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I don’t care about my own life.
It’s Paigelynn who suffers the most if I choose wrong.
A light comes on across the backyards of a few houses, catching my attention. I’m just around the corner, a few blocks from her house, and when I tilt just the right way, I can see into her backyard.
The dog tips me off, the tiny beige thing dancing in the yard, racing to a corner to do its business. Paigelynn appears, wearing a long, light-colored sweater, wrapping it around herself with arms that self-soothe.
I know that gesture. She’s comforting herself, her anxiety off the charts as she processes, well...
Me.
I’m freaking her out.
You can fake attraction, but you can’t hide it.
Craving another person’s presence and attention is impossible to conceal. I can smell the need emanating from her.
Which puts me in a perfect position.
Or it should. There’s one little problem.
I feel the same way toward her.
Having the upper hand here would be ideal, but I don’t have the upper hand because my own damn body is going haywire at the mere thought of her.
How in the hell do I complete my mission under these circumstances?
Nothing about this project prepared me for accidentally stumbling across her. And I never, ever considered the idea that I’d fall for my target.
I have no team.
I have no confidant.
There is no partner to talk to.
I have nothing but my wits, my hands, and at the rate this is going, a fucking baseball bat in my pants.
“I found you,” I mutter to myself as I watch her walk in lazy steps around the yard, her head tipping up, lips moving. Does she talk to the moon? Tell it all her secrets, hopes, and dreams?
And does it reply?
Bzzz.
My hip vibrates and I nearly scream, the shock of real life intervening.
It’s a text from Newman.
Where the hell are you? There’s a nonscalable algorithm in the data analysis code and it froze the system. I need you to get back here and clean up your shitty code.
A cold slap of reality hits me.
Hard.
The second I go back to the hacker house and tell them what I’ve found, I’ll never see Paigelynn again. Debbie will dispatch a quiet team of men and women no one knows exist. They’ll take down Paigelynn’s bodyguards and if they’re unlucky, kill her as well.
Or she’ll kill herself.
It’s a cult, after all. Cyanide drills were a daily practice in Gaia. Paigelynn has likely been taught that the world outside what she knows is a dangerous place. If the wrong people get her, the world will end.
