Page 84 of Burn

“I take it you pulled my birth certificate? Or my Passport?” Yeah, that wasdefinitelycreepy.

He winked. “Just let me know if there’s something else you’d rather I load on there. You won’t have access to WiFi, so everything needs to be side loaded.”

Clearly, I wasn’t allowed to use it for anything else. Noted.

“That said, you don’t need to be bored. These jobs can sometimes take longer than any of us like.”

If I was busy, then they wouldn’t need to be as worried about me. Right.

I stared at the screen for a long moment before I began to type in my middle name.

“What’s your middle name, Firecracker?”

I glanced up at Voodoo and raised my eyebrows. “You didn’t also look it up?”

“No, and apparently Alphabet isn’t sharing either.”

“You want a prize, do your own homework,” Alphabet told him, then he winked at me. I wasn’t sure what that wink met and reading men had never been a struggle before. I wasn’t sure it was a struggle now so much as I wasn’t sure what their long term goals were or how it affected anything.

Degas.

My middle name was Degas and it was for one of my mother’s favorite impressionist painters. I’d always been kind of fond of his work, though I suspected it had everything to do with Maman’s stories about the work.

She’d been a French expat settled here. When our brother died at fifteen, we’d only been seven, but Maman’s grief had been ours. We’d done everything we could to look after her, but I really didn’t think she’d ever gotten over his loss.

As promised, the tablet had been loaded with some action movies, romantic comedies, and a couple of thrillers. In addition to the films, there were a couple of full series includingGossip Girl,Wednesday, andReacher. All shows I’d been meaning to watch forever, but I just hadn’t had the time.

The books were an eclectic mix of romantic suspense, comedies, and erotic thrillers. Yeah, I wasn’t going to comment on those selections. While I absolutely read that genre, they were absolutelynoton my wishlist.

I caught a movement out of the corner of my eye, and tilted my head to track Alphabet reaching down to stroke Goblin’s head. The dog had moved to rest his head against Alphabet’s lap while Alphabet worked on the tiniest laptop I’d ever seen.

The longer he petted the dog, the more some of the tension seemed to leech out of his expression. Dog and man both seemed more at ease, though neither shifted from their position.

A light touch against my foot had me shifting my gaze to Voodoo. Ah, I was staring. I gave him a small shrug then winced. He put two fingers on my knee and that snagged my attention. A moment later, he reached over to adjust something on my headset. There was a chirp.

Then he touched his own before he said, “I saw that. Are you hurting again?”

“It’s sore, but it hasn’t stopped being sore. I keep forgetting it’s there and then I do things like shrug. I’ll live.”

“I know you’ll live.” Oh, now he was scolding me. “What I want to make sure is you’re not in pain. Pain is debilitating, Firecracker. You have enough on your plate, you don’t need that too.”

No one else reacted to his words and I flicked a glance around the plane before I looked back at him.

“Different channel,” he answered my unasked question.

Oh.

“Privacy?” With all of them present, that hadn’t seemed like such an issue. Then again, he hadn’t invited anyone inside to help me with my back.

“For the most part. You don’t trust us at the moment.”

No, I really didn’t.

“While we may not be offering you a lot of reasons to trust us, I need you to know you can tell me when you’re hurting or if there’s more pain than there should be. We need to avoid infection primarily and frankly—I don’t want you to suffer if you don’t have to. To do that, however, I need you to tell me when it does hurt.”

As much as I wanted to just dismiss his comments, I studied him instead. Was he being honest? Maybe.

This didn’t seem like something where a lie would serve him better than the truth. They did want me to trust them—maybe. Voodoo had done pretty much everything he said, from arming me, to protecting me, to getting that tracker out of me—not once had he left me alone with the doctor I didn’t know.

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