Page 113 of Mile High Ruin

Anton looks toward the window.

Cowards.

“What made you look into my bag?” I ask.

“We checked everything,” Anton says. “We weren’t specifically targeting you.”

“How generous,” I say. I still don’t understand how the tracker got in my bag. “What exactly have you found?”

Vadim hesitates just long enough to tell me there’s more. “The device was hidden inside the lining of your bag, not simply dropped into it.”

I stop. “Hidden how?”

“The seam had been opened and closed again.”

A cold sensation moves down my back. I think of my bag at the airport, then every moment before the flight when I stopped paying attention to it because there was no reason to imagine somebody wanted to sew a tracking device inside.

“But I cleared airport security with it?” I say.

“It’s small enough to pass through undetected,” Anton says.

I swallow. “So how long has it been sitting in my bag?”

They look at me as if they expect me to answer the question. And maybe they do. After all, I’m the guilty party here. I sit back, frustration tightening in my chest.

The worst part is that I can see the logic from his side now, even though I don’t like it.

A tracker was found in my bag. His enemies arrived at an airfield nobody was supposed to know about. I appeared on his plane at the last minute and desperately needed money, got close to him…way too close, and he randomly got attacked not long afterward.

If our positions were reversed, I might have questions too.

That doesn’t make the way he looked at me last night hurt less.

I wrap both hands around my coffee cup. “If you still think there’s even a chance I did this, why are you keeping me here instead of getting rid of me?”

Vadim’s expression gives nothing away. After a while, he says, “I need some time to think.”

And then what? I want to ask. You’ll ditch me in the middle of the desert, drop me at the deepest point of the ocean?

“That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

“No.”

“Good, because it doesn’t.”

“You asked why.”

I look down at my phone. For the first time since waking, the anger gives way to something colder. Yesterday I was worried that I had ruined my chance of working more private assignments because I had annoyed the wrong man. Now I’m apparently involved in an assassination attempt I knew nothing about.

My life has become ridiculous.

Vadim watches me absorb it. “You understand why you cannot simply leave.”

“I understand why you think that.”

“That’s enough.”

“No, it’s not.”