“Are you okay?” he asked.
I looked up at my savior, the man who opened the door, but my eyes didn’t linger, my tablet beeping again and grabbing my full attention.
The facial recognition had found another man in the age range I’d requested—and that same man was standing right in front of me.
He looked down at my tablet, his eyes going wide before they narrowed. He was about my height, his eyes a little beadier than I expected, his stomach a little rounder. I had pictured him more like Cameron Fletcher—tall, slim, aging well—but the man in front of me looked more frazzled, more unkempt, and for some reason, that deflated the bit of hope I had let settle in my chest.
Could this man really be the one who ruined my parents’ lives? Could he really be the one hunting me—or us—down?
“Looking for me?”
“That depends, are you Jack Anderson?”
His nostrils flared, the wave of emotions he was going through painted on his face.
“It is you. I thought... what happened to you?” he asked.
“None of your business. Are you Jack Anderson?”
He stepped back, checking the hallway for anyone else and, once he saw it was clear, grabbed my arm to pull me into the door across from the one I had escaped.
“You bitch. You’re the one that’s been digging into me, aren’t you?”
“You’re the one that’s been asking around about us, aren’t you?” I snapped back, fighting at his fingers digging hard into my arm.
He shoved me through the bathroom doorway hard enough that my shoulder clipped the tile wall as he followed me in. My shoes squeaked against the grimy floor as I caught myself, and the smell hit me—cleaner, but sour, like whoever last mopped the place had spread the filth around instead of getting rid of it. The overhead light flickered once, buzzing like it was thinking about dying, and every inch of the mirror above the sinks was spiderwebbed with cracks, reflecting my red-streaked face back at me a dozen times.
“Veritas isn’t something you want to mess with,” he said, breathing hard. He had reached back out, his hand clamping on my arm again, but now there was something else in his voice—something that made my chest tighten for a whole different reason. It wasn’t anger. It was urgency.
“I’m already messing with it.” I jerked against his grip. “I need to know what they were doing and who even was doing it. Are you the one who’s been asking about me and my friends? Why?”
“Because others are asking me,” he shot back. His eyes darted to the door as though he expected someone to come bursting through any second. “And those people are worse than you canimagine. You should consider it a relief I found you first. They’re after you and they aren’t happy it’s taking so long to get to you.”
My stomach churned, but I shoved the feeling down. “Right. And you’re the concerned citizen who wants to warn me? Because you look a lot more like the kind of guy who’d take a paycheck to sell someone out.”
He really did, too.
Jack wasn’t ugly by any stretch. He had to be in his fifties now, but he still looked in decent shape. What wasn’t in good shape was how out of sorts he looked. When I thought about a cunning businessman I thought of Asher—well kept, eerily calm, not a hair out of place. Nothing about Jack screamed mastermind of an empire.
Something in his jaw twitched, like maybe I’d hit close to the mark. “You think you know how this works, but you don’t. You think you should be worried about me, but you have no idea what’s coming.”
“The only thing I’m worried about is how you guys got my parents involved. How did Veritas lead to their death?”
“Your parents weren’t given a choice. That’s why they joined. That’s why they stayed.”
“That’s not an answer. Did Veritas put out a hit to kill my parents?”
He shook his head. “You don’t even understand what Veritas is. That business could not really have put out a hit on your parents.”
“You’re right, I don’t understand, but I want to. Please tell me.”
He stayed silent, the air around us thick and musty. I opened my mouth to push again, but his next words made my stomach knot.
“The Order will be watching you. They already are.”
It felt like an omen—like he was here to warn me instead of threaten me like I expected.
The door slammed open with a bang that rattled the mirror, a sliver of glass dropping to the ground behind me. Anderson’s head whipped around, but I didn’t have to look to know who it was—every nerve in me already recognized that particular kind of fury.
