Page 20 of Master of Lies

She handed it over without meeting my eyes.

I swiped the screen, and hit the passcode prompt. “What’s your password?”

She shot me an embarrassed look. “FreeJamesCraig884.”

Whoa. That was alarming, but I shined it on and entered the password without comment. It took me to a hot picture of Sandee dressed up in an old-time saloon girl outfit with two other girls. Lots of cleavage and dazzling smiles on display. Sandee was the prettiest of the trio.

I looked through her chat app. There were messages from someone named Willie. He was evidently her boss at the roadhouse. I skimmed a series of ranting, angry texts about her not showing up for a bartending shift. There were chats with two girls named Kelly and Loretta, heavy with emojis and colorful stickers. Kelly and Loretta seemed fun-loving, man-crazy girls. No more or less than what I’d expect.

“Are Kelly and Loretta the girls in your wallpaper picture?” I asked.

She looked panicked. “You’re not gonna do something bad to them, are you?”

“Nope,” I said, scrolling through the chats. “I hope I never lay eyes on them.”

Her fitness app told me she logged 12,000 steps a day, her heartbeat averaged around 71, and her blood pressure was well within the norm. Huh. Good for her.

I pulled the battery out of her phone and stuck it all into my bag for further study later on. “I’m going to clean up in the bathroom,” I said. “Don’t move, and don’t touch anything. Finish your chocolate. And be good.Understand?”

She gave me a jerky nod, still not meeting my eyes.

I rifled through the boxes in the corner, a gift from my former self, five months before. Clothes, rope, tools. The guns were all stored in the safe, other than the gun I’d hidden inside the Jeep. I brought that one into the bathroom with me, along with the first-aid supplies, the fresh clothes. All I needed was to turn around and find Sandee holding my own gun to my head. Like the punchline to a bad joke.

I left the bathroom door open as I stripped off the bloody coverall. I was monitoring her in the mirror the whole time. No more surprises.

She huddled in her chair, dazed and confused. She looked like exactly what her letters and phone suggested she was. A lost, lonely girl with no family behind her, a crap job, plenty of self-destructive tendencies, and a desperate need to overcompensate.

But she was smarter than anyone gave her credit for, and she’d gotten bored.

Boredom could be deadly.

She’d told me about her hard-luck childhood in her letters. At great length. Heart-tugging, hair-raising tales of abuse and neglect in the foster care system. One story in particular had creeped me out the most. The fanatic religious couple who had chained her up in the basement when she was seven because she was so “bad.” God, who did that to a defenseless little kid? No wonder she was bouncing off the walls.

Her emotional fragility was so clear. As if she were literally advertising to be abused by a psychopathic predator. As if she actively sought the suffering that would bring her. It made me scared for her. Angry at the assholes who had hurt her.

And knowing all this? It should be a huge dick-wilting turn off for me. But no.

I could drive railroad spikes with this hard-on.

CHAPTER8

Freya

My gaze kept skittering away from the floor show in the bathroom as he stripped off the bloody coverall and shoved it into a plastic bag. I caught a peek of his lean, muscular body as he reached up to put the gun on top of the hot water heater next to the shower, a glimpse of his taut, muscular ass…and he stepped into the shower stall.

The water started to hiss. Breath left my lungs in a shuddering rush. Good thing he’d forced me to sit. I would have hit the floor otherwise. I gulped some swiftly cooling chocolate. The sugar helped.

This disaster had stripped away my illusions. I saw very clearly now that my James&Sandee4ever prison project was a coping mechanism. A way to pretend I was doing something proactive to find Shane, and not just waiting like a good girl, hands folded in my lap, while my big brother did all the work. And it had blown up in my face.

I had been so sick of Ethan insisting I stay out of it. He’d always been overbearing. Shane too. Both my brothers were hyper-macho even before they’d joined the Special Forces, and they were overly protective of me because of the trauma that had gone down when we were kids. I get it, I do. I understand their motivations and their fears, rational and otherwise, and even so. Sitting around with my hands folded had been killing me.

The idea had come to me on tequila night with my girlfriend, Rose. After a couple of margaritas, I started thinking, what do I have that Ethan doesn’t? He’s smart, tough, an ex-Ranger, he’s laser-focused and relentless, and he’s an Unredeemable, like Shane. Those Unredeemable guys have practically superhuman capabilities.

Of course, Jed Clearwater’s an Unredeemable, too. Which made this very tricky.

My brother is the most competent man I know, and he was working twenty-four-seven on finding Shane. His position was always, “Don’t worry your pretty little head. You’ll just get in my way.”

But my pretty little head kept worrying. And so? What special thing could I contribute to this enterprise? I’m a shit-hot hacker, sure, but Ethan already has a stable of great hackers working around the clock, looking for Shane from every angle. Though arguably, none of them were as motivated as me.

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