Chapter Twenty-four: Shallow

Gia

SHALLOW

Performed by Danielle Bradbery and Parker McCollum

I considered myself a fit humanbeing. Unlike other NSA analysts who never left headquarters, I spent the majority of my time in the field as part of the Special Collection Service and had to be prepared to defend myself and any team members with me. I’d been trained at FLETC, the government’s training center in Virginia, right along with other analysts and agents from multiple federal agencies. After, I’d maintained my strength by spending hours at a CrossFit gym, in a kickboxing ring, and pounding the pavement. All that to say, I wasn’t out of shape, but come lunchtime, my body was sore from running the nail gun and helping Ryder hold up plank after plank. Addy had stayed at our side, helping as she could with a quiet determination. Every time Ryder praised her, she glowed like someone had shone a flashlight on her.

By the time snow started to come down in a steady thrum, I was ready for a break. My nose, toes, and fingers were practically numb from the frigid air even as a bead of sweat dripped down my back. Addy looked just as frozen as I felt, but Ryder… He looked as if withstanding the snow gods was something he did all the damn time. He looked like he belonged in a calendar for the good ol’ boys of winter.

His cheeks had the barest tinge of red, his cowboy hat was tilted back slightly, and his dark hair curled out from underneath it. His corduroy work jacket lined with flannel was worn but not shabby, and his jeans clung to his narrow hips and muscled thighs like they were made especially for him. The well-used tool belt accentuated the fact that he wasn’t some random model but a man comfortable with hard work. Hands callused and strong. The same hands that had run along my skin and touched my breasts last night, bringing me closer to the edge in mere minutes than any man before him had when I’d been fully naked.

“Lunchtime,” Ryder said. He hollered into the cabin at the other two workers, and all five of us headed for the farmhouse.

When we got to the parking lot, Enrique was gone. I pulled my phone from my pocket with fingers that could barely move. I’d missed a text from him, reading that he was following up on a lead, but he’d be back later.

We’d just helped ourselves to huge helpings of the soup Eva had left in the crockpot and the same sourdough bread from the day before when Eva, Brandon, and Sadie walked in. The women’s faces looked sad and tear-stained, and even Brandon’s eyes looked red.

Ryder’s dad gave him a hug that was much more than a masculine back pat. This one clung on and spoke of love. It made me miss my dad and my brother for some reason, made me long to go home and hug my family and make sure they knew how much they meant to me—all thoughts I was unaccustomed to in the middle of a job where normally only the case filled my brain. Except, this case was starting to feel less and less like work and more and more like…nothing I could think of without my heart hurting.

“Sit down,” Ryder said to his family. “I’ll dish you up.”

And my heart twisted again. Ryder was good at taking care of the people he loved. I bet he’d doted on Ravyn, and once he’d found out she was pregnant, I bet he’d waited on her hand and foot. The letter she’d written had said she loved him, loved him even now, but she’d still walked away. While part of me understood—if she was part of the Lovato family and they wanted her back, they’d stop at nothing to get her—the other part of me wondered what would have happened if she’d trusted the Hatleys to help. If she’d trusted Ryder and his sheriff brother to protect her, would the Lovatos have fallen years ago, before they’d embedded themselves right at the top of the criminal world?

It felt like she’d taken the easy way out. It would have been harder to stay. Harder to trust. Harder to risk everything.

What would I have done if I’d been in her shoes? If I had someone like Ryder adoring me, taking care of me, loving me—would I have left? Especially while carrying his child? The idea nauseated me, and I pushed my bowl away to focus on the people in the room rather than my tormented thoughts.

Shawn and Ramon offered their condolences to the family while Ryder worked on ladling soup into bowls for his parents and Sadie.

“How’d it go at the funeral home?” Ryder asked his mama.

“We’ll hold the funeral Friday with a celebration of life at the bar afterward,” Eva said, rubbing her forehead.

Addy shifted in her seat next to me, and I looked down. Her face had been smiling and open all morning, but now she’d shut down.

“Once Gemma gets here, we need to talk to all four of you about his will and his estate,” Eva said.

Sadie shot Eva a concerned look that had curiosity spiking in me—curiosity I shouldn’t have as this had nothing to do with me or the case. If Ryder had noticed too, he didn’t say anything, letting it drop.

We finished our meal, I helped clean up, and then the five of us who’d been working all morning headed for the door.

As we stepped outside, I halted. The snow was still flitting to the ground in soft, silent waves, and the temperature had dropped another couple degrees. In the forty-five minutes or so we’d been inside, the snow had stuck and begun to build. A few inches was all, but it was enough to turn the world into a black-and-white photograph. A delightful portrait of winter farm life. Buildings and fields and fences all coated with powder. Our breaths left a smoky cloud in the air.

“Well, I think we’re done with the siding for the day,” Ryder huffed.

“We can still get a few hours in on the electrical,” Ramon offered.

“It’ll be colder than a frosted frog.”

Shawn laughed. “Nothing we aren’t used to.”

The two men dropped their cowboy hats onto their heads and stomped down off the porch, heading toward the cabins. They left dark, sooty footprints in their wake.

Addy leaned forward off the porch, sticking her hand out, catching the flakes. They melted at first and then stuck to her little palm. She looked up at Ryder with a smile on her face that took my breath away. She was an incredibly beautiful little girl, even when somber and serious, but when she lit up like this, it was almost miraculous.

“Snow,” she said softly.

“You ever been in the snow?” he asked.

She shook her head. “Mama didn’t like the cold.”

Ryder gave a quiet chuckle. “She really didn’t. She’d wear so many layers during winter it looked like she was a ball you could roll down the hill. She even wore three pairs of socks to bed.”

The little girl looked up with both sadness and interest in her gaze. What I felt was the same jealousy I’d been having over a dead woman. Because Ryder knew what she looked like in bed. Because she’d shared a bed with him. But I also felt a strange affinity with her as we had at least two things in common—I wasn’t overly fond of the cold myself, and I found myself strangely attracted to the man Ravyn had been engaged to.

“If you’d like, I can grab some gloves from Sadie for you, and we can build a snowman,” he suggested, and Addy nodded, smile growing wider. He turned toward the door and looked back at me. “You need a different pair of gloves?”

My fingerless ones were definitely not up to the challenge of snow play. As a kid, Holden basically had to bribe me to put myself through the torture of wet and ice. But the idea of playing with Ryder and Addy—watching her experience it for the first time—didn’t seem like torture at all. I shrugged. “Sure.”

He raised a brow at my half-hearted response and then disappeared into the house.

He was back sooner than I liked with a small pair of rainbow mittens and a matching beanie for Addy and a pair of purple gloves for me. “Lucky for us, Mila left these here.”

As I pulled on the gloves, Ryder helped Addy tuck her hair into the beanie and tug the mittens on.

We stepped down into the snow, and Ryder led us out past the barn in the opposite direction of the cabins into the wide-open pasture where the animals had grazed when I’d been here in the summer. At the far end of the field, bright-red crabapples shimmered against dark branches layered with pure white, and I wanted to take a hundred pictures of it all from different angles. Ones that included just the landscape and ones that included the pleasure radiating from Addy’s face and the gentle smile on Ryder’s as he watched his daughter.

Addy and I followed his instructions, patting the loose snow into tight, round balls and then rolling them along the ground. The balls collected sticks and dried grass along the way as the snow wasn’t really deep enough yet. But eventually, we had three balls of differing sizes that he helped us pile on top of each other. He jogged to the trees and came back, helping Addy place sticks for arms, not yet fully grown crabapples for a wide mouth, and more crabapples down the front of the snowman as buttons. Then, they searched under the snow for pebbles to make the eyes and a nose.

We all stood back and admired the sad little snowman. He was hardly the perfect shape, and the snow had been too thin for him to be pristine, but it was a snowman. Addy laid a mittened palm on it with a reverence that made my heart skip several beats.

“He’s missing something,” Ryder said, one eye closed, assessing the crooked mass.

“Hat,” Addy said.

He chuckled. “Yep.” He pulled his cowboy hat off and placed it on the snowman’s head.

Addy laughed, and the sound traveled through the cold air like fairy wings. Soft and light and bringing joy.

“We have to name him if we want him to come alive,” Ryder said, voice lowered as if he was telling her a secret. “Only snowmen with names can visit your dreams and grant wishes.”

I held back a snort because Addy was eating up his words like they were pure sugar.

“What should we call him?” she asked. Her fully formed sentences kept catching me off guard when they happened, tugging at all those emotions floating around inside me.

“He’s your first snowman, so you get to name him.”

“Why does it have to be a guy?” I asked. “Couldn’t it be a girl?”

Ryder looked up at me, and his smile was as wide as his daughter’s. They both were beautiful. Stunning in a way that made them glow as if the sun had come out even though it was still tucked behind dark clouds and shimmering snowflakes.

“It can be whatever gender you want it to be,” he said, winking at Addy.

After a moment of deep thought, she whispered, “Rosalinda.”

My eyes caught Ryder’s. That was such a unique and specific name that it had to mean something.

“Yeah?” he asked.

“My abuela was Rosalinda.”

The name tickled at the back of my brain. Something from one of my files. Something about the Lovatos. Damn. I hated not being able to pull it to the surface. I’d go back through them tonight and see what I could find.

“Did you meet your abuela?” I asked.

She shook her head. “She went to heaven when Mama was little like me.”

“Rosalinda it is,” Ryder said, handing Addy a stick. “Can you write her name? Here at the base of the snowwoman?”

Addy took the stick and started to carve the name in the growing layer of snow. She seemed to be thinking about the sounds as she did it, taking her time, and ended up using a U for the As. But at least she could write and spell. She’d had some kind of schooling.

Ryder handed me his phone. “Can you take a picture?”

My throat clogged, thinking about all the pictures he’d missed with his daughter. Thinking of the photo albums at my house filled with pictures of me and my family. Thinking about the ones Eva had shown Addy and me of his childhood. He didn’t have those with Addy. He’d had so much stolen from him that he’d never get back. And if those thoughts carved sharply through me, I couldn’t even imagine what they did to him.

These two humans belonged together with their matching smiles and love drifting around them. My heart and body ached once more for that “something” I’d never wanted. A man. A little girl. Ties that would tether me to this place instead of letting me float freely around the globe. It was absolutely contrary to everything I’d ever seen for myself. Even growing up, I’d recognized that all the spy heroes I idolized had only received pain from relationships because the life they led wasn’t fit for them. Instead, it got people killed. The hero’s love interest rarely made it through unscathed or even alive.

Ryder kneeled on the ground, bringing his height in line with our snowman, and tucked Addy up in front of him. They both sent those wide smiles in my direction, and I clicked several shots. I handed him his phone back, and then, without really thinking about it, I dropped down on my knees with them, leaned in, and took a selfie with all of us. It was crooked and blurred with snow, but it had four faces in it, one made of ice and fruit, but they were all smiling.

That moment seemed full of the magic Ryder had accused Mila of having. It made me want to believe in the wishes granted by snowmen. It made me wish for something I knew wasn’t mine to have.

I longed to belong to them.

For them to belong to me.

And I really didn’t know what to make of it—what to make of this Gia yearning for an unexpected family.

“Come on. Hot chocolate is a must now,” Ryder said, standing up and taking Addy’s wet-mittened hand in his.

We were halfway across the field when Addy pulled away to turn back and look at the snowman in the middle of the field. “Alone,” she said softly, mournfully.

My throat bobbed. Ryder squatted to look her straight in the eye. “Seems like it, doesn’t it? But all the snowpeople get together at night. They have a party out by the creek.” He pointed out past the pasture. “They use magic to turn snow into candies and rain into punch, and they dance to the beat of the storm. And if they’re really lucky, and the moon comes out, it’ll cover them in shimmering diamonds. Rosalinda will be all dressed up in jewels, and she’ll fill her tummy while having the time of her life with all her snowmen friends.”

Addy looked at him like he was a little bit off his rocker, but for me, the story he spun only made those feelings inside me bloom stronger, made me long to always have a person at my side who could turn loneliness and tragedy into joy and enchantment.

When she didn’t respond, his throat bobbed, and he tapped her on the nose, saying, “If there’s still snow tomorrow, we’ll come back and make her a friend. But we’re all frozen and need to get warm. I think Rosalinda understands humans are made of weaker stuff. Okay?”

She nodded, and he rose to his full height. Addy tucked one hand back into his and then surprised me by sliding her other one into mine. We finished walking across the field, looking like a single unit. It brought tears to my eyes, and that ache grew wider and more painful inside my chest.

We’d just made it back to the porch steps when Ryder’s phone squawked—an ungainly, sharp sound that broke the sweet moment. He yanked it out of his pocket, and his face turned dark. He opened the door for Addy. “Go on inside with Nana for a moment.” His voice was calm, but I heard the tension—the spark of fear in it that raised the hair on my neck.

As he shut the door behind her, he showed me his phone with a hand that shook. His voice was a low, animalistic growl as he said, “Someone’s breaking into my house.”

On the screen, the doorway to his house appeared and a wide-shouldered figure clad in black with his face obscured by a hoodie was fiddling with the handle. As I watched, his gloved hands picked the lock, and in a handful of seconds, he was inside.

I spun around, racing for the Escalade with Ryder on my heels. As I started the vehicle, he jumped in with his phone to his ear, explaining in a torn voice to Maddox what had happened. I wasn’t sure I wanted the sheriff’s office involved, but I just gritted my teeth and spun out of the driveway with snow flying around the tires as I headed for the gates. After he hung up with Maddox, he called Eva, telling his mother briefly what had happened and asking her to look after Addy.

My heart pounded with anger and frustration at having our beautiful moment torn asunder, but also a teeny bit of hope. If we could catch him, he might lead us to the Lovatos. We might finally find out who their leader was. We might be able to end this for Addy…and Ryder. Waves of mixed emotions flung through me.

“This is why you need cameras inside,” I told him.

“I shouldn’t need them!” he fired back. I rounded a corner a little too fast, and the car skidded on the icy roads before the four-wheel traction caught. “This is why I should be driving.”

I ignored his comment, calling Enrique. “Where are you?”

“I told you, following a lead.”

“Someone broke into Ryder’s house. He’s still there. We’re on our way.”

Enrique swore. “I’m almost back in town.”

The line went dead.

“They either think she has something like Ravyn’s letter insinuated, or they know she does,” I said more to myself than Ryder. “It’s clear no one is at the house. They risked the alarm and the police showing up for something specific, but we haven’t found anything. Just a damn backpack with a few clothes and toiletries.”

“And the Switch.” Ryder’s voice cut through my thoughts, drawing me back.

“Yeah, but it’s not like Ravyn hid anything there. It just had a few games and nothing else. I checked. And the coding you’d have to do to hide something else on it would be…” Fuck. Ravyn could do it. If she could create a Houdini box like Rory suspected, she could get around the coding on a damn gaming device. I’d meant to go back through it again, but I had let myself get sidetracked…to slip into the cocoon of ranch life and the sweetness of Ryder and his daughter.

“When Addy and I tried to load the games we bought,” Ryder said, “It kept saying it was out of room, which didn’t seem right because the terabyte drive was huge, and she only had four games on there to begin with. I thought it was broken.”

Shit. I’d had the data in my hands for days and missed it. I’d fucked up, just like Ryder had accused my brother of doing. Except, this was worse than Holden because there was no way he could have known the bracelet Leya had worn wasn’t really from her friend. Whereas I knew better than to trust anything in that hotel room—any technology an expert hacker had kept at their disposal, especially after she’d basically told us she’d left something behind.

I gritted my teeth, wanting to pound on the steering wheel and, instead, shoved my foot on the gas pedal.

Ryder’s alarm on his phone sounded again.

“He’s leaving!”

We were on the bridge when I stomped my foot on the brake. The Escalade slid to a stop with the front end outside the bridge and the back end still under the covered roof.

“What are you doing?” he demanded.

“Blocking his way out,” I said, leaping from the car and taking off at a sprint.

Ryder followed me, our heaving breaths the only sound as the snow cushioned our boots. When we reached the house, there was no vehicle in the driveway. Nothing but a gaping front door. I stopped, searching the snow for footprints.

“There,” I said, running in the direction of the prints as I pulled my gun from my back. I pointed it toward the trail the burglar had left and headed in that direction with Ryder still on my heels. One set of footprints went toward the house, and the same single set pointed in the opposite direction as he’d left. One perpetrator. After just a few feet, we entered the dark shadows of trees and brush that wound along the hillside on the edge of the Hatley property. I stopped, trying to get my breathing under control so I could listen. A branch cracked behind me as Ryder stepped closer. I put a finger to my lips, tilting my head.

There, down the hill to the right—rustling that had nothing to do with animals tucked away as the snow came down.

I took off again, trying to keep as quiet as possible while still moving quickly.

“Will he have to cross the creek?” I whispered.

Ryder shook his head. “Not from this angle. He’ll hit the emergency fire road first.” He pointed the way we were going farther through the trees.

Screw quiet. I had to catch him before he slipped out of our grasp.

I ran as fast as I dared, pushing through the brush, swiping at tree branches, desperately trying not to trip over rocks and downed limbs. The burglar’s footsteps were hard to follow here as the snow hadn’t made it past the dense blanket of foliage overhead, but we kept going in the direction Ryder had pointed.

When we finally broke out onto the barely visible fire road, there was a dark truck parked several hundred feet away. It roared to life, and I planted my feet, took aim, and let loose. The first shot pinged along the tailgate. Crap. I needed a tire. I aimed again, lowering my sight to the black rubber, and pulled the trigger just as the truck turned a corner. A weak ping let me know I’d hit metal again. Damn it. This is when being a SEAL versus an analyst would have come in handy—where my basic training didn’t quite cut it.

I yanked my phone out, calling Enrique. “Where are you?”

“Stuck behind the damn Escalade on the bridge.”

“Go back. He escaped in a dark-gray Ford F150. It has a bullet hole in the tailgate and the right rear fender. No license plate.” I looked at Ryder. “Where does this come out?”

“State Road Fifty.”

I repeated it to Enrique. In the distance, we could hear sirens—Maddox coming in blazing.

Ryder called his brother, repeating what I’d told Enrique.

We headed back the way we’d come, Ryder leading the way this time.

By the time we made it to the house, Enrique and Maddox had both called. There was no sign of the truck, but Maddox put out a Be On the Look Out, or BOLO, for it.

At the front door, Ryder went to go in, and I yanked him back, tossing him the keys to the Escalade. “I’ll clear the house. You move the car.”

His jaw worked. The debate clear on his face. I could practically hear his protective instincts clamoring at the idea of letting me go in without him, but I didn’t wait to argue about it. I eased into the entryway, peeking around the corner into the kitchen and great room. We’d only seen one person entering the house, but I still had to be sure. I slid with my back to the wall down the hall. Ryder’s study was empty. I continued toward the bedrooms. The door to my room was open, but it was empty and looked undisturbed. The bathroom and closet were just as clear.

I moved to Addy’s room, and my breath caught. It had been tossed. Clothes and toys were strewn everywhere. The mattress was shoved off, bedding dangling from the sides. Anger filled me followed by a wash of grief. She couldn’t find out about this, not after she’d just begun to feel safe enough to sleep in the damn bed. She needed to believe she’d be okay here.

I had to fucking make it the truth. Somehow, someway, that little girl would be protected here.

My eyes went to the nightstand where she always left her backpack. She hadn’t had it with her today, but it wasn’t there either. I did a cursory search of the room and didn’t see it. Maybe she’d brought it down to the game room this morning?

I left and headed up the hall to Ryder’s room. I hadn’t entered his space since I’d been there. And I was surprised to find it full of teak furniture reminiscent of Caribbean hideaways. The vibe echoed in the soft blue-and-tan of the linens. It was soothing and yet somehow masculine at the same time. The windows took up two walls. Gorgeous views of the valley in the west. The room would be full of golden rays and strokes of color in the evenings. I made my way into his enormous bathroom with a sunken tub and a shower with a bench seat and dual shower heads.

Unbidden, images of Ryder’s muscled body naked in the shower, an open palm leaning on the beige-and-blue tiles as water sluiced off him, hit me.

I swallowed hard, pushed it aside, and finished clearing the room before forcing myself to leave.

As I was coming down the hall, Ryder showed up with Enrique.

“No one upstairs,” I said, heading for the basement.

The men followed me. We searched all the unfinished rooms and found nothing.

I put my gun away, making my way to the entertainment center and cupboards where I’d put the games away the night before. Relief flitted through me when I found Addy’s Switch sitting right where I’d left it. I let out a shaky sigh and met Ryder’s gaze.

“Her room… It’s tossed. They took her backpack. But they didn’t get this.”

Fury crossed his face as he raced up the stairs. “Don’t touch anything yet!” I hollered after him.

“What’s on that?” Enrique asked.

“Don’t know yet. I checked it out when I first saw it, and it looked like just your normal games. Nothing odd about the menus. Nothing odd about the storage, so I didn’t think much about it until Ryder told me on the way over here that it wouldn’t load any more games.”

“Think Anna was good enough to place information on it?”

“I do.”

His eyes turned hooded. We both wanted this. He’d been working on the Lovato case even longer than me. Since before the multi-agency task force had been created, and it had only been the DEA tracking them down. That was when his brother, also an undercover cop in Los Angeles, had been slaughtered and left on the LAPD’s doorstep.

I gripped the Switch tightly and jogged back upstairs. We’d just hit the entry when Maddox entered the house with a grim face.

“Nothing?” I asked.

He shook his head. “What happened here?”

Ryder stormed down the hall. “They tossed her room.”

“What were they looking for?”

I waved the Switch.

“What’s on it?” Maddox repeated the question of the day.

“I’m going to grab my computer from the car and see if I can figure it out,” I said. “He had gloves on, but there’s a chance we might catch something. A hair. Anything.”

“Crime scene techs are on the way,” the sheriff said with a curt nod.

The air was full of tension and frustration. The lighthearted sweetness from building the snowman in the field seemed like a dream now. I hated that it had disappeared almost as much as I hated the fact that Ryder’s home had been violated, and Addy’s beautiful room that had become a haven for her had been wrecked. I clenched my jaw, straightened my back, and slammed my way out of the house toward the Escalade.

A renewed determination filled me. I was going to find something. I’d find something and end this for all of us.