I don’t want to risk faking it. If this is going to work, the deluge of vulnerability needs to come as fast and effective as possible.
So I open my mouth and let all my weakest thoughts tumble out, gazing vaguely at the floor, pretending I’m speaking to my guys rather than putting on a performance for our hostages.
“I always just want to help, but you never believe me. You’ve made me weak and sick and then you get mad at me because I can’t do enough. I’mtrying. I’m trying so hard to make things right, to be what you want, but that’s never enough either.”
A lump I don’t have to force rises in my throat. A couple of very real tears slip down my cheeks. I take a ragged breath, leaning into the display of patheticness and ignoring the screaming of my dignity.
The guys are silent around me, but I don’t dare look at them or our captives. I can’t tell whether they’re shocked or skeptical or if they’ve figured out what I’m trying to accomplish here.
I squeeze my eyes shut for a second, and more tears trickle out. “You want me dead too. I’ve spent the last four years thinking about nothing but getting back to you and getting you free, and all you seem to think about when you see me is how much pain you want to put me through. How horrible it is that I’m around. How much of a burden I am. I don’t know what else you want from me.”
My voice breaks on the last word of its own accord. I can’t stop myself from sniffling, but maybe that’s a good thing.
I hug myself tighter, hoping I look as frail as I feel right now with all my emotions stretched to fraying.
“You can all hate me as much as you want, but you know what? You can’t hate me more thanIalready do. The mistakes I’ve made, the disasters I couldn’t control… But I have never wanted to hurt any of you—not Griffin, not the rest of you—and every second of my life when I had the choice, I did whatever I could to protect you. If you can’t ever believe that, then… I don’t know.”
My legs tremble beneath me, and I let them give. I slump down on the floor as if I’m totally defeated—and in that moment, I kind of am.
What if even this doesn’t work? What if I’ve just made a fool of myself and still gotten us nowhere?
I can already hear the caustic insults that Jacob is probably forming in his head right now. A sob I can’t contain hitches out of me.
I drop my head into my hands. I want to curl up in a ball so they can’t see me, so I have some kind of shell against the world again, but that would defeat the point of this demonstration.
Just hold on. Just stay here in this awful stew of emotions for as long as I can…
“I’ve got it,” Andreas says in a low rasp. “I got everything.”
As I raise my head, a strange ache spreading through my chest, Jacob sucks a breath through his teeth—and two spines crack simultaneously, our captives’ heads going slack.
Twenty-Five
Andreas
“We shouldn’t stay in this junk heap of a car any longer than we have to,” Jacob announces as he marches us out of the underground building. “We don’t know if these guardians radioed details about it back to wherever they came from.”
He glances over at me. “Where exactly are we going?”
“I’m figuring that out,” I say without looking up from the phone I’ve taken control over. It’d be a hell of a lot easier to do this search on a computer with a big screen and proper keyboard, but I’m making do with my thumbs because I don’t have a choice.
The conversation I plucked out of the one guardian’s memories replays through my head. I’ve been concentrating on nothing but that since I recognized it was our best shot at finding Engel.
She’s going all the way up to Glen Lily?
And a stretch farther north, it sounds like.
Must be fucking cold up there.
It was obviously a place, not a person named Glen. I squint through the reflected sunlight at the search results that pop up on the screen.
“Sometime when she was packing up to leave the facility—at least, I think that was what was happening—that one guy we caught was monitoring things from outside her office with another guardian. They made a few comments to each other about where she was going.” I frown. “The main thing popping up is someplace in Kentucky—I can’t tell whether it’s an actual town or just, like, a landfill site or a road name.”
Zian perks up. “Kentucky isn’t too far from Kansas.”
“Yeah, but… it doesn’t really make sense with the other things they said. They were talking about her going ‘all the way up’ there. Kentucky isn’t ‘up’ from any of the facilities we know about.”
“Keep digging and see if you can find anything else,” Jake orders.