Page 83 of Forged in Flames (Made of Steel 2)

"Right."

"So...Sadie Davis?"

Liza glanced at V and then back at me. "Sadie Davis was your mom's real name. But I guess she would have been Sadie Brooks after marrying your dad."

I felt sick to my stomach. Neither one of those names had meant anything to me a month ago. Now I was sitting here with the same name as my mom, a name I never knew belonged to her.

"Which brings us to Mr. Crawford," V said. "Whoever he is, he clearly wanted you to know the truth or he wouldn't have gone to such lengths to get you that new ID and everything."

I just sat there, staring at him.

He took that as a sign that I wanted to hear more. "But that doesn't necessarily mean the mysterious Mr. Crawford is on our side," V said. "He could have had reasons of his own to tell you."

I felt numb. I could barely even focus on V's words. Jane had risked her life to save my mom. And now she was trying to kill me? She was my only living relative. She was my last family. It didn't even make any sense. Unless... The queasy feeling returned as a terrible thought settled in my stomach. "Who was the man in the woods?"

"Your mom swore she didn't know his name," Liza said. "All that was in the report was this sketch of his face." She pulled it out and placed it on the table in front of me.

I put my hand over my mouth. Don. I could have been wrong. He was clearly younger. It was just a sketch. But those eyes. The death in them. I let the tears stream down my face.

"Shit," Eli said. He shifted closer to me and wrapped his arm around my back.

I immediately placed my head against his chest. I needed the comfort. For just one second, I needed to pretend that none of this was real.

"We agreed to leave the make-believe at the door," V said, his voice an octave lower than usual.

"Jesus, you psychopath," Eli said, continuing to hold me against his chest. "She's crying."

"And I'm asking you to get your hands off of her," V growled.

"Did you ever think that what you and her have is what's make-believe?"

"I'm giving you two seconds to..."

"Cut it out!" Liza yelled. "While you guys are busy having a fight over doomsday, I'm the only one trying to figure out just how long we have. We don't exactly have a lot of time to waste here."

I pulled away from Eli, wiping away my remaining tears. Liza was right. Crying over the past didn't change anything. We were running out of time. I could hear the clock ticking down in my head. "Did you just call me doomsday?" I asked.

"Mhm." Liza looked down at her notes. "We really need to know whether or not it's like a three-two-one-go deal, or just a three-two-one boom right away."

I hadn't even considered that the one would be the last day. I thought when Sadie Davis showed me one finger, I'd still have one whole day to figure it out. "I think the first one."

"It's more diabolical to jump the gun, don't you think?"

Everyone was silent.

"So that's it?" I asked. "I'm going to die tomorrow?"

"You're not going to die," Eli and V said at the same time.

I looked at Liza. For some reason her silence was louder than their words. All she seemed capable of was the truth, or at least, whatever she deemed the truth. "What do you think, Liza?"

She shrugged her shoulders. "We still don't know who Mr. Crawford is. We're not 100 percent certain what happened in the woods, but I'm pretty sure that Don had some kind of weird sexual infatuation with your mother. Who you happen to look a lot alike. And with the dye job that your aunt just got, he's probably fornicating with her too. Maybe consensual though. She looks a little off her rocker. I wouldn't even be surprised if the name change was her idea."

"This isn't helping anyone, Liza," V said.

She pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose, ignoring him. "Regardless, I'd have to run some calculations to get a more precise number, but I think the odds that you're going to die tomorrow are roughly 87 percent. And obviously the odds are even higher the following day because if you don't die tomorrow you're even more likely to die the day after that. Since death really appears to be the only logical conclusion to her threats. So that has to be like a 99.8 percent chance of you dying on Friday with a slight possibility of skewed data if there were any errors in the research V did. Because all my research was logically sound and I didn't have time to double check his work."

I swallowed hard. The information was jarring. But I appreciated her bluntness. There was no reason to sugar coat anything when I was living on hours. "So I'm probably going to die tomorrow. And if not tomorrow, definitely Friday?"

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