Seconds later, the hail of bullets had ended. Their Uzis still ready, his heart still pounding, Graham and his partner edged toward the room where the terrorists had hidden.
Graham steadied his aim.
“Freeze. Put your guns down. Hands in the air. Don’t get heroic.”
The blasts had already rattled through every pore in his skin, every cell in his body, every nerve ending, every muscle and bone. Most of all, Graham hated the noise, the sharp spurts of automatic fire, the tracers arcing through the night.
Except it wasn’t night.
Except for the smoke, it wasn’t real.
Tell his heart that, he thought. Tell his lungs.
It would be hours before he unwound.
Graham barged through the barren room. Kicking weapons out of the way, he secured the area. It stunk of creosote and kerosene. Hours before, after some punk had lobbed a Molotov cocktail, the D.C. fire department had issued permission to use the building. The team never knew when an opportunity for such an urban exercise might occur.
Graham barked commands to the mock terrorists. Up against the wall. Feet spread. Between them, he and Jackie Miles cuffed the “traitors” with plastic restraints. Other team members moved in to help.
And Graham inhaled his first deep breath in thirty minutes. He was sweating.
His partner laid a hand on his back. “You all right?”
Graham flinched. “Fine. You?”
“Still here. Still breathing.”
With that, he dragged her aside. “What the hell did you think you were doing?”
Looking away, Jackie holstered her sidearm. “We would have been here all day if I hadn’t seen where they were hiding. It’s only training.”
“Yeah? Tell my churning gut. It could have been the real thing. If it were, we’d both be dead.”
Under guard, the “captives” filed past.
Holding his temper in check, Graham finished his duties in record time. Just as he’d raced from Hearthline, leaving the agency’s intense security behind as soon as the alert came in. Not secure enough, he thought, but he’d deal with that later. And with Jackie. What was her problem?
His new partner had a thing or two to learn. Still, they had stayed in one piece—and captured the “bad guys.” When the time came for a real takedown, they’d be ready.
Graham shook his head. Casey considered him to be just a boring civil servant. If she only knew. Which was exactly the point. She couldn’t.
Now that he could breathe again, it wasn’t just Jackie who worried him. Or the exercise. For the two weeks since Casey’s horrible accident, he’d had a nagging feeling of dread. He had to get out of here. Graham couldn’t get it out of his head that she might still be in danger.
He needed to see for himself that she wasn’t.
“TELL ME WHAT YOU SEE.”
The yellow-gray, elusive blur danced just beyond Casey’s wide-open eyes. Innocent and harmless, the light fluttered around the doctor’s examination room like a ballerina doing a tours j’eté under water. Then it spun away as if on satin toe shoes, trailing gossamer ribbons of remembered sun. Like that imaginary dancer’s flowing skirt, the glow was fleeting, graceful…gone.
Casey stared hard at the blank space in front of her. “Nothing,” she said, her heart beating hard.
She clenched the edge of the table with—probably—white-knuckled hands. She saw nothing. Felt nothing, except the terror that seemed to follow her everywhere. Without her sight, she felt vulnerable…afraid. Even the antiseptic smells of the office made her nervous. Oh, how she had hoped for better news.
At an unexpected brush of air on her skin, Casey jerked back on the exam table. The doctor had passed a slow hand in front of her face, that was all. She had to get hold of herself.
“Shapes?” he said. “Do you see any shapes?”
She shook her head. “No. Just the flickering light sometimes.” Rarely.
In the hospital that first day, her whole body had hurt but Casey’s vision seemed fine. Then a few days later, it blurred, dimmed. From there, her eyesight had gone downhill. Was this all she could expect, forever?
Fresh anxiety ripped through her.
Her future promised—no, threatened—total darkness, her own terrors locked inside her like a scream. She didn’t know where the next thought came from. Certainly she didn’t want it. I’ll never see Graham’s face again.
She squeezed her eyes tight, turning the darkness into a blood-red sunset behind her lids, and conjured him mentally—dark hair and eyes, that handsome face and beloved smile, broad shoulders and tough, lean body so at odds with his sedentary job pushing papers at Hearthline.
Casey bit back tears. “I should get myself a guide dog, what do you think? A nice big German shepherd….” With teeth like razors.
She loved animals. She’d always wanted a dog, but not under these circumstances. How would she take care of it now? Take care of herself? She couldn’t do this, wouldn’t survive on her own this time.
The doctor patted her shoulder but said nothing more. Which, for Casey, said it all. Poor thing. She hated pity.
“Try to be patient,” he said. “You never know in cases like these. It can take time.”
Casey couldn’t cling to false hope. “I doubt time will help. You said I had some kind of delayed hemorrhage.”
“Yes, that happens sometimes after a frontal head trauma. Edema within the optic nerves leads to—”
“I know what it leads to.” Casey touched a hand to her forehead, where some of the worst bruises had been. They were healed, but her eyes were not. She made herself say the words through tears. “I’m blind.”
Bilateral blindness. Both eyes.
He didn’t try to contradict her. When the doctor slipped out of the room to make her next appointment, he left Casey defenseless in the blackness from which there would be no escape. She was alone inside herself. And still terrified, not only because of her blindness.
In Casey’s mind getting run down in that parking garage had been no accident. To her, that meant only one thing. Someone—the same someone who had blinded her—would try again to kill her. And now she couldn’t protect herself.
Ironic, really, when she had prided herself on not needing anyone, especially Graham.
But it wasn’t Graham she “saw” now. Another face, unsmiling, flashed through her mind. When she’d been in pain, she had suppressed the memory of the man she’d seen in the elevator at Graham’s office building. Pale hair, pale features, she remembered. Why think of him again now? Was he harmless, just an
