was really struggling with this. “Just knock on the door to one of his secret facilities? He’ll see us coming a mile away. We’ll be outnumbered and unprepared. What’s the point?”
“No. We make him come to us,” Tyler explained, and I knew I had him. We were moving from whether to do this or not to the practicalities of it. “We level the playing field and draw him out.”
“How?” Ethan growled.
“I stop running.” I moved to my bag in the corner of the room and dug around in one of the pockets for my stash of passports. It took only a moment of flicking through them to find the one I was looking for.
I slapped my Evelyn Maynard passport down on the table—the only legitimate passport I’d ever had, the one I’d applied for as soon as my true identity became known.
“How do we know this will draw him out? How do we know it’ll work? How can you just put yourself in danger like this?” Alec continued to argue. I understood why. I didn’t want them anywhere near danger either, but it was time for us to do what we’d been working so hard to do since we met. It was time to be brave and honest and work together as a Bond.
“I don’t know the answers to any of those questions.” I looked around at them, squaring my shoulders. “But I know without a shadow of a doubt that I can’t keep sitting here, hiding and doing nothing, while the world burns. And I know you can’t either. I know in my soul that this is the right thing to do, and I know I have the strength to do it. Because I’m not alone anymore.”
We took a day to prepare.
Whatever Nina’s impassioned speech had been to her leaders, it worked. The Lighthunters were going public. They hoped to burst onto the world stage with a message of hope and unity to distract from Davis’s hateful crap.
They were also putting the full weight of their support behind any organization focused on peacekeeping around the world.
Tyler and Alec reached out to the few people we trusted and filled them in on the plan. Every call met with resistance and arguments, but once we’d made a decision together as a Bond, we were united. My guys may not have liked what we were about to do, but they supported me one-hundred-percent.
We packed our meager possessions and went over the plan repeatedly. Alec’s team and a handful of other agents would be with us, prepared to go rogue and defy orders if necessary. A few other players in the Variant world were behind us too, including a good number of Mr. Takata’s trusted contacts.
When I spoke to Dana, however, she was so quiet on the line, her answers so short and reserved, by the end of it I was questioning my faith in her.
“Look, I know it’s a lot to ask—this is really fucking dangerous—so I completely understand if you can’t be there to back us up, but please, at least don’t tell anyone about it. Give us a fighting chance.”
“Yeah . . . I gotta go.” She ended the call without even waiting for a response.
“Shit.” I dropped the phone and dropped my head into my hands. “Shit fuck fucking tits.”
Ethan chuckled as he leaned over the back of the couch to massage my shoulders. “Nothing you can do about it now, baby. You had faith in her humanity—you trusted her. I, for one, am glad you haven’t lost the ability to trust altogether after all the shit you’ve been through.”
His words were comforting, as were his strong hands on my shoulders, but I still worried I’d made a colossal mistake.
Once we’d spoken to everyone we could trust, we fell into silence, sitting about the room lost in our own thoughts.
Tyler’s computer pinged, and he shook himself out of his contemplation to look at it. “It’s Charlie again,” he announced, then smiled as he kept reading. “He’s asking if the phone is free to set up a secure line? Dot’s demanding to speak to you, Eve.”
He typed as he spoke, and a few moments later, the phone next to me on the couch rang.
I took a deep breath and answered. “Hey, girl.”
“Don’t ‘hey, girl’ me! If you fucking die pulling this shit, I’m gonna be so mad at you. So mad! I mean, I know when we did that whole ‘go rogue to Australia,’ that was a stupid move, but