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Danvers responded with a subtle shift in his seat. I thought I detected a flicker of fear, but I couldn’t be certain.
Danvers’ cell vibrated and threw his concentration, but then he connected the call, his gaze focused on me. I assumed he was being given a quick and dirty report on me. His expression didn’t change, but this was the first test of the backstory that had been set for me. He ended the call without saying a word, and my heart raced, I had to keep my hand still and not reach for my gun. He’d either been fed the perfect storm of believable lies, or I was a dead man.
“Where are Sanctuary holding Josh?”
I shrugged and then changed the direction of the questioning. “I know you’re connected to Rouxier and that he’s paying you to turn a blind eye to whatever he’s doing. Get me a job.”
A muscle twitched in Danvers’ jaw. “That’s not how this works. I don’t trust you enough to pull you in to the big stuff.”
I rolled my eyes. “I had a hundred opportunities to kill you, and I haven’t. You’re the one link I have to a cash cow.”
He considered me with care. “But what about Josh?”
I shook my head. “What is it with that guy that makes him such a hot property? Because I don’t know where he is,” I lied. “They moved him. He’s out of sight, out of mind, and he’s locked down tight and it’s not a job that’s gonna pay out any time soon. If you have nothing for me, then I’ll go elsewhere.” I moved in my chair, shuffling forward as if I was going to stand, knowing this moment was pivotal.
“Sit the fuck down.”
I stopped. “You have work for me?”
He paused. “One job. Fuck it up and you’re dead.”
“What’s the job?”
He tapped his fingers like some kind of scheming villain and then quirked a smile.
“Ryder West was your comms man in the Rangers.”
“And?”
“Let’s say he’s a person of interest to me, and he has intel that could compromise my position with the FBI. Make sure he doesn’t email more of his reports on previous missions. He’s been drip-feeding them, and my superiors are getting nervous. Find him and kill him.”
“I told you he went to ground.” My chest tightened—this was not something I’d seen coming. I never thought I’d be asked to kill one of my closest friends to be admitted to the inner circle.
“Then you’d better find him, because your first job to prove loyalty is to take him out.”
Fuck. Fuck.
Fuck.
Breathe.
“Okay.”
ChapterTwenty-One
Josh
“Doyou want to go on another adventure?” Beckett asked Ben.
Beckett, the nicer half of the Beckett/Kayden relationship, was cross-legged on the floor next to Ben, assisting him in completing a list of math questions. I say nicer, but it wasn’t that I didn’t like the uncompromising Kayden, only he was all about keeping us safe. In fact, he’d been teaching us some self-defense moves as part of scheduled physical exercise during the otherwise short school day.
Beckett was easier to like than his partner, less abrasive, kinder in the way he said things, which was why it was Beckett sitting with Ben, about to reveal that we were moving on to a new place. Beckett had explained to me we needed to move—for our own mental health more than anything else, but also to keep security fresh. Beckett had been the one to answer my questions. He’d spent a ton of time with Ben, and he was there in those bleaker moments when it hit me that Ethan was gone. I’d lost track of the number of days we’d been in that cabin, but I could count every single hour since Ethan had left, and I tried hard not to ask questions about what he was doing, and instead relied on that fact that Kayden wasn’t bugging out to prove to me that Ethan was okay.
I missed him so much. It was as if the other half of my heart had been ripped away and I hated that it left me feeling bereft. I should be happy Ben and I were safe, but I knew Ben missed him too, so it wasn’t me. We had to stay here, and he had to go out there and put his life on the line.
Shit.
Staying here forever wasn’t an option, and on top of missing and fretting over Ethan, I worried about Ben’s education, any of his friends who probably thought he’d moved away to be with me, and how he was feeling about being apart from his mom. For the most part, he was treating this whole mess like an adventure, hence the word that Beckett used to broach the conversation of us moving on. It had been Kayden’s idea to move us to a horse farm, in a town in the Smoky Mountains, a place that Sanctuary had recently purchased, with a brand-new security system.
