Page 35 of Fractured Loyalties
My throat tightens. “So this is bait.”
“Yes.”
A pause.
“And I’m the lure.”
His gaze cuts to mine—sharp and immediate. “No. You’re the reason he’s going to get careless. There’s a difference.”
I want to challenge that. I want to argue semantics. But instead I ask, “What do you get out of this?”
His answer is a long time coming. “Closure.”
That surprises me.
Not the word. The way he says it.
I nod slowly. “You’ve known men like him.”
“I’ve been one.”
The confession doesn’t land the way it probably should. I don’t flinch. I don’t even breathe differently. But something in me absorbs it.
I think about what he said before—that he doesn’t do anything halfway.
“You still haven’t told me what you do,” I say.
He smiles faintly. “Would you believe me if I said I used to be a consultant?”
“No.”
He chuckles. “I wouldn’t either.”
I step away from the counter, setting my mug in the sink, rinsing it out, needing something for my hands to do. “So now, we just wait here in your hideaway by the sea and hope he makes a mistake?”
“Yes.”
“Feels passive.”
“It’s not.”
I turn back to him. “You’re tracking him, aren’t you?”
He doesn’t deny it.
And that tells me everything.
I study his face carefully, trying to make sense of the calm threaded through his features. "So...when you finally do find him—what then?" I ask, softer this time, like I’m not sure I want the real answer.
Elias walks toward me, stops just short of close. “That depends on you.”
“Me?”
He nods. “This doesn’t end until you want it to. Or until he makes it impossible to wait.”
I stare up at him, trying to decode the thousand ways he could mean that.
I don’t get the chance.
