Page 101 of Wicked Sexy (Wicked Games 2)
Connor’s body is completely still. In the shadows, his eyes shine with a strange, deadly light. “The team in Miami that went in to get him…” He hesitates. “It was an abandoned house. The place was rigged with explosives.”
Horrified, I gasp. I bolt upright and clutch his arm. “Oh my God. How many were hurt?”
“Nine agents went in.”
“How many came out?”
Connor says simply, “None.”
Twenty-Seven
Connor
On the ride to the studio, Tabby is silent. Unnervingly silent, like she might have lost the ability to speak. I keep her hand tightly wrapped in mine, but in spite of that physical connection, there’s a chasm between us. She’s beside me, but she’s a million miles away.
I sense that somehow, with some twisted logic that only makes sense to her, she’s blaming herself for what happened.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I say as gently as I can.
We’re stopped at a red traffic signal only a few blocks from the studio. Her face is lit crimson, bathed in a devilish light. She doesn’t answer me. She doesn’t even blink. She just stares through the windshield into the gray dawn of early morning, her face as white as chalk beneath the traffic light’s eerie glow.
“Tabby—”
“I should have known it was too easy. I should have known it was a trap.”
Her voice is flat. Empty, like she’s dead inside. I squeeze her hand, but she doesn’t squeeze back.
When we drive into the parking structure at the studio, she’s out of the car and striding across the dark lot before I’ve even turned the engine off, leaving the passenger door wide open behind her.
“Tabby! Wait!” I curse when she ignores me.
She enters the open parking garage elevator, punches the button, stands mute and stone-faced while I jog across the lot, my footsteps echoing. I run through the elevator doors just as they’re sliding shut.
I grasp her shoulders, turning her to face me as the car begins to ascend. “We’re in this together, all right? Don’t shut me out. Whatever happens, I’ve got your back.”
Tabby stares at me like she’s never seen me before in her life. The bell dings. The elevator doors slide open. With a sharp twitch of her body, she shakes me off.
With frost on her breath, she says, “When I told you before that Søren would end it if he found out I was involved in the investigation, I didn’t mean what Miranda thought I meant. I wasn’t talking about what he’d do to the studio.”
“What are you saying? I don’t understand.”
Her eyes are dark and endless, full of secrets only she knows. “I mean that all these years, we’ve both just been biding our time.”
I’m so frustrated with this cryptic line of conversation, I want to shake her. “Tabby, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about fate, Connor. About physics. About how certain events have so much weight they create their own gravity, and you can waste your entire life in orbit around their memory, caught in their magnetic pull. And there’s only one thing that can break that miserable, endless revolution.”
I’m lost. I admit it. She’s completely lost me. I stand with my hands spread open in a helpless gesture, waiting for an explanation.
It never comes.
Instead, she surprises me by reaching out and caressing my cheek. Softly, with grave tenderness, she says, “You’re a good man, Connor Hughes.”
Something about her tone of voice makes all the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. “Why does that sound like a good-bye?”
She smiles. It’s the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. Then she turns around and walks away without another word.
Into my mind a thought rises, unbidden.
