The Grave Between Us: M|M Romantic Suspense by Tal Bauer

Author:Tal Bauer [Bauer, Tal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Noah & Cole Thriller
Published: 2021-06-05T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

EIGHT YEARS EARLIER

Cole didn’t talk to Ian for over three weeks, after Beury Mountain.

He checked out of his hotel and went back to Quantico. Spent a week working through his inbox, the reports and emails he’d let pile up in his absence, in his complete devotion to Ian Ingram. At night, he went home to his empty apartment. He drank beer at first, but when the silence filled up with Ian’s voice, he switched to whiskey. He slept with the lights blazing in every room. He woke up several times a night, checking the locks on his doors and windows, even though he was on the third floor.

Darkness crept into his life, like tar oozing through cracks. He felt the weight of it, the heavy presence of evil.

He kept his earbuds in, kept his phone cycling through music playlists and podcasts. He needed noise to fill up his brain. To push out the smooth cadence of Ian’s voice, the words he whispered in Cole’s unconscious. Ian’s voice had taken over Cole’s inner monologue, as if Ian had stepped inside Cole’s brain and was thinking for him. Ian had made a home for himself in the space between Cole’s neurons.

He was like the dark matter of the universe. Invisible to the naked eye, but suffusing reality with weight and terror.

Eventually, the requests started coming in, first from McHugh and then from SAC Hillary. Ian was asking to talk to Cole again. They’d offered to have another agent speak with him, but he’d refused. He’d only speak to Cole. And only in person.

Ian could rot in his cell until he decomposed like one of his victims for all Cole cared. He could sit and wither away, his skin melting off and then turning to leather, his tissues fraying and evaporating until his bones collapsed and he was nothing but a pile of dust that the rats chewed on and the worms crawled over.

But the FBI disagreed, and Michael ordered him back down to the RA. “We need his statement on the body we uncovered. We need him to give us something. A confession, ideally, detailing exactly what happened and how that man came to be buried in that spot. Are there more bodies up there? We’ve scoured the place, but we haven’t found any more graves. Are we missing something? Why did he lead you to that grave?”

“I don’t know,” Cole murmured. He bounced a pencil on his desk, sitting slumped forward, his spine curled. “I can’t read his mind, Michael.”

“You’re pretty damn close,” Michael snapped. “You’re the only profiler or FBI agent who was able to get into his head, and because of that, we’ve got solid leads on finding his victims and bringing them home. You’re doing that. Be proud of that.”

He nodded. Was he getting inside Ian’s mind, or was Ian getting inside his?

He drove down the next morning, taking backroads and driving under the speed limit. An hour outside the RA, he pulled over at a gas station and sat for forty minutes in the parking lot, staring at his dashboard.

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