Total pages in book: 109
Estimated words: 103027 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 515(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103027 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 515(@200wpm)___ 412(@250wpm)___ 343(@300wpm)
“Is this the part where I’m supposed to tell you everything?” The bomber gave a thin, humorless smile. “I missed the monologuing class in villain school. You’ll have to figure the answers out yourself, if you can. My time is up.”
There was a curious, resigned flatness to his last words that I didn’t understand.
He cocked his head to the side as if listening to something we couldn’t hear. I saw the shadow of something in his ear, like a compact hearing aid. A red light pulsed, the shell of his ear glowing for a split second. His body locked solid as a jolt seemed to go through him. I would have thought he’d been tased, but the only people near him were Ryder and Maddox. They both held a gun on him, but no taser. Nothing that could deliver a shock strong enough to have him crumple to the floor.
His knees gave out like a hinge whose pin had been pulled, his body going down with a thud. He fell on his side, the tiny device in his ear tumbling to the floor, pushed out by a thick stream of blood running across his cheek and dripping out of his nose to pool beneath his head.
“What the fuck was that?” Maddox asked, staring at the body at his feet with wide eyes. “Did he do that to himself? Or did he—”
“I don’t think he did it to himself,” Ryder said, watching the motionless form of the bomber on the floor. “I heard something just before that light flashed. A voice, but it sounded mechanical. Like a countdown. 3-2-1, and then—” Ryder lifted his chin to indicate the moment the bomber had gone down. He stepped back, scanning the hall and the open door of the cottage.
“Someone triggered that device,” I finished for him. “They knew he’d been captured.”
“Or they were listening,” he said, grim. “And who the fuck is they?”
“Ever since Silas disappeared,” Maddox said in a low voice, his eyes fixed on the blood pooling at his feet, “every answer only gives us more questions.”
He wasn’t wrong.
I shifted to the side to let Sylvie sit up, wrapping my arm around her to steady her as she rolled forward on the mattress to study the body on the floor.
“He looks very dead.” She glanced at me for confirmation. I was as sure as I could be without taking the guy’s pulse.
“He is,” I agreed. “That’s one problem solved. Whoever hired him has our names, but my bet is they’ll focus on Silas. With their first assassin out of the game, I doubt they’ll waste the next on us. Not when we only made the list as collateral damage.”
Maybe it would have been better if the bomber had been arrested. The FBI had been hoping to collect a prisoner. Instead, they’d be picking up a body. He would have given us answers, but Sylvie was safer if he was dead.
We’d find the answers on our own.
“It’s okay,” I said, pulling Sylvie back from her view of the body. “We’ll need to lie low for a while, to make sure we’re clear, but I think the immediate danger is over. Even if they were listening, they know we don’t know anything.”
“Yet,” Maddox said.
Sylvie eased into my arms and lay her head on my shoulder. After a second, she whispered, “This problem might be solved, but until we know what Ghost Trace is and why an assassin was sent after Emily and Silas, it’s not over.”
I turned my head to kiss her hair, the tension I’d been holding for days draining away. She and Maddox were right. This wasn’t the end. We had more questions today than the day Sylvie had walked into Sinclair Security. But with the bomber dead, she was as safe as we could make her until we unraveled Silas’s secrets.
I could live with that. As long as I had Sylvie.
Epilogue
SYLVIE
Things quieted down faster than I would have expected. The FBI arrived at the cottage, and after a few questions, they removed the body. That was the last we heard of our mysterious bomber-assassin.
The team did some digging and identified him. He, like the data broker, went by a few aliases, but Maddox thought he’d most recently gone by Seventeen. A former NSA agent gone freelance, who’d taken his affection for explosives in the wrong direction. Basically, the opposite of Eli, who mainly used his skills to keep bombs from blowing up.
Our guy was responsible for a long list of murders and assassinations. Sometimes he used a bullet, sometimes a knife, but mostly a variety of explosives. The FBI had accepted that he’d been neutralized by an unknown party, though they would rather have taken him alive.
No one was happy that we didn’t know who’d set off the device that had killed him. While the team had managed to uncover the identity of our assassin, they’d been unable to determine who had hired him. The best lead we had was the mysterious Ghost Trace.