After the emergency vehicles passed them, Trevor could have pulled onto the road and kept going. But instead, he sat there. “You’re right. I have been keeping a lot of secrets from you. Something tells me you’ve been keeping more than a few of your own, too. We can’t do that anymore. It’s time we go somewhere and have a discussion we probably should have had the first day we met.”
* * *
“I can’t believe Dick bugged my apartment.” Alina glared at the tall glass filled with water and micro listening devices that was sitting on her kitchen counter. “That bastard.”
“We can’t be sure it was Dick,” Trevor pointed out as he picked up the glass and tried to count the number of bugs that had been planted around his partner’s place. He quickly gave up—it was like counting gumballs in a vending machine. If Alina had this many hidden microphones in her place, he could only imagine how many his apartment contained. “It could just as likely have been Thorn who ordered it. Though I do have to agree with you on one point—Dick is a bastard.”
They’d only learned about the bugs because Trevor had called Adam on the way back from Aberdeen to give him an update on what had happened there and tell him that they were heading to her apartment.
“I’m going to tell her everything,” Trevor had added.
“You know her apartment is probably bugged, right?” Adam had pointed out.
“Any chance you can do something about that?”
“I can,” Adam had said. “As long as you realize you’ll be tipping Dick and Thorn off that you’re onto their surveillance. That may cause complications for both of you later.”
Trevor was aware of that. But he and Alina needed to get a lot of stuff out in the open, and the best place to do that was somewhere she’d feel comfortable.
“Understood,” he had told Adam. “Think you can have the place swept within the hour?”
Adam had assured him he would.
“What was that about?” Alina had asked when he’d hung up.
That was when he’d told her that her place had almost certainly been wired for sound from the moment she’d accepted the job at the DCO.
Needless to say, she hadn’t been happy about it. Muttering under her breath, she’d texted her friend Kathy and said she was coming home but that she’d need some privacy for the night so she and Trevor could deal with some stuff, then asked if Kathy could keep Molly for a bit longer.
“How do we know this friend of yours was able to find all the bugs?” she asked now, taking the water glass from his hand and giving it a shake.
He took the glass back from her and set it firmly on the counter. “Adam, and the people he employs, are very good at what they do. If they say the apartment has been cleared, it’s clear.”
She regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, then nodded. “I guess that brings me to my next question. Do you work for Adam? Is he the one who’s been sending us all over the place the past few days?”
Alina had been patient on the drive back to DC, asking a few questions but essentially waiting until they got back here to get into anything serious. He supposed now was finally the time to talk about it. But looking at Alina, her face and hair smudged with black soot from the fire, her clothes torn and burnt in places from the flying debris and the impact of being thrown to the ground, she looked tired. Judging by how slowly she’d walked up the stairs earlier, beat up as well. He’d be lying if he said he wasn’t concerned about her. It was all he could do not to pull her into his arms. He shoved his hands in the pockets of his cargo pants instead.
“Maybe you should get cleaned up first,” he suggested.
Alina didn’t say anything, and for a moment, Trevor thought she might take him up on his offer, but then she shook her head.
“Not yet. We need to talk and get everything out in the open first. We’ve been hiding the truth from each other long enough. We can worry about cleaning up later. Right now, I just want to know what’s really going on.”
He nodded and motioned her over to the small table in the corner of the kitchen. He would have preferred the couch, but both of them were too dirty for that. They’d make a mess of her nice furniture if they sat there.
“First off, no, I don’t work for Adam. He’s a friend of John’s and had been working with him for years, trying to find something that would put Thorn in prison. When John was murdered, Adam continued to try to find that evidence.”
“Evidence of what?” Alina asked. “I keep hearing all this innuendo implying Thorn was involved in John’s death, but if John and Adam were after him for years, he must have done something else. What’s behind all this?”
Trevor shrugged. “I have no idea where it all started. I’ve heard some rumors that make me think Thorn broke the law around the time the DCO was getting started. I’m not sure what it was, but it was bad enough for John and Adam to commit themselves to putting the man away. I’ve only picked up on that kind of stuff recently, of course. John had kept most of us out of his personal war with Thorn, probably thinking it would keep us safe.”
“What changed?” Alina asked. “Why suddenly pull you into it?”
“Tajikistan happened,” Trevor said. “John called and yanked me out of the mission I was on in Jakarta, telling me to get my ass to southern Tajikistan in time to help Landon, Ivy, and some other DCO agents take down a hybrid research station. It’s a long story, but the short version is that we confirmed Thorn had been behind the hybrid program from the very beginning. He’d been funding the project with money skimmed from the DCO’s budget for years. He’s the one who gave the order to start experimenting on shifters to see what made them tick and to kidnap doctors and scientists like Zarina to further his research, and when his people came up with the first hybrid serum, he was the one who ordered they use it on innocent people. We have no way of knowing how many people died during that testing, but it wouldn’t be a stretch to say it was probably a couple hundred.”
Alina flinched. “Tajikistan? That’s where you rescued Sage, right? Thorn turned her into a hybrid?”
Trevor nodded. “Yeah. Out of all the people injected with various strains of the serum in Atlanta, Washington State, Costa Rica, and all across the globe, we know of only three who lived—Tanner, Sage, and a DCO agent named Minka Pajari.”
