Page 52 of Catching Fire

Her thoughts churned. Were Maggie and Sebastian coming back over tonight? Would Kalan spend the night in her room with her? Or …? Well, any number of things could happen and she didn’t have the mental space to deal with any of it right now.

Seline tried to softly close the bathroom door behind her but it was difficult to be quiet in these older homes. The metal knob was smooth in her hand and she was slow in her movements but the door still made an audible click in the silent afternoon.

She looked in the mirror. If she'd had a life changing alteration it didn't show on her face. Not like when she'd looked at herself the first time after she lost her virginity or when she'd walked out of her interview at the University of Nebraska. Not like when she’d lost her mother, or not too long later when she’d lost her father.

If there was a revelatory moment on her skin, it was being covered up by all the accompanying crap she was dealing with these days.

She washed her face and ran a brush through her wickedly tangled hair. Then she stood in the bathroom for a moment, almost trapped there by the naked man asleep in her bed on the other side of the door. When she went into the main room, he would likely be awake. And if he was they would need to have a conversation, one she was quite certainly not prepared for. But she couldn't stay in the bathroom all day.

Taking a deep breath and bracing herself to walk naked into her own room, Seline was forcing herself to reach for the small doorknob when her phone rang from beside the bed.Well, that decision was made for her.

She threw open the door, dashed across the room, and grabbed the phone. Watching as Kalan came awake from the noise.

“Seline?” he asked, even as she picked up the phone, double checked that the camera was not on, and answered.

“Agent Watson?”

Watson, her usual cool self, did not mince words. “We have another body.”

Chapter Thirty-Three

Kalan sat next to Seline on the couch, his fingers loosely intertwined with hers, though it didn't quite feel as if she was truly holding his hand.

Watson and Decker sat in the two chairs, facing them—a position he was getting all too familiar with. He could only imagine that Seline had been here twice as often as he had.

“The body was heavily decayed. A fisherman came across it. It appeared the rope used to anchor it had given way and the body had drifted.” Decker was running down the details as though talking about a corn harvest and the size of the necessary silo rather than discussing another dead Nebraskan. “The fisherman spotted it stuck in a jam of logs and twigs that had been caught up between some rocks.”

“When was this?” Seline asked, ever the practical one.

“The fisherman found it around four a.m. this morning. Our team has been out all day, processing the scene, trying to figure out where the body was originally placed.”

Kalan noted that they didn't seem to say where they had found it, only that it had ‘drifted’. They didn’t say if Sanders had left it for them or not, nor did they say if the new body gave them any evidence to use against Sanders, to find him, or bring him in. But this was the second body it had taken time to find…

Kalan wondered if Watson and Decker were on board with Seline’s plan to get a tracker and bring Sanders after her. They asked a few more questions, but not anything that Seline knew the answer to. Watson reached into her bag and even Kalan knew what was coming … pictures.

He felt his head automatically turn away. But when Watson slid the photos across the coffee table, it was impossible not to notice the word carved into the torso. His stomach rolled but he fought to keep the feeling off of his face.

It was hard to read. Something had taken small bites at the skin around the cuts. He didn’t know if that was normal or not, but the agents hadn’t said anything about it. With the skin nibbled away there was just enough left to read “watching.”

Kalan wasn't sure if the dead body or the cuts in the torso bothered him more than the fact that Sanders had called and spoken to Seline.

“So the phone call that everyone dismissed was the real deal?” he demanded.

“Yes.” Watson laced her fingers together and sat still. There was nothing more she could admit to at this point.

Silence fell over the room.

Kalan wondered what it meant. Did the FBI agents have nothing more to do? Were they waiting for Seline to spill secrets that she didn't seem to have?

After a moment of prolonged awkwardness interlaced with somber reverence for whomever this dead body had once been, Decker spoke.

“We wanted to thank you—you and your friends.” He nodded briefly to Kalan. “For heading into the farm by Stromberg. It was the perfect way to not have agents raid the place if there was nothing obvious there.”

Jesus, Kalan thought, his anger growing. They’d used Maggie and Seline and him as an inexperienced lead team.

At least Seline didn't sayYou're welcome. Instead, she asked, “Now what?”

“Well,” Decker said, cutting a quick side eye to Watson. “Now we are at this.”

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