Dark Abyss by Kaitlyn O'Connor (top fiction books of all time txt) 📗

She has enough brains to more than make up for her lack of sparing abilities! If you can’t keep your head on straight around her, keep your distance! She’ll play mind games with you and fuck you over forwards and backwards!”

“Jesus, Simon!” Caleb snapped. “There wasn’t a damned thing in anything we uncovered about her to suggest she’s like that! Or even that she had any connection at all with her father!”

“And yet she’s written and published a half a dozen papers condemning genetic manipulation of the human species!” Simon shot back at him. “Whether she is or was connected in any way to the attack, she is clearly a chip off the block—of a like mind with her father who considers the only good ‘mutant’ is a dead one! You need to keep that in mind when you’re dealing with her! You probably make her skin crawl.”

Caleb looked angry and a little sick. “She … clung to me.”

“Because she’s scared,” Ian said coolly. “It was probably instinct because she was more afraid of Simon right then than you—or because you offered sympathy. Don’t let her get in your head, Caleb. I hate to agree with Simon on this. I think she’s as pretty a little thing as I’ve ever seen and there are a lot of things I’d love to do to her besides interrogate her, but there’s the danger. She doesn’t need strength to beat us. She just needs to weaken us—turn us against one another.”

Caleb glanced down the hall, but he subsided. “So … we’re going to keep her here and interrogate her. I don’t see what that will gain us. Say what you like, but she convinced me she didn’t know anything useful.”

“She’s been inside his home,” Simon pointedly. “She attended a party—I still say a celebration of their victory. If that was the case, then she saw a lot. She knows what Miles Cavendish looks like—and we don’t. She knows what a lot of his people look like—because she saw them. She also knows what his home looks like. It’s a long shot.

He could’ve moved it anywhere up and down this coast or he could be heading for Europe—in fact anywhere. But it’s still something and we don’t have anything without her.”

“You don’t think we could use her as bait?”

Simon stared at Ian a long moment and finally moved to a vacant chair, settling in it heavily. “I don’t know,” he said finally, reluctant even to consider it. “If it’s true she didn’t even know the man before she met him last week … doubtful. Anybody as cold-blooded as Miles Cavendish probably doesn’t have any real attachments to anyone—let alone a young woman he doesn’t even know.”

“So … we keep her here, under wraps, until we’ve gotten what we can out of her, and then what? She’ll know our names and our faces. The minute we let her go we’re facing federal kidnapping charges. She’ll make a dash to the nearest police station and spill her guts.”

Simon shrugged. “We’re territorial lawmen. The most we have to worry about is operating outside our jurisdiction—fines and a slap on the wrist. She has terrorist connections. All we have to do is produce the evidence and the charges vanish.”

“Then why hold her here at all?” Joshua demanded. “Wouldn’t it be better to hold her at the Watch Center? This could easily be interpreted as false imprisonment—keeping her here.”

“Except the bomb made the Center unstable,” Simon pointed out and held up his hand before any of the others could comment. “There is a chance Cavendish will try to get her back—a slim one, granted, but a chance that he’ll discover his only child is being held by the people he despises. As long as there’s any chance, at all, that she could help us stop the bastard, I’m keeping her here. Like I said, if we jail her, the governor will be informed and if the feds demand her back—which they would—then we have to turn her over.”

“This is a little deep into the gray area,” Ian said.

“I don’t like it either,” Simon said grimly. “But I also don’t like the idea of waiting for the next bomb to go off.”

Caleb blew out a heavy breath. “Alright. How are we going to handle this?”

“The same way we would if we’d caught the bastard that blew up the desalinization plant. We interrogate her, keep her off-kilter until she cracks and we know we’re getting the truth out of her. If any of you just don’t think you have the stomach for it, speak now.”

* * * *

The bone deep chill that had been rattling her teeth finally eased off and some of the tension with it, but Anna was still in such a state of shock that it almost seemed that she was moving through a nightmare. She kept trying to reconcile the smiling, personable man she’d met with a cold-blooded killer and discovered she just couldn’t. A monster capable of killing so many people should look like a monster. He shouldn’t be able to project so much charisma, kindness, joviality. He shouldn’t be handsome and rich and polished.

Was it possible, at all, that they were mistaken?

They didn’t seem to think so, and she still couldn’t accept it. She hadn’t been able to accept his claims of being her father—and her patron!

Bitterness washed through her at that. She’d felt like she was making her own way, felt like her mother would’ve been proud of her if she’d been alive to see it! She’d felt that winning a grant right out of school justified her existence, underlined her importance to society.

And it hadn’t been anything but … an ego-trip for a