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“We’ll be spoiled if you keep it up.”
“I live to serve the oracles.” Nico’s gaze flicked to Lila’s wounds. “Are those new?”
“Yes, but I’m fine.”
Lila wondered if he’d put them on her face.
“I heard you’d come back to the compound this morning,” Nico said. “I’m making plenty of food. Will you be at dinner?”
“She’ll attend if the food is worth it,” Connell answered for her.
“Oh, it’ll be worth it. You’ll knock on cabin twenty-four tonight.”
After Nico left the rotunda, Connell led Lila and Dixon from the security building, not stopping until he’d reached their porch.
“It’s funny how Nico keeps showing up exactly where we are,” Lila said.
“He probably paid someone at the gate to call him the moment you returned,” Connell replied. “Listen, I’ll be back for lunch if you need me. I need to head over to the temple and give Mòr an update.”
“Are you going to tell her what I think you’re going to tell her?”
Connell nodded. “We don’t have a mole. We have two.”
“And both seem to have different agendas.”
Chapter 17
Lila dried her damp hair and stepped from the bathroom, the frigid air chilling her skin. Her wrist ached as she tightened the knot in her robe and padded across the cold hardwood floor. Dixon handed her another ice pack from the freezer.
Sorry, he mouthed.
“It’s not your fault.” She wrapped a towel around the ice pack and held it to her wrist, still sore from the zip ties and the latest training session. She’d had to see Dr. McCrae for the second time in one day. The third doctor’s visit she’d had in twelve hours.
Gods, she was falling apart.
“I regressed so much at hand-to-hand that I’m worse than when I started. I think I impressed Connell with the depths of my failing.”
She plopped on the couch and snatched up her laptop.
“Impressed” didn’t describe Connell. “Frustrated” did. When Dixon had accidently bent her wrist a little too far during a failed defense, Connell had sent her away in a huff. He’d pointed out the bags under her eyes and her injured wrist, blaming it all on a lack of sleep. “Lessons are a waste of time if you refuse to take care of yourself.”
Lila wished she could excuse her regression so easily. Perhaps a lack of sleep had affected her recall of what she’d relearned two days ago, but she had slept well enough during her militia training.
At least Mòr had not witnessed the session.
Lila had too much work on her plate to waste an hour in the gym, anyway. She’d train after she solved the oracle’s mole problem, after she found the identities of everyone La Roux trapped for Bullstow, and after she resolved the situation with her mother.
The chairwoman had not yet returned her money.
Elizabeth Victoria Lemaire-Randolph was still broke.
Lila turned on her laptop and reached for her star drives, confused when she did not find one of them on the coffee table. Holding her ice bag on her wrist, she knelt on the rug and peered under the sofa, snatching it up from where it had fallen.
She sank back on her knees, judging the distance from the table to the sofa.
What’s wrong?
“I could have sworn…” Lila opened up her snoop programs, letting them run upon her computer.
