The Undercover's Secret Promise

The sniper who just put a bullet through the man holding a knife to my throat is the same man I gave away three years ago.

I gave him away because a woman came to me crying, calling herself his fiancée, and begged me to hand him back. So I did.

I signed the transfer, I moved to another city, I told myself I would never see him again. Blood was still sliding down my neck.

The knife had been pressed right over the artery, its owner screaming into my ear that he wasn't going down alone tonight. Then a shot. One clean round through the skull.

Warm blood sprayed across my collarbone. And that man walked toward me through the wet red mess of it, uniform crisp, eyes cold and level. Officer Frost.

Three years ago his memory came back all at once, and with it a whole life I had never been part of. An undercover cop. A childhood sweetheart. A promise older than me.

I let him go clean. No fight. No interest owed either way. I thought I had closed the account for good. And now he's here. Chapter 1 The knife was at a little girl's throat first.

I need that on the record, because later half the internet would decide I did it for the cameras. She couldn't have been seven.

The man behind her had a blade to her neck and his mouth in her hair, and she was screaming the kind of scream that doesn't stop. Something in me just moved.

I talked him into taking me instead.

So by the time the rain came down for real that evening, it was my artery under the edge of his knife, my pulse jumping against the steel. "Move and you're dead," he said behind me.

That was the state I was in the second time I ever laid eyes on Callum Frost. Three years, and this was how.

He stood a few yards off, turned half away from me, saying something low to another officer.

Rain ran down the clean line of his jaw and made his face look colder than it already was.

After a moment, he started to negotiate. "Tell me what you want." The man's voice came out twisted. "A wife!

Give me a wife, one who'll give me sons!" Which was, of course, impossible. The rain got heavier. Hostage negotiators worked him through a few rounds.

Somewhere in there, someone said the wrong thing. He snapped. His fist ground the handle. "No wife anyway. Might as well take a pretty one down with me.

Fair trade." The blade sank into flesh. The pain and the animal fear of dying hit my heart in the same second. Then a crack.

The bullet split the rain and went straight into the forehead behind me.

By the time Callum lowered the gun and crossed to me, I was already up, one hand clamped over my throat, swaying on my feet. I'd lost too much blood.

The world pulsed black at the edges. I got two steps. Then I went down into his arms. I woke up in a hospital. My neck was bandaged. The pain was still bright and specific.

Callum stood at the foot of the bed, his rainsoaked hair still dripping onto the floor. I got my voice working, rough. "The little girl I traded places with—" "She's safe.

Her mother has her." He looked at me for a long moment. "He had a knife. Wanting to save someone doesn't mean throwing your own life at it." I tried to smile.

The wound pulled and killed it. "Sorry about that. But protecting the weak is human nature." I held his eyes. "You taught me that. Officer Frost." This wasn't my fight.

I was just walking home from work when I saw her. The blade at her throat. The man mouthing at her hair and her shoulder like she was already his.

She was crying so hard she couldn't breathe. And I thought of Callum. Three years ago, before we broke up, he'd thrown himself under a falling billboard to get a kid out of the way.

Six stitches in his back. In the hospital I was so angry I almost cried.

I jabbed a finger at his forehead. "Next time, could you make sure you're safe before you go saving anyone?" He sat under a single lamp and tipped his head back to look at me.

His lips were pale from blood loss. But when he smiled, there was still light in his eyes. "Protecting the weak is human nature." Selfish, selfserving me.

And he was the first person alive who ever left me with nothing to say. Chapter 2 Not one word.

He took my hand and looked straight into my eyes, dead serious. "But hurting myself and making you worry, that part was wrong of me." "I'm sorry, Wren." That was how much Callum and I loved each other, back then.

Which is exactly how ugly the breakup got. Because a few months later, a woman named Priscilla Dane showed up at my door. That was how I found out Callum had been an undercover cop.

That a job went bad, that his cover was blown, that they'd nearly tortured him to death before he clawed his way out.

That the injuries took his memory with them. "The whole two years he was with you, I was out there looking for him," Priscilla said, and the tears came right on cue. "Please.

Give him back to me." She'd come prepared. Photos. Gifts. A ring in a little box. Their whole history, laid out on my coffee table. Twenty years, she said. Inseparable, she said.

And Callum couldn't tell me otherwise. His memory had only just come back. The first thing it handed back to him was her.

I've never fought to keep something I didn't believe I deserved. So I ran. The day I was discharged, Callum came to get me. He brought a young officer with him.

He sat in the back seat beside me, expression grim. I touched the gauze on my neck and tried to warm the air up. "Anyone watching would think I committed a felony.

Leaving the hospital in a squad car." Callum kept his face flat. "You didn't. It's just a statement." The young cop took me seriously and rushed to reassure me. "Of course not, Ms.

Calloway. You risked your life for a stranger.

The department's talking about a valor commendation for you." "A commendation and no reward?" I tipped the corner of my mouth. "Not even a young, handsome officer to date?" In the rearview mirror, the kid's ears went red. "That, uh, we—" he stammered.

Callum cut him off before he could finish. Cold. "Eyes on the road. Don't get distracted." "Yes, Detective." I dropped my gaze and let it go. The statement ran until noon.

A case came in, and Callum went out to handle it. Everyone walked me warmly to the door, and I stepped out straight into a face I knew far too well. Priscilla.

White dress, soft and demure, a lunch tote in one hand. The soft little smile she wore died the second she saw me. The others greeted her on their way past. "Ms.

Dane, here to bring Detective Frost lunch again?" "He's a lucky man. Not like us.

We come back late and it's cold leftovers." "Wedding bells soon?" She ducked her head like she was shy. "Very soon.

I'll get invitations out to everyone." My chest pulled tight, and my throat with it. I pressed my lips together and walked fast for the exit.

Priscilla came after me. "Wren Calloway." She stepped into my path, and the sweetness was gone. "You promised me.

You said you'd give Cal back." "Backing out now that he's made lieutenant?" "I'm not backing out." I said it without a flicker. "Congratulations.

A long and happy marriage to you and Callum Frost." Her smile came back, satisfied. "Thank you." In the cab home, we stopped at a red light. I looked out the window.

A girl slipped and went down on the sidewalk, and her boyfriend scooped her up and pulled her in against his chest, tight, like it was nothing. Tears came out of nowhere. One drop.

I wiped it before it could become anything. I found myself thinking about the seventh month of knowing Callum. The night he turned down my third confession.

He said his memory was gone and his name meant nothing and he had no way to give me a happy life. Chapter 3 He turned me down. And then he came home with me anyway, to help me pack.

We were halfway through it when my stepfather came back. Reeking of liquor. Same as a hundred nights before. Cursing before the door was even shut, already coming at me.

I tried to kick him off. He got a hand around my throat and cracked me across the face. Callum was in the next room, fixing the busted hinge on my closet. He heard.

He came through that doorway in three strides. He took my stepfather by the collar, hauled him up off me, and put his fists into him until the man stopped swinging.

I lay on my back on the floor and stared at the ceiling and felt nothing. My vision was a smear.

I couldn't even find Callum's face in it. "Wren." He was over me. "Wren." I managed to curl one corner of my mouth. "Ten years." My voice came out flat. "First time in my life anyone bothered to save me.

Callum." Something moved across his face that I didn't have a word for. He lifted me up off the floor and carried me out the door. "Don't look back.

Don't look." He kept a hand over my eyes. "You never have to come back to a place like this. I'll handle all of it." "Wren. The answer's yes.

To the confession." Ordinary lives come prebroken. I only missed Callum in the odd stray second of one. Second week back at work, I went viral.

The story: I'd stepped in for a terrified little girl and taken her place as a hostage. A hero.

One night later, the wind changed. [Commenters: idk didn't read "hero," read "woman who overestimated herself"] [Commenters: full face of makeup, dressed like THAT, and we're supposed to buy that she was just walking home being a saint? walking home from WHERE lol] [Commenters: who wears a tube top to save a child. be serious.] [Commenters: kinda feel bad for the guy they shot honestly. never could get a wife his whole life, quiet type pushed too far] The whole thing caught fire.

A media outlet reached out. They wanted a sitdown. I almost said no. Then they told me they'd already lined up an official to appear beside me.

Someone who'd set the record straight, clear the smear off my name. I only found out who, after I'd already said yes. The official appearing beside me.

The one who'd fired the shot that put the hostagetaker on the ground. Callum Frost. The day of the interview, I sat in front of the camera.

The reporter across from me was a man, and he opened with this. "Ms. Calloway.

When you offered yourself in that little girl's place, what was going through your head?" "Nothing much," I said. "She was crying.

I wanted her home." "So her tears set off your empathy?" I frowned. Something in the phrasing had a hook buried in it.

Beside me, Callum spoke, cold and even. "As officers, we don't encourage civilians to put themselves in harm's way. But what Ms. Calloway did took courage.

It deserves recognition." The reporter gave a noncommittal nod and glanced down at the cue card in his hand.

When he looked back up, there was something bright and hungry in his eyes. "The man who was shot had a record. Priors." A pause. "I've seen the photos from the scene.

His hand was on your lower stomach. Did you feel it, at the time?" My face went cold. "That question is out of line.

I'm starting to doubt you're fit to call yourself a—" He talked straight over me. "From what I understand, when you were very young, you grew up in a home where you were hurt.

Badly." My mind went white. Almost on reflex, I looked at Callum. The one secret I could never say out loud. He was the only one who knew it. I'd only ever told him.

The mic pushed toward my mouth, dripping with intent.

Chapter 4 "Was it the little girl crying," he said, "that made you think of the child you used to be?" "Who cleared these questions?" Before I could get a word out, Callum was on his feet.

Cold. He crossed the room in a few strides and put himself between me and the camera, his back blocking the whole malicious frame. "We confirmed with your station in advance.

The purpose of this interview was to clear the rumors going around about Ms. Calloway." His voice didn't rise. "That question crosses into a private citizen's history.

It has nothing to do with why we're here. It ends now." The glare of the lights vanished behind the width of his back. The world in front of me went soft and dim.

I dropped my head and forced everything churning in my chest back down. Callum didn't give an inch.

The reporter went from smug to stammering, and finally pasted on a smile and apologized to me. I kept my voice level. "I want a different reporter.

Someone with the standards and the ethics this job takes. Otherwise I'm within my rights to walk." They escorted him out fast and brought in a woman. Sharp, warm, and good at it.

Every question she asked was clear, and every one of them went straight to the bone.

When it wrapped, she shook my hand and made me a promise. "I'll send you the written version before anything airs, Ms. Calloway.

You'll see it first." I thanked her quietly and stood to go. I'd just reached the lobby when I heard footsteps behind me. Fast. Then a hand closed around my wrist. Not hard.

But the warmth of it, the exact weight of that grip, made my eyes sting for a reason I didn't want to name. "Officer Frost.

Putting your hands on me like this is fairly offensive." "Is it offensive to hold my own girlfriend's hand?" His gaze skated over my face and settled on my mouth, which had gone pale.

His voice dropped, softer. "You turn to say two words to someone, and you're gone." "I just didn't want you disappearing on me without a word.

Again." Something sour foamed up in my chest and spread thin. My throat closed. It took me a while. "We already broke up." "That was you telling me. Onesided.

I never agreed to it." He paused a beat. "That question, from the reporter today. I'm not the one who gave it to him." "Whatever else is true, that's yours. Your history.

Whatever side I'm standing on, I would never hand a piece of you to anyone without your sayso." It landed. I stayed quiet a second.

Then I pulled my hand free, hard. "I know." "But Callum. Whether or not you'll admit we're over, there's been nothing between us for a long time." I did know.

The sourness held for a second, and then I was thinking clearly again. A thing like that is private. It isn't untraceable.

There were a dozen ways that reporter could have come by it. Exactly one was impossible. Through Callum. Callum had always been a good man. Good in a way that was almost stupid.

That was why I fell for him in the first place. The goodness of him. It was only later, when his memory came back, that I learned the truth.

Before me, earlier than me, there had already been someone else in his life. Priscilla. All it takes is the name, and everything roped to it comes back at once.

His memory was full of holes. I had no family of my own. Three years ago. The day before Callum and I were supposed to get engaged. Chapter 5 We'd meant to keep it simple.

But Callum went and picked up work behind my back anyway, saving up to buy me a nice engagement ring. "The day you found me," he said, "you were the only whole thing in a world I couldn't remember." Snow coming down in sheets.

He wrapped his arms around me. I was furious with him for working himself into the ground, and he murmured into my hair. "I don't remember my past.

But I still want to give you a love you can hold your head up about." Then, the day before the engagement, he took a knife meant for me.

A violent man, out of his head, put it in him. He went into a coma and into a hospital, and that same night, people from his old life came knocking.

They told me Callum had taken an undercover job. That someone on the inside turned, sold his cover. That he'd clawed his way out barely alive, and the injuries took his memory.

I watched them, my eyes not quite focusing. A woman stood in front of me, dabbing at her redrimmed eyes. "Ms. Calloway. I'm Cal's fiancée.

My name is Priscilla Dane." "You just crawled in when he'd lost his memory and had nothing left to hold onto. How could you think he actually wants you?" "We grew up together.

From the time he was seven, he never stopped saying he'd marry me." "If he'd come home safe from that job, we'd have been married." She reached into her bag and took out a little box and opened it.

A diamond ring, throwing off light. Her gaze slid over and landed on the thin platinum band on my finger. The meaning didn't need saying. "He doesn't remember his past, Ms.

Calloway. His memory's in pieces. How is a man like that supposed to give you a whole love?" My head was a mess. My ribs went tight around it, until I couldn't pull a full breath.

But I still said it, almost on instinct. "I want to hear it from Callum. Himself." "Ms.

Calloway." The young man who'd come with her spoke up. "How do you have the nerve to go ask him? Our Detective is in a hospital bed again because he saved you.

He's remembered his past. He's remembered his promise to Cilla. What more do you want out of him? His whole life since the academy has been balanced on a knife's edge. Please.

Stop making this harder for him." They showed me a video. The picture was a little blurred. A birthday cake in the frame.

Priscilla, barely more than a girl, hiding her face, shoulders heaving as she cried. "Cal.

I don't have any family left." Callum sat across from her, looking at her steadily. "From now on, I'll be your family." Family. Such a heavy word.

A thousand times heavier than the fragile thing between us. Which was only a scrap of stolen time, taken while he couldn't remember who he was. "Ms. Calloway. I'm begging you.

Give him back to me." "Ms. Calloway. Your life is already a dead, stagnant pond. Don't drag our Detective down into it to keep you company. Please?" In the end, I ran.

A few days later, the day the interview aired. I was leaving work when I found Callum's car parked outside my building, waiting. Him in it.

He'd pulled me inside before it fully registered. "What are you doing?" He leaned across and buckled my seatbelt. "After the interview wrapped, I went back and asked the production team a few things." He didn't look away. "Whoever leaked your history." His eyes had gone flat and cold. "I'm going to find out exactly who.

And I'll make it right for you. Whatever it takes." Chapter 6 I didn't expect him to drive me back to their station.

In an empty little conference room, I came face to face with someone I knew. The colleague who'd come with Priscilla that day.

The one who told me not to make things hard for Callum. I recognized him. Brody Nash.

When he saw the cold look on Callum's face, something scrambled behind his eyes. "Detective." Callum went straight at it. "Two days ago you pulled the file on a threeyearold investigation out of records." "I—" "You're suspended pending review for misconduct.

You have no clearance to pull classified files. You know that." His voice dropped, close to a bark. "And on top of it, you handed a private citizen's records to the press.

You think you can carry the weight of that?" Before Brody could get a word out, the door swung open.

Priscilla stood in it, head tipped, eyes full of confusion. "What is going on in here?

I could hear you laying into someone from all the way down the hall." Callum turned his head and looked at her with something I couldn't name.

She didn't wait for him to answer. "Brody, what did you do to get Cal all worked up this time? You know how stubborn he is. Just apologize.

Swallow your pride, it's nothing." She crossed to Callum's side like it was the most natural thing in the world and tipped her face up at him, close and sweet. "Come on.

Do it for me. The three of us grew up together. You of all people know what Brody's like. He never means any harm." "Isn't that right, Ms.

Calloway?" She even lobbed it to me on the way out. The provocation was practically laid out on the table.

I looked at that carefully built expression, soft and harmless and innocent, and for some reason, I nearly laughed. "Officer Frost." I lifted an eyebrow, smiling. "You brought family along to run one good cop, one bad cop on me?

Your idea of an accounting is really something." Callum didn't so much as glance at me. He just said it, flat, to Priscilla. "Go wait outside.

What I'm dealing with right now is official business." The room went dead quiet. Brody's eyes cut between them and stuck.

And I stood there and let myself feel it, cold and clean: him setting her aside in front of every person in the room, and not making it about her for even a second.

The soft, wounded thing she wore cracked straight down the middle before she could catch it. "Cal—" "Priscilla." He cut her off.

His voice had an edge on it now. "You really think I don't know who it was?

Who stood up under the cover of ruling out an enemy mole, and put Wren Calloway's name forward to be investigated?" By the time I walked out of the station, the sky had gone dark.

With Callum refusing to let it slide, Brody finally admitted it. He was the one who'd fed my private history to the press. "I just thought, there's so much bias against Ms.

Calloway online. Maybe if people knew she'd been through something like that too, they'd ease up—" I didn't bother looking at him through the excuse.

I looked at Callum. "His apology. I'm allowed to not accept it, and not forgive him. Right?" "Of course.

That's your right." "But whether or not the person he wronged forgives him, what he did is serious. There will be consequences." "Okay, Officer Frost.

Thank you for your incorruptible sense of justice." I stood and turned for the door.

Callum stood too. "Let me drive you." "Don't bother." I stopped in the doorway and looked back at him. "Officer Frost. Go comfort Ms. Dane instead.

Your heartbroken, ranoff, twentyyearsofchildhood Ms. Dane." Callum stared at me, thrown. His lips moved, like there was something he wanted to say.

Chapter 7 But his phone rang, and cut him off. I figured that was it. The last point where Callum's life and mine would ever touch.

After the interview aired, the tide of opinion turned, and then, slowly, the water went flat and quiet again.

Back to a life as still and dead as it had always been, I went a long stretch without seeing him. Until a monthlong work assignment out in Northvale.

I came home on the first hard cold of the year. It got dark early.

I was bundled in my coat, dragging my suitcase up to my building, when I saw a shape I knew far too well on the bench a little way off. The wheels rattled over the pavement.

He heard it, stood, lifted his head, and looked at me. "Wren." There was a faint tiredness on his face. The corners of his eyes were red.

A few steps apart, dead leaves spun down between us. I asked him, polite. "Officer Frost. You've come to find me again.

Is there some problem still unresolved?" "Don't be so formal with me, Wren." He smiled, and it hurt to look at. "If the job didn't require me sober, I'd have come to you drunk.

If you saw me drunk, do you think you'd believe I mean it a little more than you do now?" I froze where I stood.

Since his memory came back, he had almost never spoken to me in that voice. I didn't want to admit it.

But the truth was, for three years, I'd been missing the version of him who couldn't remember anything. Back then there was nothing between us but reckless love and being saved.

My throat closed around something. I pulled in a breath and took two steps forward and just put it out in the open. "You and Priscilla are getting married.

How am I supposed to believe a word about your heart?" "Callum. Are you going to do wrong by two women at once?" His hair drifted over his eyes.

He looked at me and didn't look away. "When did I ever—" He didn't finish. His pupils snapped tight.

Behind me came the fast, rising scream of an engine and a horn. "WREN!" His voice came out of somewhere bonedeep. Terror, and under it something close to rage about to blow.

He hauled me behind him. The world tipped as I stumbled, headlights swinging bright and dark. Tires ground against asphalt with a sound that set my teeth on edge.

The car stopped one step short of us. If he hadn't reacted, hadn't moved when he did, it would have hit me. There was no question about that.

The driver leaned his head out the window. "Sorry about that, Officer Frost. Didn't see the road for a second. Lucky, lucky.

If I'd clipped her, how would I ever live it down?" Then the scar carved across his face pulled itself into a smile. He started the car again, turned it around, and drove off.

Callum didn't say anything. He stood with his back to me, silent, gone still as carved stone. "...Callum." I said it softly.

He came back to himself like he'd been somewhere far. "Wren.

There's something I need to go confirm at the station." There was something in his eyes then, honed and cold enough to raise the hair on your arms. I said okay.

He nodded and turned to go. A few steps out, he looked back at me, and under those heavy lashes his eyes were red enough to look like they were bleeding. He said, "Wren.

Goodbye." Monday at work, my manager called me into her office out of nowhere. Chapter 8 "You did excellent work on that trip.

It so happens the company's opening a new operation in New York, and we'd like to send you out there. If it goes well, you'd be one of the founding people on the branch. Wren.

Think it over." I went back to my desk and still couldn't quite land. My thoughts were a knot of tangled thread.

Something was crouched in the middle of it, and I couldn't find the end to start pulling. Then, at the company offsite, I got drunk.

I wandered off alone to a corner of the hallway and called Callum. He picked up right before it would have cut to voicemail. I asked, a little slurred, "That day.

What was it you were about to tell me?" "...Are you drunk?" "No." Wind rushed past my ear, like surf rolling in and breaking.

After a long few seconds of silence, Callum finally spoke. "It's nothing. You were right. I can't do wrong by two women at once." "I'm sorry, Wren.

I have to give you up." I sank down into the corner and wrapped my arms around my knees