explosion rattled windows and made the ground shake. West instinctively dropped to the sidewalk, spilling the paper bag, and covered his head.
Screams filled the air. He waited for a few seconds, but it felt like minutes, before rising and looking at the edge of town.
In the direction Quinn had strolled. His heart dropped to his stomach and he raced to his truck, where Rex sat in the front seat, the air-conditioning running. West opened the truck, grabbed Rex’s leash, but the dog needed no coaxing.
They both ran in the direction of the explosion. Locals stared at the building, now engulfed in flames. West was already running, phoning for backup. No need, for the whole damn county must have heard the blast.
Not Quinn. Please, not Quinn. Let her be far away, hell, in the next town. Not Quinn. Not when he’d finally found her, allowed himself to feel again after all these years...
The real estate office was leveled, white smoke pouring from it. Safety first. It had been drilled into him, but that was for cases. Not for the love of his life.
Boards and rubble lay everywhere, shards of glass sharp enough to slice through skin. Flames licked at the back of the building. Ordering Rex to stay back, he picked his way through the rubble.
Quinn always delivered Tia’s meals in person...putting them on her desk. He had been there once, knew the agent worked at an expansive desk in the back. Everything in the back was splintered, fragments of a profession...of a life. Smoke billowed through the air.
Where the hell was Quinn? He’d seen her head in this direction, knew she was delivering Tia’s lunch. Maybe she hadn’t entered. Please, he prayed. Let her be okay. He whistled for the dog.
“Rex, find Quinn,” he yelled out.
Rex nosed through the rubble toward the front of the shop, clambering over boards and debris.
Rubble was everywhere. Rex barked, the signal for finding a human. Boards and a chair covered a petite figure sprawled on the ground. West lifted the board and tossed it aside to find a woman lying on her back. A shattered food container, and mangled bits of pasta, was nearby.
Quinn. She couldn’t be dead. His breath hitched, and then he saw her chest rise and fall. Relief made him weak, but he got a grip.
Alive, but unconscious, bleeding heavily from a laceration to her head. Blood streamed down the side of her face. West shrugged out of his jacket, tore off his white T-shirt and held it to her head to stanch the bleeding.
Not daring to move her further, in case of a neck injury and shattered vertebrae, he held his shirt against her head, his hand trembling.
“It’s okay, baby. It’s okay. I’ve got you,” he whispered, everything inside him bunched up in knots. Rex licked her face.
People were running toward him. The whine of sirens grew louder. Help was arriving. Hurry. In his mind’s eye, he flashed back to that terrible night when he was a teenager. House burning, broken glass littering the front yard, his screams echoing through the night as the sirens wailed a mocking song... Too late, too late, too late...
Not too late. Quinn was breathing. Alive.
EMTs rushed forward. One medical professional squatted by him, opened a kit. West was dully aware of the man trying to shoulder him aside.
“We’ve got this,” the paramedic assured him. “Let us treat her.”
Let her go. They’re professionals. But everything inside him screamed to hold on and not let go of Quinn because if he did, he could lose her.
She might die, just like his mother, father and little sisters.
She will die if you don’t move it, Brand.
Dragging in a deep breath, he stood and stepped aside.
With quiet, swift professionalism, the paramedics went to work, swapping out his soaked shirt for real bandages, putting a neck brace on her to prevent her head from moving, starting an IV, taking her pressure. He heard a buzz of words, saw them slide Quinn onto a backboard and then lift her onto a gurney.
She’s going to be okay. Has to be okay. I can’t lose her.
Everything inside him fought to run back to his truck, race after the screaming ambulance. Follow her to the hospital, make sure she got treated, hover until she opened her eyes and looked at him.
West clenched his hands and unclenched them. Using a breathing technique he’d learned from a therapist who’d treated him for PTSD, he centered himself and his thoughts.
The best way he could help Quinn was by doing his job. The sooner he helped catch the bastard doing this, the safer she and the town would be.
“Brand!”
He turned at the sound of Finn Colton’s voice. The chief looked at the departing ambulance, his expression grim. “What happened?”
West told him about finding Quinn, as others arrived and began to work the scene.
He knew cops, knew the tight brotherhood. Quinn had been injured—one of their own, family—and they were going to work this case hard.
West didn’t need to get insider information on the local cops to ascertain this. He knew human nature.
Finn gave him a hard look. “Brayden and Shane are on their way to the hospital, and they’ll question Quinn if she wakes up. I need you to stay here, work the scene.”
West nodded, though he fought the instinctive need to rush to the hospital with the chief. He turned back to his truck to fetch his equipment.
No one knew what Quinn meant to him. They had kept their relationship secret on purpose. But right now, as he jogged back to his truck, Rex at his side, he was the one who could openly claim her and join her brothers at the hospital.
* * *
Firefighters had quickly doused the flames and now the cops were working the scene. Someone had marked Tia’s body.
What was left of it.
He saw a high-heeled red shoe attached to a section of bloodied leg sticking out from beneath half a large-screen television. High heels. Quinn had not worn high heels. Not during the day. At night she liked wearing them when they met in secret outside town. Dinner, a show, good times.
He liked her in high heels, and when she wore them to bed last week...
Was she okay?
Focus, Brand. Focus.
West dragged in a breath and studied the body with cool, professional detachment. Tia lay on her side. One of her arms had been torn off in the blast, and her torso was horribly mangled.
Burns covered her body and part of her head...
He looked at Tia’s head, noting the head injury and exposed brain matter with analytical coolness. If she had died before the explosion, the autopsy would confirm it.
“Find,” he ordered Rex, his death grip on the leash making his palm sweat through the latex gloves.
Rex combed through the building’s rubble to search for secondary devices. Nothing found. But near what had been Tia’s desk, West found pieces of the bomb, including the detonator.
Cell phone. Same kind of burner phone used in the first bombing.
Until the pieces were tested, he couldn’t be certain, but he suspected it was the same type of bomb that had gone off earlier in the abandoned building. The first bomb was a trial run, probably to see how much damage the unsub could inflict.
But something had gone wrong. The killer hadn’t known that Quinn delivered lunch here every day around noon. Nor had he anticipated the device wouldn’t totally destroy evidence.
Or had he? Quinn had told him that everyone knew her schedule—that every day she hand