Page 70 of Seven
He thought about the woman. About all the women like her, crawling to him, begging for attention and relevance.
They were insects.
He felt nothing for them.
Not even disgust.
They deserved to be fucked and discarded.
The investigator was already waiting when Caius walked into his office two days later.
"I want you to look into Kimberly Holt deeper," Caius ordered coldly.
"Want me to keep following her?" Talbot asked.
"More than that. I need you to find the connection between her and our mystery man." Caius's voice was all clean precision—no rage now, only the sterile charge of a surgeon's gloves snapping tight. "Start with the usual—background, phone, finances. Look for any hint of relationship, contact, or mutual employer. I don't want conjecture. I want hard, undeniable facts."
"Of course."
"If she's working with that man, she's not as harmless as she looks."
Two minutes later, Talbot was gone.
Caius smiled. He relished when the game became intriguing. If that was the case now, he intended to savor every moment of it.
27 kimmy
I spent an hour staring at the new burner Operative Seven had given me.
Not in a poetic, longing way. I just sat on my couch in the dark, feeling the measly weight of the device in my hand. The rest of the apartment had faded to grayscale. Only the phone mattered.
I wondered why he'd given it to me, unsure that I believed the explanation that he'd provided.
I'd told myself a dozen times I was over this, but I wasn't.
If I'm in danger, just tell me.
You're not if I'm around.
And then he vanished like a professional hallucination, and I hadn't heard back from him in days. The emptiness left behind was the kind that expanded to fill whatever container you put it in. It leaked into my coffee, my work, my dreams.
The nights were the worst, always the worst.
I didn't understand this emotion, this strange attachment to the person whose face I'd never seen. I hadn't felt this way—or ever—before.
I debated calling the new number but the little voice in my head said he wasn't my friend, he wasn't someone I could just dial to chat about my mental state.
If you want to call someone, call Brynn.
But my relationship with Brynn had gotten complex. She kept on if I had anything to do with the news articles about Ronan Wick and Jerico Thorne. I had no choice but to kept my distance to avoid getting her in trouble.
After a while, I snorted and said out loud, "Fuck it." Then I hit the call button.
The phone rang once before I heard a click.
"Are you in danger?" The voice was even colder than I remembered. Like he'd been stored in a freezer for a few days, then thawed just for this.
I opened my mouth, wondering if he had this number programmed into his phone.
