Uneasy, he pushed off from the counter. He’d watched her jump three times to escape the airport. It was doubtful she even knew she had drafted. Her mind was flirting with collapse, and that he felt responsible bothered him. It had been too large a task; too much of her life had needed to be erased.
It was her choice, he reminded himself, but he still felt betrayed as he came closer, halting just within her range of sight and waiting to be noticed. Power and recognition meant more to her than he liked, but her determined drive had drawn him regardless. Even now, years later, he could feel it, and his jaw clenched.
As if sensing it, she looked up, her hazel eyes and long lashes vivid against the heavy eyeliner she’d used to muddle any facial recognition software. Her shock melted into a quickly quashed panic. She was afraid of him. “You,” she said, eyes darting to the perimeter for others even as she blanked her screen. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s just me. I’m alone. You don’t have to run.”
“You’re alliance, aren’t you?” she asked. Nodding, Silas set his coffee down, the electrical field in the base engaging the table’s heating circuits with an audible click. Her eyes were determinedly not on the muffin, but they lingered on his tablet tucked under an arm, and he set it tauntingly on the table between them. Immediately her gaze rose from it, traveling over his pressed shirt tucked into his high-end jeans, then dropping to his leather boots and belt, and finally his coat. Her eyebrows arched in question; he shifted his coat so she could see he had no weapon.
“I do so love the scent of imported cashmere,” she said. “Armani?”
He dropped his hat on the table, annoyed that she’d found the one nerve he had and stomped on it. So he was a clotheshorse. So what? “So you’ll understand if you dump your coffee on me like you did Allen why I’ll throw mine in your face,” he warned as he took the hard-backed chair across from her. Still she said nothing, staring at him with that assessing gaze, and he ran a hand over his short-cropped hair to smooth it in unease.
“I should have gone to the library,” she muttered.
But she hadn’t run, and Silas took a sip of coffee, relieved. “I think this is what you’re looking for,” he said, hitting a few buttons on his tablet to bring up a news story. “Go on. Read it,” he said, pushing it toward her. “I’m not stalling. The alliance doesn’t know I’m here.”
“No?” Suspicious, she used her stylus to drag it over, and he swallowed hard when she flicked her bangs in a gesture so familiar that Silas felt an unwelcome flash of hurt. Eyes darting, she read the highlights about the security guard and CEO found dead two days ago. It was being called a botched robbery, but it was how the guard had died that he wanted her to see.
Her signature killing style was all over it.
Peri’s fingers were trembling by the time she got to the end. “Is there any doubt why the alliance is trying to put an end to Opti?” he said lightly.
Her eyes flicked up, and he spitefully took a bite of muffin, corralling the crumbs onto the scrap of wax paper. Her stomach growled, and he wondered why he was being so nasty—except that it had been a long, hard year when she’d left.
“He must have killed me first,” she said, her words almost lost in the surrounding conversations. “I don’t kill anyone unless they kill me first.”
“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” he said.
Peri’s eyes narrowed. “Did you call the police? How far behind is the alliance?”
He licked his fingers, elbows on the table as he leaned in close enough that she could smell the sugar on his breath. “I already said I’m here alone. But as for Opti?” He shrugged.
“You’re not afraid I’ll draft and run?” she said, eyebrows high.
He had to get her out of here. Clearly the enticement of food wasn’t going to do it—even half starved as she was—but the lure of knowledge might. “You won’t risk forgetting this.” Confident, he took his tablet back and tucked it into an inside coat pocket.
She watched it go, and his pulse quickened as he saw her calculate the risk of making a scene in the busy café. “I could just leave and look it up later.”
He nodded as if considering it, then went cold in the sudden realization that he’d made a mistake. He shouldn’t be here. He should have let someone else do it. But no one knew her better, that she was like a wild horse: canny, indomitable—and likely to run at the clink of a stone. “Go ahead,” he said, calling her bluff. “Make both our days.”
Expression cross, she flopped back into the chair to stare at him, probably trying to figure out why he was here. There was a nasty-looking pen by her hand, and he watched as she shifted her fingers and drew it close. “I’m not a dirty agent,” she said, chin lifted.
“Then why did you run away?”
“It seemed like a good idea at the time.” Her eyes avoided his. “They think I’m corrupt. I’m going to prove I’m not.”
He snorted, sucking muffin crumbs out of his teeth as if he had all the time in the world. “Anyone who can do what you do is dirty.”