Total pages in book: 90
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 86450 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 432(@200wpm)___ 346(@250wpm)___ 288(@300wpm)
Connie gasps, her eyes flaring so wide all I see are the whites. “You… you… you don’t mean that.”
“I have never meant anything more in my life. Now, tell me you understand, Connie.”
“Finn—”
“Tell me you understand,” I bellow at her.
She blanches, stammering, “I… I… I understand.”
Not good enough. “Tell me you’re not going to make that call.”
“I’m not going to make the call,” she says quickly, eyes darting to the side.
“Look at me when you say it,” I snarl, unable to get my rage under control.
She looks back at me, fearful and angry all at once. “Fine,” she snaps. “I’m not going to make the call.”
I take a step back and she slides sideways along the brick wall and away from me. She’s breathing fast.
We stare at each other a long moment and then she walks past me down the alley toward the street. I watch her until she gets to the corner, turns left and then she’s gone.
I stand in the cold air with my hands shaking inside my coat pockets. My heart beats in a way I haven’t felt for years, and I tell myself, very quietly and clearly, that I’ve just threatened a woman who has been with me through thick and thin, and that the threat I made was the truest thing I’ve ever said in my life. That version of me who made the threat is a version of me Josie hasn’t yet met and, if I can help it, won’t.
I take a breath.
I straighten my jacket.
I go back inside.
CHAPTER 16
Josie
BOB’s been running the same lunar overlay for forty minutes and I haven’t looked at it once. The coffee at my left elbow is ignored and I’m absolutely uninspired today.
While I’m at my desk doing the choreography of working—hand on the trackpad, eyes on the screen—my head is firmly back on the events of last night.
I switch monitors and attempt to read the FBI’s most recent surveillance summary on the Bellevue bakery. I glance away and realize I can’t remember one word of what it says.
What I do remember, with acute clarity, is Connie kissing Finn’s cheek last night and touching the lapel of his jacket. I had clocked that as I was talking to Margaret about her art. It was familiar and practiced. A public claim, so to speak, and jealousy ripped through me. I should have felt better when I saw Finn step back from it and the move was of a man that has been managing that situation for a long time.
It didn’t stop me from sauntering that way, wanting to interject myself into that conversation.
To stake my own claim.
In a million years, I never thought the situation would devolve the way it did.
The compliment about my dress was the most precise piece of cruelty I’ve been on the receiving end of in a long time. Connie picked the one thing in the room she could weaponize and did it within seconds of me entering her perimeter.
She watched me stiffen.
She enjoyed it.
And I realized that no matter what she was to Finn, I’d never like her.
Connie had no clue what that dress meant to me and it didn’t matter. She just knew it was something I was wearing because I cared what Finn thought, and she made it ugly.
I’d be impressed if I weren’t busy hating her.
But that isn’t the part that has me at my desk staring at a lunar overlay without really caring if I get a decent output.
“She works for people who hunt people like us,” she’d said.
“Our house,” she’d invoked.
She put me firmly on the outside and she wasn’t going to let me in.
Truly, I’ve gleaned she’s a foolish woman ruled by emotion. She knows I’m the lead intelligence analyst on the Voronin case and she stood in front of me and confessed in three sentences that they’re running something illegal.
I take a sip of the nearly cold coffee and swallow it down with a grimace.
“Ugh.” I close my eyes for a beat and I’m back at the art show with Marcus beside me. Finn nearly dragged Connie out of the gallery and Marcus babysat me in the aftermath. I remember thinking he had very kind eyes as he handed me a fresh glass of wine I didn’t want.
“She’s been like that for as long as I’ve known her,” he said quietly, eyes roaming the gallery.
“In love with him?” I guessed.
“He doesn’t return it,” he said. “Never. Not for one minute.”
I couldn’t help but ask. “Does she understand that?”
He smiled sardonically. “She knows. She just hopes.”
I drank the wine I didn’t want and watched the door Finn had walked Connie through.
When he came back inside, he was alone, and while his expression was composed, his eyes were not. He locked his eyes on me, crossed the floor and didn’t stop until he had his hand at the small of my back.