Total pages in book: 118
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 112001 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 560(@200wpm)___ 448(@250wpm)___ 373(@300wpm)
As her eyes searched his face, he did the same to her, like the pair of them had been away from each other for years.
“How’d you like it?” he asked weakly.
“Now I understand.” The wolven brushed his face. “The bike is freedom.”
“Yes.” He closed his eyes and sank into the SUV’s seat. “That’s right.”
“He doesn’t want that,” Lydia said to the nurse with the wheelchair. “He’s going to walk into the house himself. Aren’t you.”
As Daniel nodded and put out his hand for Lydia to help him, the medical staff didn’t force the issue—then again, they’d been dealing with him for how long? Six months now? They knew what the angle of his chin meant.
Well, and then he had his woman.
Wolven, rather.
“We going back to Plattsburgh now?”
The male voice in C.P.’s ear was a confusing interruption. But then she shook her head to clear it and glanced at the guard, who had leaned back into the interior.
Was that what she wanted to do? In a quick sequence, she replayed pulling up to Gus’s house. She’d been frantic. Distracted. But she knew she was never going to forget the bike in that short driveway, or the way the snow fell in lazy circles, or how neat and tidy everything had appeared from the outside, given what had happened in the interior. If she hadn’t known better, she would have—like anybody else—assumed all was well.
The residence should have been stained with smoke, or pitted with bomb holes, or rotted and decayed and about to fall in on itself.
As she’d gotten out, she had barked at the two guards with her that she was going first—which in retrospect had been more about her need to take control than any rational thinking. But she had wanted to be the one to go over and punch in the code to lift the garage door. Gus had given her the six digits for the keypad on his first day in the new lab site, when she’d asked him about an emergency contact.
God, she could still picture him in her office, sitting on the other side of her glass-topped desk, wearing a pair of blue jeans with a hole open on one knee and a Led Zeppelin t-shirt for some concert that had been held on April 19, 1977, in Cincinnati, OH.
Funny, how she could remember details like that about him. And forget so much about so many others.
1-1-2-7-4-2.
She’d written the random sequence down, and when he’d gone to leave her office, she’d reminded him that he still hadn’t given her an emergency contact.
He’d looked over his shoulder at her, wagged his eyebrows, and said, Looks like you’re it.
So she’d gotten that garage door open—and the instant the panels had risen and revealed his Tesla, an alarm bell had gone off in the back of her mind.
It was still ringing. And she still couldn’t figure out what it was trying to tell her—
“Ms. Phalen?”
With an odd disassociation, she focused on the guard. The man’s pose, as he leaned in, was dynamic, his well-trained body poised on an off-balance that he could have held for hours if he’d had to. For a moment, his features and hair color distorted. No longer dark-haired and dark-eyed, he became blond and baby-blue’d. Then, between one blink and the next, she saw a dead body out on her lawn where her helicopter landed and took off from. The skin of the handsome face was gray, the stare sightless, those bright spring-sky eyes no longer lit with consciousness.
Her hand went back to her stomach, and this time, she let it stay put.
“You go back,” she heard herself say.
With jerky movements, she opened the driver’s door and jumped to the ground. “Check the Tesla and see if it was left on sentry mode. If there are any PINs to access the car or its computer for the camera feeds, use one-one-two-seven-four-two. I don’t know exactly how those fucking iPhones with wheels work.”
The guard nodded. “Can you repeat that—”
“Jimi Hendrix’s birthday,” the man in the rear announced as he crabwalked forward. “I’ve got it.”
Well, that explained the sequence, didn’t it. Gus’s favorite musician of all time.
And as for Teslas, her security detail had told her back in 2017 that she could never own one because they recorded everything if you weren’t careful. No worry there. She liked her cars with gas engines that sounded like something. But if Gus’s goddamn Tinkertoy had managed to catch the break-in? She promised never to take the company’s name in vain again.
As C.P. headed for her mansion’s threshold, she cut past the remaining white coats who were lingering in a disapproving kibitz, and the moment she stepped inside, her eyes went to the left. Lydia and Daniel were slowly making their way across her acre-sized black-and-white foyer, heading for their bedroom in the rear of the house.