he said with a large smile still stuck on his face. Mine had been wiped away, and he seemed to read it. “What’s wrong?”
I forced a smile. “Nothing. Exhaustion. I’m heading up to New London so I can sleep for twenty-four hours straight. Do you need a ride up, or are you coming tomorrow?”
“Stay in town. Celebrate with Demario, Angelica, and me,” he said.
“Nah. We have the party tomorrow. I’m wiped. I just need sleep,” I said.
He eyed me for a minute, trying to place how much of it was true and how much had to do with the partial conversations he’d heard in Spain—Jada, and the Kyōdaina, and our business mingling into one.
It was Demario who replied, smirking. “Tell the truth. You’re really going to see a blonde-haired vixen with purple eyes, right?”
I was. I’d wanted nothing more than to lose myself in Violet when we’d docked. But now I had other balls flying in the air that weren’t going to let me just forget the fact there was a bomb sitting in Mandy and Leena’s garage. None of that was anything I could tell them, however, so I just let my wide, lazy grin slide over my face. “Yep. Nothing you three have to offer could come close to that. I’ll have my own private celebration instead.”
Demario winked at me while Angelica rolled her eyes.
Dax was still weighing all of my words in a way that he hadn’t ever done before, and it killed me a little that I was going to have to earn back a layer of trust that had once been so easily handed to me. I started to leave and then turned back.
“Hey, man,” I said. Dax looked up. “We did it.”
His face lit up like it had when we’d first pulled into the bay. “Putain ouais, we really did.”
I let the joy of it settle in for a brief moment before the anxiety of everything else pushed its way back in. We’d won the Conquistar de la Atlántica cup. We’d taken a twenty-year-old record and smashed it to hell.
Whatever else happened, that couldn’t be taken away from us.
Violet
UNCHAINED MELODY
“Woah, my love, my darling,
I've hungered, hungered for your touch.”
Performed by LeAnn Rimes
Written by North / Zaret
I was shaking from head to toe as I entered the garage. I had a hard time slipping into my lab gear because my fingers kept fumbling. As I checked on my petri dishes, I took out the phone Nolan had given me and tipped it at my hip, shooting the camera repeatedly. I moved around the metal table so I got it from all angles while futzing with the lamps and the other vials.
Thankfully, all my seals were in place, and none of the experiments had been screwed with. It would have been devastating to start over.
Back in the house, I handed the phone to Nolan, and he downloaded the pictures, sending them off to other people at the Bureau. He zoomed in on several of the images and rattled off things to me about remote detonation and tonnage. While I was sure I could follow the science of it, I didn’t want to. I forced the formulas from my head, refusing to see any beauty in it. I just wanted it gone.
“It looks small enough that any damage would be contained to the garage. You might have some broken windows in the main house, and it would definitely rattle the place, but I don’t think it’d do much worse,” Nolan said. “Honestly, they knew what they were doing. A small amateur lab like yours wouldn’t have anything in it to cause more damage than that. If they wanted it to look like an accident, this was the best way to do it.”
It was only a small relief, knowing that, even if it exploded, it wouldn’t ruin everything that had been in Leena’s family for over a century. I was still trembling while Jada and I served breakfast to the guests and encouraged them to leave for the day by suggesting places they could visit locally for fall photo opportunities.
I almost forgot to turn on the news in the chaos of the bomb, and by the time I did, Dawson had already disembarked from the Ada Mae. He was standing with Dax, Demario, and Angelica on the steps of the yacht club, answering questions about the race, their yachts, and the win. He was smiling, almost glowing, and I hated knowing that once he heard about this,