The Devil. I Loved. First

Familiar. ghosts

CHAPTER FIVE: Familiar Ghosts

They began meeting on terms neither of them would have called a partnership, because partnership implied trust, and what existed between Elena and Damian in those weeks was closer to a hostage negotiation that never quite ended.

"You want to know who killed your witness. I want to know who's framing me for it," he said, the second time they sat across from each other, this time in a diner far enough from either of their usual territories that no one would recognize the pairing. "That makes us allies of convenience, not friends."

"I'm aware of the difference," Elena said.

"Good. Don't forget it."

She didn't. She told herself that daily, in fact, with the diligence of a woman reciting a rule she suspected she was about to break.

It was the small things that started to unsettle her most. The way the smell of diesel and brine near the shipping yards made her chest tighten with a grief she couldn't source. The way she found her fingers drifting to the scar behind her ear whenever Damian said something that landed too close to a nerve she didn't know she had. She caught him once, in the middle of an argument about intercepted shipping manifests, staring at her hand where it rested against that scar, an expression on his face she couldn't parse — something between recognition and disbelief, gone as soon as she noticed it.

"What?" she said.

"Nothing. " His voice had gone rough. "You do that a lot. Touch that scar."

"Old habit. Car accident when I was a kid, apparently. I don't remember it."

Something crossed his face then — quick, involuntary, immediately suppressed — and for a moment neither of them said anything at all.

The night it almost became something else, they were in his car outside a dockside warehouse they'd both independently flagged as a possible meeting site for whoever was running the frame job. The stakeout had gone on for three hours in near -total silence, and somewhere in that silence, the air between them had changed shape.

"You should go home," he said, not looking at her. "This isn't your kind of work."

"Neither is babysitting a prosecutor, and yet."

He turned to look at her then, and the look lasted a beat too long to be professional, and she felt something in her chest lurch toward him with a force that terrified her more than the dead man in the parking garage had.

"Elena—"

"Don't, " she said, though she didn't move away.

"Don't what?"

"Whatever you're about to do."

"I haven't done anything."

"You're about to."

He was, and they both knew it, and for one suspended second his hand found the side of her face and her breath caught and the distance between them narrowed to almost nothing — before he pulled back first, jaw tight, cursing under his breath in a language she didn't recognize.

"This is a mistake," he said.

"Yes," she agreed, and neither of them moved for a long time after that, both of them furious at themselves for entirely different reasons that were, underneath, the exact same reason.

Marcus Voss called her the next morning, and the warmth in his voice had curdled into something closer to panic.

"I hear you've been spending time with Damian Cole . Personally. Not just professionally."

"How do you—"

"It doesn't matter how I know. Elena, I need you to hear me. This is not a man you should be near. I want you off this case."

"You want me off the biggest case of my career because you're worried about my safety?"

"Yes," he said, too fast, too raw for a man who prided himself on never sounding rattled. "Please, Elena. For me. Step back."

It was the "for me" that stopped her — not the concern, which she might have accepted at face value, but the specific desperation underneath it, a fear that seemed to have nothing to do with organized crime statistics and everything to do with something older, something he wasn't naming.

"I'm not stepping back," she said, and for the first time in her adult life, she hung up on her father without saying goodbye.