Page 116 of Shadow Of Sin

If Wolfe was planning to ship me out on Friday, was saving Sal ever the real priority? Or was it just the thing he said to keep me quiet long enough to get me to this cabin?

I grip the wheel until my knuckles ache, blinking fast to hold back the tears that threaten to fall. I don’t have the answers. I don’t have anything except a car that isn’t mine, a bag I packed in under two minutes, and the address of the one person in this city who has never lied to me.

I’ll go to Sal. I’ll figure out the rest when I get there. I always do.

Even when the rest is the wreckage of everything I thought was real.

Eva Moreno does not cry while driving.

She saves that for later. When nobody’s watching. When nobody can use it against her.

The highway stretches ahead. My eyes are dry, my jaw clenched.

I don’t look in the rearview mirror. There’s nothing behind me to dwell on. Not the cabin or the quilt or every lie he whispered against my skin that made me believe I was worth staying for.

How fucking naïve.

Nobody ever stays.

CHAPTER 28

WOLFE

She’s not answering her phone.

I’ve called her twice and she hasn’t picked up. Eva always picks up.

We spoke last night around nine once I was settled back in Boston. She picked up on the third ring and her voice sounded normal. Tired, but normal. She asked about the drive. I told her Cillian almost killed us twice with his lead foot. She laughed and it sounded real. A little distracted, but real.

“I miss you,” she said right before we hung up. I’ve been carrying those words in my chest ever since.

“I miss you too,” I said. And I meant it. I have a hard time functioning without her and focusing when she’s not right next to me with our shoulders touching or our knees pressed together.

I miss her. Her warmth, her energy, her sass. It grounds me in a way I never knew I needed.

We exchanged those last words eight hours ago. I’ve texted her twice since then. Once at eleven to say goodnight. Once at midnight because I couldn’t sleep. She didn’t respond to either one. I tried to convince myself it was no big deal, that her phone must’ve died, or she fell asleep. I also tried chalking it up to bad reception. I told myself a lot of things.

Now it’s six in the morning and I’m sitting on the edge of my bed at the house staring at my phone with a knot in my gut that’s tightening by the second.

I call her. Straight to voicemail.

Again. Voicemail.

My thumb hovers over her name on my screen. Something is wrong. I know it the way I know her sleep breathing pattern and the weight of her hand on my skin. Something shifted between nine o’clock and now, and that certainty lands like a brick in my stomach.

I grab my phone and pull up the tracker on my car. The dot isn’t blinking. The car is two blocks from Rosario’s. She’s at Sal’s and has been for hours.

I open my laptop and pull up the cabin’s security cameras to see when she left. The driveway feed shows the car pulling out at 12:34 AM. Then I check the system logs to find out why.

The logs tell me everything…everything I already suspected.

At 11:47 PM, she accessed the encrypted folder. The password-protected one that nobody was ever supposed to open. The session lasted forty-three minutes. Both subfolders were opened, leading her to both saved documents and my text message archive.

Fuck. She found everything.

I close the laptop, put my hands on my knees, and breathe.

Except I can’t breathe. My lungs are squeezed tight, and drawing in a breath is near impossible. I press my hands to my forehead while my brain runs through what she saw, and what she thinks, and what it means, and every scenario crashes into the same brick wall.