The Griffin Marshal's Heart (U.S. Marshal Shifters 4)

wasn’t very much.

His old team had been a strange bunch, that much was true, and it was nice to think that he hadn’t been the problem. There was something kind of liberating in knowing that Gretchen thought that he’d deserved more friendship there than he’d gotten.

He had always felt inherently broken, like he hadn’t found a family or a circle of close friends because there’d been something wrong with him all along. But... maybe he’d just had bad luck.

If that was true, he could hope for something better someday.

Gretchen was thinking about something else, though. Her voice was cautious as she said, “And Roger and Monroe... would they have had access to the leaked files?”

Cooper started. In all the time he’d had to think, he’d never thought of that. They were all Marshals, and they were all shifters, and those common bonds had to mean some kind of loyalty, right?

Luckily, he didn’t have to think about it for more than a second.

“No. Not even Roger had access to our files—not that I know of, anyway. And Roger and Monroe couldn’t have hacked their way through wet paper bags. They’re both old-fashioned—without me or Phil or around, I don’t even know how they’re managing to check their email.”

“Then it has to be the mob.”

She sounded as relieved as he felt. No Marshal wanted to investigate other Marshals.

Though his old team had investigated him awfully quickly.

“They hacked the files, stole the info, and killed their witnesses. Once the heat was on, Phil must have noticed something, so they killed him and framed me for everything. That way...” Cooper grimaced. “It’s like we’re sitting on a ticking time bomb. If all this is true, then they probably still have a way to see all the witness information. They can pluck witnesses out of our system like getting an apple off a tree, anytime they want, because nobody would have overhauled the system when they thought that it was just one corrupt Marshal. All of this could happen again.”

And when it did, someone like Gretchen could be the scapegoat. He couldn’t let that happen.

The trouble was, it was a hell of a lot easier to accuse the mob than to convict them. No one but him had ever even been formally tried for the murder of the witnesses.

He said all that, and Gretchen nodded along, her expression grim.

“That explains why they’ve decided it’s too risky to keep you around. If you filed another appeal, maybe it would never lead to anybody on their side going to prison... but it could make the feds sniff around their business a little more. But if you were dead, the case would stay closed for good.”

That made sense to him—or at least as much sense as anything else. But he couldn’t shake the feeling that they were bending one or two of the puzzle pieces to make them snap into place. There were a few things still rattling around unresolved.

The fear gas, for one. Was it chemical or was it magical? Before all this, he’d never had any reason to think magic existed, not outside of whatever let shifters be shifters, but they had seen some strange things today. And he guessed if magic were real, the mob would use it as a weapon the same way they used everything else.

It was just that something didn’t feel quite right. But in a situation like this, what answer could feel completely right? No matter who was chasing them, they were being chased. No matter who had framed him, he’d been framed. And like he’d said, the situation was a ticking time bomb.

Especially once the snow started falling.

10

Gretchen had known this snowstorm was coming, but it still managed to surprise her in how fast it showed up. One minute, it was nothing but heavy clouds on the horizon and a reason to crank up the heat. The next, it was a complete whiteout. In between, there had been the faintest sprinkling of snowflakes, exactly the kind of thing she would have loved on Christmas morning—and then, just like that, they were getting buried under them.

There was so much snow and hail in the air, whipped to and fro by vicious winds, that she could barely see a foot in front of her. Even with her headlights on, and even with moving only at a crawl, she couldn’t be sure she wasn’t going to drive them straight off the embankment. She had to pull off to the shoulder.

Cooper squinted through the wintry haze. There was an oddly familiar expression on his face, one Gretchen had seen before but couldn’t exactly place.

“Can you see in this?” Gretchen said, surprised.

“Not much. But I’ve driven this way before, and... I think there’s an old motor court a few miles ahead of us, just off the exit. It’s rundown, but—”

“At this point, I’d happily stay at a motel run by Norman Bates himself. But I don’t think we can make it a few miles. Not in this.”

She didn’t have to say why. He was seeing the same weather she was, and if he knew enough about this road to guess at the location of the nearest motel, he knew as well as she did that there were plenty of treacherous ravines and steep drop-offs along the way. Fumbling around out there would be a good way to wind up in a ditch. And if the crash didn’t kill them, it could easily hurt them enough to keep them from getting back up again—and then the cold would take care of the rest.

“We could try going on foot?” Cooper said.

“We’re not dressed for it. You especially.” The prison had at least given him a reasonably bulky coat, but the snow would soak right through the cloth legs of his jumpsuit.