T
he nightmares didn’t come often, but when they did, they were real pissers.
It took Luc several minutes after wrenching his eyes open to orient himself—to let the panicked part of his brain recognize the agony for what it was:
A memory.
Luc sat upright in bed, leaning forward and digging the heels of his hands into his eyes, trying to push out the memory of Jensen’s shocked eyes as the bullet ripped through his chest. The mental image of Shayna Johnson’s tiny, unmoving body on the bedroom floor.
Fuck.
He knew from experience that going back to sleep now would risk him falling back into the dream, so he rolled out of bed and headed into the kitchen for water and something—anything—to distract him.
He was halfway through his second glass of water when Anthony’s bedroom door opened. Luc caught a glimpse of long blond hair spread out on his brother’s pillow and the rustle of sheets before his brother stepped out into the darkened kitchen.
Luc jerked his chin toward the bedroom door that his brother had just closed. “Is that the same woman from last week? Kelsey?”
“Kelly. And no,” Anthony said, loosely tying the string on his pajama pants before opening the fridge. He pulled out a Tupperware of pasta leftovers and held it up to Luc with raised eyebrows, but Luc shook his head.
The shitty nightmare had killed any semblance of an appetite.
Anthony shrugged and popped the leftovers into the microwave before pouring himself a glass of water. Luc waited and watched.
Anthony drank the entire glass in three gulps, refilled it, and then turned to stare at Luc.
There it was.
The big-brother-inquisition. It was a silent inquisition. Most things were silent with Anthony. But the question was there.
Scratch that.
The
demand
was there. The one that said
talk
.
As always, the desire to talk about what happened warred with the desire to bury it deep inside him in hopes that the memories would die a quiet death.
But Luc had heard about too many cops going off the deep end because they didn’t deal with the shit they’d seen head on.
“Another dream,” he said finally, setting his glass on the counter and folding his arms over his chest.
Anthony said nothing as he retrieved his pasta, stirred it up a bit, and placed it back in the microwave. “Same shit?”
“Same shit.”
“Tell me.”
Luc gritted his teeth. “I just told you it was the same shit. The definition of
same
meaning that it’s identical to every other Goddamn time that I’ve told you about it.”
Anthony pulled his pasta out of the microwave again, popped a piece of penne in his mouth to test the temperature, and deeming it hot enough, dug in with his fork.
All the while, he stared at Luc.
That damned silent inquisition.
Shit
. Luc caved.
“It’s like a movie reel,” Luc said, arms still crossed over his chest, fingers clenching his arms. “Except I never see the beginning. I never see the part where we get to the house of the suspected perp and sit outside, awaiting orders. I never relive those agonizing moments where we sit with our thumbs up our ass outside that house waiting to see if the lead is good.”
Anthony pauses in his chewing, looking like he wants to interrupt but instead nods at Luc to continue.
Luc runs a hand over his neck. “I never see any of the early stuff. It’s like my subconscious wants to utter the ultimate
fuck you
by dropping me into the dream right at the moment that the front door opens and there’s a Goddamn thirty-nine barrel pointed at Jensen. Two pops, and…”
Luc paused. This was the hard part. No,
one
of the hard parts.
“I see Jensen’s face. The walk, the front door, even the gun, they’re all kind of a quick blur, like they’re just details, and then the dream sequence hits slo-mo when I turn and watch Jensen go down. His eyes…”
Anthony sets his pasta aside unfinished, and Luc knew he’d just killed his brother’s appetite. Mike Jensen had been Luc’s partner, but he’d been Anthony’s friend too.
“What else?” Anthony asks, breaking his silence.
Luc stared down at his bare feet. “The girl. I see her every time, lying there, still. That’s the only part of the dream that deviates from memory…the way it actually went down; when I first saw her body, I knew she was dead, but didn’t know just how recently.”
Luc tensed his jaw, once, twice, before continuing. “But in the dream, I know. In the dream I’ve got the shitty benefit of hindsight, and I know that she’s been dead only minutes. Dead because Jonas Black saw our fucking car parked out front like a couple of rookies and panicked.”
Anthony’s gaze was steady. “Black was going to kill her anyway, Luca. You know that. He killed three other girls before that, without any cop intervention.”
“I could have saved her. I fucking knew it was him, and I sat there waiting for orders.”
“Luc—”
“I knew it was him!” His shout echoed, and both men glanced toward Anthony’s bedroom door, but it stayed shut. His sleepover buddy was apparently a deep sleeper.
Luc took a deep breath. Calmed himself. “I knew it was him in my gut, Anth. I
knew
it. But I was too scared of getting reprimanded for disobeying orders.”
Anthony shook his head. “Your captain tells you to hold off, you hold off.”
“Is that what you would have done?”
It wasn’t a casual question. It was a
challenge
, and Luc could tell from the narrowing of his brother’s eyes that Anthony knew it.
“Following orders is the
job
.”
It wasn’t a straight answer. Luc wasn’t sure he wanted a straight answer, although he was afraid he already knew.
Anthony would have gone in there without permission if his cop instinct was buzzing.
If Anthony had been called to the scene instead of Luc, Jensen and Shayna would still be alive.
But even chewed up as he was over the nightmare, Luc knew that going down the path of hypothetic wasn’t healthy. It wouldn’t happen. Except…
It had been
Luc
who had been called to the scene.
It had been
Luc’s
partner who had gotten shot.
It had been
Luc
who had to touch the angry marks on Shayna’s neck to check for a pulse that wasn’t there.
“Hey,” Anthony said, his voice gentler than its usual gruff bark. “Whatever you’re thinking…stop.”
Luc met his brother’s eyes, and then with every burst of willpower did what the cop therapist had suggested he try whenever the memories threatened to take over.
He took a deep breath. Counted to three. Another breath. Three again.
One…
Two…
Very slowly the pressure in his chest started to ease. He gave his brother a nod.
I’m okay.
Then he reached for Anthony’s discarded leftovers, not bothering to get a fresh fork, because…
brothers
.
“Guess I should be thankful the paparazzi and tourists weren’t around for that part of my career, huh?” Luc asked with a wan smile, trying to lighten the mood.
Luc stopped chewing and narrowed his eyes on Anthony’s face. His brother had suddenly stopped making eye contact and was making a big deal out of washing his water glass.
Not having Anthony’s power of silent inquisition, he went for the regular, verbal kind. “What’s up?”
“Huh?”
Luc speared the last remaining piece of penne and studied his brother. “Don’t
huh
me. You got all weird when I mentioned the media.”
Luc’s fork dropped loudly to the counter as he stood up straighter. “You didn’t. Tell me you didn’t tell Ava Sims about Shayna Taylor.”
“No!” His brother looked uncharacteristically expressive, and the expression was pissed. “Fuck you.”
Luc relaxed only slightly. “Nonna? Did she tell Ava?”
“Christ, Luca…We’re your family. We’re here to protect you, not throw your most painful memories out to a hot reporter.”
“Then why’d you go weird?”
“I
didn’t
,” Anthony said, shoving past and using his shoulder to jar Luc’s. “You’re the one being weird. I’m going to bed.”
Luc watched his brother head to the bedroom. “Hey, Anth.”
His brother paused, turned his chin almost to his shoulder, although he didn’t look back all the way.
“Thanks. For listening.”
Anthony held up his hand in a silent
you’re welcome
, before slipping back into his bedroom to spoon his overnight guest.
Luc stood for a long while in the dark, the sharpness of his dream fading into the usual shadows of his mind, even as his instincts hummed that that episode in his life wasn’t over yet.
Not by a long shot.
T
his is bullshit,” Luc said, running two hands through his hair. “You’ve already seen the video.
Everyone’s
seen the video. What’s the point of reenacting something when you can watch the real deal?”
Ava’s chest expanded slightly in what Luc now knew was her
don’t lose your shit
internal pep talk to herself. “So we can have dinner together, but we can’t just walk and talk along the river’s edge in Battery Park?”
Sawyer turned and gave Luc an incredulous look. “Sharing meals? Like, you guys split a candy bar from the candy machine, or…”
“It wasn’t like that,” Ava snapped.
Only because you won’t let it be
, he wanted to snap back. Still, keeping things platonic had been his idea too. Sort of.
But
fuck
. That kiss.
“Can’t you have a stand-in go through the motions?” he asked. “You know, a body double, or some shit like that.”
“Great idea, Officer, that’ll make for really compelling television. Here, folks, we have a random person off the street
pretending
to be a—”
She broke off suddenly and gave him a look. “You know why I stopped just then? That’s a million people changing the channel.”
He shrugged. “Not my problem.”
Ava rolled her eyes to the sky as though dealing with a petulant child. He knew he was being difficult, but that was tough shit.
Just because he had some seriously raunchy fantasies about this woman didn’t mean he was going to become her lackey.
As a woman, he wanted her. As a news reporter, she was more a pain in his ass than ever.
If he went through with this, it would make his “heroic” actions seem manufactured and calculating, and the last thing he needed was people thinking that he was the type of cop that over-thought things.
Overthinking led to tragic circumstances.
He knew that better than anyone, and no way was he going to sell himself out on national television.
“It’s not like I’m asking you to jump into the river, Luc,” Ava said, her voice slightly softer. “Just talk us through what happened that day.”
“You mean talk to a couple thousand viewers who I don’t even know.”
“No, talk to
me
. Ava. Ignore Mihail, ignore the camera, ignore the shit that Lopez will be flinging your way before and after.”
“Who says I’ll be flinging shit?” Luc’s partner asked.
They both looked at him, and Lopez lifted a shoulder. “Okay, maybe. Probably.”
“Look, Luc, what the hell did you think was going to happen when you agreed to this?” Ava asked.
“I
didn’t
agree to this!”
“Well it’s happening,” she shot back. “And it’ll happen a lot faster, and a lot less painfully for everybody, if you’d cooperate.”
Luc stuck this thumbs into his belt and remained resolutely silent. He knew he was on the verge of being out of line, and he didn’t blame her for being confused. He was all over the place with her. Amiable one minute, prissy the next.
Kissing her one day.
Yelling at her the next.
A match made in heaven, they were not.
Still, in the grand scheme of things, her request should have been harmless.
But with last night’s nightmare fresh on his mind, he felt…threatened. Being asked to perform like a trick pony was bad enough on most days, but on a day when he was running on hardly any sleep and a couple years’ worth of bad memories?
Let’s just say Ava didn’t have a clue.
You could tell her.
He pushed the thought away almost as quickly as it had popped into his head. Tell a woman he hardly knew his deepest, darkest pain? Bad idea.
Telling a reporter his deepest darkest pain?
Really
bad idea.
Nobody wanted to see a cop
pretending
to be a hero. But wasn’t that exactly what he was doing every damned day?
“Dude,” Lopez said under his breath. “You okay? I know you’re not the biggest fan of all this but you’re being kind of a dick.”
Luc almost smiled. Sawyer Lopez was completely different from Mike Jensen in almost every way…Mike had been quiet and focused, whereas Lopez was outspoken and spontaneous. Mike short and broad, Sawyer lean and lithe. Mike fair, Lopez dark.
But his former partner and current partner had one very crucial characteristic in common: they were both damned good at calling Luc on his bullshit.
“Christ,” he muttered. “Fine. Sims, let’s get this over with.”
He half expected her to continue to give him crap, but at the end of the day, Ava Sims was a professional and she gestured over to her camera crew as though there had never been a delay.
Ava spent a few minutes explaining the shot she wanted to Mihail and some other guy whose name Luc had already forgotten. Then Ava turned to Luc. “Okay, Moretti, you’re up. Nothing to it. We’ll just walk nice and slow along the river talking. I ask you questions about that day, you answer, taking me through what happened as best you can. ’Kay?”
Luc gave a curt nod.
“What about me?” Lopez asked, surreptitiously checking out a well-endowed brunette who was trying to ascertain what the camera was for.
“Watch for bad guys,” Ava said. Then she followed his line of sight. “Or go get that girl’s number.”
Luc followed Ava over to the start of the shot.
“Take a deep breath,” she said quietly.
“I’m not nervous,” he said irritably, just annoyed.
“Yeah, I got that,” she said, her mouth curving into a smile. “But it’s just me, Luc.”
It was her use of his first name that got him. He would do well to remember that they weren’t friends.
But sometimes it felt like they were.
She touched his arm briefly to indicate that they were about to start, and her fingers seemed to linger.
Sometimes it felt like they were more than friends. Definitely.
“So, Officer Moretti,” she said in her reporter voice.
Shit. Here we go.
“How many times would you say you’d walked along this very riverbank before the fateful events of February twenty-first?”
Fateful events? It wasn’t like there was a second coming.
She looked at him patiently and he realized he had to speak, or else risk looking like a mute on national television.
Fine.
“It’s not my usual beat,” he said as they moved slowly forward, the camera in their faces but more or less ignored. “My precinct is in midtown, but I’d come down to the Battery for another call…false alarm, as it would turn out.”
“What was the other call?” she interrupted.
“Cop business,” he said with a little wink.
It had been another charming indecent exposure call, but the perp was long gone by the time Luc had arrived.
Luc figured the fewer details the better.
The entire country didn’t need to know
quite
how often New York dealt with naked weirdos.
“So you were just strolling along…”
“Can’t say we on-duty cops do a lot of strolling,” he corrected, although he added a smile to soften it.
She laughed softly, and in an instant he knew why she was so good at her job. Her voice called people in. Her laughter made them want to stay.
“Okay, so you were walking. With purpose,” she said, making a jokingly macho move forward with her hands.
“I was,” he said, playing the game.
They came to a stop, and both of their smiles faltered a little.
“It was here?”
Luc pointed a few feet to the right. “She was there. Wearing a red dress and singing the chorus of some terrible pop song, but she was messing up all the words.”
“And it was cute,” Ava said with a smile.
He smiled back. “It was cute.”
“Tell us what happened next. Because in that YouTube video, all we see is you diving headfirst over the railing and coming up with a little girl soaked, wearing a red dress.”
Almost done,
Luc told himself.
“Well she had, like this…doll,” he said. “A little one.”
Ava’s brow furrowed. “A little doll?”
“Like a…Barbie. Or something.”
“The NYPD cop knows what a Barbie is, folks. Do you have daughters, Officer Moretti?”
She knew that he didn’t, obviously, but the audience didn’t, so he played along. “I do not.”
“Nieces?”
“No nieces, although I think my brother Marco might be working on that.”
Marco absolutely was
not
working on that, but it served the bastard right for moving to Los Angeles.
Ava leaned forward slightly, her mouth in a teasing smile. “Then pray tell, Officer, how do you know what a Barbie is?”
“I’m a man of the world, Miss Sims,” he said mysteriously. “A man of the world. Anyway, the little girl had her Barbie dancing along the railing, and I’m still really only half paying attention, but then I hear her cry of distress, and the doll is gone.”
“She dropped her Barbie into the water.”
“Yes. And she’s full on crying by this point, because, I mean, who
doesn’t
hate to lose a Barbie, and I look around for her parents, but before I can figure out who she belongs to, she’s managed to get herself on top of the railing.”
Ava walked to the railing and put her hand exactly in the spot the little girl had gone over. “Here?”
Luc nodded.
“And then she went over,” Ava said.
“And then she went over.”
“How soon after her going in did you follow?”
Luc shrugged. “Instantly, I guess. I don’t remember.”
“Do you remember making the choice? Thinking, do I really want to throw myself into the river for a little girl I don’t know?”
Good Lord, she was milking this.
He gave her a slightly withering look he hoped the camera would miss before continuing.
“When a child’s life is in danger—
any
life is in danger—you don’t stop to think.”
“Because you’re a police officer. Because it’s your sworn duty.”
Fuck no
was on the tip of his tongue but he bit it back. “Because I’m human.”
Ava tilted her head. “So you’re saying anyone would do this.”
Luc gave a little shrug.
Anyone decent
. “I would hope so.”
Ava let that sink in a moment before she turned and looked over the railing. “So this brings us up to the moment that the tourist started filming you. Right as you kick off your shoes. Were you aware of the tourist?”
“I was not.”
“So you didn’t know there was a camera.”
“Absolutely not.”
For a second, just a split second, Ava looked skeptical, but she smiled to cover it.
“Was the water cold?”
“You have no idea,” he said with a little smile. “Although I don’t think I really registered that until long after I’d pulled her out of the water.”
Ava’s face sobered at that. “And when you pulled her out…she wasn’t breathing.”
Luc’s eyes squeezed shut at the memory. Not just of this little girl, but of another one who’d also been too still, too cold, when he’d gotten to her. Only that one hadn’t had a happy ending.
He shook his head and forced himself to meet Ava’s eyes. “No, she wasn’t.”
Ava paused, as though to let his statement sink in. “You gave her CPR.”
Luc swallowed. Nodded.
“What were you thinking?” she asked quietly. “You jumped in on instinct, but when you pulled her out, and realization set in that this little girl might not make it, what were you thinking?”
Luc ran a hand over his face and answered the only way he could. Honestly.
“I was thinking
please
.
Please
let this little girl be okay.”
Ava’s smile was gentle. “And she was. Because of you.”
Luc lifted a shoulder and scratched the back of his neck, feeling almost unbearably embarrassed.
Luc answered the rest of Ava’s questions as briefly as possible while still being polite.
Yes, he’d known to swim her around to the side of the boardwalk where there was a tiny ladder built in.
Yes, he’d given CPR before.
Yes, the mother was grateful. Beyond grateful.
“And just one last question, Officer Moretti.”
“Shoot.”
Ava leaned in with a conspiratorial smile. “Were you able to save Barbie too?”
Luc laughed, mostly because he knew it was expected. “Sadly, Barbie met her demise that day.”
“Aww, well that’s too bad. Perhaps I’ll talk to the station manager about replacing her myself.”
Luc opened his mouth to respond, but closed it just as quickly, catching himself.
But he wasn’t fast enough. Ava’s brown eyes missed nothing, and she pointed a friendly finger at him. “Officer Moretti, is there something else you’d like to add?”
“Nothing comes to mind.”
Ava moved closer with a laugh. “Officer Moretti, you replaced that little girl’s Barbie doll, didn’t you?”
Luc pressed his lips together, but it was all the answer she needed.
“Out of your own pocket?”
He said nothing, but he couldn’t lie either, so he gave only a curt nod.
She turned and for the first time, looked straight into the camera, giving it a secret smile.
“And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call a
true
American hero.”