Page 47 of Sherwood
“Belief isn’t required,” Will said. “I’ve decrypted this shit myself. It’s all real, it’s all documented. How can you not believe her? When you can see the evidence with your own two eyes?”
I didn’t answer right away, and maybe he was a better dominant than I’d thought, because he found the thread of my thoughts more easily than he should have.
“Ahh,” he said softly. “So that’s why we’re here—why you want Lox alone before the others can get to her. You want to hear what she has to say. Maybe you’ve been watching Lackland over the last year and wondering if the idea of Ys isn’t so far-fetched after all.”
I knew my face betrayed very little, but for the first time in a long time, it was a near thing. Because he was right. He was right, and I didn’t know what to do with all the doubts swirling inside my thoughts like so much mist creeping over the sea.
When I came to Sherwood, I knew the job. I knew the target and I knew the stakes. Lox was a traitor and had to be stopped.
But the Lox I’d encountered had been the furthest thing from the Lox I’d constructed in my head since she’d left me a year ago. I’d forgotten how brightly she burned, how cleanly, like the flame off a candle, the edges as sharp and clear as her mind.
In my memory, it had been easy to turn Lox into something other than what she was—too eager to believe, maybe, or too stubborn to change her mind, or too idealistic to accept that no reality was a perfect moral landscape. But that wasn’ther, that wasn’t the actual Lox. The actual Lox wouldn’t chase a fantasy, and she certainly wouldn’t risk her friends and Marian for the sake of her own stubbornness.
And I still loved her.
As good at my job as I was, I couldn’t pretend that away.
My phone buzzed, and I pulled it out of my pocket to answer it, walking into a different part of the empty structure so Will wouldn’t hear my conversation.
“She’s approaching,” Zhang said. “You were right. She took your bait immediately.”
“She won’t want to waste any time,” I murmured, pushing aside a tattered plastic sheet to peer down the dirt road leading to the house. I’d texted her where I was with Will only an hour ago, guessing that what I’d said to her about Marian would hold true for her childhood friend too.
Love seeded lapses in judgement. Love begetted mistakes.
Whether it was old love or new love, lover-love or friend-love, it was all the same. Good people would risk everything for it, and despite what Lox believed of herself—despite what I’d used to believe of her—she was a good person. Chaotic maybe, and reckless, certainly.
But good.
“I’ll be sending Will Scarlett out once she gets here,” I told Zhang. “You’re to let him go, unfollowed.”
Zhang made a noise. “Lackland won’t be happy about this. You know he’s on a plane to Olympia as we speak, right? He wants Lox and everyone and everything associated with her, and he wants it off the books.”
Off the books was not good. Off the books meant no written reports, no memos, no records.
Off the books meant bad things could happen to Lox and there’d be no way to connect it back to the NSA or the American government, except through rumor and hearsay, and that would never be enough to make a difference.
My hand tightened around the phone, and I forced myself to sound even and calm as I said, “I still need three hours, Zhang. Just give me three hours before you let him or any of his personal jackals up here. I think I can get Lox to turn on her own, and you know that if she does, the quality of intelligence we’ll get will be so much better than if Lackland throws her into a cell somewhere and subjects her to the worst shit he can think of.”
“I’m just saying that I don’t know if I can hold him off if he gets to Sherwood faster than we plan, okay? I’ve never seen him this intense about literally anything before.”
Because if Lox is right, this information could destroy him.
“Fine,” I told Zhang. “But at least promise me nothing happens to Will Scarlett.”
“Nothing happens to Monsieur Scarlett,” Zhang said with the gusto of someone who’d had way too much fun reading Will’s file. “Scout’s honor.”
“And make sure none of Lox’s people come up here either. The last thing I need is some sort of rescue attempt derailing everything.”
“We’ll watch the perimeters, but you know as well as I do that this environment is porous as hell. I can’t promise anything.”
“I still appreciate it, Zhang. Thanks.”
I hung up, and as I dropped my hand to my side, I saw her. She’d changed into another pair of tactical pants, a dark gray this time, and she wore a thin ribbed tank top without a jacket. Her dark copper hair was tousled on the side where it was longest, and without her usual lipstick, her face looked open and young. A woman in her mid-twenties who loved combat boots and the forest she’d grown up in, nothing more.
I greeted her at the yawning concrete mouth that served as the structure’s entrance.
“No jacket?” I asked.
