Bodyguard by Melanie Shawn

19

Savannah

I followedthe guys into a room in the back of the house. It felt weird mentally calling it a house, but I couldn’t think of a better name, and it really did feel like a house, so that’s what I’d settled on.

The room we entered was significantly less homey, though. It reminded me of the space at the back of Gage’s closet at the cabin. The one he’d called the “control room.”

This was bigger, though, and brighter. There was a long, oval table in the middle of the room. One entire wall was filled with banks of monitors, and there was an extensive computer system at the desk in front of it.

Another wall was completely covered in white board material. There were some notes already jotted on it, which Bear promptly erased. He turned to Gage and nodded. “Fill me in.”

Gage related the facts of my situation. Which honestly sounded even more hopeless and depressing when broken down into stark, factual statements than if I’d actually tried to dress them up in the most dramatic language possible.

Listening to Gage, each sentence seemed like a new bar on the window of my prison. How could there possibly be any way out?

Bear listened intently, never interrupting, only occasionally nodding. When Gage finished, he said, “We can work with that.”

My eyebrows shot up. “We can?”

He nodded. “We can.”

Gage nodded in agreement. “It won’t be easy, though.”

Bear smirked. I was starting to really like his smirk. “Nothing fun ever is.”

“These are my thoughts so far,” Gage started, and I was shocked to find out that he actually had any thoughts, so far or otherwise. He certainly hadn’t shared them with me. “First off, we need more information. A lot more. We need to know about Mitch Barlowe’s operation. We need to know what Savannah’s father’s role was, what he testified about. We need to know how it operates today, and we need to know what his weaknesses are.”

“Agreed.”

“And we need to know how they infiltrated WITSEC. That’s not easy. Finding that out will let us know what we’re up against.”

My head spun. “I don’t understand...how will any of this help?”

“The only way to get Mitch Barlowe to stop coming after you, for good, is to make him understand that it would be far more painful to continue than to stop,” Gage explained.

“And not just a little more painful,” Bear added. “Magnitudes. Life and death difference.”

“Right. But to do that, we have to take the fight to him. We can’t keep playing defense. And we only have one shot. We have to hit him where it hurts.”

“And for that to happen,” Bear finished, “we have to know where it would hurt.”

My gaze ping-ponged back and forth between them as they spoke, trading off sentences like a well-oiled machine. It was oddly comforting, how well they worked together. It gave me confidence that, should the shit hit the fan, they’d already have a plan in place, one that involved throwing up a shit shield to protect me from the flying feces.

“Okay,” I agreed. “But how will we find that out? I mean...I don’t even know what my father’s relationship to Barlowe’s organization was. I guess we could look up the trial transcripts—” I mused, but Bear cut me off.

“That’ll take too long. We don’t want to rush, but we’re not gonna drag this out for months, either.”

“Agreed,” Gage said.

I smiled weakly. It was hard to keep up with the way the landscape of my future was shifting before my eyes. “You guys clearly know what you’re doing. I’ll stop pestering you with questions.”

“It’s not pestering,” Gage insisted. “It’s your life at stake. Your freedom, your future.”

“Not to mention,” Bear added pragmatically, “you don’t really know what you know or don’t know. Details that you never thought were significant could bust this thing wide open. Chime in whenever you have something to say.”

I nodded, but I knew I wouldn’t. I just needed to listen for a while. I needed to let all of this sink in.

Everything was changing. Until about five minutes ago, my best hope for the outcome of this nightmare had been survival. I’d assumed that, if I did survive, I’d be swept up into WITSEC again. Another new identity. Another anonymous city.

Another start at a lifetime of the sharp ache of missing Gage. Of grieving the life we could have had together.

But now, there was a new possibility. A new hope. One of a life where Barlowe was no longer after me. Where I could live where I wanted. As who I wanted.

I looked at Gage. With who I wanted.

It seemed too good to be true. It seemed like too much to hope for. In fact, just the act of hoping felt scary. Like maybe I could jinx it with nothing but the strength of my own stupidity...because, after all these years, hoping felt like a lot of things. Futile. Dangerous. But, most of all, it felt stupid.

But, as I listened to Gage and Bear talk and plan, I had to admit—they seemed confident. And it was clear they had engaged in these kinds of missions many times before. And they were both still standing. And, as far as I knew, so were all of the people they’d been protecting, or rescuing.

So maybe their judgement about how futile, or dangerous, or stupid it was to indulge in a little bit of hope was slightly more dependable than mine.

I sure as hell hoped so. As ironic as that was, it was still true. I sure as hell hoped so.