Page 84 of One More Chance

Either way, they’d found themselves caught up in something huge. Maybe even in over their heads.

Maybe that’s why she felt a bit like she was drowning.

“Do you have something to plug that drive into?”

She frowned, holding onto his hand for dear life. “I have my laptop.”

“We need FBI analysts with the tech to read it. The whole thing could be corrupted or password protected, and we have no way of getting into it.”

“Or the scope of what’s on it presents a threat.” Her voice broke on the last word.

“We should use the resources of the FBI.” He squeezed her hand. “This definitely presents a considerable threat. More than what we knew. He kept those guys for years.”

He needed to read the letter, the one that was in the envelope labeled FBI. Then the bureau would finally have an answer on their cold case.

She inhaled a breath that shuddered through her.

When she closed her eyes, all she could see were those two men, one with no mouth and one with no eyes. Like a macabre representation of the old Japanese saying.See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.Had there ever been a third man? That saying was supposed to be about mindfulness and avoiding evil by not even participating in it.

As with so many things she’d encountered, it seemed that Doctor Buzard warped the world around him to suit his aim.

“Don’t let him do that to me.” She opened her eyes, her breath coming fast. “Don’t let them take me.”

Jax swerved across a lane of traffic and bumped up into a parking lot, stopping across two spaces. He put the car in Park and turned to her, sliding his hands across her cheeks so that his fingers threaded into her hair. “He’s not gonna touch you.”

She held onto his arms, needing his steadiness to keep her straight. Otherwise, she’d be falling apart. “Say it again.”

“I’m not gonna let him touch you.”

She managed to nod.

Jax pressed his forehead to hers, hanging onto her as much as she was hanging onto him. The doctor had targeted her. He’d touched her. They’d messed with her genetics and altered herphysically. And yet, not to the extent that Lorin and Walter had been detained as prisoners for years.

Why did some things happen to others versus what had happened to her? People made choices, took actions, and God was sovereign. She probably wasn’t supposed to understand it, but that didn’t mean her mind wasn’t going to wrestle with the idea.

The road some walked was much harder. She’d had a taste of what chronic illness felt like, but it had been an anomaly for her to feel that way. She couldn’t imagine a lifetime of fighting the kind of daily fatigue she’d had just weeks ago.

Jax’s strong fingers massaged the stress from the back of her neck. “I want to go to the FBI office, but if you want to go home?—”

She shook her head, cutting him off. “Let’s go to your office.”

“I trust my people. We can keep this tight.”

She nodded. “I trust you. The rest of the world, not so much.”

He chuckled. “Not Maizie or Ramon?”

“It’s not the same.” She drew back, and he let go of her. “Not that I think they’re going to betray me.”

“I know what you’re saying. And I trust the FBI, but the faith I have in you?” He stared at her. “The rest of the world, not so much.”

She held on to that idea all the way to his office, through the extensive security procedures—oh, did I leave that knife in my boot? I forgot all about it—and up to the floor where he worked. Jax was still chuckling about all the weapons she’d had on her when they stepped off the elevator.

An agent she’d met before at the police department, Special Agent Herron, glanced over. She was standing behind a desk in an ocean of pairs of desks that faced each other, spanning a wide room with a wall of windows. TV screens on the wall displayed most of the major news networks, national and some local.

“This is fancy.”

Jax glanced over, blushing slightly. “It’s too fancy. I’m still reading the manual on how the wall screen works.”

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