Page 30 of Live for Me

“That doesn’t sound so terrible,” I said as quietly as possible. I could feel Utah shift ever so slightly to try to see my face when he looked down at me that time, but nothing in me had the willpower to meet that stare.

He pulled the truck into the first parking lot that we happened across after that. This time it was a church that was perfectly empty. I went right around to where he was opening the back door on his side, probably thinking he’d get that speaker out again, but it really wasn’t dancing that I wanted. I didn’t need music. We didn’t need to even move. Those little circles were useless.

He turned just barely to look at me and I took that chance to squish all of my body into him and wrapped my arms all the way around his waist.

I’d watched him hug Trista more than once when she was caught in her own head. It seemed to be exactly what she needed each time.

I just wanted to find out if maybe he could have that effect on me, too. The way he’d felt when he hugged me outside of that school had my mind wandering in several directions.

That made it easier to accept.

Call it a science experiment.

Inexplicable tears came right back to my eyes when his arms crushed me against him and he kissed the top of my head.

“You don’t ever need to come up with an excuse if you just want me to hold you, angel.”

He was so sure of himself. So calm. So in control.

It radiated from him with so much force that it felt like if I just stayed there, he might crush every ounce of the nerve-wracking worry about what needed to happen next.

And that led me right to wondering what he might be able to do about the demons behind me.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

utah

We’d been back in Indiana for almost a week.

And I hated every second of it.

Some part of me already decided to believe that I’d gained ground on the Memphis front, but we went right back to simply co-existing once we were back in the house with Indy. I was starting to wonder if maybe I’d imagined all of those little moments that felt like they were adding up to something. She hadn’t sought me out even once since we’d made it back. She was back to spending all her time with Indy or staring at her computer.

The trafficking side of the Evans organization consumed every piece of her. I listened in on some of their conversations, but I didn’t possess even half the knowledge that those two had when it came to hacking, or code writing, or Internet creeping in general. I paid way closer attention when they talked about the other teams that they’d planned to send me out after soon.

I couldn’t imagine any of it going over well. Executioners were paranoid in naturebecauseof their nature. They were used to being difficult to find because regular people weren’t supposed to be able to find them. They operated under the pretense that they wouldn’t have to encounter other Executioners. So, realizing that another Executioner had gone out of his way to locate them, meet them, and then try to sway them to turn against the organization that paid them beautifully was a shitty situation just waiting to implode. We hadn’t even started on that part of this undertaking, and I was nearly certain that it was going to fail. I was decent enough at interacting with people and it took quite a bit to get me worked up, but these encounters were going to be a battle from the very moment that the other Executioners realized that I was also an Executioner.

“Is there a backup plan in the event that none of these other teams will want anything to do with this?” I asked the tech twins, who were busy going over the list of who I might try to recruit first. Both of them stopped to glare at me.

“These are all people who’ve had their regular lives taken from them against their will,” Memphis said shortly. “They’re going to join us. It probably won’t happen right away. The Executioners won’t listen, won’t want any part of it. But they will eventually bring it up to their Judges and the Judges won’t be able to resist looking into it. They’ll start digging into their own pasts just like I did. They’ll find things that really can’t be ignored, then they’ll come back to us.”

“What about the ones who don’t, angel?” I asked. “The ones who lean harder into the organization. The ones who go tattle about what we’re trying to do.”

“I don’t think it’ll go that way. This is an entire organization of people who operate on paranoia. All you have to do is plant that tiny seed of doubt. It’ll work.”

The alarm on her phone went off to effectively end that conversation. Keeping New Jersey at bay was always the top priority in her world, and it was time for her to text him to say that she was still alive.

“Ask him for a tit pic from Triss,” Indy said.

“Gross. And no.”

“I just want to rile him up,” Indy said. “It’s been a minute.”

I dropped my elbows down to the countertop to plant my face in my hands.

I was supposed to be starting this shit tomorrow, and none of it felt like it was going to go very smoothly. All while one Judge didn’t understand the first thing about boundaries, and the other had so many walls erected that there was barely a human visible from this side of them.

“You guys are going to get me killed,” I mumbled.

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