Page 53 of Catching Fire

He handed over a mid-sized metallic-looking capsule and Kalan didn’t want to believe what he was looking at.Was this the tracker?

“Is this for me?” Seline asked far too easily.

“Yes,” Watson replied as though they were talking about TV channels. “And that one's active. You should swallow it now.”

There was nothing he could have done to stop her. Seline had popped it into her mouth, walked into the kitchen for a glass of water, and returned with an expression that said the deed was done.

Kalan was also on his feet, but for an entirely different reason. He didn’t mean to raise his voice, but he didn’t mean to sit idly by and watch them track the woman he was … falling in love with? He didn’t know. But his lack of certainty didn’t make this plan okay. “You just lost an officer that way! And now you're going to put a private citizen in thesame situation?”

“No, it's not the same at all,” Decker replied far too calmly. They were always far too calm.But it wasn’t their girlfriend on the line now, was it?But Decker was still having a reasoned conversation. “We weren't openly watching Balero’s home. We counted on the tracker and on Sanders not knowing that it was there.”

“You counted on too much.” Kalan stabbed his finger angrily at the floor because he couldn't jab them physically.

“You're right.”

Watson’s quick concession deflated his anger balloon, but only just a little. “So why would you do the same thing with Seline?”

“Kalan?” She called from behind him. “I'm fine.”

That blew him up. “No, you're not! You justatea tracking device in case a serial killer kidnaps you.That’s not okay!”

Watson jumped to her feet, too, Decker now the only one remaining seated. His expression looked as though he did it just to maintain some semblance of status quo, so the room didn't break into an all-out melee.

Watson tried to calm Kalan, but he didn’t like beingcalmed.

“We only monitored the tracker with Balero, just like Decker said.” Watson even used her hand to make a signal as though she were driving and needed to apply the brakes. “This time we're maintaining physical eyes on Seline. We’re not going to trust the tracker alone. We're still watching the house, the same as we've always been. We also—if you noticed—changed the type of tracker that we are using.”

Oh goody. It was a different brand. That made it allsomuch better. He quelled the sarcasm that wanted to rise in his head and instead just clenched his jaw.

“This version will make it much harder for Sanders to remove it.”

Kalan gritted his teeth against the thought of Sanders removing the tracker he’d just seen Seline swallow. Given what this killer did to his victims, Kalan had no doubt that Sanders would happily cut it out of her if he knew where it was.

Watson offered an odd expression as she turned to Seline and said, “You'll need to swallow a new one every third morning.”

Seline almost grinned and offered an odd laugh in the middle of this strange and awful conversation. “Will it go through me that fast?”

“Not usually,” Watson replied. “And that’s the point. It’s better to have you double dosed than have a gap where we can’t follow you.”

Or losingher,Kalan thought again, the anger hard to scrub from his thoughts or his tone.

Just when he thought the morning couldn't get any stranger, or weirder, Decker reached down into the bag at his feet and pulled out another of the small shiny pills. “This one's for you.”

“I'm sorry, what?” Kalan asked.

“We'd like to put a tracker in you, too. We know that Sanders is going after the people around Dr. Marchand.”

That threw him for a loop. He wanted to believe he didn't fit Sanders’ profile at all. He wanted to believe that he was simply too big, too bulky, to let a serial killer haul him into a car, or that he might lose in a fair fight.

But Kalan knew the facts: there would be no fair fight. If he got hit on the head hard enough or drugged, the only challenge he would pose was his heavier weight to drag around.

He practically snatched the pill out of Decker's hand and headed into the kitchen, where he used the same glass Seline had. Given the things they’d just done to each other on this counter then again upstairs, sharing the same glass was not an issue.

Watson had already pulled a tablet out of her bag and was tapping at it with her thumbs, as she almost gleefully replied, “I've got you both!”

Oh, Lord, he thought. Given how well the tracker in Marina’s arm had worked, Watson and Decker would know exactly what was going on between him and Seline at every single moment. There would be no more repeats of this morning without an audience, he thought.

Fuck it. Let Watson and Decker know about him and Seline. Let them know he was now sharing her bed, figuratively and—he hoped—literally. He’d already swallowed a damn tracker and the FBI agent in the living room had already pinpointed him. He'd moved past the point of caring about what they saw.

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