Run to Ground(133)

“Not yet.” Kaylee fought to keep her expression untroubled. After going over the new persona that Mateo Espina had created for her, Kaylee had wanted to cry. No, she’d wanted to scream and kick things and roll around on the floor and have a complete and utter tantrum like a two-year-old. The disappearance expert had stripped her of her six years of hard-earned college education, both her undergrad and grad-school work, and replaced it all with a GED. A GED. She didn’t even get to keep her status as high-school valedictorian. All of those double shifts at the factory and sleepless nights spent studying had been for nothing.

She took a deep breath, reminding herself for the hundredth time that a life of minimum wage and limited personal space was a small price to pay for not getting tortured to death.

“I have to go job hunting,” she added. Her tone was as flat as she felt.

“Okay, well, just let us know when you need the bathroom in the mornings, and we’ll work around your schedule.” One of the teenage twins made a sound of protest, but a look from Jules had him turning it into a cough.

“What’d you do?” the other twin asked.

Kaylee looked at him quizzically, but Jules must have understood his meaning, because she gave him a stern glare. “Tio, zip it.”

It finally registered with Kaylee what he’d been asking. Although he didn’t press the question, everyone except for Jules was staring at her with varying degrees of interest and wariness. Not for the first time, she wondered why Jules and her siblings had had to run. Mr. Espina had told her that they’d take Kaylee in because Jules owed him a favor. Kaylee figured that had to mean that he’d helped this family disappear, too. Had they witnessed something, like Kaylee had? They stared back at her, obviously wondering the same thing about her. From the wary looks they were giving her, she could only imagine what heinous crimes they imagined she’d committed to be forced her to change her identity and share their house.

“Nothing.” Kaylee figured she’d better say something before they mentally convicted her of mass murder. “I just…saw something. Something bad that a powerful man didn’t want me to see.”

“Like a mob hit?” the other twin, Ty, asked.

Kaylee couldn’t stop a wince when his words touched a little too close to home. “No.”

“A drive-by shooting?” Apparently, the twins weren’t going to leave it alone.

“An assassination?”

“Someone planting a bomb?”

“A kidnapping?”

Everyone went still, the air thick with tension, until Jules broke it with a clap that made every single person in the hallway flinch. “Sorry. How would you like to see your room?”

Honestly, Kaylee would rather not see her room, since she could only imagine what it would be like. It was in this collapsing house of horrors, after all. Jules looked so desperately optimistic, however, that Kaylee couldn’t find it in herself to crush her hostess. Instead of allowing her true feelings to escape, she swallowed back all the emotion that had been building from the moment she walked into Martin’s basement room.

“Sounds good.”

Kaylee followed Jules to the base of the stairs, the kids close behind them. Since no one could see her face, Kaylee allowed her forced smile to drop. It probably just looked like she’d been baring her teeth anyway. Maybe once they’d shown her to her room, she could lock herself inside and have the shrieking, stomping, pillow-punching tantrum she’d been dying to have since her life had been stolen from her. The entire time Kaylee had been traveling to Monroe, Colorado, she’d been terrified. Everyone—from the gas station attendant to the woman in the next public bathroom stall—had been a potential associate of Martin Jovanovic.

A potential assassin.

Kaylee’s foot had just touched the first step when the front door swung open, startling her into turning. There, framed in the doorway, backlit by the afternoon sun, stood a cop with a police dog by his side.

Officer Jovanovic’s face flashed in her mind, and her head spun with instant panic. That had been so fast. She’d just arrived at the supposed safe house, and Martin had already found her. Kaylee grabbed at the banister to catch her balance. Her fingers felt thick and useless, but she managed to grip the wood. She braced, waiting for the shouting, for the cop or the dog to tackle her and handcuff her and put her in the squad car and drive her who-knew-where to her grisly death. Everything in front of her went gray.

“Viggy!” Dee ran to the dog, petting him as he pressed his head into her stomach. The cop smiled down at them.

Jules brushed by her as she headed for the cop. Kaylee sucked back a protest, wanting to scream for her to run, not to get closer, not to grab his hand and smile up at him in greeting.