~ 45 ~
PEYTON
The man in the trench coat registered Colson in an instant, and dismissed him just as quickly. Even as I watched, his eyes moved to me.
“It wasn’t hard.”
“Bullshit,” Theo growled immediately.
The man’s features were average. His hair, his nose, his unremarkable chin — it was all so very nondescript, he really could be anyone. The only non-average thing about him was his exceptional height, which matched Colson’s.
“Look, I wasn’t the one who found you,” the man said coldly. “You outed yourselves.”
He took a step forward, and Colson growled a warning. It was a literal growl, too. The man responded by straightening up and rolling his eyes.
“One of you made an error,” he said simply. “I’ll leave it up to you to figure out who. That part doesn’t concern me. Donovan doesn’t even know I’m here.”
At this, Colson seemed to relax a bit. Theo, on the other hand, had tensed up.
I stored that information away for the future.
“You came alone?” Ripley asked, intentionally flashing his knife.
“Yes.”
“Then either you have a death wish, or you have balls the size of artillery shells.”
“Or he’s lying,” spat Theo.
The intruder’s expression — which up until now had been all business — curled into a smile.
“Which doyouthink it is?”
“I’m not really sure,” Ripley answered grimly. He held the knife out again. “But maybe we should cut you open. Look for answers on the inside.”
The intruder shrugged, as if bored. “You can try.”
“Enough,” barked Colson. His expression was defiance. “What do you want, Roman?”
Roman.I turned the name over in my mind a few times, but it didn’t ring a bell. His face wasn’t something I’d recognized either. Yet somehow, somewhere, I could swear I’d heard his voice before.
“I’m here because you escalated,” Roman said, matter-of-factly.
“You came all this way for that?”
“You leaked Wayland.”
“And Connor,” Colson added smoothly. “And Granger.”
“Yes,” the man in the trench coat acknowledged grimly. “And Connor and Granger.”
“And Mengan tomorrow,” Theo said smugly. “Along with Jandris and O’Keefe. And after that—”
“Say what you came to say,” Colson ordered, cutting him off.
Roman sighed, but not in frustration. It was more the sigh of a schoolteacher trying to control an unruly class.
“You started something you don’t fully understand,” he said.
