t been in contact since.”
“They’ve had contact,” Grayson denies, his tone lowering. “It didn’t go down well.”
“Exactly!” I agree. “I’m not doing that again. If you want info from Alex, ask him for it.”
Alex is Grayson’s younger brother. He’s also my supervisor. He is a deadly marksman like Grayson but with the arrogance of their father, which grew worse after he granted me access to his girlfriend’s laptop. I forgot that any computer accessed by the FBI’s mainframe automatically uploads the hard drive to the Bureau’s servers. By the time I had noticed my error, it was too late, they had everything.
“It’s a bank record, BJ. I’m not asking you to take one up the ass for the team.” Grayson’s voice switches from stern to playful in under two seconds. “If I were, we would have gotten Theresa off everyone’s back earlier than we did.”
I shake my head as my stomach rolls. I should have taken Zayne’s advice eight months ago. Theresa, my previous supervisor, was a nasty piece of work. She belittled agents who had years more experience than her and treated everyone as if they were disposable—even more so when they turned down her offer for a nightcap after a long working week.
I discovered that the hard way my first week under her command.
She was more than friendly when I reported for duty at precisely nine in the morning the first Monday of my shift. She showed me the ropes, pointed out the best places to grab a bite to eat between shifts, and even went as far as picking me up a coffee on her way to work Thursday morning.
It all went to shit when I turned down her offer for a ‘friendly’ drink after my Friday night shift. My polite rejection was quickly chased by a change in my roster. Instead of having the weekend off as predicted, I was required to conduct surveillance on a supposedly high-ranked target.
I was twelve hours into a sixteen-hour shift when I bumped into Alex for the first time. He ‘accidentally’ spilled my tenth cup of coffee onto my keyboard with the hope he could wipe his kiss with an associate of the target our division was investigating. I led him to believe that was what occurred, although it wasn’t close to the truth.
As taught by Grayson, I back up every piece of equipment I use. It was for the best. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had any footage of the perp who had entered Regan’s apartment to leave her a rather nasty threat. His exit was never recorded.
I had no clue how unfit I had become during my six-month suspension until I ran the stairwell of Regan’s apartment building when I spotted the perp’s exit on the security camera we were tailing after Alex had entered. Mr. Gregg would have rolled in his grave if he’d seen how red-faced and out of breath I was. It was a quick reminder that this game is as physical as it is mind-fucking. I’ve visited the gym once a day since.
We caught the perp who entered Regan’s apartment. It wasn’t who we anticipated, but his arrest was the equivalent of stomping on an anthill. It’s been one motherfucking tornado after another since then. Grayson’s request for me to dig a little deeper into Isaac’s—my team’s target—connection with Henry Gottle had us stumbling onto information no one outside of Isaac’s tight-knit team knew