But for how long?
She thought about all the mornings she had spent drinking tea and watching the sunrise. All the evenings she had wasted pushing her food around her plate, telling herself it wouldn’t have worked, anyway.
And all that time she could have spent finding them. Fighting for them. Saving them.
“Bryson trusted our father. Cared about him even. Despite all the evidence, my brother always stood up for him,” Elena said with a sickening tone. “But when he said you were a good one, that he trusted you, for some reason I believed him. It’s a disease we have, letting ourselves trust the wrong people.”
“We will find them,” Adria said.
“Wearen’t doing anything. This is a dead end,yourdead end. I am moving on without you,” Elena hissed.
Adria took a steadying breath. “You and I can look on our own, or we can look together and cover more ground.”
“Why would I trust you? You left them to die.”
Heat roared in Adria’s belly, and she bit out the next few words. “I tried to protect them.”
“You did a shit job; you abandoned them,” Elena screamed at her.
“I love them!” Adria screamed back, surprising them both.
Fuck.
She loved them?
The silence rippled around them as the pair stared at each other.
Elena whispered, “Then where are they?”
Adria was going to open her mouth to say she didn’t know, when something clicked.
Who was the one person who wanted to hurt her more than anyone?
CHAPTER 8
NORTH CAROLINA
He answered the phone on the third ring.
“Dri, what a pleasant surprise,” Jonathan’s velvet voice came through the phone.
“Cut the fucking games.” Adria’s knuckles whitened around the phone. “You know exactly why I’m calling.”
Her blood boiled with satisfaction remembering how her team had decimated Jonathan’s kiddy ring campus last week. Right now, the former director was screaming in a windowless room, his fingernails scattered across the floor as her people extracted locations of every sister site in the country.
And Jonathan was next on her list.
He had real balls to fuck with her when she had so much evidence against him.
“Dri, I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about.” His voice dripped with mock innocence. “I left your home two months ago and, as discussed, I only leave for Triune business. Ask that pathetic little shadow you have trailing me.”
Just because he hadn’t left didn’t mean his hands were clean. She knew—in her bones, in her rage, in the cold void where her heart used to be—that he had them.
“If anything happens to them, I will make sure you burn.”
“I think we both know that isn’t going to happen.” His voice hardened. “And before you get on your high morality horse and do something rash, I want you to consider all the reasons it isn’t going to happen.Threeto be exact. I can’t get into them right now. But if you were willing to meet, I’d be happy to run you through them.”
Adria sucked in a breath. He did have them.
