Page 92 of Mastermind

“Even if we’re stepping into a trap with five tons of C-4 ready to kill us?”

“Yes.”

The way he says it without hesitation soothes me a little. For the first time, I realize that it’s not dying that scares me; it’s the thought of dying alone.

I touch the plastic card to the elevator sensor, and the door opens. Theo steps inside first. I panic for a moment at the thought of the doors slamming shut and taking him away from me.

But they stay open.

I step inside and stand next to him.

The doors close, and we feel the sudden acceleration upward as the elevator takes us to the eighty-fifth floor. Theo gives my hand a squeeze, letting me know he’s present.

I reach my other hand up and touch it to his stubbled chin and turn his mouth toward my own. I pull him in, and his lips make contact with mine. My tongue probes his mouth for the briefest of moments, and I feel every blood vessel in my body open wide. I want to pull him closer, but instead I let him go.

I pull back and release his hand. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay,” he says.

“I know you just . . .”

“I think she’ll understand,” he replies.

“I don’t think you understand women.”

PART SIX

THEORETICIAN

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

ASCENSION

Our kiss may have killed us.

Jessica is calm, collected, and outwardly fine, but from the perspiration on her hand and the pulse I sense with my fingertips, she’s experiencing what feels like a minor panic attack. All my enemies are dead, in jail, or ten thousand miles away in another country, dreading the day they encounter me again. Jessica’s enemy has been watching her the entire time.

While chasing Heywood, she found herself in the exact spot he wanted her to be in—or at least he made it appear that way. He may be in love with her, but he doesn’t love her. The distinction is the difference between wanting a thing and wanting what is best for it.

I can convince myself that the kiss was just a platonic reassurance to a friend in a terrifying situation, but I know there’s a deeper truth. The moment I gave Jillian the papers to the bakery, the house, and everything else, she treated it like a divorce. A polite one, but a separation.

I felt so horrible for everything I’d put her through I wanted to make sure that if I didn’t return from Myanmar, she’d be able to make a clean break of it. The reality was that I didn’t expect to return.

I went there to die.

I’d become a dangerous thing. A creature willing to crawl through the gutter to strike at my enemies while casting off my few friends and the people that loved me. I was more reptile than man.

At first, I blamed it on the Hyde virus, a pathogen that I may have come in contact with while hunting Forrester, the biomedical researcher who wanted to infect the US’s armed forces, but I slowly came to realize my behavior was my own choice.

Having been the victim of a cruel and indifferent universe that stole away my father, I wanted that power for myself.

When they came for us in the jungle, I got to be who I truly wanted to be. I didn’t hold back like I did with Forrester or Angelica Covel. I didn’t hesitate like I did with Oyo. I didn’t even wait to be physically threatened.

When Johnny ran, he wasn’t running from them. They were all dead. He ran from me, terrified by what I had become.

Jillian never saw it. She didn’t know the man she slept with each night when we were together was thinking up a thousand ways to kill all the evil in the world. She saw my light and my shadow but didn’t realize that the real me was the shadow.

When I was in that cell, expecting to die, I hid away knife blades and picked the locks at night to see if I could do it . . . but I didn’t want to leave. I was too tired.