Alex goes very still. “Someone like who? Your sister?” She pauses. “Or maybe a partner?”
“No.” But it’s half-assed and we both know it. In another life, I would’ve had a better lie. But in this moment, Griff is so close to the surface, my surface, and I need to know he’s safe. “I just need to do a little work off record. There’s no partner.”
Alex’s eyes go flat, dull. “Maybe not a partner like Kent thinks, but there’s definitely someone.” She waits and I say nothing.
“Fine,” Alex says at last. “Be like that. You ready for the other secret?”
“I don’t want to know.” I press both hands into the mattress, struggle to my feet. I want a shower. Or maybe just a break from this, from all of it. “I don’t want to know anything else you two are doing.”
“Oh, you’ll want to know this one. Trust me, it’s good.” I start for the bathroom and Alex follows me. “Has your pretty boy been honest with you?”
I grab a towel from the rack and turn, ready to shut the door in her face. “I’m guessing you don’t think so.”
“Still not interested?”
“Nope.” Yes.
“Has Milo told you the deal with his mom yet?”
No, actually. We talk about a lot of things—mostly computer related, yes, but I know about his dad. I know all about Milo’s fascination with explosives, the run-down restaurant his uncle left him. And he knows all about my biological mom. He even helped me find the real truth about her.
But his mom? We never really talked about it.
Alex smiles. “That’s what I thought.” She puts one hand on the door handle and the other on the frame, leaning closer and closer. “That’s because he doesn’t want you to know.”
Another pause. Another waiting game. I don’t rise for the bait, but I have to stuff myself down to do it.
“And you know why that is?” Alex asks. “Because his mom is Dr. Norcut.”
19
I stand under the hot water for ages and it never goes cold. I almost wish it would. I’d be forced to get out.
I face the shower spray and let the hot water burn the top of my head. Maybe Alex is lying? She’s mad at me. Could she be desperate enough to lie? Maybe. Probably.
But somehow, I can’t brush it off. My brain keeps circling something Milo said to me once, when we were outside the courthouse and he’d saved me by cutting Carson’s video feed.
“I understand you better than you know,” he’d said. “This is survival. We all do things we aren’t proud of.”
What if I’m one of those things?
It isn’t so much that his mother is my therapist that bothers me. It’s that he didn’t tell me. It’s why wouldn’t he tell me?
I grab the metal dial and crank the water off, stand there, dripping. Milo’s mother runs Looking Glass. Which means he wasn’t just “picked up.” He wasn’t hired on for some work. This isn’t casual.
Which also means all his interest in getting me to do as I’m told isn’t casual. It isn’t about me finding where I belong. It’s about getting me to play along. And I have played along—because they’re protecting Lily and Bren, because they’re protecting me. Think about Michael being loose. Think about how I was almost kidnapped.
Only . . . now I’m wondering how much of that could’ve been manufactured too. Chills ripple across my skin and when I close my eyes all I see is the grille of that SUV ramming into us. What if the whole almost-kidnapping was really just to gain my trust? To make me think there was a problem?
No. No way. Looking Glass had nothing to do with Michael’s release or Jason Baines’s death—two other reasons I’m here. I still don’t understand why I’m so special to them though. There are better hackers in the world. Is it because I was convenient? Because I was already caught? It’s possible, I guess.
And the pacemaker? It’s a cold, little voice whispering in my head. There were all of those excuses and all of it was so convenient and I so, so, so wanted to believe it.
Still do, because if I don’t . . . if I did—
My stomach heaves into my mouth and I yank the shower curtain aside and wrap the towel around me.
Don’t think about it. Think about Lily. Bren. Think about how Norcut and Hart are protecting them. I don’t like my therapist and I’m pretty sure she’s not a fan of me either, but we are useful to each other and that’s something . . . right?
And I’m all the way finished drying my hair before I realize that if Norcut and I are useful to each other, what does that make Milo and me?
My stomach makes another drunken lurch and I force myself into a clean T-shirt and jeans. It’s not the same thing.