Free Burned (Vanessa Pierson series Book 2) by Valerie Plame, Sarah Lovett Page B

roommate, Marie, the only person outside her immediate family who knew her true employer. Marie was a true-blue friend. If necessary, Vanessa knew she could trust her with her life.
    It wasn’t just the desire to let close family and friends know she was safe, it was also the need to connect with people she loved. Her career with the CIA had a way of pushing all that aside . . . the constant travel, the need for secrecy, and admittedly the strangeness of it all.
    Of course her instinct had been to get word to David Khoury, but in the end she decided to leave it alone for the night. He was Agency, so he would have known just minutes after the bombing that she was safe. She gave herself a halfhearted mental pat on the back for showing some willpower—but the truth was she missed him deeply.
    Saving her brother for last, Vanessa had e-mailed Marshall, who was serving with the Marines’ 3rd Recon Battalion in Afghanistan:
Alive here Big Bro—miss you love you V
     
    She was alone in the safe house for the first time in more than twenty-four hours, and she tried to take comfort in the sounds oflife—the moan and rattle of rusted pipes, the hissing breath of radiators, the hum of computers breathing data twenty-four/seven. At this point, she couldn’t sort out if solitude was a good thing or not.
    Death had brushed past her today, leaving scratches, bruises, aches—adding another notch to a disturbing straight of near misses.
    But in the end leaving her alive. She’d survived again.
    What happened to the young girl she’d tried to help? Had she lost her leg today? What hospital was she in? Was her family with her?
    Tomorrow, Vanessa told herself, she would find out what she could about the girl and the other victims. Tonight—make that today, because it was past midnight—she needed rest. Only a few hours until Team Viper’s first meeting.
    But sleep eluded her the way it so often did.
    The Agency shrink, Dr. Peyton Wright at Headquarters, hounded her about sleep deprivation: “You can’t function forever on three or four hours a night, Vanessa. If not eight hours, you need to try at least for six.”
    “My dad was this way, I’ve always been this way,” Vanessa had reported, shrugging at the psychologist. “You want to give me pills, be my guest, but I’ll flush them.”
    “I don’t want you to depend upon pills,” Peyton had said, sighing stoically. “I want to get at the heart of why you don’t sleep. Is it the nightmares?”
    “I’ll try counting sheep, Doc.” Skipping past the question about her nightmares, Vanessa masked her discomfort with a flip grin. “One bah, two bah, three bah . . .” Her evasion didn’t fool either of them.
    Vanessa counted crunches now. Beginning the regimen she’d put her body through two times a day for the past six weeks.
    After she killed the Chechen, her reward had been doled out in twenty hours of Agency-mandated counseling (she hated everyminute) and a refresher course in personal safety at the Farm (which she actually kind of liked). She had paid special attention to the firearms portion and the hand-to-hand combat training. She moved up to take a level 4 belt in Krav Maga. All of it an effort to make herself feel safe in the world again, as the Agency shrink had pointed out—“How’s that working out for you?”
    A hundred crunches, roll-ups, push-ups, pull-ups, kicking and punching drills—all of it a kind of physical and mental detox to keep old ghosts at bay.
    Midway through the push-ups, sweat gleamed on her forehead and dripped down her neck, dampening her T-shirt. Eyes closed, she worked to exhaust her muscles until they were shaky and strained, until her mind finally pulled back from the worst images.
    She finished the push-ups and bounced quietly to her feet, waiting for the dizziness that had plagued her all day. But she stayed steady—almost.
    From the room’s two outside windows came the muted pitch of a car horn, standing out tonight