CHAPTER THIRTY
Paige could see the surprise on Christopher’s face as he stood there, watching her and Nadia hold down Sebastian Carmichael. Then he rushed forward, taking out handcuffs to secure him.
“This is the killer,” Paige said. “Not Cal Sanders.”
“And while I was stuck in an interrogation trying to get a confession out of the wrong man, you were here taking on the real killer alone,” Christopher said. He sounded slightly guilty about that. “You shouldn’t have had to do that.”
“I had help,” Paige said, with a nod across to Nadia. She was convinced that the prison guard’s toughness was one of the main things that had made this turn out better than all the other times Carmichael had attacked women. It was what had allowed her to survive those seconds that it took for Paige to get there.
“I should still have been here,” Christopher said. He took out his phone, making a call. “This is Agent Marriott. I’m going to need an ambulance on site at my location. I have a prisoner with a knife wound, and a civilian who looks as though she has suffered cuts to her arms.” He looked over to Paige. “Paige, are you injured?”
Paige could hear the concern there, and she realized that she didn’t know. She started to look over her arms and her stomach, knowing from her training that it was far too easy for someone to get stabbed in a fight without realizing it, the adrenaline of the fight covering the pain of it.
“Here, let me,” Christopher said, moving around Paige to check her for injuries. It felt strange having him so close, checking over her body like that. It was hard to keep from reacting to that closeness, especially when he was in front of her, looking into her eyes, just inches away.
Paige had to remind herself that there wasn’t anything between them, that there couldn’t be. That this was just him checking to see if she was all right and nothing more, and that anything she felt right then was probably just the emotional aftereffect of being in such a dangerous situation and surviving. Even so, she wanted nothing more in that moment than to close the distance between them, to throw her arms around him at least. It took everything Paige had not to do it.
“I think you’ve suffered some minor cuts,” he said, “but nothing serious. I still want you to get checked over at the hospital, though.”
“What about me?” Sebastian Carmichael demanded, in an agonized voice. “I have a knife in my shoulder.”
“That will have to stay in until it can be removed professionally,” Christopher said. “We wouldn’t want to kill you accidentally. Not before your trial and conviction for four murders.”
“More than that,” Paige said.
Christopher looked over at her sharply. “More?”
“By my count, almost half of the murders attributed to Lars Ingram were actually down to Sebastian here. By today, they had as many kills as each other.” After all he’d done, Paige couldn’t stop herself from kneeling down in front of Carmichael, exacting the one piece of revenge that she knew would hurt the most.
“You almost won, Sebastian, but you failed.”
He’d failed, and with any luck, he would go down in history as nothing more than a copycat. He wouldn’t get the recognition for his crimes that he so obviously craved. There would be attention for a little while, of course, but after that, Paige hoped that he wouldn’t be remembered as anything other than someone trying to copy Lars Ingram, if he was remembered at all.
“Paige, can I talk to you for a moment?” Christopher asked.
Paige nodded, and he led the way out of the kitchen. Paige had no worries about Carmichael trying to escape. If anyone could restrain a handcuffed prisoner, it was a trained prison guard.
“What is it?” Paige asked. In spite of herself, a part of her still hoped that he would say how worried he’d been about her, or that the danger of all of this had made him realize that he had feelings for her.
“I wanted to apologize,” he said. “I shouldn’t have spoken to you the way I did outside the interrogation room. I should have listened to you. My instincts had me in there with a man determined not to say anything. Yours caught a killer.”
“We caught a killer,” Paige said. “I wouldn’t even be on this case if you hadn’t believed in me.”
“Well, I’m glad that I did, or we might have had another death on our hands,” Christopher said. “You’ll make an amazing agent, Paige.”
Paige hoped so, she really did.
*
Graduating from the FBI academy was a big deal, and not just because of the effort it represented in getting to this point. The whole class was there, out in front of the main administrative building of the compound, but so were plenty of other people. It seemed that everyone had friends or family who wanted to see them in this moment, so that the space in front of the low stage that had been set up was thronged with people.
Almost astonishingly, Paige actually had someone there for her. Her mother had come, sitting a couple of rows back from the front, looking incredibly proud even if Paige suspected that she still didn’t quite understand Paige’s decision to work with the FBI like this.
Christopher was there too, looking almost as proud as Paige’s mother did. Maybe he would have come anyway, but Paige wanted to believe that he was there for her.
The ceremony began, with Agent Podovski moving out to the front of the stage to speak.
“I still remember when I first became an FBI agent,” he said. “I thought that it would be like something from TV, all running around, chases and shooting suspects. Solving crimes with brilliant deduction, sweating suspects until they finally cracked. When I came through the academy and joined the bureau, I discovered that… well, yes, all of those things could and did happen. But they weren’t the most important part of what we did to catch criminals and protect the US from domestic threats.”