Page 44 of Never Enough

She barely registered the whiplash of the change in conversation. “What?”

“Why did you leave?”

Her thoughts raced. “Which time?”

“I didn’t specify, did I? Let’s just worry about today for right now.”

Clearly, they would be returning to times one and two at a later date.

“I panicked?”

“You’re not sure?”

“I panicked,” she answered firmly.

“About what?” He seemed genuinely confused by her response.

She didn’t have an answer for that since she couldn’t tell him the real reason, so she just lay there staring at the ceiling of the shaft.

He sighed.

She waited. When he didn’t say anything or make any move to get out of the shaft, she turned her head to look at him. “Why are you here?”

“Why are any of us here?”

She huffed and crossed her arms over her chest. “You know what I mean. Christ, four years later, and you’re still a total cunt.”

He ignored the insult. “I’m here because you’re here.”

She turned her head toward him again, her eyes wide at his response. He wasn’t looking at her. Instead, his head was tipped back against the wall, his eyes still on the wall across from him.

“C’mon, kitty cat. Let’s get out of here.” He tapped his ear. “Midas, can you bring the elevator up to our level?” He gestured down the main path. “After you. This will empty out onto the top of the elevator, and then you can drop down into it.”

Rolling onto her stomach and getting onto her hands and knees, she began to crawl in the direction he indicated.

16

SEPTEMBER 9, 2022

Nemo

“I think this is a classic case of misdirection,” Midas said.

Midas sat at a computer directly in front of the observation room window, Scheherazade at his side, her front paws on the window frame. Her attention was riveted on Haskell, who was back in the conference room and curled up in one of the high-backed chairs at the table, doodling on a notepad she’d found. Nemo was in the middle of the line of men standing in a semicircle directly behind Midas.

“I agree with Midas,” Steel said. “Cerberus is known for hitting hard targets for whatever cause he’s pushing at the time. He has no history of endangering civilians when he strikes. He has no history of targeting people, period. Doing so now is out of character.”

“It’s been my experience that bombershave little conscience when it comes to innocent lives standing in the way of their causes,” TB snarled.

His parents had been killed in the Dizengoff bus bombing in 1994 when he was seven years old. After years of abuse and neglect in an orphanage, years of being ostracized in the army for his interrogation and torture skills, and then years of self-imposed isolation due to his work on the dark web as a hired procurer, he was still a grumpy bastard. Thirty years later, TB was still bitter. Even meeting, falling in love with, and committing himself to a romance novelist hadn’t quite softened him.

“Haskell is a jewel thief,” Steel pointed out. “What purpose would an ecoterrorist have in blowing up a jewel thief?”

Waters’ left side was leaned up against the frame of the window. His thumb and first two fingers of his right hand were pulling on his lip, a sure sign he was working through information. “We’ve got a device that matches Cerberus’ signature down to the etching of the three-headed dog. We’ve got a target—a popular café over its maximum capacity in the middle of Los Angeles—which is not his usual M.O. Is it possible he’s changing his game?”

Midas argued, “Bombers do practice and build their skills, but not this late in their development. By this time, he’s perfected his trade. However, his motivation has always been the environment. It would take a catalyst of epic proportions to trigger him to suddenly change his methods and targets. Today’s bomber is a copycat.”

TB grunted. “I don’t trust him, no matter what your profiles say.”

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