Ice Shear by M. P. Cooley

qualified Hale as a boyfriend, particularly after he blew me off to pursue Missy Fenwick. I decided to hedge. “We haven’t talked in years. We were NATs together—”
    â€œGnats?”
    â€œNATs. New Agent Trainees, at Quantico. He and Kevin were roommates.” I hoped that would end this discussion. Most people backed out of conversations about Kevin or my FBI days so fast my head spun. But Dave was trained at getting answers and kept silent until I felt forced to fill the void. “Anyway, we kind of lost touch. I was a dogsbody, going from Missouri to Nevada to L.A. to Oakland. Kevin was in the cybercrime unit in the Bay Area, and Hale did antiterrorism. We never got assigned to the same office.”
    Hale had been a legacy candidate at a military college—everyone in his family had attended since before the Civil War—and was communications director for the House minority whip before going to Quantico. The FBI allowed him to ever-so-slightly rebel, since his family thought the whole enterprise was in questionable taste. I had trained my whole life for law enforcement, doing admin work at the police station in high school, getting a dual master’s in psychology and criminal justice. I considered the FBI a place that would let me take the good work my father did to the next level.
    Kevin was the only person I knew in the Bureau who was actively recruited. He started as a black hat, hacking the Pentagon’s Web site when he was fifteen. With his midwestern modesty, his sweet black curls and thick black-framed glasses—which he claimed were “punk rock” but in fact were full-on dork—he avoided suspicion. He cut his hair, ditched the glasses, and switched to being a white hat, helping identify security holes in the CDC’s Web site. I preferred him with short hair and without the glasses, where you could see his dark blue eyes, like the night sky. The FBI wanted him, and he liked the idea of outsmarting the mob and pornographers. I teased him about the big firefights during the raids on the servers, but he was doing some dangerous assignments, working with Interpol to take down some Russian organized crime figures who posted pictures of teenage “exchange students” who could be bought and shipped anywhere in the world. Those mobsters weren’t afraid to kill anyone, including three agents and twenty-two fifteen-year-old girls who were no longer considered “marketable.”
    I searched through Norm’s notes for a topic that would derail Dave from this line of questioning.
    â€œSo the last time you saw Hale was when?” Dave asked as he stopped at a light. “Kevin’s funeral?”
    â€œNo, before that. Kevin was disabled for a long time, and I was the loser who quit when things got to be too much—”
    Dave frowned. “I, look . . .”
    â€œâ€”and people more or less washed their hands of us at that point. Or me, since I couldn’t hack it.”
    â€œLyons.” Dave reached over and grasped my arm, sliding his hand down until his pinky rested against the skin of my wrist. “June, trust me, I know people who cut and run when things get hard. My mom did that. You didn’t. You did fantastic, taking care of Kevin and Lucy. I saw you coming in, humping the job, and I couldn’t even figure out how you did it.”
    Dave hit the gas, but he didn’t remove his hand. He tended to be casual with his affection, cuffing heads and resting his hand on people’s shoulders, so I felt a flash of embarrassment when I realized we were holding hands.
    â€œDo you want off?” he asked.
    â€œNo!”
    Dave pulled his hand away. My vehemence surprised him, and me, too. “No. I like the work. And hey, this could be a way to get a little of my own back, right?”
    â€œRight. Won’t bring it up again.” He drummed a little song on the steering wheel. “You, me, and the G-man