Текст книги "Midnight Secrets "

Автор книги: Lisa Marie Rice

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 3 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Clearly, he could walk faster than that. Hell, he ran almost every morning. But coming back from the park, he’d kept step with her without making any kind of big deal about it. And it had felt just great. Arm linked with his, feeling him so big and warm and strong at her side, well...she’d felt strong too. Just a little. It wasn’t like the old days when she was fit and happy and energetic. Those days were over, maybe forever. These days she felt a hundred years old.

But she’d definitely felt better with him by her side. She didn’t need to watch her feet. He wouldn’t let her fall if she tripped. So for the first time in what felt like forever she’d walked with her head upright, seeing the street for the first time. Acutely aware of the big man by her side. Wishing they could walk together forever.

But that was crazy. He was just walking his nutso, next-door neighbor back home because she’d nearly been knocked over by a dog. Couldn’t even be trusted to take a short walk to a nearby park.

Oh, God she was so tired of this! So tired of being a pale shadow of herself, so tired of not sleeping, so tired of feeling guilty because she hadn’t died together with her parents and her brothers and her aunts and uncles and cousins.

Yes, she should have said. I’d love to come over. Sit by his side while he played cards, listen to the male banter, laugh at their corny jokes. They’d probably watch their language around her but she didn’t care. Teddy had passed through a stage where fuck was a noun, a verb, an adjective, an adverb and an exclamation. He’d been so funny.

Isabel sat down and ducked her head back between her legs as the dizziness came back, together with a pounding headache.

She missed her family. So. Fucking. Much.

Would the pain ever go away?

Would it have helped if she’d accepted Joe’s invitation? Could she shed this dry husk of sadness that enveloped her, just for one evening? Go back to her old self?

No dizziness, no sudden crippling bouts of sadness, just a sense of play among strong, confident men.

She liked guys. Growing up with three brothers had given her a sense of ease around men. In college, it had been a game the girls played—finding new and inventive ways to describe the dumbness of the guys. They were fine for fucking but none of her friends stuck to one guy for long. One of her friends, when asked why she’d dumped the date du jour after only a couple of nights, simply rolled her eyes and said, “The Y chromosome.” And everyone laughed and understood.

Not Isabel. Granted, guys could be clueless most of the time but they never took offense and she loved their take on things. Her best friends in college had been two jocks who were smart as whips but who were having big problems passing the obligatory English exams. English profs objected to jocks almost on principle. So she coached them through the exams and they kept her car running and everyone was happy.

Could she have that with Joe and his friends?

Maybe if she reached out. But she hadn’t been attracted to her two jock buddies, not at all. Sex hadn’t been any part of the equation. She was attracted to Joe, so maybe that wasn’t a good idea.

Joe was hot. In every sense of the term. She hadn’t really understood it completely when her friends said that a guy was hot. Usually it meant he had money, or tons of charm or dressed well. Mostly, though, in her circles, it meant he had money. Money left her cold. The fact that a guy was rich wasn’t in any way a factor in attraction as far as she was concerned. She’d moved among the wealthy all her life and if there was one thing she knew, right down to the ground, it was that money did not make a person a better human being.

Joe didn’t seem to be rich but he was definitely hot. And by hot she meant he made her hot. Or at least that icy crust around her heart melted a little when she was near him, or thought of him.

But if grieving, semi-crazy Isabel Lawton thought Joe Harris was hot, then lots of other women did, too, guaranteed. And he was a former navy SEAL. Ever since she discovered that, she also discovered that SEALs were considered rock stars. The hottest of the hot. Women lusted after them, they were babe magnets. There were calendars of bare-chested SEALs and they sold like crazy. SEAL seemed to be synonymous with sex.

She hadn’t seen women flocking to Joe’s door but then he was often gone. Who knows where? And with whom?

And she really had no business thinking these thoughts because she was barely human these days. She wasn’t good company for herself, let alone for someone else.

And sex. God. She’d enjoyed sex back in the day, but now? Now she shuddered if someone got too close to her. Claustrophobia clawed at her in an enclosed space with too many people. Her hands and feet turned to ice and her stomach churned and panic rose in her throat. Walking with Joe had been really nice but who knew how she’d react if it ever came to intimacy? She’d freeze, surely. Curl in on herself, incapable of reacting like a woman.

Isabel rested her head against the back of the couch. Sadness and weakness nearly overwhelmed her.

Was this going to be the rest of her life? Missing her family like crazy. Unable to stop grieving them. Nightmares every night. Despair and exhaustion her constant companions during the day.

These thoughts were toxic thoughts, just as surely as if she was taking poison, drop by drop. She couldn’t go on this way. She was dishonoring her family, who had loved life and lived it to the fullest. Though the dizziness and the nightmares were beyond her control, her thoughts weren’t. She could control her thoughts, or at least try to.

Doing something. That was usually a good antidote. But do what? The house was spotless. Her accounts were in order. She’d neglected her food blog for so long she had no more followers, so that was out.

Food.

Okay.

She’d cook something else for Joe, to thank him for saving her from the big bad slobbering puppy. Baked ziti. A hearty recipe a friend’s Sicilian grandmother had taught her. He could freeze the pan and share with his buddies over poker some other time.

The thought energized her enough to propel her from the couch and back into the kitchen. Her hands took over. When she cooked she rarely had to think. Her hands just did the work without much input from her. It was magic.

So she switched on her cook setting and went along for the ride.

There was something so magical about food. Food and sex, the eternal healers. In her heart of hearts, if someone put her feet to the fire to make her tell the truth, she thought food was better than sex. More reliable as a source of pleasure. Good food never let you down like people did.

Before the...before. Before, she’d been making a name for herself as a food blogger because all of it interested her. Foodways, her blog was called. Well, it had been called that when it was active. Now it was dormant, dead. She still got puzzled inquiries from fellow food enthusiasts who hadn’t put together that Isabel Delvaux of Foodways was one of the Delvauxes, the political and artsy family. The family that had died in the Washington Massacre.

The contacts were falling off fast and other food bloggers had picked up her readership. Foodways was dead. Last week she’d even canceled her personal Foodways email address.

But in its heyday Foodways had received hundreds of thousands of hits a day. A million and a half readers. A best of collection of her posts had been published and enjoyed a modest success. Before...before. Before, she’d received several offers from publishers about writing a big book about the history of food, about food folklore throughout the world, including recipes. She’d been in negotiations with a major publisher when...

When the bottom dropped out of her world.

Memories usually carried sharp-cutting edges, slicing deep, making her bleed. It was only in the kitchen that she was able to chase memories away.

Right now she resolved to make the best pan of baked ziti in the history of the world for Joe. She’d put it into the biggest pan she had and leave a note on top that he could freeze the pan until the next poker night if he wanted. All he’d have to do was take it out of the freezer and pop it into the oven an hour before his friends were due to arrive.

Not the microwave oven, she’d have to add that to the note. She knew the attraction microwaves held for bachelors.

The real recipe, the true one, for baked ziti took hours. It was something only a grandmother could possibly cook. And, well, Isabel, who had hours to kill. Great aching vast oceans of hours to kill.

So she set to it, making the sauce from scratch, making almost a hundred tiny flavorful meatballs, undercooking the ziti because they’d finish cooking in the sauce in the oven, grating the scamorza cheese. It was a rich dish full of carbs and fats and protein. The kind of dish you’d need if you were walking across Antarctica.

Not the kind of dish she could eat, though she could certainly cook it. That was another thing that had fled from her world that night, together with sleep. An appetite. She’d always loved food and now most food tasted like cardboard, like a simulacrum of food. No matter what the dish, whether she’d prepared it or a master chef had, she couldn’t taste anything. Her stomach often clenched shut so tightly her abdominal muscles hurt.

Months ago, she’d have vomited if her plate was too full. Now she’d learned to nibble at the blandest, most tasteless things possible. Dry toast, small bowls of plain rice. Nothing with taste and color.

Right after the Massacre she’d completely lost her desire to cook. Cooking was recently reintroduced in her life, thanks to Joe. He helped her so much with things she couldn’t do that she knew she had to do something in return, something she did know how to do.

Crazily, cooking for Joe didn’t make her dizzy or nauseous. She could cook the most elaborate dishes and as long as she didn’t have to eat a bite of them, she was okay.

Like now, putting together the ziti dish, delicious smells coming from the stovetop, and all she felt was pleasure.

She’d often toyed with the idea of actually inviting Joe over for dinner, instead of leaving something on his doorstep like the cooking fairies. He went out of his way for her so much that cooking a meal and serving it was the least she could do.

The thought even gave her a crazy kind of pleasure. She’d started over completely here in Portland, getting her furniture from IKEA and her linens from Bed Bath & Beyond. But she’d shipped over all her culinary equipment and her Limoges dinner service and the Delvaux silver cutlery. She could wow him with an elegant meal as a thank-you.

It was so incredibly tempting. Not spending an evening nursing a cup of lukewarm milk, with the TV on to a show she wasn’t watching, simply so she could hear the sound of human voices. So she wouldn’t feel at the bottom of a deep well, the only person in the world. Having Joe over would be fun. He was an interesting guy and, well, there was that hotness factor.

But...she wasn’t an ordinary woman. She didn’t do well in company. The days of bursting into tears with people around her were over but that didn’t mean she was back to normal. She could throw up. She could become so dizzy she’d faint. She could lock herself in the bathroom because she couldn’t deal with him.

They were all fun possibilities. She didn’t trust herself at all. Joe helped her because she was visibly wounded and still relatively weak. He never asked, bless him, and she never said what was wrong. Keep it like that. Let him think she’d been in an accident and was putting herself back together again.

Because the truth was much blacker and bleaker. The truth was that she had been in an accident that had torn her family from her but she wasn’t putting herself back together again. Maybe she’d be like this for the rest of her life, unfit for human company.

Missing her family like crazy, for the rest of her life.

Put like that...put like that maybe all she really was good for was to cook things for someone who’d suffered but who was pulling himself out of it.

She swiped angrily at her eyes as she finished the pan of ziti and started making naan bread.

Chapter Three

“Well?” Joe asked Felicity impatiently, ignoring the nasty look Metal was shooting at him. Everyone always treated Felicity with kid gloves. Apart from the fact that she was Metal’s love and Metal would pound anyone who was disrespectful to her, she also earned a hell of a lot of money for the company as their in-house computer guru.

And she beat everyone’s ass at video games.

“Sorry, Joe.” Felicity Ward, soon to be Felicity O’Brien, pushed herself away from his desk where she’d been using her own computer. Some kind of woo-woo piece of tech that could have been time-traveled from the future, it was so advanced. Felicity had taken one look at his laptop and sniffed in disdain. “Whoever sent you that message is scary good. I can’t identify the IP. Believe me when I say that’s unusual.”

Oh yeah, he believed Felicity. She was a computer genius and ASI had snatched her up, right after she’d unmasked an international conspiracy. An international nuclear conspiracy no less. She was smart in everything but she was off the charts smart when it came to IT. If she couldn’t track down the sender of the mystery message, no one could.

“Whoever sent it must be as smart as you,” he said.

Felicity smiled and waved Metal, who’d risen from his seat, down. It was a pillar in Metal’s thought system that Felicity was the smartest person on earth. “Yeah. Hard as it is to believe.”

“Scary stuff,” Metal rumbled.

“Yes.” Joe nodded his head sharply.

It was scary stuff. Someone Felicity couldn’t ID had sent a message about Isabel. That blew his mind. That someone knew about Isabel and that that someone knew she was connected to him. How could that happen?

“So,” Felicity said. “Let’s look at the object of the message. Isabel Lawton. Who is completely off the grid.”

Joe frowned. “What do you mean?”

Felicity was frowning, too, only at her monitor. “She almost doesn’t seem to exist. No Facebook page, no Twitter handle, I can’t find any trace of her educational or job background anywhere in the US. I’ve found plenty of Isabel Lawtons but they’re either too old or too young and no one fits what you’ve told me about her. Which, frankly, isn’t much.” She sighed and turned a serious face to him. “You’d almost think she is me.”

Hmm. Felicity had grown up in the Witness Protection Program. Her father had been a famous Russian nuclear scientist who had defected and Felicity had basically been undercover her entire life. She’d changed names several times during childhood.

“Like...a spook?” Joe asked. “Or a spook’s daughter or sister or—” He swallowed. “Someone’s wife? Maybe the wife of someone dangerous? And she’s run away from him?”

That thought burned in his chest. Isabel married to an abusive husband. It was a thought he didn’t want to have but it sort of made sense. Instead of being a woman of mystery maybe she was a woman on the run. Maybe someone was after her, which would explain how she seemed always on edge.

If that was the case, her running days were over. Joe wouldn’t let anyone hurt her. No one was going to touch her. Except him.

“Not a nice thought,” Metal said.

Metal hated abusers as much as Joe did. They’d both been sick at heart when they’d had to negotiate with a warlord in Helmand for safe passage for a convoy of marines. The warlord, who was in his sixties, had called in his pregnant wife, a girl in her late teens, to serve them. Her shaking hands had spilled some hot tea on Joe and the warlord had punched her in the face.

Joe and Metal had kept their faces bland because the mission was an important one with the lives of a marine battalion at stake, but they didn’t forget. It had been Joe’s immense pleasure to find the warlord’s head in his crosshairs after a double cross had cost the lives of fifteen marines. Pulling that trigger and seeing that fucker’s head explode had been one of the great pleasures of Joe’s life.

“What do we know about Isabel Lawton, besides the fact that she makes the best boeuf bourguignon I’ve ever tasted?”

“The best what?” Joe and Metal said in unison.

Felicity rolled her eyes. “The best boeuf bourguignon. Hello? What we had for lunch and which we all agreed was fabulous?”

“Oh.” Joe sat back. “The beef stew.”

Felicity rolled her eyes again. “Yeah. The beef stew.”

“Great stuff,” Metal said.

It had been. They’d practically inhaled it. The instant Joe had seen that message he’d invited Metal and Felicity over for a late lunch, making it clear that if Felicity didn’t come along, Metal wouldn’t get to eat.

It was a threat with bite. By now, getting a chance to eat whatever Isabel cooked was a fought-over privilege. Joe got points for Isabel’s cooking.

So they’d eaten and then Joe had shown Felicity the mystery message.

“Was she a chef?” Felicity mused, tapping on her laptop’s nearly invisible keyboard. The keys were barely raised and allowed Felicity’s hands to float and conjure up miracles with what looked like the merest strokes. “Have any chefs gone missing lately?” She briefly consulted a website then sat back. “No.”

For an instant Joe was distracted from the problem of someone stalking Isabel. “There’s a website for disappeared chefs?” he asked, astonished.

“No, dummy.” Felicity shook her head. “I consulted a list of notable chefs and wrote a little algorithm to check for people who were on last year’s list but not on this year’s lists. There were ten people missing but they were all men. Three had died and one is doing time.”

Joe slid his eyes to Metal. Felicity had done all that in less than a minute. “She’s scary.”

Metal grinned smugly. “That’s my girl.”

“Well, someone knows enough about Isabel to know that we see each other on a regular basis and that’s scary, too.” Joe ground his teeth.

“Does she see other people?” Metal asked.

“No.” Joe’s voice was abrupt. Issue closed.

Metal recognized that tone but Felicity didn’t. “How can you be so sure?”

The good thing about Felicity was her smarts. The bad thing about Felicity was her smarts.

“I just know,” Joe said, his tone chilly enough to get a frown from Metal.

Felicity’s head cocked as she studied him. She wasn’t afraid of him in any way, which was good but damn, Joe wished they were in the military and he could shut her down with a command.

Though it was entirely likely that if Felicity was in the military she’d be a general by now. Head of Cyber Command.

“You keep tabs on her,” Felicity said.

Joe sighed. “Yeah.” He made an impatient gesture. “It’s not like I’m stalking her or anything. She’s not in a good way and to tell you the truth, she worries me.”

There, that sounded normal and sane. Concern for a neighbor, no more no less.

“Plus, she is a fabulous cook,” Felicity said dryly.

“Yeah, there’s that too.”

“And probably beautiful, judging by the expression on your face.”

Busted. Joe sighed. “Yeah. She’s a looker.”

Metal rested his arm against Felicity’s seat back and she leaned into it, the movement so natural because she’d probably done that a thousand times.

Metal was a lucky guy. Felicity was a looker, too. Joe and Metal were old enough not to be attracted by looks alone. As a teenager, Joe’d been turned on by just about any girl who didn’t make dogs whine and cringe. The pretty ones had been like catnip. Experience had taught him the hard way that pretty features didn’t mean shit. He’d met some vain and vicious pretty women and his radar was fine-tuned for that. Felicity and Isabel didn’t ping any of his warning buttons.

Like Isabel, Felicity wasn’t vain or neurotic about her looks. She and Metal were lovers, but they were also a team. A pretty cool one, too.

The same with a lot of guys in ASI. At first, Joe had thought it was something in the water out here in Portland. A lot of the guys were in tight, solid relationships. Maybe because the two owners, John Huntington, aka Midnight, and Douglas Kowalski, known as the Senior, had fantastic marriages. Jacko was also engaged to a looker. They were crazy in love, too.

Weird, so many solid couples in one place.

“Someone knows you’re interested,” Metal said soberly. “Otherwise that message doesn’t make sense. You don’t tell someone to look after their neighbor unless you know there’s some relationship there.”

“And you don’t take high-level precautions to hide your identity,” Felicity added. She touched her magic computer. “This guy, or this woman, employed a lot of difficult tricks to hide his or her identity. It’s not just a question of an anonymizer. The person who sent the message had to take a number of steps to hide their identity, and not easy steps, either. That person had to work, and work hard, to hide from me.”

She said it without false modesty. Felicity was the best of the best and she knew it.

“Someone’s watching you,” Metal said. “No way around it.”

“Or watching Isabel.” Joe didn’t know which thought bothered him more.

“And you’re not catching it.” Metal shook his head. “I don’t buy it. You’ve got good situational awareness. You haven’t noticed anything, anything at all?”

Joe shook his head.

“Security cams,” Felicity said suddenly and both men turned to her.

“What?”

But she was too busy communing with her laptop, fingers flying over the keyboard. She sat back and turned the monitor so he and Metal could see. Joe’s eyes widened.

She had some kind of map of their street with an overlay of security cameras with their field of vision. His street with projected cones over several houses.

“Okay, these are the security cams on your street, including yours and Isabel’s. Someone has probably hacked into some of them.”

“Not mine,” Joe said heatedly.

“No,” Felicity said softly. “I set yours up myself and they are not hackable.”

“And I set up Isabel’s system using your equipment and software.” So nobody had hacked his vidcam system or Isabel’s.

“What about the vidcams in the neighborhood,” he asked. “Are they hackable?”

Felicity had kept up the computer patter, fingers flying. “Oh, yeah,” she said and turned the monitor toward him. He and Metal bent forward.

And shit. Sure enough, there was his front doorstep, front and center of the camera view of his neighbor across the street, Edward Crawford, a retired doctor. Isabel’s doorstep was at the edge, barely visible. But when she walked down the small paved path to her gate, she’d be visible.

Felicity scrolled, from vidcam to vidcam, and he got a choppy view of his side of the street down to the park, where security vidcams took over.

“Are these vidcams hackable by someone who’s not you?” he asked.

“Oh yeah,” Felicity said. “You’d need a little nimbleness and savvy but they are hackable. You don’t have to be me to do it.”

Again, she said that without false pride. She knew how good she was.

Joe swallowed. “Have they been hacked?”

Felicity frowned. “Now, that I can’t say. Because I’m assuming that whoever is doing this is pretty good. Good enough to cover his traces.” She gave a half smile. “Or her traces. I’m assuming it’s a guy, though.”

“Yeah.”

“You still have that same email address? You didn’t change it to Joe.Harris123 did you?”

Felicity had a thing with passwords and email addresses. All of her passwords were created using a randomizer—and she remembered them all—and her email address was impossible to guess.

“Yeah.” Joe rubbed the back of his neck. “You pounded that home to me. To all of us. So not only is this guy following me and following Isabel, he—”

“Has a stake in this. He cares for some reason,” Metal said.

“That’s the thing that has me worried.” Joe looked at his friend who was looking as grim as he felt. “Someone is watching us who cares. And reaching out and touching me. So, yeah, he’s saying I need to protect Isabel but how do I know he’s a friend?”

Felicity’s pretty face was scrunched up in thought. “I’m not too familiar with tactics, not like you guys are, but didn’t he just show his hand? For what purpose, if not to focus you on Isabel?”

“And you’re already pretty focused,” Metal said, jabbing Joe with an elbow. Metal was a strong guy and his elbow jabs would knock over a lesser man. Joe wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction of budging.

“I mean, what does he have to gain?” Felicity persisted. “So I think we’re going to have to take this message at face value.” She held up a slender hand and started counting the points off her fingers. “One, he’s probably not in town. He’s at a different location and can’t make it in time if she needs immediate help. Two, he’s on Isabel’s side. I think we need to simply assume that. Otherwise the message makes no sense. Because if he wanted to hurt her, he wouldn’t have alerted you to his presence. Three, he’s been able to peg Joe as a good guy and as someone who has a stake in Isabel’s safety. To reveal himself like that to Joe, he has to have done some digging. Though Joe’s military history is probably heavily redacted as to specific missions, the facts are publicly available. He’d know you were a SEAL. And he trusts you. So I guess in a way we’re starting to get a picture of him.”

“Okay.” Everything Felicity was saying made sense. “So now what do I do?”

Felicity cocked her head and smiled.

“Uh-oh,” Metal said. “I know that smile.”

“We do two things.” Her fingers moved on the keyboard. “First, we answer the guy.”

“Okay.” Joe sighed. “So, what am I going to say?”

“You already said it,” Felicity declared, showing him the message she’d sent.

You bet your ass I’m going to protect Isabel.

She stood up. “And now I’m going to go visit our mystery woman.”

Joe’s eyes widened. “Wait!” he said but it was too late. Felicity moved fast when she wanted to. In a second she’d grabbed the pot the beef stew had come in, and which they’d washed, and was out the door.

Joe and Metal looked at each other when the door closed.

“She doesn’t take no for an answer,” Joe finally said, glancing at his friend.

“Nope.” Metal shook his head. “She doesn’t. And she usually does exactly as she pleases. But living with her, I have learned one thing and that’s that she’s usually right. So I’ve learned to stop worrying.”

And he had her back. That went without saying. Metal was always there for her and always would be.

They sat in the silence of the house and simply waited. As SEALs they’d been taught patience the hard way—through pain. So they were perfectly capable of waiting anything out. Because clearly, Felicity wasn’t just dropping off the pot. She was staying at Isabel’s, God only knew for how long.

“So,” Metal finally said, looking at him keenly. “Isabel.”

“Isabel,” Joe nodded.

“She’s pretty.” Metal had seen her when he’d tended her knee.

“Yeah,” Joe sighed. “Very.”

“Pretty women can be dangerous.”

“Can be,” Joe agreed. “But she’s like Felicity. Nice, not nasty. But she’s also...damaged. Something’s happened to her, only I don’t know what and she isn’t talking. It’s like there’s this huge no-go zone she’s created and I don’t have the courage to step into it.”

Metal gave him a sidelong glance. Joe had courage in battle. He’d proved that time and again. He’d spilled blood time and time again, once in saving Metal’s ass. But it was true. Squeezing info out of Isabel that she didn’t want to give—he just couldn’t go there.

“What?” He met Metal’s eyes. “You’re not gonna make a crack?”

“Nope.” Metal zipped his lips. “If there’s one thing I’ve learned lately it’s the power of women. She doesn’t want you to know something, you’re not gonna know it until she wants you to.”

Joe nodded. Man, yeah.

He’d been present when CIA agents interrogated jihadists and their methods had been brutal, even the psychological ones. Necessary, but nightmare inducing. Joe was down with breaking terrorists. The thought of coercing Isabel in any way, however, made him nauseous. But damn, he wanted to know her deal, find out what happened to her.

Because the truth was, there was that really ugly suspicion rolling around in the back of his brain. He couldn’t get it out of his head that she’d been abused. It wasn’t something he wanted to think about but it stuck in his head like a nasty burr. That first day—she’d been hollow-eyed and terrified. Joe knew that look. None of his teammates had had it, of course, they bent but were never broken. But Joe’d spent the better part of a decade in war zones and he’d seen shell-shocked civilians. They had that same look.

Actually, it drove him bugfuck crazy, the thought of someone hurting Isabel. He could picture it in his mind and it was almost more than he could bear. Isabel’s skin was delicate, incredibly fine. The idea of her covered in bruises made his heart beat faster with rage.

Of course, he couldn’t go anywhere with these thoughts. Who would he talk to about it? Metal and Jacko would just look at him funny. And he couldn’t ask Isabel because she wasn’t talking.

Because if Isabel was on the run from some man, if that cryptic message was from someone who wanted her to be safe, well whoever sent it had sent it to the right guy. Joe had never backed down from a fight and never would. And to protect Isabel? He’d go to the wall.

“What are you thinking?” Metal asked. The guy looked like a WWE wrestling champ, a big slab of meat and Joe had seen people treat him as if he was a few sandwiches shy of a picnic. Nothing could be further from the truth. Metal was sharp—he just had nothing to prove and he liked being underestimated.

So Joe knew better than to lie to Metal. But he could put a little Vaseline on the lens and misdirect.

“Trying to figure out what’s wrong with Isabel. What happened to her.”

Metal narrowed his eyes. “You figure she’s running from some guy who hurt her.”

There it was, out in the open. Joe sighed. “Yeah. I think about it all the time. Drives me nuts.”

“I hear you,” Metal said. “Every time I think about that fuckhead slicing Felicity open, I can’t see straight.”

Felicity had been coming to visit her friend Lauren and instead she’d been met at the airport by a guy who wanted to kidnap her for what was in her pretty head. Felicity had escaped because she was Felicity, but not before getting a nasty knife wound. Metal said it still gave him nightmares.