Sinner walked out of the trailer with a little catch in his step like a man with back pain. He threw himself into hauling materials, working enough to sell the story while still appearing to be fucked up on drugs part of the day and hurting the other.
Deep down, he enjoyed the burn in his muscles. Sweat dampened his shirt and dust clung to his forearms.
By lunch, the men around him had started talking like he was one of them. Sinner checked his phone several times and shot off a few texts to Opal.
One guy leaned against a stack of pallets, chewing slowly. “Your wife text you much?” he asked.
Sinner took a drink of water. “Enough.”
The man laughed. “Mine too. Always wants to know if I ate.”
Sinner was glad the guy noticed. That meant others did too.
His phone vibrated again, and he checked it.
Still pretending to be normal?
He felt the small jab at his personality. It made him smile.
It made him eager to finish the day and see her again.
But it brought a load of worry too. She’d retaliated against a drug dealer and left him bleeding in an alley. Men like that didn’t take those things lightly. He could be waiting for her when she left the office. Not to mention she was being watched in general by Cipher.
Opal had proven she could handle herself. But the thought of watching her tracker on a screen while he looked on, helpless, made him want to break apart the wall the crew just erected.
As normal as you,he returned the jab.
He slid the phone back into his pocket and went back to work even though he was eager for quitting time. Somewhere in the middle of luring a terrorist out of hiding, dark confessions about WitSec and Opal landing in his arms, he’d started looking forward to seeing her and trying to make each other break first.
It made his chest squeeze in a way he hadn’t felt in a long time, and that was dangerous.
Near the end of his shift, he pulled the phone out once more.
Pizza tonight. Chili tomorrow. Compromise.
Her reply came after a beat.Deal.
He stood there for a moment, the noise of the construction site fading into the background. Staying two steps ahead of things had been drilled into him until it was instinct. It was how he survived.
But this wasn’t something he could have ever predicted.
Opal was one thing he hadn’t seen coming.
* * * * *
Opal never allowed what little personal life she had to bleed into her career, and she’d told herself from the start this op would be no different.
But even as she settled into her cubicle, her thoughts kept circling back to Sinner. What they did together lingered in her mind…in every inch of skin he’d touched…and made the thought of going back to the hotelanythingbut neutral.
At lunch she sat on the same bench, not eating as she scanned the area for a dealer. She nodded politely at people she knew worked in the building but didn’t know any of their names—a recurring theme in her life.
People passed through her life in an endless stream. The men in the MC, their women and children. Countless others moved in and out of the motel so often she never could remember their names even if she’d tried. Not to mention the kids in school who were never friends.
In second grade, she thought she had a friend—Bethany. But when she told Bethany that her real name wasn’t Opal and she was living a life that wasn’t her own, the girl dropped her so fast that it took weeks of crying in her pillow to get over. It also meant, she and her family had to be moved—a punishment for telling the truth.
Now Opal rarely thought of herself as that name. She was Opal.
Besides Bethany, people in Quantico came and went, a big pool of names and faces that didn’t mean a thing to her. It was the same for the people she met during missions.
