Page 32 of Hellbent

“I washed out, okay? I didn’t make it.”

“Who was your handler?”

“Orphan Y,” she said. “Charles Van Sciver.”

Hearing the full name spoken aloud in the muffled damp of the barn—it was a profanity. For a moment Evan was unsure if she’d actually said it or if he’d conjured it, spun it into life from the primordial soup of his own obsession.

He breathed the sweet rot of old wood. His throat felt dry. “He trained you?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Until he didn’t.”

He fought to grasp the contours of this. “Van Sciver was neutralizing the remaining Orphans. Everyone that wasn’t his inner cadre.”

“Yeah, well, he decided to rev up recruitment again. More assets, more power.”

A stab of eagerness punctured Evan’s confusion. “So that’s the package? Information on Van Sciver.”

“No,” she said. “I don’t have any of that.”

“Then what were you doing in that apartment?”

“I lived there,” she said. “What were you doing in that apartment?”

“Jack Johns sent me.”

Her stance shifted at once, forward ready. “Who the hell are you? How do you know Jack Johns?”

“He was my handler.”

“Bullshit,” she said. “Bullshit. Where is he?”

“He’s dead.”

Her eyes welled with an abruptness that caught him off guard, emotion rushing to the surface. “I knew it. You killed him.”

“Jack was a father to me.”

“No. No.” Her hands were balled up tightly. “If that was true, if he was your handler, you wouldn’t have killed those cops.”

“I didn’t.”

“Never let an innocent die.”

“The cops are all—” He cut off in midsentence. “What did you just say?”

It seemed all the oxygen had gone out of the barn.

“Nothing.”

“The Tenth Commandment,” Evan said.

She glowered at him. And then her face shifted, just slightly.

No one would have gotten the Commandments out of Jack. Evan knew that. Which meant she knew it, too.

“The First,” she said. “What’s the First Commandment?”

“‘Assume nothing.’” He drew in a breath. “The Eighth?”