There was only one answer.
Luca.
Nox didn’t even try to hold back the thought.
“The only thing I need is you.” Luca slid his arms around Nox’s neck. “Just you.” And he believed what he said. Even if Nox couldn’t feel Luca’s emotions, it burned in Luca’s eyes.
But no amount of belief changed the truth. Luca needed so much more.
And Nox wanted to give it to him. He just didn’t know how.
Luca stepped back and took the toiletry bag with his shaving supplies, soap, and other necessities out of his duffle bag. “What time do you leave for the construction site?”
The construction site.
The job.
After finding out Nox was ex-military, the foreman had promised a small house in exchange for rent if he stayed on-site so the company wouldn’t have to hire a guard to keep vandals from damaging the multimillion-dollar houses they’d been contracted to build.
But yesterday changed things.
“I think it might be too soon to stay somewhere.” Nox went to throw away the garbage left over from breakfast, only to realize he already had.
“Too soon or too close to Jelani?”
Nox picked up the plastic cup of orange juice Luca had left and drained it. “Yeah, that’s part of it.”
“Part?”
“They tracked us from Canada.” Nox tossed the cup into the garbage. “And they don’t exactly look like the type to have high-tech equipment. If they found us with nothing, the military could find us, too.”
“If the military had a way to track us, they would have found us by now. So obviously they don’t.”
“Or it’s broken and they’re still trying to fix it.”
Luca shook his head and started toward the bathroom.
“How else were they able to find us before?”
Luca stopped. “Ever consider that the pile of dead Anubis had something to do with it?”
A logical deduction.
The same conclusion Nox had let himself believe until yesterday. “They were always right behind us and knew exactly where to go. I don’t think that was a coincidence.”
“Then what? You have a tracking device on you?”
The Anubis would know if New World Genetics had implanted anything inside him.
Three days after the ichor resurrected Nox, it pushed out a bullet in his thigh he’d earned years before he’d died. The Anubis also had decided it didn’t like the fillings in his teeth. Within a few weeks, he’d woken up with those lying beside him on his cot.
“No. No tracking device.”
“Then how would they track you?”
“I don’t know.”
“That’s what I thought.” Luca turned away.