Now I know exactly how ‘too young’ she really is.
But those eyes. So expressive. So beautiful. So deep. It was like staring into the depths of the Atlantic.
What the fuck, Winchester?Waxing poetic wasn’t my style. Hell, most people would hesitate to call me friendly. My brother called me a robot more often than he used my name.
I opened the file and pulled up the CIA credential photos of her parents.
That’s why she seemed so familiar.
Nina had her mother’s eyes and her father’s wavy hair. Features I’d seen a thousand times after my current case linked to their cold case. Features I hadn’t thought much about.
Until now.
Where are they? They’d been presumed dead for twenty-five years, but that didn’t mean anything. The CIA ‘killed’ people off anytime they had to give them new identities.
Would they relocate them without their daughter?
Are they alive?And why wasn’t there any record of Nina’s birth in their files?
Only one answer made sense: they had been in danger before Nina was born. Or they suspected they were.
From who?
I used a delivery app to order a medium rare T-bone steak, garlic mashed potatoes, and a side salad before going over my file notes again.
It wouldn’t matter that my dinner would get cold before it arrived; I usually worked through my meals and rarely ate warm meals.
With wet hair and a scratchy hotel towel wrapped around my waist, I messaged an old friend from the farm, from my personal phone to his.
You have time to talk?
My phone rang as I stepped into my navy blue boxer briefs.
I hit the answer button and put the phone on speaker. “Winchester.”
“It’s been a hot minute. Where are you calling from?”
I laughed, it’d been almost a year since the last time I’d talked to Ryan Gibson.
“Dallas.”
“As in Dallas, Texas?”
“That’s the one.”
“Work or vacation?”
Gibson wouldn’t know that I rarely came home during my virtually non-existent vacations. I had months of accrued time off that’d make for a nice paycheck when I retired.
“Work, but I’m visiting family while I’m here.”
“Two birds and all that…” he trailed off.
The repetitive noises in the background had the rhythm of fast moving traffic.
“Are you driving?”
“Surveillance.”
