Page 8 of Shadow Operative

By the time she got there, her lungs burned. Her head pounded harder. Her panic was barely contained.

She darted to her apartment and tapped in the door code, thankful it didn’t require a key.

Just as she slipped inside, an elevator pinged.

Her heart pulsed out of control.

Could it be the killer?

The cops?

The thought of either oneterrified her.

Maybe Gage should have called the police right away.

But as an operative with the Shadow Agency, he had skills and resources the police didn’t.

Trained in black ops, he knew how to fight. To use weapons. He knew about poisons and toxins.

That was why he wanted to gather his own clues. To do his own investigation.

He’d been trained to be a shadow, to disappear, to blend in.

So that was what he would do.

Soon enough, the police would discover his friend was dead. The local PD would launch their own investigation. That investigation might even lead right back to Gage. He hadn’t made his arrival a secret.

He’d handle that when it happened.

When the government had chosen him to be a super soldier, they’d invested a large amount of time and money into his training. It was more than training. There were experiments. Injections. Covert missions.

Scars. So many scars—some not visible to the human eye.

His friends liked to call themselves the Jason Bourne Club.

But Jason Bourne was fiction and members of his team were real. They’d been treated as a commodity, as people whose lives didn’t matter.

They might as well have been robots.

Now they all lived with the consequences of what amounted to brainwashing.

A fact that haunted each of them in different ways.

Right now, Gage needed to figure out who had been in Rob’s apartment tonight.

He pulled his computer from his bag—he’d also been trained in technology.

It only took Gage a few minutes to hack into the apartment’s security server and pull up the video feed from the front door of the lobby.

He scrolled back to six-thirty when he and Rob had last spoken. Then he began to fast-forward and watch people coming and going.

At eleven, he saw Rob step into the building.

A woman was with him. She had her arm around his waist, and Rob’s arm was slung over her shoulders. The two looked . . . cozy.

Gage tried to zoom in to get a better look at her face, but the image quality wasn’t high enough.

In the video, the doorman barely looked up to say hello to them. He’d been texting someone, and his eyes were glued to his phone.

---