“So what does that mean? No, wait. An extraction.”
He almost grins. “See? All those scripts you read and spy movies you watch actually are relevant.”
“Well, duh.” I grin, too. “Is that honestly what you think?”
“It fits.” The ice in his voice matches his eyes, and I know that Hunter is back. “For one thing, it explains how I survived.”
“What do you mean?”
“They didn’t throw me over. They left me to bleed out, and I got lucky. Why? I always wondered. Now, I think that it wasn’t worth the risk of getting me close to the extraction team. I could just as easily die in the train car as in the river. They left me out of an abundance of caution.”
“Maybe,” I say dubiously.
“Plus, there was always the question of how the rebels got into Mikal’s father’s complex. It was highly protected. They had to have someone on the inside.”
“Felicia? But why?” Immediately, I push the question away. “Actually, I don’t care. That’s old news and not the problem.” I suck in air, fighting back a sob. “What I want to know is why is she back? Is she back? You never actually saw her face to face. Maybe someone is pretending to be her. Leaving the note and sending the text. You said the video wasn’t actually clear.”
The thought perks me up, but Ryan shakes his head, his expression so sad that I can’t help but be afraid. Immediately, my world starts to crumple again. “What?” I demand. “What do you know?”
“I need you to listen to me, Jamie. No, no, I don’t care if you listen or not. What I need you to do is obey. Can you do that, Kitten? Without a collar—in real life—can you do what I say without question?”
“I—” I swallow, then lick my lips. “Ryan, you’re scaring me.”
“Good,” he says. “If you’re scared, maybe you’ll do what I say.”
“I don’t—”
“Go home, Jamie. Go home and stay with Nikki and Damien. Or go to New York and stay with Dallas and Jane. Their place is a damn fortress.”
I wince. Our friend Dallas used to head up a vigilante organization that rescued kidnap victims and other innocents in situations where official channels didn’t work. He has enemies. Lots. And the house really is secure. But it’s a long way from our home in LA and a long way from here. And I don’t understand why he wants me gone.
Slowly, I shake my head. “What’s going on? Come on, Hunter, talk to me. Why do you want to send me away?”
“For Christ’s sake, Jamie, I want to keep you safe.” The words burst out of him, their force launching him to his feet. He paces in front of the couch, and I simply watch him, not understanding why he’s so concerned about me.
“You think because we’re married she’s going to try to take me out or something?”
“If she’s alive, then I think there’s a good chance she’s in intelligence—or that she was all those years ago. And that she was working with the dissidents. If she’s popping up now, there must be a good reason. Something she needs desperately—apparently from me. Something she will do anything to get. Including leveraging my wife.”
I swallow. “Like what?”
“Kitten, I don’t know. But I don’t think it’s because she wants me to help her book a suite at one of Damien’s hotels.”
“No. Probably not. Wow.” I grew up in Dallas with dreams of becoming a movie star. And though I’ve watched a lot of spy movies, I never truly touched upon the world of spies and intelligence and security until I met Ryan. For that matter, I hadn’t touched upon much of anything until I moved to Los Angeles and my best friend got involved with Ryan’s boss, Damien Stark. You see a lot of interesting things when your bff gets involved with a billionaire. But never once in all the years since I started living in the Stark orbit did I think that I would somehow end up inside some sort of bizarre espionage plot.
I frown. “Leverage me,” I repeat. “But—but she doesn’t even know I exist.”
“She does,” he says. “And she’s already shown me that she can get to you in a heartbeat.”
I gape at him. I don’t have a clue what he’s talking about.
He sits beside me, then takes my hands. “Kitten, I need you to answer my question.”
I blink, completely confused. “What ques—?”
“The cafe, Kitten. Who were you with in the cafe?”
“Gabby? She’s a friend from college. What does she have to—” I sit up straighter, then shake my head. “Oh, no. No. That’s crazy.”
“Maybe it is,” he says. “But there are only two things in this world I trust with absolute certainty. You. And my own two eyes. That’s her, baby. The woman in the cafe is Felicia.”
Chapter Nine
“Gabby?” Jamie shook her head. “No. Ryan, that’s impossible.”
“Is it?” He sat next to her, then took her hand. “Because, honestly, I’d be thrilled to know that she’s not really Felicia.” So would Jamie, he thought. And not just because such proof would mean that Gabby wasn’t a liar at best and a spy at worst. But also because of the rest of it.
The worst of it.
But Jamie hadn’t gotten there yet, and he didn’t intend to push her. She was still numb, but she’d see the horrible truth soon enough. Right now, they just needed to go over the facts.
And maybe—just maybe—it would turn out that Jamie was right. Maybe there was no way that Gabby could be Felicia. Maybe the texts were a hoax. Maybe there was nothing at all to worry about.
He hoped that was the case. But he knew in his gut that it wasn’t. Even so, he nodded. “All right. Tell me the story. Why can’t she be Felicia?”
“Because I’ve known her for years. And she’s not British. You said Felicia was British, right?”
He nodded.
“See?”
“Kitten, it’s not that hard to hide an accent. You tell me that yourself every time we watch a movie with a British actor playing an American.”
She made a face. “Okay, fine. What about school? She went to the University of Texas with Nikki and me.”
“She’s your age?” A tiny bit of hope bloomed in him. Felicia would be older than Jamie. Of course, if she’d changed her identity, she’d likely be lying about her age, too.
Jamie shook her head. “A few years older. She was a grad student finishing up her masters when Nikki and I were freshmen. She had the apartment above us. We used to hang out at the pool. Drink. That kind of thing.”
“When was this? What year?”
She told him, and he nodded, that tiny bloom of hope starting to open. “That’s after the mission, but you said she was a grad student. That means she’d been there at least a year doing graduate work and then four years before, right? As an undergrad?” If she’d been in school in Texas during the mission, she hardly could have been in the Middle East with him.
“I—” Her shoulders slumped, and he knew the answer. “Well, no, actually. She’d only come for one semester because of the collection of medieval texts that UT has. Her field was history. The Middle Ages. She didn’t go to UT undergrad.”