But Reggie and Floyd aren’t dead.
On the other hand, Noah was out late…way, way too late.
And the dossiers…
I look at the laptop. I wish I could say the dossiers were just pranks. But my father had a top-level security clearance. He coordinated a lot of projects with other departments and agencies, and he worked on things I’ll never find out about.
I shove my fingers into my hair, then bend down and grab the hammer. My knuckles turn white around the handle.
You only cared about the secret you thought you could extract from me.
Bang.
Chapter Thirty-Four
Noah
Instead of the usual homey scent of bread and flowers, a stench of acrid dust hits me when I open the door to Bobbi’s house around six p.m. The kitchen tiles are ripped out, and I run a hand over my face. The notification on the app had a post complaining about construction noise next door, and I knew exactly what she was doing after I left. It took all my self-control to not barge in and take over the task.
“Bobbi, I thought you were going to wait,” I say.
Intellectually, I understand she needs to use her body. She isn’t one of those people who likes to sit at a desk and sign papers. She was chafing at what she called my overbearingness. But seeing her bleed was like being hit in the solar plexus with a baseball bat, and it’s my prerogative to take care of her to my heart’s content when she’s injured, even though she believes she’s immortal. People are incredibly fragile. If she’d had her arm angled differently, the knife could’ve sliced the radial artery in her wrist, which could leave her blacked out in half a minute and dead in as little as two.
Just thinking about it makes me want to encase her in metal armor…except she’d run the other way, calling me crazy. So I’ve been hovering between the desire to hide her away in a padded room with nothing that could hurt her and the desire to accept what my brain has been telling me—that she’s fine and I need to back the hell off unless I want her to lose her temper and throw my ass on the ground just to make a point.
“I was, but then I wanted to prove to you that my arm’s fine.” She sounds stiff, probably defensive, since she must be expecting me to be upset. Not moving from the couch in the living room, she gestures at the box with the old tiles. “All yours.”
“Well, glad you waited for me to take them out, at least.” I grin to let her know I’m not upset with her.
“No, I mean you can have them.”
“What?” Finally I register the tight set of her jaw and mouth, the ticking of the muscle under her right eye. “What’s wrong?”
I start toward her, but she doesn’t meet my eyes. Instead, her heel bounces in that way she has when she’s preoccupied with something that she doesn’t want to think about.
My gut shivers with warning. I’m in the presence of a ticking time bomb. Just what the hell happened after I left?
“Do you really call your guns cheetahs?”
It takes a moment for my mind to process the abrupt question. My blood turns to ice. My brain says I should act dumb and give her my most charming and lighthearted smile. As I start to grin, her eyes meet mine, and I freeze, unable to continue with the ruse.
She knows.
“Here,” she says, giving me a microSD card. “What you’ve been looking for.”
I stare at it like it’s a leech.
“My father’s papers,” she adds when I don’t move to take it from her. “You weren’t being fully honest before.”
“Bobbi—”
“You aren’t a wildlife photographer or an adventurer. Who do you work for?” She looks at me like she doesn’t recognize me, and that shrivels my heart. “Whoareyou?”
I should deny everything, except she’s seen the dossiers. Fuck. She must’ve found them in the floor, but how? My team and I went through everything, including the floor, which was the first place we looked. But we found nothing. “Where did you get the memory card?”
She grabs my hand and slaps the card onto my palm. “It was hidden in a groove inside one of the tiles.”
Shit. No wonder we didn’t find it.We were very careful to rip out each tile without breaking it. Otto picked out the ugliest tiles, ones that couldn’t be replaced, and we didn’t have the time to replicate them.
