Cas deflated. “Not really. None of it makes any sense. Still. Even if I suppose that the people on list A actually represent a celebrity of some sort, list B seems to mean nothing. There’s no record of those people even existing. The only thing they seem to have in common is the initials of their first and last names. They all correlate.”
Sadie dropped back so she could lie on the couch, her socked foot connecting with Cas’s calf. “So, maybe list B isn’t a list of names but a list of keywords.”
“Keywords?”
“Yeah, like maybe they’re aliases or…something.”
Not aliases. Aliases would have brought up social security numbers, passports, driver’s licenses, credit history. The whole point of an alias was to become somebody else. “Passwords. What if the lists were just the first part of the puzzle? What if part A is the file name and B is the password?”
Sadie bobbed her head in agreement. “Yeah, okay. I’m picking up what you’re putting down, babyface. But if A is a file or website or whatever and B is the password…where do you plug in the password?”
Cas flopped back over, his legs tangling with hers, before digging his palms into his eye sockets. “Fuck if I know.”
When the lock on the door clicked yet again, they both craned their heads to look, Sadie’s gun in her hand once more, steady even though she was practically looking at the door upside down.
They both relaxed as Jonah entered, staring at the two of them, legs intertwined. He dropped his weapon on the counter before relocking the door. “Sorry to interrupt your little slumber party,” Jonah muttered, glaring at their legs.
Cas frowned at Jonah’s attitude, but Sadie just laughed. “Oh, don’t be like that, brother. I come bearing gifts.”
22
Jonah
“You’re here sooner than I expected.” Jonah spoke to Sadie, but his gaze had already moved on, crawling up the length of Cas’s legs to his torso and then to his face, as if something might’ve changed in the couple of hours he’d been away.
Cas’s mouth tipped into a somber smile.
“I happened to be close by.” Sadie disentangled from Cas then arched her back in a stretch. “But I can always leave again, give it a little longer and see who else ends up dead before I ride my white horse in.”
“You hate animals.”
Sadie let Jonah pull her off the couch and into a stiff hug, and he felt both her surprise in the gesture and the effort she had to put into relaxing within his embrace. It’d been almost two years since he’d last seen her, and even more so than Jonah, Sadie was a loner who would spend months holed up somewhere, taking contract after contract with little to no human contact aside from her targets. Madi had called her feral once, and he wasn’t far off the mark. In the last decade, she hadn’t had someone like Cas come along to keep her tethered to the living.
“So, you were at Madi’s?” She cocked a brow.
Jonah had been studying Cas’s scribbles on the glass, about to ask about them, but nodded and dropped onto the couch instead, wrapping a hand around Cas’s ankle and stroking the tendons without thought. He ignored Sadie’s knowing grin as her gaze flitted between Jonah’s hand and his eyes. “We had some business to settle.” Cas let out a soft snort but said nothing. “And we’ve got a plan.”
“Wait.We?” Cas narrowed his eyes.
Jonah ran his fingers along Cas’s calf then explained Madigan’s idea of faking Cas’s death. “It’s not genius—”
“Not from Madi, no,” Sadie interrupted, and Jonah glared at both of them when Cas snickered.
“Like I said, it’s not genius, but it could work.”
“Right, no biggie. Just pull some of my teeth and send me halfway across the world.”
“Sounds like my kind of vacation.” Sadie grinned.
“But what about the list?” Cas made a sweeping gesture toward the windows and started to hop up, but Jonah laid a forearm over his shins to keep him in place.
“Who cares about it? Let ‘em have it. You get to keep your life.” It was as close as he got to a pep talk, and it earned him another funny look from Sadie.
“They might want a body with a contract like that,” she said thoughtfully. Her gaze flitted toward Cas, scrutinizing his features. “We could find one, though. Not a perfect match but close enough.”
“Club junkie?” Jonah suggested.
“Absolutely.”
