“Oh, my God,” I said aloud as a thought suddenly struck me.
“What?” Bray asked.
I stared at my feet and blinked a few times while I fit the pieces together in my mind. I hadn’t thought of it until that moment, but what Bray had said about his mother keeping him safe suddenly took root in a way that made a new kind of sense.
I looked up at him. “Bray, do you think he did the same thing to me?”
“What thing? And who?”
I stood so the thoughts in my head would fall into place with the help of gravity. “Wallace. Do you think he sent me here, to Del Rio, because he was thinking just like your mom, that it would be safe?”
Bray pushed himself to stand on the step where his feet had been planted. He stood two below me and met me at eye level. The gray of his eyes narrowed into focus. “Where were you before here?”
“New York, and the move was really sudden. He called me in the middle of the night and said I had to catch a plane toCalifornia.” I sucked in a gasp and slapped a hand over my mouth, thinking back to the sounds I heard through the phone that night. “It was that night! He died that night! I heard weird sounds through the phone, and he wouldn’t tell me where he was. He just told me to finish the job I was on and get to the airport. Bray, he’d planned it.” I looked at him with wild, searching eyes. “He’s known for the past decade Olena is after me. He must have known she was close to finding me, so he relocated me.”
I thought back to more details about that night: the wind, the car door, the fact Wallace had told me the data drivewould be collected, not thathe’dcollect it. The sound I was pretty sure had been a gunshot in the distance. How he’d called me by my real name.
“Shit,” I said out loud, understanding there was much more to the story than I’d thought. “Where was he when he died?”
A spark danced in Bray’s eyes as he too put pieces together. He climbed up to the landing where I was, resuming his standard stature of a head taller than me. “I don’t know. That’s what I was looking into right when I found out Olena was being released from prison today and there’s a threat on your life. I got a little distracted.”
I didn’t have time to fawn over him dropping everything to tend to my safety. I needed answers.
“Well, please, let’s continue looking into it.”
CHAPTER19
5 years ago
The harsh bite of burnt hair still hovered around me as I all but kicked down the cabin door. Inside the authentically rustic space, Wallace sat at the small, wooden dining table, right where I’d left him.
“I quit,” I spat and yanked off my wig, the source of the burning smell. Luckily, I’d been able to smash out all the embers before they sparked and set my whole head on fire. The wig was synthetic—agoodsynthetic—but still, I didn’t know how flammable it was. I’d run from the burning barn without looking back. My throat still felt charred from the black smoke, and I could only hope whatever chemical castoff I’d inhaled wasn’t burrowing into my lungs to put down cancerous roots.
Wallace calmly looked up at me, unbothered by my dramatic entrance or appearance. I hadn’t had time to glance in a mirror while running for my life, but I could feel the ash on my face, the heat from the fire still keeping my cheeks flushed. I threw the burnt wig on the table, where it landed sprawled like a dead brown animal. Wallace glanced at it, and then looked back to me.
“Did you get it?” he asked in that steady tone of his. No matter that my heart was still pounding, my ears still ringing from the explosion, the fear of death still speeding through my veins. The job always came first.
His apathy crashed into my anger like gasoline into flame—or like ammonium nitrate into fuel oil, as I’d learned from this very job—and caused me to combust.
I crossed the small room to the table and gripped the back of the chair across from him. My heavy boots clomped against the cabin floor. “Did you not hear what I said? Iquit. I want out.” I unzipped my thick jacket, thinking some ventilation would help me breathe easier. I was dressed for the location: deep in the Pacific Northwest woods, fifty miles outside of Portland, where a domestic terrorist group was building chemical bombs to further their cause. One of those bombs had gone off by accident tonight. I’d fled the hidden compound with everyone else lucky enough to escape, but I knew when the flames went out and the ash settled, there’d be bodies inside that barn. I was still reeling over the fact I could have been one of them.
“Did you not hearme?” Wallace repeated my question back to me. “I asked if you got it.” His cold indifference straightened my spine into further defiance.
“Doesn’t matter. The Department of Forestry is going to be all over that place soon, or a wildfire is going to burn down half the forest. You can almost see the flames from here.” I pointed over my shoulder with my thumb. My cabin was a solid ten miles from the barn, which was testament to the size of the blaze. “They’re going to know it was chemical and arrest anyone who made it out alive—which I almost didn’t, by the way,” I bitterly added.
Wallace smoothed his fingers over his mustache and sat forward in his chair. “And you think any of those zealots are going to confess? You’ve gotten to know them.”
He was right. I’d infiltrated their little cult over the past months; I knew them well. At face value, they didn’t fit the mold. Young women my age with names like Skye, Lily, and Willow, who wore their hair in blond braids with wildflower crowns. And their counterparts, the men of the group like Asher, Clark, and Xavier, who built weapons in the name of environmental conservation and plotted to use them against logging companies and GMO testing labs. To anyone looking, they were a group of passionate college kids who held protests on weekends trying to save the environment, not a hive of ecoterrorists playing chemist deep in the woods.
When I hesitated to answer Wallace, he knew it was because my answer wasno.They would not turn on one another and confess. They might even get the fire out before any authorities noticed and bury their dead on their own, and it would all remain secret.
Wallace gave me a stern look. “Did you get it?” he asked, again, with a note of finality like his patience had expired.
The child in me wanted to throw a tantrum. I wanted to refuse and pout and tell him to do his own dirty work. But I had almost just died completing the job and wasn’t about to admit I’d failed when I hadn’t.
I shoved my hand in my coat pocket and yanked out my phone. I tossed it on the table atop my singed wig and glared at him. “Of course I got it. And now I quit.”
He leaned forward to grab the phone and unlocked it with the passcode he’d supplied it with. I winced when the incriminating video began to play. Sounds of the minutes leading up to the accidental explosion were already looping through my mind; I didn’t need to hear the recorded version too. I’d walked through the barn and filmed footage of the gallons of explosives sitting in jugs, the powder kegs, the tubing, and igniters. I’d been discreet in capturing shots of most everyonethere: Willow and Skye packing nails into bins, Xavier and Asher lugging crates from a truck. Clark in a pair of goggles stirring the mixture that would blow up in his face minutes later.Iwas the one who was going to turn on them. They would have died for one another and their cause, but little did they know that Rain from Seattle was an undercover informant plotting their demise from day one.
