Total pages in book: 218
Estimated words: 215412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 862(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 215412 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1077(@200wpm)___ 862(@250wpm)___ 718(@300wpm)
“What the—?” I drop my backpack and stare with a slackened jaw. “How?”
He slides the bolt on the door and sits at the desk, fingers moving fast.
The screens bloom to life with camera feeds, street views, and angles from places I recognize. The alley we were just in. The house with the pit bull. The mechanic shop where I work. Intersections. Streetlights.
“Holy shit.” I lean against his chair, looping an arm around his neck.
“Watch your mouth.”
“You can see all that? All the time?”
“I see everything, anytime I want.” He types faster.
The feeds rewind, and he filters through different time stamps until two figures appear on the street. Me and the man walking behind me.
With a few commands, the images disappear. Frame by frame, they vanish. Erased.
“How?” I turn to him.
“I’m good at this.” His eyes finally lift to mine. “When they find the body, there won’t be a trace of us on any camera within a mile of it.”
“You can do that?”
“Just did.” He leans back, breathless from the rush of it. “I can control the investigation from here and keep our tracks clean.”
“Who was he? Why did he say I was wanted?”
“I’ll find out.” He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a wallet.
“That’s his.” My stomach knots.
“Yeah.” He tosses it onto a tray with other wallets that don’t belong to him.
“There have been others? Were they all following me?”
He nods, eyes stony.
How many times has he taken out a bad guy on my tail while I was just walking along, completely oblivious? God, I’m so stupid.
“Why is this happening?” My panic rises. “What do they want?”
“Lower your voice.” He pulls me to stand between his spread legs and studies me from head to toe, taking in the condition of my clothes, the scrapes on my arms, and the tattered ends of my hair where it hangs on my shoulders.
Then he rests his hands on my hips and stares at my stomach. “You’re in danger, Little Bird.”
“From who?”
“I have enemies.”
“Because of the computer stuff?”
“When you can do things other people can’t, dangerous people take notice.”
“So you just… What? Hack bad guys?”
“I accept jobs that use my skills. Sometimes those jobs make enemies.”
“Then stop. Just stop doing it.”
“I can’t.” He says it fast, final, slamming a door on my concern. “Drop it.”
“No.” Anger climbs up my throat. “This is our lives. You disappear for a month, and I’m supposed to just wait around—”
“Dove.”
“No! Where were you? What happened? Why did you leave me alone for that long?”
He stands abruptly, the chair scraping against the floor. He paces with his hands locked on top of his head, turning, pacing, and turning again. His shirt rides up with the movement, exposing a strip of his stomach—hard muscle, familiar grooves, and—
A barely-healed, scary-big wound under his rib cage.
My heart stumbles.
“What is that?” I grab his shirt before he can yank it down. “Jag! What is that?”
He reaches for my wrist, but not fast enough. I shove the shirt higher, revealing the full injury, pink and new, the width of a thumb. A wound that can only come from a blade sinking in deep.
“Someone stabbed you,” I whisper.
“It’s nothing.”
“It’s not nothing.” My fingers hover near it, afraid to touch. “This is bad. This should’ve killed you.”
He doesn’t deny it. He doesn’t say anything at all. He just lets me hold his shirt in my trembling hands.
The silence between us is too loud, the distance too far. He’s hiding things from me.
The story about the man following me, the jobs he’s doing, the danger we’re in… That’s not all of it. Not even part of it.
“A couple of months ago, a soldier took me out for beers.” I watch his face carefully, the hard set of his jaw. “He was stabbed in a bar fight later that night.”
“Don’t know anything about that.”
“Yeah, you do.” I trail my fingers over the puckered skin. “Did he do this?”
“Fuck, no. He didn’t even get a hit in.”
“So you did kill him.”
“You’re fifteen-fucking-years old!” He bares his teeth, eyes wild. “And he was—”
“Twenty-two. A year younger than you.” I return my attention to his wound, examining the raw skin.
It’s only a few weeks old. Maybe a month. Too fresh to be related to the soldier.
A month…
This is why he vanished. Why he left me to fend for myself. Why the streets felt wrong and empty in a way they never have before.
“You were hurt.” I grip his scruffy face, holding it in my hands. “That’s where you’ve been. You weren’t working some job or hiding from the cops or whatever story you were going to feed me. You were dying somewhere.”
His eyes flick away. “Cracker patched me up.”
“Cracker?”
“The paranoid drug dealer who aimed the six-shooter out the door. This is his house.”
“You live in a drug dealer’s house.” I lower my hands.