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“You are out of your fucking mind,” Debbie growls at me over the secured phone line. “I can’t protect you.”
Paigelynn’s asleep in the other room, her head resting delicately against the satin pillowcase, hair arranged around her face like an angel. I have visual on her at all times, courtesy of the camera room I’m in right now.
“I’m doing fine on my own.”
“Who’s helping you?”
“None of your business.”
“It’s all my damn business, Cam. You know that. I know you work for more than one master, but I’m one of them, too!”
“Fine, mistress,” I snap back. “You couldn’t cut it. Dropped the ball. Didn’t give me the tools I needed. So I found someone else who has the right tools.”
“And you turned me into one!”
“We’re on the same side,” I assure her, though we both know that’s partially a lie. “Paigelynn is safe. I stopped The Basher before he got her.”
“Good save, but what the hell? Why would any of those crazy billionaires want her dead?”
“That’s the part that makes no sense.”
“Is it as simple as ‘if I can’t have her, no one can’?”
“Maybe.”
“You sound skeptical.”
“I am.”
“Is it possible her tissue matches to only one family? And one wants to kill her just to prevent the other from getting her organs?”
I’ve underestimated Debbie’s intelligence. Fuck. That never occurred to me. And Debbie has no idea there’s a third family vying for Paigelynn, which makes her hypothesis even more possible.
My hesitation makes her groan.
“I don’t think that would do it,” I answer slowly, struggling to think it all through without tipping my hand too much. Paigelynn stirs on camera, and a small censor on the screen turns yellow. It’s hour seventeen of slumber for her, and the bio scans the system does on her indicate she’s deep in REM sleep, on a new cycle.
I managed thirteen hours of deep sleep before my body started screaming for caffeine.
Then Debbie started screaming for a call. The staff here at the bunker patched her through.
“Then what? Why send The Basher?” she muses.
“Maybe he went rogue?”
“Guys like that don’tfartwithout a paycheck, Cam. He doesn’t just kill a woman like her for funsies. Someone paid him a lot to do what he did.”
“What’s the word on the street about him? Have people figured out he’s dead?”
“Oh, yes.”
“Is my name attached to it?”
“Not yet. And the other two virgins have gone on lockdown now that words gotten out about Paigelynn.”
“You zeroed in on their locations already?”
For a moment, time wobbles. I rewind in my mind. Only three days ago, I was sitting next to Newman at a terminal bank, trying not to smell his sweaty stink, brushing off potato chip crumbs from keyboards.
