Page 61 of Forged in Deception

“To pick up where we left off? Way back in the Jeep?” he joked.

She was blushing again, and it was all he could do not to pull her into his cabin and start kissing her right then and there, which would be an insanely stupid idea.

Instead, he forced himself to step out into the warm afternoon, pulling the cabin door shut behind him.

He decided not to tell Karlin that he now had his handgun secured in a concealed ankle holster, just in case. He doubted they would need it, and there was no need to freak her out.

“How is John, by the way?” he asked.

She narrowed her eyes at him before answering. “Nothing to report. He left a message on my voicemail that he was fine and that he’d try to call me later today or tomorrow. Anyway, we need to get moving if we want enough time to search the Senera offices.”

A smile had snuck its way onto her face, and he could barely contain his own excitement. “Sick! Good work, Karlin,” he said, pumping his fist at the sky. “Finally some good, old-fashioned, reading-piles-of-irrelevant-documents investigating!”

“Oh, there’s more,” she teased, raising her hand to reveal a small ring with several silver keys and a plastic ID card attached to it. “Bajwa actually left everything aside from his Jeep keys behind. Apparently, he didn’t want to risk losing them in the canyon.”

Asher widened his mouth in mock horror. “Youstolehis keys? I can’t believe my eyes!”

“Technically, I’m borrowing them. For very legitimate purposes,” she argued. “Or maybe you’re just a really bad influence.”

He reached out his hand and brushed a few strands of hair out of her face, catching her gaze with his own.

“Definitely. I’m definitely a bad influence.”

KARLIN

Karlin watched the passing desert out of the pickup truck’swindow, glad that Axel had volunteered to drive the maintenance vehicle they’d borrowed. Her hands were shaking way too much.

It wasn’t very far between the retreat site and the main Senera compound, but the road twisted back and forth, went up and down steep, sandy hills, and was covered with an unreasonable amount of potholes.

The view was pretty, though she definitely preferred the softer light of sunset.

Or sunrise.

Not that she was going to start thinking about sunrises right now.

“So, what did I miss?” Axel said after a while, glancing over at her as he expertly navigated around a trapped tumbleweed.

“Well, I learned some stuff about Cora,” she offered. “When I was talking to her and Lily this morning, she kept going on about some old Indian tribe that apparently went missing. She seems to think they might have been abducted by aliens or sent through another dimension.”

Axel laughed. “I mean, that’s totally weird, but I don’t think it means she’s secretly a spy on Senera’s payroll.”

She rolled her eyes. “Obviously not. But I do think it means she was never really here for mental health purposes. She’s a conspiracy nut looking for an intense high. It’s probably not important, but that’s about all of the new information I’ve dug up.”

“No, this is good,” Axel said. “We now have at least two patients that never should have made it into Senera’s patient pool, and that’s information we can use against them. Investigative work rarely involves a smoking gun. Usually, it’s just the slow process of building a case.”

“You know, you’re kind of a nerd. At least when you talk about your work.”

Axel looked genuinely horrified. “No! No. Gabe is the nerd.You’rethe nerd. I’m the one who can parkour between two rooftops, guns blazing, and take down the bad guy without even making a big deal about it.”

“There’s no way.”

“Well, maybe not literally, but you know what I mean.”

She laughed. Despite his utterly ridiculous example, she did know what he meant.

“Okay, Jason Bourne,” she teased. “Point taken.”

“Oh!” he exclaimed suddenly, smacking his palms against the steering wheel. “I did learn something useful from the biggest nerd in my entire family.”

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