Falling into step behind Holbrook, I followed him back through the maze of cubicles towards the elevators and then down a hallway leading off to the left.
“Here we are,” he said, pausing outside a darkened office, the small nameplate next to the door reading “Special Agent D. Holbrook.”
Juggling the box and his backpack, he pushed open the door with his hip and flipped the light switch with his elbow, bathing the room in fluorescent light. The room was small and windowless, and smelled of spilled coffee and him. A desk lurked in the center of the room, a computer monitor sitting on top along with a desk calendar filled in with several notes written in a sharp, precise hand.
The rest of his desk was devoid of clutter, not even a single pen out of place. It was the complete opposite of my work space at home, which was covered in dozens of scribbled sticky notes, sketches, doodles, and various scraps of paper. Briefly, I wondered if I’d ever see my cluttered desk, or get to sleep in my own bed, again.
Setting the box down on the edge of the desk, Holbrook dropped his backpack in the corner of the room and draped his jacket over the chair. Turning to face me, he took Loki’s carrier from my clasped hands and set it down gently beside the desk. Loki let out a single meow before turning around inside the crate and burying his nose beneath his tail, almost instantly falling asleep again. At least he didn’t seem too put out by all the shuffling around we’d been doing over the last couple of days.
Turning back to the box on his desk, Holbrook set the lid aside and began flipping through the folders.
“There’s a break room down the hall on the left. There should be some coffee, tea, and maybe even some donuts if they haven’t all been scavenged yet,” he said, setting several files aside on the desk until he found the one he wanted. “I need to go check in with my boss, but I shouldn’t be gone long,” he said, pausing long enough to notice that I was still standing in the doorway, my hands clenched at my sides. Moving to stand in front of me, he tucked the folder under his arm to lay both hands on my shoulders, the now familiar electricity arcing between his fingers to send tremors of sensation through my skin. “You’re safe here, Riley. I promise.”
Unable to say anything for fear that my emotions would overcome me, I just nodded and stepped aside to let him pass. I hadn’t realized just how much my little spat with Johnson had unsettled me until Holbrook’s behavior tugged at my heart strings. If the guys protecting me would just as soon see me dead in a ditch somewhere, what hope did I have of surviving Samson a second time?
And since when did I become such an emotional wreck?
“I’ll be back soon,” he said before turning to stride down the hall, his long and measured steps carrying him away. I watched his retreating back with a growing sense of unease, feeling as though he were taking a small piece of my safety away with him.
Huffing out a tense breath, I wrapped my arms around my middle and turned to regard his office. The wall behind his desk was filled with filing cabinets and bookshelves that stretched up to the dingy ceiling tiles. The shelves held several sets of volumes, a cursory glance showing that most of them were about supernatural law and governmental regulations. A few personal items were tucked in amongst the volumes, and I found my feet carrying me across the room to investigate before I realized what I was doing.
My fingers roved over the objects, a faint tingle buzzing in my fingertips like an echo of the electricity that passed through me every time we touched. A baseball with an indecipherable signature scrawled across the scarred surface sat safely nestled in a plexiglas cube, a pair of dog tags coiled next to a folded American flag in a glass fronted frame, and a photograph of a younger Holbrook and an older man with similar features, both of them beaming at the camera as they held up their fishing poles, proudly displaying their catches.
A ghost of a smile drifted across my face as I touched the picture of the younger version of the agent, the bare skin of his chest and shoulders bronzed by the summer sun as he stood on an old wooden dock, a long arm draped around the older man’s shoulders.
My smile turned wistful as the memory of early summer mornings spent fishing with my grandfather rose faintly melancholy in my mind. It had been thirteen years since he passed away; ten since my grandmother had followed.