Kellan pulled himself from the driver’s seat of his Camaro, every one of his muscles feeling as if it had been strung up and stretched thin. Captain Bridges had given him a lot of latitude during yesterday’s shift, sparing him from his duties on engine in order to take Isabella and Sinclair through the scene of the fire, inch by inch. But Seventeen had rolled out on four back-to-back calls after that, and while two of them had been relatively minor, the three-car smash-up on the highway and the utility worker they’d rescued from a drainage pipe had sucked away energy he’d had to manufacture out of sheer will. Add to it the fact that DuPree had somehow managed to ID Isabella as a cop and kill both Angel and Danny Marcus, then cover it up while still flaunting the crime in their faces?
Yeah. Stick a fork in him. He was freaking cooked.
Kellan sent a few extra covert gazes around the parking lot in front of his apartment complex, his awareness on full-alert as he walked the path from the asphalt to the building’s double-wide glass front doors. If DuPree knew who Isabella was, chances were high that the bastard had ID’d Kellan, too. He’d called Kylie and Devon as a precaution, his sister kicking into what-the-hell mode and Devon kicking equally hard into oh-hell-no mode. Kellan had assured Kylie he’d be fine (and Devon had assured Kellan she’d be fine—thank fuck), passing along the same assurances to Bridges and everyone else at Seventeen when Sinclair had told them all to be extra vigilant for the time being, just in case. Gamble had even gone so far as to get all Special Forces on his ass, making him swear to check in at regular intervals between now and their next shift. And Kellan thought he was paranoid. He didn’t even want to know what had happened to make Gamble so sharp around the edges.
Speak of the devil. Kellan liberated his ringing cell phone from the back pocket of his jeans and tapped the icon to take the call. “I left the fire house ten minutes ago, you know.”
“Yeah. You home?” Gamble asked without pretense.
Kellan swiped his way into the building with his electronic key card, stepping into the empty lobby and hitting the button for the elevator. “Copy, jackass.”
“That’s all I needed to hear,” Gamble said. Leave it to a Marine to set their code word for the all-clear to jackass. “Later. Jackass,” he added, and Kellan could swear he heard an oh-so-rare smile in the guy’s voice just before he disconnected the call.
“Nice talking to you, too,” Kellan said to the dead air, a small huff of laughter crossing his lips. Sharp around the edges or not, there were far worse people to have his back.
The elevator arrived seconds later and he stepped on, looking down at the cell phone still in his hand. Scrolling through his list of contacts, his finger hovered over the icon labeled Moreno, his brain doing the yes-no-yes-no dance the whole way to the fourth floor, and screw it. He might have some ironclad impulse control in all other situations, and Isabella might be more than your average badass. But DuPree was a psychopath who had killed two people in direct connection with her investigation, and she’d taken Angel’s death as hard as he’d expected. Kellan needed to know Isabella was okay.
Shit. For all her tight-lipped caution and chin-up bravado, he missed her. And dangerous or not, he wasn’t quite ready to lock that feeling away with all the rest.
His finger came down on the icon two seconds before the elevator doors opened, but it wasn’t the sound coming through his phone that shocked him into place as soon as he stepped into the corridor.
It was the sound of someone else’s phone, ringing from a few doors down, that blew Kellan the fuck away.
“Moreno?” He blinked, certain his weary, bleary eyes weren’t cooperating with reality. But Isabella looked up at him from the spot where she’d been sitting outside the door to his apartment, her cell phone in her hand and a look of total shock on her face.
“Hey, I…are you calling me?” she asked as she stood, and Christ, could Kellan be any less suave?
“Sorry, yeah.” He hit the end call icon with the edge of his thumb, and her phone fell silent. “I wanted to make sure you’re okay.”
“Oh.” Isabella nodded, her hair spilling forward to shield her eyes. “Sorry to just show up like this. I’m sure you’re really tired. Or, you know. Maybe busy. This was probably a bad idea.”
Kellan lowered his brows in confusion, and what was that look on her face? “No. I’m glad you’re here.” His smile lasted only briefly before he asked, “So, are you okay?”
“Not really. No. I mean, I’m safe,” she added, likely in response to the swift step he’d just taken in her direction and the tactical stare he’d just lasered over either side of the narrow, empty hallway. “But yeah. I’m not okay.”
“You’re not hurt,” he said, and looked like his tactical tendencies weren’t on the shelf just yet.