Page 32 of Beyond Reason

And… well… Some small part of me knew that the information was too valuable to simply hand over. It was too important.

It meant something. Maybe my need to do something about it was the dying wish of the body I was in—maybe it was just my own curious mind.

Whatever it was, I wasn’t going to just give the information up.

Which meant I needed to run faster.

And fuck me if I wasn’t saying a silent thank-you to those extra miles Axel had forced me to do on the treadmill, even though I’d been ready to kill him for it at the time.

I wanted to think that the training we’d done would give me the ability to turn around and take my pursuer out, but at least a small part of me wasn’t completely thriving on pride.

He was a lot bigger.

And he had a fucking gun.

It was mostly the whole gun thing that sealed the deal.

Which was why it was a damn fucking shame when I rounded a building that had led out into open space before, trees that I could get lost in… and found myself facing an iron gate.

There were no trees. There was just an empty storefront.

Well, shit.

I whirled around and tried to make sure my feet were planted far enough apart that I’d be able to move if he stepped forward, that I could dive away if I had to.

It wasn’t like I could surprise him. As soon as he rounded the corner, his gun was pointed at my chest with careful precision that told me all the wishing in the world wouldn’t make this a situation I could get out of. He held the weapon with steady hands and a cold look in his eyes.

“Now, Mr. Lister… I’m not sure what you were trying to accomplish by taking the drive, but we need to know exactly who you’ve shared the information with.”

The question instantly made me go on guard. I would have happily told him to go fuck himself with the goddamn flash drive and all of the corrupt information on it, but he wasn’t just asking for that now.

He was asking me who I’d shared the information with… and if he found me, there was no way to know how long he’d been watching me.

There was nothing to say that he hadn’t seen me come out of Axel’s house.

That he wouldn’t know who else I could have possibly told about their fucked up little experiments.

The thought of some asshole showing up with a gun and blowing a hole through Axel’s head because I’d brought him back into my bullshit…

It made me see red.

“I didn’t share it with anyone.” I said the words carefully, wondering if my muscle memory included sounding like Marshall. Did the man in front of me know him? Did he have any idea about what had actually happened?

I still had no idea what happened to Marshall Lister. His knowledge didn’t extend as far as hacking security cameras to try to get an answer. Apart from that, the entire building was burned to the ground. I wasn’t sure there was anything left to hack. I didn’t know how technology worked, and Axel had muttered something about never being skilled with a computer, but that he’d ask around.

I wondered if he didn’t want me to see what had happened because he didn’t want it to traumatize me.

“As much as I’d like to believe that, I’m afraid I can’t. I know you’ve been staying with someone. Now, the question is, do you want to give us their name now, and I’ll make this easier on you, or do you want to hold out and I can make it slow for both of you?”

Fuck. He knew about Axel.

He knew about him, and he’d all but told me we were both going to die because of something that I hadn’t even done. Something that I would have been so much smarter about if I had bothered to do it. I’d smuggled information out of locations before when clients paid me a little extra, and I’d never had the audacity to get caught.

Unless I had, and that was what had gotten me killed… but the thought didn’t feel right in my head.

I shook myself—it wasn’t the time to wonder how I’d died. It was time to figure out how to get myself out of this situation, to figure out who in the fuck the man in front of me worked for. I couldn’t just kill him. I had to know who’d sent him, because he had the word lackey written all across his forehead. He wasn’t the one who wanted the information.

I could only imagine it was either the company that Marshall worked for or a competitor. The flash drive said Dr. Northman hadn’t been the man to head up the project. It was someone named Nathaniel West.

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