Listening carefully, I catalogued this news about the hit placed on me. If it wasn’t Hufford, then someone else in the agency wanted me out of the picture. The Cartel chased me and Emil with too much accuracy for it to have been a case of trespassing.
“They were using your watch as a tracker,” Aaron said, sliding a printout of an email toward me. He’d pulled the paper from his pocket, and I felt my blood chill at the strategy listed there. My watch had been taken from the gym to have a tracker slipped in on it. It hadn’t mattered that it was dead in the jungle. The tracker still worked.
My agency, the one I worked for, had turned traitor onme, tracking me like this!
Not only to track me, but to use my location as a way to kill me.
To kill me? Or Emil?
“If you want my opinion, you were getting too close to the Obsidian Eye alliance.” He shrugged. “Someone in the alliance who asked for a favor from someone in the agency, and theytried to kill you out there. Then when that failed, they made up whatever they could to fire you so you wouldn’t be on the case anymore.”
I wasn’t sure how to interpret that. No one knew I was with Emil, and he could have been the target too.
“You okay?” he asked after a few minutes of silence. I had to let all of this fit into my head somehow, but I needed more time.
“No,” I replied at last, shaking my head. “Because this proves I’m not safe.” Those feelings of being watched had been nagging me ever since I left the Cayman Islands. At first, I dismissed it as a phantom sensation ofwantingto be watched, of wishing Emil were near me and had his eyes on me.
Not anymore.
If I were deemed a traitor, other agents could be after me.
If anyone from the criminal world saw me as a variable to erase, I could be targeted too.
“Of course you’re not safe,” Aaron said as he slid another printout of an email toward me. “It took me longer to get into the system to find these, but…”
I took the paper. Holding my breath, I read the lines that implied the leaders in the Cartel knew I was pregnant and planned to take my child, to hold him or her hostage until I explained what intel I’d sold about them or the Obsidian Eye plans.
“Fuck.”
I was getting sick of this feeling, this floating dizziness like a rug had been pulled out from under my feet.
Paranoia wasn’t something I often allowed to control me. After Aaron left, though, and I walked back to my apartment, I couldn’t help but worry about every shadow hiding someone out to get me. That around every corner, an enemy would be there to grab me.
I had zero protections in place. Not from my employer—not when news about my child was spreading through the world of organized crime.
Too many people were out to get me, and with all the irony in the world, the one who wasn’t pursuing me was the one I felt like I could trust.
Emil.
He would keep me safe.
He would know how to navigate these lies and complications that tied us together at the same time they pushed us apart.
I checked over my apartment late that night. My mind was made up. With this news about the dangers lurking too close to the surface, I had to take this rash step to once more go hunt down Emil.
Nothing incriminating could be left here. My possessions were just things.
Yet, I stopped, looking over the home I’d built here, wondering where I could build another one suitable for this baby.
Never before had I worried about the perils of being an agent, of working in a risky industry of hunting down criminals. But I did now. I didn’t regret the good I’d done. As I left late at night to break into the Dubinin mansion and confront the father of mybaby, I wondered if I’d ever be able to do good again. If I’d have a chance to help purge the world of evil and make it safer.
Nothing felt safe for me.
On the walk to the subway, then the slower trek toward the Dubinin mansion where I’d need to rely on every ounce of stealth I could possess, I almost wanted to laugh that in seeking safety, I was running toward the criminal I once identified as the enemy who belonged behind bars.
I’m coming for you, Emil.
And once I’ve got you, I’ll be damned if you just walk away from me again.
