The Grave Between Us (A Noah & Cole Thriller, #2)

by Tal Bauer

Cole held his breath and pushed two fingers into the man’s mouth. He knew what he’d find.

He screamed as he fell forward, crumpling the crane in his fist as he rested his cheek against Noah’s cold lips.

Noah murmured some nonsense and kissed Cole’s hand. A moment later, he snored, boneless in Cole’s trembling hold. Cole waited, counting the seconds and then the minutes as he stared at their bedroom wall, not blinking. If he blinked, if he closed his eyes for even a moment, he’d see the grave again. The woods. The lake. He lifted his hand, staring at his palm. He could still feel the paper crane tickling his skin.

Then Cole had appeared. Agent Kennedy. So young he still seemed to fluoresce neon green. Ian wanted to crawl across the room and pin Cole back, knock him to the ground and kneel on his chest, get his hands in Cole’s hair and his nose and his lips on Cole’s skin, on the delicate, paper-thin flutter of flesh between jawbone and neck. He wanted to smell Cole, inhale the essence of him. The smell of his fear, beneath the soap and the deodorant and the laundry detergent. The smell the dogs tracked.

Suddenly—like a lightning strike—there Cole was again. It had been a perfect January Saturday, the air crisp and brittle, the taste of fresh snow from the night before on his tongue. He’d been at the base lodge at Seven Oaks, a postage-stamp-sized ski and snowboard hillside north of Des Moines.

Ian heard Cole’s voice before he saw him.

Jealousy slid up his spine. He hissed, almost crumpling his paper coffee cup.

So happy. So fucking happy together.

He’d had time to imagine how Cole would sound, unfurl the fantasy in his mind, all those days and nights over the past eight years.

After so many years, he could fold these birds in seconds.

The conference room chair creaked as Special Agent Jacob Moore leaned all the way back.

Noah had questions, and Cole helped him find answers, all night long.

He hadn’t been looking for a man to spend forever with, but he’d met Noah, and that was that.

What pliers did to flesh. The definition of piquerism. What skin looked like from the inside. He was haunted by the things he knew.

“You’re perfect for me.” Cole kissed him. “You’re the man I love.” And again. “You’re the man I want to be with forever.” A third kiss. “Yes, I’m sure.”

They couldn’t keep their hands off each other the rest of the night,

Dawn spilled across the eastern horizon, blood orange and buttery yellow lightening to a kind of iridescence, thanks to the stars flickering on the edge of the morning.

Upstairs, he got dressed in his khakis and a polo, grinning when he saw Noah had drawn a heart over his sink in dry-erase marker. Would they ever not be ridiculous about each other? Would this hummingbird heart he had for Noah ever slow down? God, he hoped not. He loved loving Noah.

“In fifteen years, the Des Moines office will still have Noah, Cole, and Jacob showing up every day,” Megan said, winking. “Mark my words.”

His first monster, and the bottle of tequila he drank alone in his bathroom after, made him move a little more slowly, a little more carefully, as he entered the darkness.

The craving was Sisyphean: there would never be an end to that burn-the-world-down bloodlust. A good profiler had to take that stone on their own shoulders. Step into those shadows. Feel how far from the rest of humanity you could go.

“Cole asked me.” Noah smiled. Some of the tension ebbed out of his shoulders as he laughed at Jacob’s shocked expression. “I know, I can’t believe it either. What on earth was he thinking?”

“How did you meet? You’ve never said.” Noah’s cheeks warmed. He slid his hands around the steering wheel, ran his tongue over his teeth. “Um, Vegas. We met in Vegas. He, uh. Picked me up in a bar.”

Honestly, I thought you were dismal when I first met you. Like you didn’t know how to be happy. I’m glad I was wrong.”

“Easier to see it when it’s not you, huh?” Jacob winked behind his sunglasses. Noah saw his eye crinkle, his eyebrow dip. “Holly loves me, yeah. But does she want to be with me for the rest of her life? Am I the guy she wants to be a father to Brianna?” “You already are a father to Brianna. You’re the man in her life.”

There was a tinkling of glass, like a rock had hit the windshield, and then Jacob grunted, as if he’d taken a punch to the arm. He rocked back, his head lolling against the headrest, then hit the passenger window with a solid thunk as a spiderweb of cracks crawled across the windshield, surrounding a dime-sized hole in the glass.

All he saw was mud, patches of filthy snow, cold asphalt, and streaks of burned rubber, rolling over and over in a kaleidoscoping circle. Was that… there, down the highway. Had the trucker stopped? Or was he driving away?

There was a snap and then a burn, deep inside of him, as if someone had heated a poker and shoved it into his shoulder joint. Things seemed to stop in his chest, his lungs stuttering as his heart trembled. His hand went limp, and his gun tumbled into the mud. Blood ran down his arm, soaking his shirt and pooling in his limp palm.

Noah screamed, and the man dug his fingers in deeper. He smiled. “What is it about you, Noah Downing, that captured his attention? What did you do that brought Cole all the way out here?”

“Cole…” She sighed, long and slow. He felt her exhale like it was a bullet. “There was an incident on Iowa 141 today. We don’t know exactly what happened or how, but Noah and Jacob were shot while driving back from Sioux City.”

So why would anyone start a war with the FBI by targeting two agents coming back from a soybean deposition in Sioux City?

And then there was Noah’s gun. Or, more accurately, there wasn’t.

He’d been the one the FBI had turned to to hunt the hunters, but now that his own love had been hunted, he was frozen. Impotent and unable to move, to see, to do. To think, even, or feel anything beyond the rush of pure terror. Even now, he itched to get back to Noah’s side and watch his chest rise that fraction of an inch. To know he was still breathing.

Cole’s doctorate, his research papers, all the court cases he’d testified in. All the accolades he’d received. None of that mattered when it came down to the love of his life lying in a ditch, his heart strangling under a collapsed lung.

Cole’s heart pounded so hard he felt his pulse in his eyeballs. “Why are you here?” Why was the head of the BAU walking into Noah’s hospital room?

“He’s back, Cole,” Michael said simply. “He’s resurfaced.”

How many days had passed since then when he hadn’t thought of Ian, in some way? Zero.

Targeted by Ian Ingram was entirely, unspeakably different.

Another groan, and then Noah’s eyes slitted open and his bleary gaze swam before landing on Cole. The tiniest smile curved the corners of his lips as he exhaled. Cole beamed—the

Failure sank like lead inside him, dropping into an oily ocean of shadows. He’d already pulled that crane from between Noah’s lips, at least in the festering spaces of his nightmare. And he already lived in a totality of fear, in a paralyzing terror that lasted the eternity between his heartbeats.

Ian had known, mailing those photos to the BAU, that they’d get to Cole. That Cole would see what Ian had done, how he’d had Noah’s life in his hands. And wherever he was, near or far, he was orgasming in white-hot joy as he imagined Cole’s terror, his fear. He’d already won.

“We don’t know how many victims Ingram may have. We don’t know where they are. All we have are thousands of missing persons reports over the past decade and a half, and a man who claims he’s murdered ‘many.’ We’ve got a confessed serial killer but only one body. There are families out there waiting for answers. God only knows how many. Only Ingram can close the file on his victims.”

“Why do you think he isn’t talking?” Michael ran his finger around Cole’s desk edge again, collecting dust beneath his bitten, stubby fingernail. “We’re not giving him what he wants.” “What does he want?” “We haven’t found out yet. That’s why I’m sending you down.”

He was a man who could blend into a crowd. A man Cole might see at a bar and not think twice about. Not particularly handsome, but not noticeably off, either. If he’d hit on Cole, Cole would have flirted back. He had a gravitas about him, something that was instantly attractive. Not from an aesthetic perspective, but something that made Cole want to know more. There was a reason Ingram was able to connect with his victims, get them into his truck. He clearly had no problem picking men up.

“Honestly, you’re boring. You’re just like all the others.”

“Why did I do it?” Ingram asked. His voice was like a river running over rocks, steady and rumbling and smooth. Seductive, even. “Why do what I do?”

Ingram was right. Cole understood. Ingram was a predator. Every moment of his life, he hungered: to possess, to dominate, to extinguish. Every cell of Ingram’s body was locked in an endless scream, fueled by incandescent rage. An inferno that never guttered. He visited that rage on his targets, relishing their cries and the chill of their flesh cooling beneath his savage touch. He dug his graves by hand with a smile. He hunted, and hunted, and hunted, day in and day out. He loved what he did. He loved to kill.

Ingram’s eyes went dark—inverting, it seemed. No longer gleaming, but turning into twin eclipses. His expression, his body, even his breathing went still. “So,” Cole said. “Daddy issues.”

Cole listened the whole time, not speaking, not flinching, not moving. Barely even breathing.

Lead interrogator. As if that banal term could encompass what he’d done, what he’d become, and what Ian had become to him in the space of those months.