Page 48 of Catching Fire

“No one that we can tell,” Verner replied softly. At least this time she had the grace to look concerned.

“Somebody had to put it there! You were watching the mailbox. Did your agent screw up?” Seline was angry, hurt, and terrified, ready to sling blame in any direction. Still, she knew as she said it, that it was the wrong thing to suggest.

“No. It went in with your regular mail. The mailman has been questioned. The note was sandwiched inside the stack he delivered yesterday. He pulled the rubber band and placed it in the mailbox, never noticing anything unusual or that there was a slip of paper involved.”

Seline slumped backward, her head flopping into the luckily soft cushions. The words tumbled out of her, so much of it too disturbing to process. “So before he took Marina, he knew she was an officer. He knew she wasn’t Wendy Buck. He knew she had a tracker and exactly where to find it. And now he can get into the mail with no one seeing him.”

Verner and Rossi didn't respond.

He’d done all those things right under the noses of the FBI.

It all added up to one thing, Seline thought.He can get to me.

But even as she wallowed in her concern, another fear tugged at the back of her brain. “What other information are you hiding from me?”

Chapter Thirty

“What are you talking about?” Kalan demanded, barely holding back his anger as he watched Seline methodically take apart and clean a gun at her table.

He’d thought it would be a nice calm breakfast between the two of them. Maggie and Sebastian had gone home early this morning. Instead, he’d come downstairs to this. Instead, anger was the only thing he could process. The fear slipped through his hands too fast to hold onto but it lingered in the cold in his blood. Loss ran a finger down the back of his brain, making him want to shudder, so he held tightly to the anger.

The scene before him was more than vaguely disturbing and the intent behind it had nothing vague about it.

“He's going to kill someone else.” She spoke with perfect diction as her hands moved with a mind of their own. The cloth rubbed at each part, leaving shiny metal in its wake, the smell of gun oil filled his nostrils and twisted his brain, completely out of place in the box store dining room. Seline’s words were full of crisp logic. “He’s killing other people trying to get to me. I might as well give him me. Fewer people will die.”

“And what happens after he gets you?” Kalan decided to push forward with her model, to show her how crazy it was.

But Seline didn't answer, just rubbed down the piece and put the gun back together with a mechanical proficiency. When she was finished, he thought she’d at least look up and talk to him, but she set the gun aside and shocked him by picking up another.

She had more than one?

Clearly, she did now,he thought. He needed her attention. “What happens after he gets you?”

His heart pounded at the thought that she might have a reasonable answer to this. Seline was smart. She wouldn't run off half-cocked in the figurative or literal sense. That maybe scared him more than anything else.

She had a plan.

“He wins.”

“Nobody wins in that case!” With that, he smacked his hands on the table, his anger growing, even though he knew it came from true concern.

He couldn’t tell if the things that had happened between them were real or if Seline was just pretending because the FBI told her too. He couldn’t tell if she actually liked him or if her adrenaline simply made her think she did. But in the end it didn’t matter. To say he was crazy about her was an understatement of epic proportions. Her strength and her vulnerability all pulled at him. He hated that she was ready to go after a killer that outmatched her—he’d outmatched everyone so far. And he hated that part of him understood. Everything hung in the balance for her. If Sanders didn’t kill her with a blade, he could just as surely gut her by stripping everything she’d achieved. And Seline couldn’t stand to see anyone else die on her watch. Kalan knew that about her. She would willingly be tortured to death if that would end Sanders’ reign.

“I'm getting a tracker,” she told him with far too calm a tone.

While he wondered which agency would agree to that, he didn’t ask. Instead, he said, “What's the point? Sanders knows about them and he'll cut it out.”

“I'll swallow them.” She’d clearly thought this through and Kalan didn’t like the chill that brought on. “He can't get them out of me if I swallow them. But you’ll be able to find me.”

Kalan stood up, his hands pressed against his forehead as he fought to keep his breathing even. He wanted to yell at her like he yelled at the kids setting off homemade fireworks with kerosene last fourth of July. But he couldn’t. She wasn’t a kid, and he wasn’t in charge here.

Just thinking through her idea made it sound at the same time too crazy to even be plausible and yet strictly reasonable.Ifhe didn’t consider who it was out there with a tracker and waiting for Sanders to get her. But Seline was already moving on to round two, and Kalan hadn’t figured out round one yet.

“If he wins, he'll stop. We know he goes in cycles. I would be number five. He'll quit for a while. And—worst case scenario—they’ll have all kinds of evidence from me so they can stop him.”

The new gun was already dismembered, the pieces laid out in neat order on the oily towel. Her hands worked methodically, like a soldier who’d done this a thousand times.

“This is not okay,” he told her, even though it was a shit argument. “You can't just offer yourself up as a sacrifice on the chance that it will give us enough information to get him.”

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