The paper ball flew in the air above my face, curving and coming back down a second later. I caught it and immediatelytossed it up again. Over and over, I took comfort in the rhythmic movement that felt too familiar even though it had been years since I’d touched a real ball.
The ball fell into my hands and I cupped it, the crinkle of the paper filling the silent room.
Something was wrong.
I felt it like a boulder falling off a cliff and right onto my chest.
A sense of panic and fear were shaking the walls of the office, turning the air toxic and making it hard to breathe.
And I should know. These walls I knew. They were my stability and comfort, sad as it might have been. This was the place where I spent most of my off time because, despite the chaos that could happen between these walls, I didn’t feel secure anywhere else. Not even in the decent apartment I rented about thirty minutes away.
All of that might have been a red flag when it came to myself, but I ignored it, like so many other things in my life. Things I refused to sort through or go all psych-deep-dive into.
My eyes were sharp as I made my way through the inner workings of the secret floor on the top of the Willis Security Tech building. I guess it wasn’t really secret, but you did have to have super high clearance and a special key card to get up here.
It was quiet, but that was normal given that I should have been the only one here now.
But the pressure in my chest didn’t let up.
As I stepped into the main room, I noticed the light pouring out of the cracked door to Reed’s office, strobing in a way that let me know he had the TV on. I didn’t see Reed as the type to sneak off to the office to binge on some show in secret. I’d bet he had some news channel up, which could only mean that whatever was going on had to be serious. As I drew closer to his office door, the motion-sensor lights flickered to life above me.The dread tightened in my stomach the closer I got to his door. It had been a long day, and I had a feeling it was about to be a long night too. I pushed the door open without stealth. I didn’t want to scare him.
“What’s going on?” I asked. My voice was casual but I was sure the pinch between my brows let Reed onto the fact that I felt the rising panic coming from him.
Reed’s honest eyes turned to me with a fear in them that I wasn’t prepared for.
“Shit has hit the fan,” he said.
Well… fuck.
I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, but whenever that saying was used, it tended to be an all-hands-on-deck type of situation, or worse, the end. I didn’t want it to be the latter.
Reed might not have been the most stoic, hide-your-emotions kind of man, but I’d never seen him look this lost before. This unsure. He usually had a plan… or knew who to put in charge to make the right plan. But he had nothing right now.
“The FBI is urging anyone that might have seen this man to call the tip line.”The voice pulled my attention to the TV where a brunette woman wearing a white shirt and a powder blue suit jacket filled viewers in on what sounded like a serious matter. A number scrolled along the bottom of the screen.“This former agent is considered to be armed and dangerous.”
Reed pointed the remote at the TV and it went silent.
It didn’t matter. The image they flashed was of a man I knew quite well, though not really.
There staring back at me was Agent Ford Priestley, with his dark brown hair lightly layered with salt and pepper and a stern expression that I knew very well from a distance. His brow was furrowed in an unhappy way, and behind the plain metal frames, his eyes cut so sharp I was surprised there was still glass covering them. The man was hard, but the image they had of himmade him look deadly— nearly evil, and ready to take blood. My gut twisted. I didn’t know the man on a super personal level, but I’d worked with him enough to know that photo was all wrong. It was taken out of context.
But at the same time, I knew better than most people that you couldn’t trust the image someone portrayed. That you never really knew people, no matter how close you truly thought you were to them.
Monsters were real. Evil existed. People wore masks to hide the things they didn’t want others to see.
Ford Priestley very well could have been a monster. He could have been the one we’d been hunting all this time. And he’d been there in the thick of it, pretending to help us save people from other monsters like him.
1
Ford
I always knew a day like this would come for me.
Okay, maybe not exactlylike this. I never imagined I’d be on the run from the very agency I worked for. Never thought my image would be turned into one of the criminals I worked my whole life to take down.
My eyes angrily cut to the go bag sitting in the passenger seat of the stolen car I was currently pushing to its max as I raced down a back road in the middle of nowhere Virginia.
Where was I headed?
