His voice went faint. “Who are you? You’re not the girl I saw raised with morals and integrity.”
Something snapped inside me. How dare he use my upbringing against me? I’d lain to rest every person I’d ever loved, and now he chastised me for trying to hold on to someone who made me feel whole again?
I stood, towering over him. “That girl died with her parents. She was buried when her best friend was taken and killed. The dirt was laid when her only remaining family sold her as a whore to a spy. Would you like to put flowers on her grave, Theo?Here lies Sophia Elena Reeves, a girl with integrity.”
Stricken, he glanced away from me. Silence rained over us.
“You said Williams wants him dead at the end of this,” I murmured. “I’ll do anything I can to stop that, even if it kills me. If you care about me, you’ll find a way to make this happen.”
Theo blinked at his desk a few times and sighed. “Alright, Soph. We’ll talk again later.” I started to leave, but he stopped me. “From now on, I will make sure every officer knows you are unavailable for missions. That never should have happened.”
“Where were you?” I asked. “I looked for you.”
“Classified,” he said. “But we’re getting close. We’re going to win this thing.”
I gazed into his hopeful eyes. “Is there any winning after all this?”
He dropped his gaze to his desk. “Dear god, I hope so.”
27
Hurricane
Men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious.
—ALEXANDER HAMILTON, FEDERALIST NO. 6
Iwent to him every night, just like I promised.
Sometimes, his smiles came easily. Other times he’d crawl into bed, desperate and reckless, long after I’d fallen asleep. He’d kiss me awake and use my body to erase the memories of whatever had happened, the things he’d been forced to do. I always offered what he needed, whether it was hard and fast or excruciatingly slow.
Every day, as the days grew shorter and the nights colder, the risk he took heightened. Each new piece of information had to be catalogued and scrutinized so it couldn’t be traced back to him.
I wanted to hide from it all, but now that I’d returned to headquarters, Lucas’s paranoia over my safety intensified, and he redoubled his efforts to make me a competent fighter.
In our training room one evening, he handed me a throwing knife. “They’re spreading false information now.”
I held it by the blade the way he’d shown me, flinging with a snap of my arm. It bounced off the wall like all the others, landing on the carpet.
My shoulders fell. “What did I do wrong that time?”
“You’re putting too much force into it.”
I sighed, wiggling my shoulders. “So they’re trying to ferret you out?”
He shrugged, handing me another knife. “I’m staying ahead of it for now.”
Another toss. Another knife on the floor.
“But?” I lifted an eyebrow
“I’ll slip up eventually, Soph.”
My heart cracked a little more each time I imagined him taken from me. His downfall was coming, and he gripped me tighter and tighter every night.
He crossed the room to scoop up the knives. Dark waves fell into his face as he bent forward, and he tossed them away with a sharp jerk of his head. It said something that the NSF’s soldiers weren’t keeping to the strict military grooming standards—just another small clue that they were falling apart, all thanks to him.
It was like waiting for a hurricane. The storm grew more powerful as it inched toward us, and I had no way to evacuate. No wish to. I sat helpless, prepared to drown.
