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)
“I’m not apologizing for that,” she said. “Because again, I’m alive, in one piece, sitting here, and we have Emily Shaw’s phone.”
I couldn’t argue with that. And I knew if it had been anyone else on my team sitting beside me, the argument wouldn’t even have occurred to me. My unsettled feeling didn’t feel logical; this wasn’t my head telling me Sylvie had fucked up. This was my gut talking.
“You could have died,” I said again, not liking the cold weight of fear in my chest.
“Stop reminding me.” She looked out the window. After another long sigh, she said, “You’re right. I get that I should have run when you said run. Also, I’m not sorry, because we needed that phone.”
“What if there’s nothing on it?” I couldn’t seem to let it go.
Another thing I didn’t understand—I was nagging at her like she was a teenager who hadn’t put her laundry in the hamper. It was over. Done. She understood. I’d made my case. It wasn’t like me to drag shit out. But I kept seeing her on that shelf, the timer ticking down, and I couldn’t drop it.
“Maybe there’s not,” she said. “Maybe she was the only person on the planet who didn’t live their life on her phone. I guess we’ll find out.” She leaned forward a little bit to pin her eyes on the phone in the chest pocket of my shirt. “Are you going to crack into it, or are you going to give it to your guys? Maddox and…what’s his name?”
“Emmett,” I said. “And if it was anything else, I might take a crack at it. But this is all we have. We can’t afford for me to fuck it up, so I’ll give it to the best. Their boss, Lucas, is as good as the two of them. Maybe better. Between those three, if there’s anything to find in the phone, they’ll find it.”
“What do we do now?” She shifted in her seat, resting her cheek against the headrest.
“We drive back to Atlanta and get some sleep. It’ll be dawn by the time we get there.”
“I don’t want to waste a whole day sleeping.”
“It’s not a waste,” I said. “How many hours of sleep have you gotten since your van blew up?”
Sylvie started to shrug, then stopped and stared up at the roof of the car before saying slowly, “I took a nap yesterday for a few hours.”
“I know you weren’t sleeping when you went to bed,” I said, “because you heard me in the hall. You slept in the car tonight, but—”
She shook her head. “Not really.”
“Then you need some sleep. Like a solid eight to twelve hours.”
“And what are you going to do while I’m sleeping? Also sleep?”
“Maybe. Depends on how I feel when we get back. I could use a few hours.” Not as many as Sylvie needed, but I knew what she was getting at. No one was leaving her out of the action.
“Obviously,” she said. “But I thought you were Superman.” She smirked at me, and I didn’t fight the cocky grin that spread across my face.
“I’ve learned to rest when I can,” I said. “And unless someone else plants a bomb on us in the next twenty-four hours, I think we can take a break long enough to get some food and some sleep.”
“Okay,” Sylvie said. “I’m not going to fight you on that. I’m exhausted to the bone.”
“I bet,” I murmured. It had been a while since I’d seen someone take so many punches without going down. If anyone needed some restorative sleep and a few good meals, it was her.
“Then what?”
I was getting used to the way she pushed. Sylvie Calloway would never be satisfied with simple answers or excuses.
“I have some ideas,” I said. “I need to hit the office and talk to my team. Here’s what’s going to happen—we get back, we both get some rest. You can work on setting up that laptop. It has a VPN, so if you go on the internet, you won’t be traceable geographically to Atlanta. But I wouldn’t communicate with anyone.”
“Can I log into my email, socials, and stuff?” She asked, one eyebrow raised, her eyes distant, as if she was working through her next moves as she waited for my answer.
I debated that. My gut wanted her off the radar completely. But she’d already gone to talk to the police. There hadn’t been a good way out of that. So, whoever tried to kill her almost certainly knew she wasn’t dead. And if they couldn’t trace her to a specific address, did it matter if she checked her email or socials? I couldn’t think of a reason why, and considering how little we had to go on, I answered her honestly.
“I don’t like the idea of using you as bait. I’d like you to keep your footprint as small as possible. Even if whoever did this can’t track you to your exact location, you’re giving them information by moving around online through your own accounts. Being so obviously alive might encourage them to try again.”