Page 41 of The Rebel King

“I know I probably wouldn’t be sitting here with you now were it not for this bracelet, Doc. I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but my independence is important to me. I don’t need looking after.”

He caresses the inside of my wrist where the bracelet brushes up against my skin.

“ButIneed to look after you. I need to know that you’re safe and that I can find you. I can get to you. When Grim couldn’t pick up the signal and the clock was ticking, I felt absolutely helpless. That lunatic could have shot you in the head, or…” The muscle along his jaw tightens. “I couldn’t get to you. Your father couldn’t get to you. Can you imagine how he felt knowing you could die at any moment and there was nothing he could do about it?”

“Oh, that’s low.” I link my hands behind my neck. He knows how sensitive I am to my father’s anxiety.

“I don’t mind playing dirty when I care this much about something.” He leans over to take my top lip between his and then my bottom. “About someone. What do you say?”

“It’s one or the other,” I tell him, balling my fist in my lap to keep my hands off him long enough to negotiate with a clear head. “Either this pet tracker or the security. Not both.”

I know which I prefer, so I barrel forward when he frowns, likeI haven’t given him any choice at all. “The security is less important until everyone knows we’re together anyway. And it’s impractical. I’ll be on the road constantly once the campaign is fully underway. I’ll be with Owen most of the time, who has security of his own. I’ll be safe with him.”

“Are you sure now that we’re together,” he says, leaning over to kiss behind my ear, inciting goose bumps that have nothing to do with the morning chill, “you don’t want to swap with Kimba? Come on the road with me instead?”

Visions of us fucking in the back of a campaign bus fill my head. I pull away, glancing around the empty park to make sure no one is around. “Um, I don’t think going on the trail with you is a great idea. Now, I won’t do this braceletandsecurity, so which will it be?”

He pulls back, and our eyes meet for long seconds. Those green eyes could persuade me to do just about anything he asked.

“Wear the bracelet.”

CHAPTER 14

MAXIM

“I have news.”

Grim’s words make me pause, my stylus poised over my iPad.

“What’s up?” I stand and walk to the window of the hotel suite. The Champs-Élysées spreads itself like a sultry woman beneath me, flashing alluring glimpses of the Eiffel Tower in the distance. The most beautiful avenue in the world and I feel nothing but indifference for the glittering lights and elegant lines of the buildings. Not just because I’ve seen this view a hundred times or more, but because what Grim has to say is the most important thing in the world to me right now.

“Jackson Keene is the one who died,” Grim says.

My remorse for killing the man doesn’t deepen knowing his name.

“It took us a while,” Grim goes on, “because he’d managed to scrub himself from the records we’d typically check. These guys have been off the radar for a while. They may have been running a pretty rudimentary operation, but that seems to have been intentional. They’ve kept their digital footprint almost non-existent the last few years.”

“Jackson,” I murmur, tugging my bottom lip and frowning. “Abe called him Jack.”

“Abe is actually Gregory. Jack’s brother, Gregory Keene. Stanford grad, computer science. Master’s degree from Harvard. Lots ofscholarships, but there was also a lot of loan debt. Not one payment’s been made since his mother died.”

“What the hell?” I turn my back on the shimmering city and scowl. “That cretin’s better educated than I am.”

“That’s relative,DoctorCade,” Grim says dryly. “He’s a genius, though, yeah. In the literal sense, not colloquially. The little I’ve been able to dig up on him all predates his mother’s long bout with cancer. After she died, the trail dries up for the brothers, too.”

“And any luck finding his hopefully decomposing body yet?”

“No, but at least now we know who he is. We have a face and a name, which we probably won’t need because he’s probably dead and the body has been eaten by some wild animal or devoured by a shark.”

“Sharks in a river? Not likely.”

“You know what I mean. We’ve had no activity since. Not even a ping.”

“Considering he managed tonotping for years, that doesn’t ease my mind. If he survived…”

The tortured voice screaming his brother’s name haunts me for a moment. I’ve thought more about that than I have about the man I shot. It was the sound of genuine human pain. I hope I’ll never be so callous that it doesn’t affect me, even coming from the man I hate.

“We’ll keep our feelers out there,” Grim says. “I’m not giving up, just telling you there’s nothing yet and we’re probably in the clear.”

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