Page 36 of After the Fall

“Yes, Boss. The bird is well-hydrated and complacent. No signs of aggression. Tim will keep running tests and monitoring him.”

“That’s good.” At least one thing was going well.

A horn honked in the background and the phone clicked over to the speaker in Atticus’s car. “Are you on your way here?”

“Yes, as planned.”

“Good. We have some big decisions to make.”

While I waited for Atticus to arrive, I swiped back through the photos that Harper had sent me. I hearted the photo of thedress with the flowers. “You’re radiant, my love. I can’t wait to see you in this dress. And rip it off you afterward.”

I didn’t want to tell her about the man who had helped Jim escape. I was ninety percent certain that the man who had freed Jim was Harper’s father, but what was his connection to all of this? If what Jim said was correct, the experiments on the hikers had made them supernatural, but the changes hadn’t lasted.

Harper’s father was more sasquatch – more like us, than human. And my gut told me he’d been that way for a long time. Was he an experiment gone wrong? Is that why he’d abandoned Harper? And what was the Carder connection?

I needed answers, and I needed them fast.

EIGHTEEN

HARPER

The yellow tulipsbounced on my leg as Fiona raced back to the mansion. The white ribbon tied around the bouquet fluttered in the breeze. It was chilly, but Fiona had insisted we keep the windows open. She didn’t want me getting car sick in the Range Rover, something about not wanting to piss off Tank more than we had to.

I didn’t blame her. I wouldn’t want to deal with that jerk either.

Fiona glanced at my lap. “Should we tell Wyatt?” Her hands clenched the steering wheel.

“Tell him what? That a florist dropped off flowers for my mom?” I scoffed.

She laughed. “Yeah. When you put it that way… It’s probably not important.” She veered lanes without signaling. I gripped the door handle hard as the driver behind us aggressively beeped his horn.

I’d had a nice morning shopping with Fiona, and I wanted to believe that she could be an ally, or even a friend, at some point down the road. But she was still Wyatt’s employee, and one ofthem. It was safe to assume her loyalties lay with Wyatt and not with me.

She frowned at the bouquet. “Was there a card?”

“No.” I made a show of checking the bouquet and coming up empty handed. “They’re probably from some distant relative.” A little white lie wouldn’t hurt. Fiona didn’t know we had no family, that it was just me and Mom, and had been for the last ten years. “I’ll put them in water when we get home. It feels silly to waste them.”

Fiona smiled. “I love tulips. I planted some purple and yellow ones outside my house in the village.” Her eyes looked wistful as she stared out the windshield.

“Do you miss your house?”

“Very much. Seattle isn’t home. I could never live in the city full time,” she said with a shudder. “I’d be so bored.”

“Why did you come back?”

A guilty look flashed across her face. “You know why.”

I had a flashback of Fiona in her running clothes, tying her hair in a ponytail, as she stretched next to me at the park. Of course, I’d had no idea that she was a sasquatch then, or that she was following me for Wyatt. “I remember thinking you were really tall,” I laughed. “And that your shoes were massive.”

“I have to get them custom-made,” she laughed. “That’s one way humans are luckier than us, I guess. But…” she turned to me with a straight face, “it’s the only way.” Her wink kept the mood light, and showed that she was just joking.

“Maybe we could go for a run sometime.”

She hesitated, and I worried I had overstepped a boundary by suggesting we spend time together. “Sure. It beats running on a treadmill. Did you know the gym Wyatt’s putting in cost $300,000? And I bet no one even uses it. We hate exercising indoors.”

“$300,000?” My jaw dropped. “I don’t even like the gym,” I groaned. “All I want is to be able to go outside without a babysitter. No offence,” I added.

Fiona smiled. “None taken.”

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