and then pushed it against his forehead, deep in thought. I could still feel the guilt coming off him in waves.
“What?” I asked as worry for Jada filled me again.
“I have to go into the office.” He got up, went to the door, and looked back at me one more time. “We can talk more when I get back?”
I was nodding as he left, but I wasn’t sure he’d seen it.
Dawson
WHAT ABOUT NOW
“What if you're making me all that I was meant to be?
What if our love never went away?”
Performed by Daughtry
Written by Hodges / Moody / Hartzler
Leaving Violet at the house with her eyes begging me to stay and her mouth whispering, “I love you,” was probably one of the hardest things I’d ever done. I wanted to stay. God, did I want to, but I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to know if it was the right thing. Saying that I was keeping her close to protect her if the life Jada and I had chosen came back to hurt her might just have been my subconscious’s way of justifying my selfish need to be with her.
So, I left, putting distance between us in an effort to make the right choice.
I also left because if I didn’t, Malone would send someone to come get me—likely someone from the unmarked car parked across the street from the B&B.
When I pulled into the FBI’s resident agency in New London, it was to a bag of more mixed emotions. It was the first time I’d been able to show up at the Bureau without taking a million different turns to shake any tails.
It was a weird sort of relief, like I could hang up one of the secret identities I’d been keeping, but also trepidation. If I took the fall for the disaster the operation had become, it would likely mean my badge, and I needed to keep it for a little while longer—until Ken’Ichi was caught and I could ensure that there weren’t Kyōdaina assassins coming after us.
After that…I would have to see. Even if I wanted to keep up with my three separate lives, my cover was blown. It meant UCA work was out of the question, and I was never going to be a person who could sit behind a desk and push paper, of which there was a shit ton and a half of it at the Bureau. It was the thing the shows and books always got wrong—the painstaking amount of paper that got shuffled before, after, and during an operation.
My phone rang. Dax.
“Hey,” I said.
“I came out of my drunken stupor this afternoon to news of a shootout at the Moris’, and I thought, ‘What? No way. My best friend would have called me.’” There was anger and worry in his voice.
Fuck, I was an ass.
“I should have called,” I said. “It’s just been a bit of a nightmare.”
“They say someone was shot…” His voice trailed off, hope and fear tangled there as well as the anger.
“First, she’s going to be okay―”
“Putain,” he interrupted, grief tearing through him.
“She was shot, Dax, but she’s going to be okay.”
Silence echoed over the line for so long only the phone counting up the seconds of the call let me know he was still there.
“I should kill you myself,” he snarled. “How could you let this happen? How could you not tell me? What the hell are the two of you into?”
I hadn’t wanted to tell him any of this on the phone. I’d wanted to tell him in person, where I could see his face and he could see mine. Where he would know the truth by seeing in my eyes how important he was to me, but the longer I let it go, the worse it was going to be.
“Dax, I work for the FBI. Jada is my informant.”
It took him a moment, and then he chuckled disparagingly. “This isn’t the time for jokes.”
“I’m serious. I work for the FBI. I’ve been working for them for four years. Remember the six months I took off after you and I had first started racing, and you were pissed because it meant you lost three in a row? I was at the academy.”
“Ta Gueule,” he said. “You’ve been undercover this whole time?”
“Yes,” I said quietly.
I hated not being able to see his face as the silence extended.
“You lied to me,” he said bitterly. “And worse, you put her at risk.”
“I didn’t lie about not working for the Kyōdaina,” I