Page 69 of Final Exit

“No. Whoever was watching the place before isn’t watching it anymore. Or, if they are, they didn’t make themselves known. Are you worried that I brought them here? I know how to spot a tail. Trust me. No one followed me here.”

“I trust you. Of course I trust you. I was just concerned, worried that you were in danger.” He dried his hands on a dish towel and folded it before leaving it on the counter. “Well, it looks like you found me.”

“Yeah. Looks like.”

They stared at each other a long moment. He was the one who finally looked away.

She curled her fingers into her palms in frustration. “I assumed you might have come here if you wanted to hide but not draw Faegan’s men to us. Thatiswhy you came here, right? To hide, but hoping I’d think about this place and would come here looking for you?”

As if he couldn’t help himself, he slowly lifted his hand and absently stroked his finger down the side of her face. “So beautiful.” His voice sounded wistful, as if he was a million miles away.

She wanted to lean into him, to soak up his touch, to slide her hands up his chest. But he seemed more of a stranger at this minute than when they’d first met. She wasn’t even sure that he wanted her to touch him.

He dropped his hand, shook his head as if just realizing what he’d done. “I’m glad you came,” he said, giving her his first smile since she’d arrived. “I just didn’t... expect you quite so soon.” He waved his hands at his shirt and jeans. “I haven’t even showered. I pretty much passed out on top of the bed when I arrived. I’d just woken up a few minutes before you walked in.”

She waved toward her yellow top and jeans. “I’m not exactly ready for a runway myself. I usually dress way sexier than this but this was easy and I was in a hurry.” She smiled, but when he didn’t smile back, she sighed and said, “You left the lab with Faegan and his men, and they took you, where?”

“To a house on the outskirts of town. Not far from the lab. But it obviously was a temporary location. Definitely not a headquarters. After I escaped, I went back a few hours later, hoping to follow them to the retraining center, or their main base of operations. The place was deserted.”

“But you know the address? We can call Jace and have them check it out.”

He immediately shook his head. “There’s no point. Like I said, it’s not their home base. And I guarantee that since I escaped, and they didn’t recapture me, they won’t be back.”

She wasn’t sure she agreed, but she let it drop. “Kade? What aren’t you telling me?”

“What do you mean?”

“You seem, I don’t know, like you’re holding something back.”

“There’s not much to tell. I got away, but didn’t manage to do anything that would help us find them again, or the retraining facility. I failed. Again. Is that what you wanted to hear?”

She blinked at the anger in his voice. “You can’t possibly call that a failure. You were unarmed, outnumbered. Most men I know in your situation wouldn’t have managed to escape.”

His gaze slid away from hers again. “Yeah, well. There is that. I’m going to shower.”

“Sure. Of course. It’s late. We can stay here tonight, then hook up with the others in the morning.” She pulled out her cell. “I’ll go ahead and call them, let them know what’s going on. Where do you want to meet up tomorrow?”

“I... have an idea about that. We need a location where our enemies wouldn’t expect us to go. Remember how you saw that story about the Sarin gas investigation?”

She frowned, not sure where he was going with this. “Yes. Why?”

“The FBI facility that handled the Sarin gas is in the warehouse district. To anyone else, it’s just a warehouse. Very few people know of its existence, including Faegan. He wasn’t part of the investigation, didn’t insert himself into it as I did. But I’m sure he heard about it on the news. He wouldn’t want to risk going anywhere near the place.”

“Doesn’t sound like anywhere I’d want to go either,” she said.

He gave her his full attention for perhaps the first time since she’d arrived. “There’s another reason we should go there, besides it being convenient and off Faegan’s radar. The facility has a computer room that’s far moreconnected, for lack of a better way to describe it. Any investigations into terrorism being operated out of that facility have to have the highest access possible to as much information as possible.”

“Okay. And we care because?”

“Any land, building, facilities, equipment used by the FBI within hundreds of miles from there will be accessible as information in those computers. Faegan has to be using a facility owned by the government. I sure don’t see him having the resources to do what he’s doing otherwise. If we can get Austin in there, maybe he can find a smoking gun to help us narrow down places Faegan has access to that might meet the qualifications of the type of place he needs for his operations.”

“Like being remote, large, no neighbors nearby, good roads but still out of the way.”

“Right.”

“What’s the address?”

He told her and she frowned.

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