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“I’m fine. You can’t tell dad I was here, though.”
“He wants to kill you for what you’ve done.” Her voice hitches, and I think she’s about to start sobbing again. The last thing I need is her alerting my father’s men that I’m here.
“I know. That’s why you have to pretend that you didn’t see me. I’m okay, Mom.”
“Are you going to be okay? Do you need anything?”
“You never saw me,” I say as I enter the bathroom.
“I love you,” she says, her hushed voice following me as I step into my shower.
One of the old tunnels leads right behind my shower. It took many hours to figure out how the back of the shower moved so I could get in there.
Once I had figured it out, I kept the information to myself. Not even Matteo knows that there is a tunnel directly into my room.
I run through the tunnels, backpack bouncing against my back. My legs ache as I take the twists and turns, following the path I memorized years ago.
When I come out at the other end, nearly a mile from the estate, Tyson’s waiting for me. He’s sitting in the car we took from Damien’s safe house, sunglasses pushed up and obscuring his identity.
“You got what you needed?” he asks as I get into the car.
“Yeah. I did. We need to go buy some more clothing, though.” I look down at my stained shirt. “I’m tired of wearing the same thing that I’ve been wearing for days.”
Tyson nods. “We’ll go to a store first. I don’t know how a fancy hotel is going to work, though. They won’t take cash. They require credit cards.”
I lean forward and slide out of the backpack, pulling it into my lap. Tyson watches me as I open the bag and pull out several different credit cards, all with other names on them.
“You know how illegal that is, right?” Tyson asks, his eyes bulging as he reads the names on the cards. “Please tell me that you don’t have entire fake identities created with stolen information.”
“Tyson, I think we’ve established that I’m not a good person.”
He sighs. “It’s not that I don’t think you’re a good person in your own way.”
“That’s the biggest load of shit I’ve ever heard. You know what I’ve done – at least some of it – and you know what I’m willing to do.”
“Either way,” he says, hurrying to switch the subject as he starts driving. “This is illegal, Aria.”
I stare at him for a moment, before sighing. “Tyson, what are you willing to do to survive?”
22
TYSON
Aria is sitting in the living room of the hotel room, folding her new clothes and packing them into a suitcase. We have spent the last two days buying everything we’ll need to go on the run again.
The weapons and the car were taken care of when we left Damien’s safe house, but everything else we had to buy.
“What’s the plan for tonight?” Aria asks as she looks up at me. “I think we need to get out of this hotel room and do something. The staff’s going to start thinking that it’s weird we rarely leave.”
“Aria, that’s not a good idea.”
“We’re a town over from Dad. He isn’t going to be looking for us here. You know as well as I do that he would expect us to run as far away as possible. I’m serious. I don’t know who here knows my dad, but if it gets around that someone who looks like me is staying in a hotel and never leaving, he is going to know it’s me.”
I run a hand through my hair and walk to the window. We have a view of the parking lot that allows me to keep track of who is coming and going.
Even though I know Aria’s right, the thought of going out right now isn’t appealing.
We don’t know what her father is planning and we don’t know how close the FBI is to catching him.
