Total pages in book: 165
Estimated words: 154925 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 775(@200wpm)___ 620(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 154925 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 775(@200wpm)___ 620(@250wpm)___ 516(@300wpm)
If I ever had to disappear, I wouldn’t trust some Agency hack to make up a person. I would find some sad-sack asshole and take over their life. It would have to be someone without a family, without much contact with the outside world. I know that sounds hard, but these days it’s pretty easy. The pandemic alone created an army of isolationists who live on social media. All I need is one who looks somewhat like me, and then I don’t need faked documents. I would have the real thing.
They’d been lying in bed after some insanely nasty somewhat vicious sex and she’d posited the idea that every spy needed a way out. He’d said if things went to hell, he would call his uncle. She’d rolled her eyes and told him not everyone had a Taggart hotline.
He’d thought she’d been thinking out loud.
Had she been telling him her plan all along?
So many things had gone wrong over the course of the last few months.
“Kyle?”
Drake’s voice cut through the cloud of panic that threatened to overtake him. He turned his way. “Huh?”
Drake’s features were grave, as though he knew what had been going through Kyle’s head, and the panic was threatening to take him, too. “It’s time for the op. Deke’s counting on us. I’m going to be watching. If anything goes wrong, you’ll know what to do. If this goes to hell, you do what you have to do and meet me in LA. We’ll figure out where to take you and Mae from there. I can find a place to stash you.”
He shook his head. “No. If Julia’s alive, I can’t be. Mae has to think I’m dead. It’s the only way to protect her.”
Drake sighed. “It’s not going to come to that.”
It absolutely came to that.
* * * *
MaeBe looked up from packing her laptop to Boomer, who’d brought in a pack of pudding cups, hoping he could get her to eat something since she’d refused to eat the lunch the hospital kitchen had sent up. Vanilla. Like her life was going to be now.
“Look, Mae. I got the nurse to give us extras for the road.” Boomer held up the package like he’d done something amazing.
He probably didn’t even realize the nurse would have given him anything he asked for when he smiled at her. All the nurses had been talking about how hot Boomer was.
She’d been in the hospital overnight. It seemed like a theme in her life now. Lots of hospitals because she was the pawn everyone seemed to use. First Jessica Layne had used her to get to Noelle LaVigne. Then that asshole had stabbed her. Now she was a rag doll for Julia Ennis to throw around.
I feel sorry for you. He doesn’t love you, you know. I’m afraid he’s with you because you’re not me. You’re pretty much the opposite of me, and that’s what attracted him to you. You’re a reaction, not an actual relationship. Kyle needs a strong woman, one who can set him on his ass from time to time, and that’s just not you. I would bet you don’t even know the real Kyle Hawthorne.
Julia Ennis’s words rolled through her head like some noxious poison that was also the truth. Oh, at the time MaeBe had found some courage and spat back that she knew him better, but now an uncomfortable revelation had settled deep inside her.
“I’m not hungry.” She was ready to get out of here, to get back to her apartment and lock herself away for a few days.
“Come on, Mae. You know you have to eat. You can’t feel better if you don’t eat.” Boomer was a glorious blond god of a man. He fit in with the Taggarts, but she always kind of thought of him as the human version of Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy. He was loyal and strong and amazing, and sometimes he didn’t quite get the things that were going on around him.
If anyone was going to break the illusion Kyle was trying to spin, it was Boomer. The rest of the group was holding the line. “How about I eat when Kyle decides to be alive again.”
Was that a sheen of tears in Boomer’s blue eyes? “I’m so sorry, Mae. I’m sorry I couldn’t save him.”
Boomer had been the one to toss her broken body over his strong shoulder and haul them out of Nolan Byrne’s mansion before Kyle had blown the whole place to hell. With himself inside. Or that’s what he wanted everyone to believe.
She knew in her heart it wasn’t true. She knew this was all one long setup to keep her out of the war that had begun. The war with Julia Ennis, who’d announced herself this evening by beating the crap out of MaeBe and trying to take the intel Byrne had wanted to trade for a place of power in The Consortium.