She sighs and takes a seat in the chair across from me. “I don’t want you to leave, Wylan.”
“We’ve discussed this, love?—”
“I know,” she interrupts, her eyes glistening. “I know.”
My hands clench into fists and I sit up, my eyes on hers. “Don’t do that.”
“Do what?” she croaks.
“Don’t cry,” I rasp back. “I can’t bear the thought of making you cry.”
“I can’t help it.” She wipes at her face aggressively, trying to push back the emotions.
“Don’t hide it from me either,” I chastise.
She scoffs. “What do you want from me, Wylan Hearst? Don’t cry, but don’t hide my emotions? What the fuck does that even mean?”
I grimace and stand up before moving over to her chair. There, I kneel before her, like a knight at his queen’s feet. I take her hands in mine and make sure she’s truly looking at me.
“Ava,” I breath. “I will do anything to make sure you’re safe.”
“I know you will.”
“Anything,” I repeat, my voice hard. “And if that means I can’t be in your life and I have to leave you in the capable hands of Dagen Fox, then I’ll do so.” I press her hands to my face. “But I want you to know, that when I leave, you’ll never be alone.” I press my lips to her palms. “You will always have a ghost to watch over you and Elsie. Until I take my very last breath.”
“Then why can’t you just stay?” she asks softly.
I don’t give her an answer. She already knows.
Instead, I wrap her in my arms and hold her together as best as I can. Even though I don’t have roots.
Even though I might as well just be her regular, run of the mill, ghost.
Thirty-Nine
Ava
“How did you become Otto_Bot?” I ask as I sit across from Felix.
Now that he’d revealed himself to me, he’d been coming over more often. I’m not sure how he manages to hide his identity, but literally every time he comes over, he’s wearing a new set of disguises. Today, it’s a beard with a baseball hat and he’s dressed like a UPS driver. Hell, there’s even a UPS truck in my driveway. I guess at the very least, it looks like I might be having an affair with a delivery man. My neighbors probably think it’s a porno come to life.
Felix looks up at me, his eyes tracing over my face and then down to my hand where I’d been scribbling notes about Dagen’s new product timeline. We’ve managed to set everything up now and my team has been in charge of scheduling all the departments that we need to work on certain things. The art department, the creative writing department, the graphics department, and the tech team. There’s so much that goes into a marketing plan as large as this and too many moving parts. It’s almost a relief to work on it though, to escape the idea of what I’m going to have to do.
I’ve started to come to terms with it. Dagen, Felix, and Wylan all make a fair point. Why would Ric stop now that I’ve attacked everything important to him? Why did I ever believe that would be enough?
“Luck, mostly,” Felix replies, his fingers flying across his keyboard. “I was really into computers as a kid and I kind of just fell into it. When the FBI came knocking on my door, I accepted the money they offered. When I didn’t like what they were doing, I went wide.”
“I bet they liked that,” I muse.
“Oh, that’s when I was added to the ‘Most Wanted’ list,” Felix says nonchalantly. “No government is my friend.”
“Were your parents proud of you when you got hired?” I ask, knowing my mom would have been had she been around and I’d achieved something like that.
Felix glances at me and then away. “I had foster parents. They didn’t really bother much with me, so no.” He shrugs. “It wasn’t a big deal though. It gave me the escape I needed, and when they would have kicked me to the curb when I hit eighteen, I instead had money to fall back on.”
“Well. . . I’m proud of you,” I say, smiling. “I’ve seen a bunch of your work, and it’s pretty awesome.”
His eyes meet mine. “Most would argue I’m a bad person for what I do.”
