It made her want to laugh. It made her want to tell Sauda to fire him. Spies didn’t look like him. As far as she knew, his brother certainly didn’t—although she’d never crossed paths with Artie Young. Spies were meant to have looks that blended in, to be able to melt into the shadows.
Winter Young couldn’t disappear if he had the superpower ofinvisibility. Frankly, she was surprised he wasn’t covered in moths all drawn to his light.
How the hell was she supposed to complete a mission—let alone get promoted—while saddled with a boy like this?
Sydney opened her eyes in the dark and ran her hand idly across the silken sheets of her bed. She didn’t know why she disliked him so much, why she wanted to give him such a hard time. He’d stepped into the meeting room yesterday, and she’d felt a lurch of irritation deep in her gut, an emotion that made her want to memorize every bit of him so she could figure out how to bring him down to size, to force him to take a step back and feel unmoored in a new place.
The feeling had left her with a pounding heart and an ache in her stomach. No wonder she hadn’t been able to resist swiping his bracelet.
She pitied him in regards to his brother’s death, she really did. The pain on his face had been real and deep. But Winter Young got tochooseto be here. He hadn’t come to Panacea because he was forced to, because life had left him no other options and steered him down a path of no return. Winter chose this, just as he’d chosen to become an entertainer, chosen what kind of star he wanted to be, who he could surround himself with, what he wanted to do.
Sydney was here because this was her only way out of her childhood. She had to run from the ghost of her mother, from the memory of the incessant beeping sound in the hospital room and the wheeze of her breathing. She had to escape the leaf-strewn curb in front of her childhood home, the angry rumble of her father’s drunken voice. She had to learn how to stop stealing, had to break the temptation to shoplift from shelves and desks, the obsessive need to controlsomethingin her life.
Her fingers twitched, aching always to take. She looked to her side and out the floor-to-ceiling window of her apartment at the vast city below. Told herself that she no longer lived in North Carolina but in Seattle, far from the other coast. That she was no longer a child.
Her phone buzzed with an incoming call from an unknown source. Sydney rolled over to grab her earbuds.
“Ich schlafe,” she said in German.
“No you weren’t,” Niall muttered on the phone. “And stop it, Syd.”
“What is it?”
“Sounds like bodyguards at the birthday functions will also need to be in costume. Something about good aesthetics for the official photos.”
“Good aesthetics?”
“They don’t want a bunch of penguin suits in every shot. So you’ll get to wear something fancy and we’ll be busy implanting a listening chip in it.”
She sighed, even as a part of her mind perked up at the thought. Eli Morrison was going all out. “Please give me functional shoes.”
“And we’re officially starting you with Winter next week. Tuesday. Be here early, so we can get your current measurements for a fitting. And cut him some slack, all right?”
“Sauda told you to say that, didn’t she?”
“Well, Sauda’s not wrong.”
“Do you think she’s right about hiring Winter?”
“I think it’s a bit too late for that question, kid, and I also think it’s not your place to question Sauda’s decisions.”
“Sauda would tell me to speak my mind,” she replied. “And I think we’re making a mistake.”
“And is that because you think he can’t do the mission, or because you just don’t like him?”
“Can’t it be both?”
“Honestly, I didn’t think you’d be a good Panacea agent, either. And yet here you are.”
Sydney laughed. The sound choked for a second in her throat, and her weak lungs gave a little spasm.
“You okay?”
“I’m fine, Dad,” she replied. “Just a tickle in my throat.”
She could almost see him rolling his eyes in exasperation at her nickname for him. She didn’t tell him, though, that in moments like this, she didn’t use it as a nickname at all. She’d said it because she liked imagining that he was the father she could have had.
But that was a silly thought. Niall wasn’t a father to her. She was just an employee, under contract. If Niall knew about her lung condition, he’d terminate her immediately from Panacea’s program. So she’d never told anyone about it, and she’d managed well enough for this long. Someday, when it worsened, she’d have to disclose it, but until then, well, this worked fine.
