I freeze, recognizing the last tab in her open browser. It’s an IRC. I click on it, maximizing the window in the screen and bringing up her last conversation. A cold sweat breaks out on my forehead.
It’smyIRC. And that’s… that’smyhandle…and her handle is…
I scramble away from the screen like I’ve been burned, nearly toppling her office chair.
No.
No!
Madison Cooper is mermaidav.
Shit.
Shit.
The General wants her dead.I’mmeant to kill her.
I’m not compromised. I’m screwed.
My heart beats wildly. My mind races, thoughts swirling too fast to catch and hold on to any single one. Rapid-fire bursts of alarm, dread, fear, excitement, longing, relief, vindication, and fury get all mixed up.
No wonder everything about her felt just a little bit familiar. I should have known. Well, I should haveguessed.What are the odds I’d have such an intense connection with two people the same way? That two different women would have the same sense of humor and use the same colloquialisms?
I suppose I didn’t want to see it. I didn’t want it to be true. I didn’t want to think thatmymermaidav is someone I’ve been sent to kill…
Well, obviously I’m not fucking doingthat. That same protective instinct I was just questioning flares. Anyone who touches a single green hair on her lovely head dies.
But the General has eluded me foryears.
What thefuckam I going to do?
I need a plan.
As much as I want to stay—to wake her, to hold her to me, to hover protectively—I need to leave. Madison is going to wake up eventually, and she can’t find me here. And I know that if I let myself stop for even a second to look at her again, I’ll never leave.
So I don’t let myself pause long enough to do anything other than place her phone back where it was and reverse pick the lock on my way out, just to ensure she’s safe. I barely maintain the presence of mind to check the time before I make the call. Not quite 11 PM. Dimitri will be in bed, but Mac should still be awake.
He answers on the first ring. “Yo.”
“We have a big problem.”
11
Wesley
A perfectly reasonable reason to do some creepy ass stalker shit
“Madison Cooper is one of my spiders.”
The time hovers close to midnight, but the silence in the office following my news is wakeful and tense. Fully dressed but looking a bit tired, Dimitri processes the information with a scowl, parked on his kneel-chair against the edge of the desk. Mac is more disheveled—he obviously threw on whatever he could find, because his rumpled tee shirt is backwards and inside out. He scrubs his face and straightens in the faded red wingback chair he always sits in.
“Whoa, really? And you didn’t know before you started watching her?” Mac’s tone is full of disbelief.
“Yes, I also assumed you knew the identities of all your informants,” Dimitri adds.
“You losing your edge or something, Short Round?”
I lift a brow. Personally, it thrills me she was so good at evading discovery, and my team knows better than to question my abilities. Still, I’m a man with an ego, same as they are. “She’s the only one I could never find.”
