Page 74 of Caught By Menace

Terror clicked his teeth and sat forward. She fought the urge to shrink back in her chair. Showing him weakness would give him an easy victory.

“I know you weren’t on the original list. Your number wasn’t pulled in the lottery. You bought your way onto the list. Why?”

Was that illegal? Had they hauled her in here because she’d broken some rule? “My best friend Jennie had her number pulled. We made promises when we were kids that we’d run together. We didn’t want to be separated.”

Terror didn’t say anything. He just stared at her. Was he trying to read her face? Probably.

“Why Menace?”

She frowned. “What do you mean?”

“Why did you choose Menace as your mark?”

“My mark?” Naya glanced at Pierce. The roughed-up man still stood guard at the door. His intense gaze unsettled her. “Menace picked me.HeGrabbedme.”

“After you deliberately injured Flare and used your friend to lure Menace closer,” Terror countered.

Dread settled in the pit of her stomach. “That is not what happened.”

“Isn’t it?” Terror tapped his finger on the table. “Didn’t you see Menace buying flowers in the market that day and recognize his officer’s insignia? Didn’t you take that information back to your Splinter cell friends and concoct this plan to infiltrate theValiant?”

Panic saturated her veins. Splinter cell? Was this guy batshit crazy? “That is not—I amnota terrorist!”

“No?” Terror flipped open the folder and started snatching out photographs. He smacked them down on the table. The old memories came flooding back as her gaze moved from one mug shot to the next. The constant hunger and cold. The fear. The depression. The anger. The desperation.

“Tell me the girl who ran guns for the Sixer gang out of The City isn’t a terrorist.” He shoved a photograph of a weapons cache across the table. She recognized the bag and packing material cradling the weapons. She couldn’t be sure that exact shipment had been one she’d ferried on her back but it was possible.

“I didn’t…I was just a stupid kid. I was hungry. I wanted a home. I needed money.”

“Spare me.” Terror picked up his tablet. “We all have sob stories. I’m not particularly interested in yours. What I am interested in is this.” He spun around the tablet and showed her gruesome images of burned and mangled bodies.

Naya recoiled. “I don’t know anything about that.”

“Don’t you?” Terror pushed the tablet in front of her so she couldn’t look away from it. “You sent the information about last night’s weapons shipment to your Splinter cell contacts. We have the data burst record that emanated from theValiant. You just happened to be spotted entering an engineering access pointaround the same time the burst was sent. How do you explain that?”

“I can’t.”

“Your transmission worked. They attacked our ship last night. All of the weapons were stolen. Men were killed and maimed.” He sat back and gestured to Pierce. “Men like him.”

Feeling the situation spiral out of control, Naya said, “Look, I know I did some terrible things when I was a young, dumb kid. No one knows that more than me. But I am not a terrorist. I don’t know anyone involved with the Splinter movement.”

Terror guffawed rudely. “You just can’t stop lying.”

He slammed his hands onto the table so hard the tablet jumped. Startled, Naya inhaled a shaky breath. Was he going to hit her next?

Shaking his head, Terror retrieved two photos from the folder. He pushed them closer. “You’re going to sit there and tell me you don’t know these two people?”

Surprise rippled through her. Nattie? She touched the photo of her older brother. The years hadn’t been kind to him. He looked so thin and drawn. The pockmarks on his face and his brown, brittle teeth shocked her. What kind of trouble had he gotten into now?

The other photo took her a moment to recognize. Her mother had aged considerably in the nearly eighteen years since she’d left. Like Nattie, her face was also scarred, but in a different way. Someone had slit her cheek from the corner of her mouth to her ear. It had been sewn back together crudely and left a thick, bumpy scar.

Her voice husky with emotion, Naya said, “This is my brother, Nattie. That’s…that’s my mother.”

“Two known Splinter cell members,” Terror added.

Her gaze snapped to his face. “That’s not true.”

“You know it is.”

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