Page 8 of Ravens
“You fucked me even though you were here to kill me.”
“Consider that your one free shot,” he says calmly. “If you ever strike me again, I’ll be sure to return the favor.” Pushing me aside, he moves away from the desk. “I may have been hired to kill you, but I never intended to.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve been looking for you.” He grabs my gun and then tosses it to me. “I’ve been doing my research. Raven is an interesting program, indeed.”
My skin tightens with the sense of being threatened again, so I don’t respond. What does he know?
“Tell me why your government is disavowing such a promising program, little dove.” He unzips the garment bag and pulls out the suit.
“They aren’t,” I say confidently.
“So, I’m here for no reason?” He shakes his head. “I’ve been stateside for a while now, Chicago to California and then back to Chicago …”
California . . . Chicago. My brain whirs through my memory banks. “Babylon and Carthage,” I whisper. “You’re why they’ve gone dark.”
“I’m why they’redead.”
Dead? My palms sweat, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. The Agency hired him to shut down Raven . . . but why . . . why would Russel cut off this information stream? It’s been wildly successful.
I bury my face in my hands for a second and try to piece it together. “This doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe someone was compromised,” he says ominously. “Maybe you all were . . . maybe, maybe, maybe.”
“What about everyone else? Why are you stopping at me? I won’t help you track them down,” I say indignantly.
He chuckles. “They’ve hand-fed me all of you, but I was only working as far down the list as it took to get to you.”
“I’m not anymore valuable than the others.” I shake my head.
All I can do is hope that he’s as ignorant as the rest of the world about who I really am . . . about who any of us really are. I can’t assume what he knows or what he’s after, and I certainly don’t want to give him anything he doesn’t already have. Although this is a massive risk for him to take if he doesn’t know anything real.
“The Agency is going to come after both of us if I don’t turn up dead like the others,” I point out, wringing my fingers again.
“Are you advocating for your own death?”
“No,” I snap. “But you better have a lot of goddamned pull with your government if you have any hope of us getting out of here alive.”
“Strictly speaking . . . this is off the books for me.” He turns and regards me. “I do a lot of work off the books, Tripoli.”
“Fuck’s sake,” I hiss. “Why are they doing this? Why areyoudoing this?”
A grunt is all he gives me for a moment. “Whatever their reasons and whatever mine . . . I’ve given you your life, and I don’t need to explain myself. So, instead of getting flustered and becoming useless to me, how about you get dressed.”
I move to my suitcase and start shuffling through things in a daze.
“And I’ll accept your thanks whenever you’re ready.”
My head snaps around as he buttons a black dress shirt, and I consider slapping him again, although I believe him when he says he’ll slap me back. With a quiet laugh, he pivots and pulls his pants on.
A myriad of emotions wrestle around inside me as I pull up a pair of jeans and fasten them. Russel knows how my brain works . . . but it’s always been an asset—a big one—and it wouldn’t explain why they are killing off the whole program.
“If I had to guess,” York says unprompted, turning back to me, “I’d say a Raven has become a mole, and they’re not sure which of you it is.”
My skin heats. If they believed that, they’d find and kill the culprit, not all of us, right?
He moves into my space as he tucks in his shirt. “You wouldn’t know anything about that though, would you?”
