"Right," I said.
"Look, I do my best not to think about things like that. Why are you bringing it up, anyway?"
I twisted my hands together in my lap. "Don"t worry about it."
"Did Griffin tell you something about me that made you not feel comfortable around me or something? Because what I had to do wasn"t torture. Not really. I made sure it was over quickly, and I don"t think it"s fair-"
"No, Sloane." I reached over and touched her arm soothingly. "I don"t know anything about what you"re talking about. This isn"t about you."
"Oh," she said, her voice tiny.
"Griffin and I... We were pretty thorough with Marcel," I said.
"Oh," she said. She took a deep breath. "That"s what"s bothering you."
"Yeah," I said.
"Well, that would make sense, then," she said.
"I keep thinking about it," I said. "Not all the time, but just out of nowhere. I remember things he said or the way he was screaming or-"
"That"ll happen."
"And... what? I"m just supposed to deal with it?"
"Well, what else can you do?" she said. "You can"t bring him back to life."
"I don"t want him to be alive," I said. "He was pretty much the worst person I can imagine. The things he did to Griffin. To me. To people we cared about... well, he deserves to be dead. I"m glad he"s dead."
"Yeah," she said, "but it would have been easier if you hadn"t been the person who killed him, right?"
"I... I liked it," I said. "It was a game. When we were doing it..."
"It"s better if you don"t think about it too much," she said.
"But you haven"t done anything like this. You killed people for Op Wraith. You were following orders. You didn"t choose it. You didn"t enjoy it. Do you even understand how I feel?"
She shrugged. "I don"t know. Maybe not."
We were quiet.
When she spoke again, her voice was so small and soft, she sounded like a little girl. "Silas and I have done... stuff together. We were recruited into Op Wraith because of what we did. We didn"t have very nice parents. They were going to do... things." She tightened her grip on the steering wheel. "We had to..."
"Sloane," I said, suddenly realizing she was confessing something to me. "You don"t have to tell me this."
A tear streaked out of one of her eyes. "Trust me, Leigh, it"s better to bury it." Her expression grew fierce. "He deserved it. Someone had to do it. That someone was you."
I nodded. "Yeah, that"s true."
"Do whatever you can not to think about it," she said.
I didn"t say anything. I could see why she was saying it, and I could see why she felt like she needed to follow the advice she gave me. But I didn"t know if I could simply bury this. I didn"t think- Sloane"s phone rang.
"Can you answer that?" she said. "Put it on speaker."
I got her phone out of the center cup holder. It was Silas calling. I answered it. "Hey, Silas."
"What"s up?" said Sloane.
"Oh good," said Silas. "You"re both there."
"Silas just had an epiphany," said Griffin.
"Well, I don"t know if I"d go that far," said Silas.
"What is it?" I said.
"You know how Sloane said that French wants us to go to her? That she thinks she can re-brainwash us?" said Griffin.
"Yeah," said Sloane.
"Well, Silas was thinking that a personal attack probably plays right into her hands."
"Right," said Silas. "I"m thinking we just blow the b.i.t.c.h up."
"Blow her up?" I said.
"Yeah," said Griffin. "We"re going to have to make a pit stop for supplies, but we can put together a pretty decent explosive, I think. We"ll level AXU along with French."
"But my father is working with her," I said. "He"ll be there too."
"That a problem?" said Griffin.
I hesitated. I looked out the window. I"d erased my father"s memory, or so I"d thought. He"d been as good as dead. But now they wanted me to partic.i.p.ate in killing him for real. Kill my father. I drew in breath. "I guess not."
"Doll, if you want us to get him out-"
"He"s been helping French. He probably helped her sick Marcel on us. He... doesn"t deserve to be my father. I don"t care what happens to him." I sank down into my seat and stared out at the headlights flashing by again. I didn"t want to think anymore. The lights were pretty.
Chapter Seventeen.
I pushed the leaves out of the way to find a hidden vent, just like Griffin had told me I"d find. I was out in the woods in upstate New York, kneeling on the wet ground. It had rained earlier and the air still smelled like early summer. I took the contraption that Griffin and Silas had put together out of the pack I was carrying.
Each of us had one. They were all controlled by one timed detonation, which Silas was in charge of. He"d rigged it up. I didn"t understand how. But we had to place the bombs, so that was why we"d split up.
AXU was underground in much the same way that the main Op Wraith headquarters had been. Dropping these bombs into the vents would get them in place. Once we"d done that, Silas would make a call and everything would go boom.
It would be over soon.
I pushed several b.u.t.tons on the bomb, activating it the way Griffin had shown me. Then I dropped it into the vent.
I winced when I heard it hit, but it didn"t explode, so that was good.
Quickly, I got to my feet. I needed to meet everyone else at the agreed-upon spot, out of the blast radius.
But I didn"t make it.
I was hurrying away when I felt a sharp point of pain in my shoulder. I gasped as everything started to go black. What had I been hit with?
"It was only a tranquilizer," said a soothing voice.
I opened my eyes to find myself gazing at the face of Jolene French. She was smiling.
"Don"t worry, Leigh, you"re fine," said French.
I sat up, panicked. I expected to find myself bound and imprisoned, but instead, I was lying on a couch underneath a blanket. I was inside a room with Monet prints on the walls and a desk in the corner. It looked like an office. That"s where I must be. French"s office.
She held up both her hands. "Now, now. It"s okay. We wouldn"t have used the tranq, but we didn"t think you"d come with us willingly."
"Am I inside AXU?" I said.
"Yes," she said, "but you"re hardly a prisoner. Think of yourself more as a guest."
When was the bomb going to go off? Was I going to get blown up? I needed to get out of here. "If I"m not a prisoner, then I can leave."
"Wait a moment, Leigh," said French. "We"ve barely had a chance to talk here. Can you tell me why you were wandering around in the woods by yourself?"
Why had she seen me and not the others? Probably because I was spectacularly bad at moving quietly through the woods. d.a.m.n it.
"Were you trying to get away from Griffin?" "What?" I said. "No. Don"t be ridiculous." Okay, so sure I was feeling a little bit weird about what Griffin and I had done to Marcel. But that didn"t mean that any part of me wanted away from him. I couldn"t have been moving noisily through the woods on purpose. Could I?
"It"s okay if you were," she said. She settled down on a chair across from the couch where I sat. "You forget that I know Griffin very well. I know all his secrets. I know exactly what he"s capable of."
She wasn"t blocking my path to the door. I got up and started for it.
"If you"ve seen his violent side, and it"s frightened you, then there"s no reason to be ashamed of that."
His violent side? That was a little creepy. It was like she was reading my mind. I hesitated. I turned to face her. "If he has a violent side, it"s your fault. You"re the one who turned him into a killer."
"Now, Leigh, that"s simply not true," said French. "There were early candidates for Op Wraith who didn"t make the cut. We gave them the serum, we tried to train them, but they simply weren"t ruthless enough. By the time Griffin was recruited, we knew what we were looking for. We picked Griffin because it was obvious he had potential."
I folded my arms over my chest. "You"re lying."
"Did you watch him kill Marcel?"
I turned back to the door. "I"m leaving." I put my hand on the k.n.o.b.
"Really?" she said. "You helped him. How interesting."
How could she tell that? I turned back around.
"Oh, Leigh," she said, her face concerned. "How confused you must be."
I swallowed. "I"m not going to listen to you."
"You liked it," she said, as if she could read it on my face or something. "Didn"t you?"
"No," I said. How could she know?
She gestured to the couch. "Sit down."
I shook my head. "I"m getting out of here."
"You must have considered the fact that you"d never have ended up in that position if you hadn"t met Griffin, haven"t you?"
Of course I hadn"t. But she was right, wasn"t she? Griffin had gotten me into this. But I needed him. He protected me. "If I hadn"t met Griffin, then Op Wraith would have killed me."
"I thought we"d already set that nasty misunderstanding to bed," she said. "Your father had intervened on your behalf. All we wanted was to bring you in."
"And turn me into an a.s.sa.s.sin," I said.
"And help you to be useful," she countered. "If you weren"t cut out to be an a.s.sa.s.sin, we would have given you a job more suited to your talents." She gestured to the couch again. "Would it really hurt anything to sit down?"
What she was saying wasn"t true. My father had admitted to me that the only reason they were going to keep me alive was because they wanted me to kill for them. She was making that up. I was sure of it.
I looked at the door.
But it was that if I"d never met Griffin, I"d never have carved my name into a man"s chest.
I looked at the couch.
I sat down.
"I"m certain that facing Griffin"s true nature has deeply unsettled you," she said.
"It"s not his true nature," I said. "He isn"t like that." He wasn"t. Griffin was good and sweet and caring. So, maybe sometimes he got violent. But that was only sometimes.
"Isn"t he?" she said. "You can"t tell me you"ve never seen signs of it before. You two have been together off and on for over a year, haven"t you?"
Did she know everything about me?