Page 63 of Final Exit

“It doesn’t make sense,” he whispered, as if to himself.

Bailey reached for his hand, instinctively wanting to comfort him. But he pulled it back as if she’d stung him.

“I’m not lying about her,” he said. “And I’m not crazy. I didn’t just... imagine that I had a wife. I can see us in front of the judge when we got married. I can picture her next to me as we walked into a movie theater. At a restaurant across from me, laughing when she spilled spaghetti sauce down her dress.” He pressed a hand to his temples, as if recalling the memories made his head hurt. “And I see her beside me in the car, begging me to save her.”

“I believe him,” Bailey said.

Kade lowered his hands and stared at her in surprise.

“I do,” she said. “I believe everything you’ve said. I can see the truth in your eyes, hear it in your voice. Something isn’t adding up, and we need to figure out what it is.”

“He made up Abby to get your sympathy,” Jace said from behind her. “That’s what’s going on. We never expected him to be able to prove otherwise. Which is why we brought Austin. Move out of the way, Kade. Let the whiz kid see what he can find out about who’s calling the shots with your mission and how high it goes.”

Bailey frowned as Kade got up and moved back, with Mason keeping pace with him, his gun out and down by his side at the ready.

“Wait,” Bailey said. “What’s going on?”

“What’s going on,” Kade said, his voice sounded tired, resigned, “is that your friends only wanted to get into the lab so they could comb through the EXIT databases.” He crossed his arms. “I could have told you it would be a waste of time. The truly damning stuff about EXIT has already been destroyed. The only thing left here are the files that I use to research where to find the remaining Enforcers. Mission critical info is all gone.”

“All we want are names,” Jace said, as he bent over Austin’s shoulder, watching him power through screen after screen of information.

Bailey backed up beside Kade. With Mason behind them, standing guard, she couldn’t really have the conversation that she wanted. So, instead, she tried to show Kade what she wished she’d been able to tell him back at the hideout—that she believed in him and had been an idiot to doubt him for even one second. She’d known that as soon as she’d stormed out of the interrogation room. Jace had twisted everything around, specifically trying to influence her. And it had worked, but not for long.

She moved sideways until her shoulder touched his biceps. When he didn’t adjust his stance or move away to break the contact, she took that as a good sign. She reached out with her right hand and feathered her fingers over his. He hesitated, then turned his wrist, and they were suddenly holding hands.

She let out a deep breath in relief. “I’m sorry,” she whispered, for his ears alone.

He didn’t answer with words. Instead, he squeezed her hand, and then his thumb brushed lightly across the backs of her knuckles. It was a simple caress, butterfly-soft. But she felt it all the way to her soul.

“What the hell?” Austin said.

Everyone drew closer to the monitor. Bailey half expected Mason to stop Kade, but he didn’t. He simply followed the two of them as they crowded around the screen.

Instead of word-processor types of documents like the ones that Kade had brought up a few minutes ago, Austin’s screen was full of video files.

“Do you know what these are?” he asked, looking over his shoulder at Kade.

“No idea. I don’t have any video files.”

“Who else has files on this system?” Bailey asked.

He shrugged. “My boss, for sure. But I can’t access them. They’re password protected. They don’t even come up on my menus.”

“Amateurs,” Austin said. “No one hides files from me. Let’s see what we have, ladies and gentlemen.”

He punched some buttons. The first video opened on the enormous movie-type screen at the front of the room and began to play.

Bailey’s eyes widened in shock.

Mason swore behind them.

The others simply stared, riveted to the movie playing out in front of them.

Kade’s gaze was glued to the screen and his face had gone alarmingly pale. Bailey forced her own gaze from him back to the screen.

It was an elaborate video, obviously shot as if from Kade’s point of view, showing the inside of a car driving at a high rate of speed, trying to outmaneuver another car. The second car pulled up alongside and the man had a gun.Bam! Bam!Bullets ripped through the door. The car careened to the side, then slammed into a tree.

And there, screaming, crying, begging Kade to save her, was the woman he’d told them about. The same woman in the picture that Bailey had taken from Kade’s wall. There wasn’t anyone else in the film, just the woman. As if someone else was in the car beside her but watching her through their eyes. Bailey recognized the video for what it was—staged. And the only reason it would have been filmed this way was for Kade to think this was something he was seeing, experiencing, when it never really happened.

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