Page 247 of Operation: Defiance

Chad swipes the screen and a second video starts to play. This one’s rougher, the image shaking slightly, like someone recorded it from across a room. Raine sits at a desk, her phone held flat, words tumbling out so quickly, I only catch half of them. Hidden networks and spies all around her, waiting to strike. She holds herself perfectly still, which is closer to the real Raine. But not close enough.

Raine leaves space between ideas—little pockets of silence for her to arrange the next thought before she speaks. The woman in the video talks in one long, run-on sentence. And when her phone tilts, the reflection of the overhead lights on the screen is wrong.

“That was a couple of weeks ago.” Chad sets the tablet back on the table. “We’re sending both of these to the Public Integrity Project. Along with a psychological assessment that raises serious concerns about her stability. Anything you want to say about that?”

I lift my gaze slowly. “Send whatever you want.”

His patience snaps. “Pressure like this breaks people, Locke. You know that.”

Mark sets the granola bar on the table, pushes his chair back, and stands. The two men advance on me, Chad unlocking the chain from the floor ring before they haul me to my feet.

My legs almost give out, but I manage to keep myself upright until they drop me back into the chair and secure the cuffs to the table.

“Tell us where she is,” Mark says. “We’ll get her the help she needs.”

“No.”

Chad grabs the back of my neck and shoves me forward. Mark locks the rings as far away from the chair as they can go, forcing my arms almost straight, the cuffs biting into the joints at the base of my thumbs.

By the time they gather their things and slam the door, the tremors have turned into full-on shaking I can’t control. The pain doesn’t matter.

They showed me a fake version of Raine. That means they haven’t found the real one.

Chapter Seventy-Three

Raine

Garages are funnels designed for surveillance. Cameras sit at license plate height, waiting for clean captures, so I stick to the street, and find a spot three blocks away from Tacoma Memorial, easing the dark blue Toyota between a delivery van and a sleek gray SUV. For several minutes, I sit behind the wheel, scanning my surroundings in the mirrors—the cadence of the passing headlights, when cars slow and speed up, anyone out walking…

A cold wind seeps through my thin leggings when I get out of the car. I pull the baseball cap a little lower and adjust the oversized glasses. Facial recognition is nothing more than geometry. It reduces a person to the distance between the eyes, the length of the jawline, the curve of the forehead. Disrupt it enough, and you can hide in plain sight.

Asher’s jacket obscures the slope of my shoulders. The fabric smells like him—woodsy soap and fresh air and his skin. For a moment, I breathe it in, reminding myself that he’s real and counting on me.

It’s late enough that the street is almost deserted. I shorten my stride—another trick to fool the cameras—as I approach the hospital entrance, and slip in behind an older man pushing a woman in a wheelchair.

The fluorescent lights are too bright, the air harsh with the scent of disinfectant and burnt coffee. A television blares in the waiting room, and it’s all too much for my battered nervous system to take in. A teenage boy lets out a roaring laugh next to the vending machines. My shoulders hike up instantly.

Halfway down the first hall, a woman in a pair of scrubs stands next to a supply cart, tablet tucked under her arm. She’s gorgeous. Warm, tawny skin, black hair cut into an angled bob, and dark eyes that never stop moving. A pink teardrop pendant hangs at the hollow of her throat, and around her right wrist is a bright green silicone bracelet—the signal we’d agreed on when we talked earlier.

I adjust the baseball cap as I approach, and she immediately turns and leads me down the hall into a room marked “Consult.”

The overwhelming cacophony fades away as she locks the door and lowers the blinds.

I pull off the cap, and my hair tumbles free. “If you’re not who I think you are, we’re going to have a problem.”

One corner of her mouth lifts in a half smile. “I solve problems. I don’t create them. And you look just like your driver’s license. Except for those ridiculously large glasses and what appears to be Asher’s coat.”

“Inara.” The noise and the lights and the weight of everything that’s happened since they took me fade away. The absence of it leaves me utterly defenseless. I lower my head to remove the glasses and give myself a moment to feel everything before I lock it away again.

“I’ve been here for almost an hour,” she says, sinking down onto a stool next to the door. “Tessa’s secure. No movement on her house as far as I could tell. No surveillance either. I left one of the guys to keep an eye on her place for the night.”

“And Ellen?”

Inara’s brows lift. “A couple of intense-looking dudes showed up at eleven on the dot. Wheeled her in, said something to the charge nurse, and walked right out again. She’s stable. Severely dehydrated, exhausted, bruising consistent with restraints. Nothing physical that won’t heal in a few days.”

An intense wave of relief clogs my throat until I force it away. “Is she under her own name?”

“I’ve been in this business a long time,” Inara says, giving me the side-eye. “No way I was going to let that happen. The computer system’s been updated. She’s Lisa Jones from Tumwater, and she was injured when she got a little overenthusiastic during a Shibari session.”