"It was the only one left standing. I took a chance."
Her gaze searched his face. "Why are you lying to me?"
"I'm not." A siren finally sounded in the distance. He glanced past her, watching the red and blue lights of the ambulance draw close. "The ambulance is here.'
"I want to go home, not to the hospital."
"Your home's been bombed, remember?" He brushed a strand of hair from her forehead.
She jerked away from his touch, expression annoyed as she glared up at him. "I don't care."
"Okay. But let the doctor examine you first."
"Fine." She crossed her arms and stared at him mutinously.
He knew her silence would only last until they were alone. Then she'd want answers — answers he had no intention of giving.
The ambulance officers trotted across, medical bags in hand. She bore their ministrations in silence, though he could feel her annoyance, a wave of heat that washed past his mind. Having opened the link to find her, he could now feel her emotions as easily as he breathed. Touching her thoughts was only a matter of reaching out... But he had no intention of playing with that sort of fire. He'd shared such a link with Andrea. Once was more than enough.
"Severe bruising around the hip and torso area, but otherwise, you seem okay," The ambulance officer said. "You might want to go to the hospital as a precautionary measure — "
"No, I'm fine, really." She flashed Gabriel an I-told-you-so look. "I'll just go home and rest."
"Good idea." The two officers packed up their bags and walked back to the ambulance.
Gabriel called a cab and then held out his hand. She hesitated only briefly before accepting his assistance. She was still wobbly on her feet, no matter how fit she claimed to be.
The cab came within minutes. He helped her inside, climbed in beside her and punched her address into the onboard computer. Despite his earlier thoughts to the contrary, she asked no further questions. Maybe she'd finally given up.
It took half an hour to reach her apartment. Several SIU gray fords were parked out front, but the police vehicles had gone. No lights shone in any of the windows above or below her apartment — perhaps the neighbors were getting used to being woken by bomb blasts in the middle of the night.
They made their way up the stairs. Sam showed little emotion as she stepped through the shattered doorway to her apartment.
He watched her limp to the bedroom, and then he moved across the living room to the window. Yet again she'd escaped a bomb blast by diving out into the night. He stopped and stared at the pavement below. At the very least, she should have broken a limb in a fall like that. But her bruising had come from the car, not the fall.
It would be interesting to see what O'Hearn came up with.
He turned from the window as two SIU men, bags in hand, filed out of the bedroom.
"Anything to be found, Burton?"
The big man shook his head. "Bomb was incendiary, as you can see by the flame damage. Meant to kill rather than cause structural damage. We picked out a few fragments and we'll see where they lead."
"Send me a report as soon as you can."
The big man nodded. Gabriel got out his viaphone and ordered a pickup on Dr. Jane Francis. Then he walked into the bedroom. Sam stood in the middle of the room, staring at the mess of soggy boxes almost blindly.
"Sometimes I wish I could step back in time," she said, voice a little distant, and etched with pain. "Just go back to a time when my partner was my best friend, and I was just a plain old orphan, not some kind of freak."
Her pain ran through him, a living thing he could almost taste and touch. He ached to reach out, to hold her. Remember Andrea, he told himself sternly. Don't get involved too deeply.
"We all wish for things that cannot be," he said, voice sharp. "Sometimes we just have to accept fate and get on with it."
She snorted softly. "Like you're getting on with it, Assistant Director?"
He frowned. "What do you mean?"
She didn't answer, simply shook her head and picked her way toward the window. "What do you want me to do about Francis?"