Page 171 of Override

My name has never sounded like that before. I decide immediately that this is information I don't need to analyze right now.

"Keaton," she says again, more firmly this time. "Who are you?"

That's a much harder question. I drag a hand over the back of my neck and glance toward the window, half expecting headlights to appear at any second.

"My team and I work for a private security company."

"What kind of security?"

"The complicated kind." She gives me a look. I sigh. "We find people who don't want to be found. We get people out of places they don't want to be. We gather information. Protection. Surveillance. Other things."

Her gaze sharpens at that word. "Surveillance."

I nod.

"And you've been surveilling Ronan."

"Yes."

"For how long?"

"Several weeks."

Her face changes. Not fear exactly. Something more fragile. "And me?"

The question is quiet enough that I almost wish she'd yelled it. I don't want to lie to her. "Yes."

She looks away.

My stomach twists. "Maeve—"

"Was I the job?"

Fuck. There are questions that have easy answers. That isn't one of them. Because she was. At first. She was a name connected to Ronan Gallagher. A face on a file. A potential source of information I needed to understand before I could figure out what Ronan was doing.

Then she'd cried over a missing sweatshirt. Then she'd asked for her father. Then she'd laughed at my terrible answers and told me things about herself no surveillance file could ever contain. And somewhere along the way, Maeve Gallagher had stopped being anything I could define with a mission parameter.

"At first," I tell her. Her eyes close. "But not for long." She looks back at me.

"Then what was I?"

I don't know how to answer that without saying too much. I don't know how to tell her that for the last seventy-three hours, she was the only thing I could think about. That I had ignored every order, every rule, and every logical part of my brain because she'd whispered goodbye into a microphone and something inside me had snapped.

So I give her the only truth I understand. "Someone I needed to get out."

Her lips part slightly. Before she can answer, my phone vibrates again. I don't need to look. They're coming. I can feel it. Maeve watches me reach for the phone, but I don't open the message this time.

"Are you in trouble?"

I let out a slow breath. "Almost certainly."

"Because of me?"

"No." The answer comes so quickly she blinks.

I shake my head. "Because of me. You didn't do anything."

Her gaze stays on mine. "What happens now?"