Total pages in book: 55
Estimated words: 51889 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 259(@200wpm)___ 208(@250wpm)___ 173(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 51889 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 259(@200wpm)___ 208(@250wpm)___ 173(@300wpm)
Of course, most boarding schools didn’t have the kind of Security that Trinita dev Monti had. And most schools did not keep their students year round, if need be. The first few years I had returned home to spend summers and holidays with my family. After my mother had died, I hadn’t come home at all.
Not once.
Not until several weeks ago.
I shivered, feeling eyes on me. I glanced around, suddenly on high alert. It was a strange sensation after the isolation of my school. I wasn’t used to people. I especially was not used to men.
There had been a handful of men who worked at the nunnery. An old man who fixed things. The gardeners. But they had kept their distance from the students.
The only men I knew well were my relations. My father. My cousins. But I had not seen any of them in years.
In the outside world they were everywhere. The male of the species were impossible to ignore or avoid. Always staring. Always coming close. Trying to speak to me. To touch my arm. Wanting something.
I couldn’t help it. I feared them.
I ducked my head and hurried down the street, looking for the hotel I had found online. It wasn’t the sort of place I had stayed growing up on the rare excursion. It wasn’t a five star establishment. But it wasn’t the cheapest place in town, either.
That was deliberate. They would assume I was either trying to save every penny, or so foolish that I spent everything I had on the familiar, the expensive.
I had to keep them off my trail. I’d read plenty of spy books and cozy mysteries over the years. But I had no practical experience with real life, let alone being ‘on the lamb’. Buying a cheap phone, pawning some of my jewelry, even buying the Greyhound bus ticket had been outside my realm. It had been scary and exciting at the same time. So far, I had pulled it off. I had survived.
But right now, I wasn’t feeling particularly safe. It was early morning and the streets of Los Angeles were already bustling with people. I was in the center of the city. I’d figured it would be easier to get lost here. That hiding in plain sight would be for the best.
I just had to get to the hotel.
Once I was inside, however, I had no idea what to do with the rest of my life. How I would disappear. How I would survive.
I only knew one thing: I could never, ever go back again.
CHAPTER THREE
Vice
“Show me,” I demanded, eagerly leaning over one of the chairs that faced the wall of monitors above Trace’s desk. He had six to ten screens going at any given moment. There were actually twelve, but he rarely used all of them. Right now, most of the screens were clicking through furiously, running a facial recognition search with a thoroughness that would be envied by the FBI.
“Might have a match, but I can’t be sure.”
He pulled up an image and started honing in on it. It was a bus station. A slender figure was waiting in line, trying to buy a ticket. I watched as she fumbled with cash, trying not to attract attention. Even with the cap pulled over her eyes, sunglasses, and oversized sweater, she was noticeable.
She was just that beautiful. And she looked lost. Alone. So alone it made my heart ache.
It was her. I knew it. But I had to be sure.
“Where is that?”
“Greyhound station, Chicago.”
“Can you get closer?”
“What the fuck do you think I am doing, Vice?”
I stared at the screen hungrily as he got closer, the girl freezing in place.
“Can’t say one hundred percent, but it looks like a match.”
“It’s her.”
“How do you know?”
I ignored him. He didn’t need to know I’d watched every bit of footage I could find on the girl, looked at every picture, read every fucking report card. More than once. One might even say I had perused her file obsessively. I’d barely slept since Cain had slid her file across the desk two days ago.
Thinking about her alone out there was killing me. This girl needed my help. I felt protective and I didn’t even know her. But it felt like I did. Something in me recognized something in her.
She was mine. I was hers. She just didn’t know it yet.
“You know sniffing around this girl is going to get you killed, right?”
I knew what he meant. He didn’t mean the job. If you cared too much your judgement could be off. It’s the reason surgeons don’t operate on friends or family. We both knew I could handle that. He meant that if I tried to actually dared to try and fuck her, her family would put me in the ground.
Probably scattered all over about a hundred miles in tiny little pieces.