Page 3 of Lone Wolf

He wasn’t answering his RoamZone phone, which had happened precisely never in all the time she’d known him, not once since he’d slammed into her on a mission way back and they’d gotten stuck with each other. X kinda sorta looked after her and she looked after him, too, because if left to his own devices, he would’ve fallen desperately behind when it came to digital intrusion (and, like, interpersonal skills). And besides, someone had to make sure the world’s most dangerous assassin didn’t embarrass himself.

Even though she was seventeen and he was, like, late-thirties old, they had some stuff in common, her and Evan, like that they were both recruited out of broke-ass foster homes into the full-black Orphan Program by three-letter-agency types intent on turning them into disposable weapons. Joey had washed out early on ’cuz turned out that while hacking was her love language, killing enemies of the state in violation of international law wasn’t so much her jam. And X—after neutralizing boo-koo targets in boo-koo time zones—had proven to be not so disposable once he’d parted ways with the Program, so the joke was on the government asshats who thought they could take him down.

Not that they’d stopped trying.

Since Evan had been on his own, he took pro bono missions under the guise of the Nowhere Man, who (Movie Trailer Voice:) Helped the Powerless and Downtrodden Who Had Nowhere Left to Turn.

A secret phone number passed from one client to the next: 1-855-2-NOWHERE. When someone in the seriously worst moment of their life dialed the line, the call got split into digital packets and filtered through a host of encrypted virtual-private-network tunnels on various continents before it rang through to the RoamZone.

The one thing you could count on in this screwed-up world?

The Nowhere Man would answer.

Which is why, after seventy-two hours of him not picking up, Joey had finally caved in to her mounting concerns and broken into his place to see what the hell was going on. The front door, with its labyrinth of internal security bars, water core to deter battering rams, and murderers’ row of next-level dead bolts, was a pretty good disincentive for mortals who were not her. She’d gotten through it before, though it had taken a half hour, two sizes of bump keys, a Dangerfield Z-wrench, a .023-inch-gauge half-diamond pick, and a copious serving of light-viscosity spray lubricant (insert gross dude joke here). So the next time she’d been over and Evan had retreated to meditate on his floating bed, she’d taken an impression of his key to save time in the future.

Now here she was, alone in the deserted penthouse.

She’d been standing frozen on the poured-concrete floor for maybe ten minutes trying to make her brain believe what her eyes were feeding her.

The RoamZone.

Sitting on the kitchen island.

Abandoned by X as surely as she had been.

She felt a weightlessness in her stomach, a roller-coaster drop where her body couldn’t catch up to the rules of physics.

X was reliable.

X honored his word.

X had that phone on him always.

The Second Commandment decreed it: How you do anything is how you do everything.

Evan stuck to that edict with the same OCD meticulousness with which he kept his penthouse psychotically spotless and tidy.

The Nowhere Man didn’t take breaks. He wasn’t allowed to. The very thought was a perversion of natural law.

She realized she’d forgotten to breathe, and she gulped in a hunk of air and finally broke eye contact with the abandoned phone.

Like Evan, the seven-thousand-square-foot condo was designed for maximum efficiency. Slab, stone, stainless-steel fixtures. The floor-to-ceiling windows made the penthouse’s floating starkness apparent, like a Scandinavian tree house hovering twenty-one stories above Wilshire Boulevard. With its discreet-armor sunshades and glass walk-in vodka freezer, it usually felt cool and contemporary.

But today it felt like a crypt.

Her legs were growing numb.

What the hell could have gotten to Evan? What made him disappear?

His last mission had been crazier than most. At its conclusion, he’d gone to Texas in search of the biological father he’d never known, a onetime rodeo cowboy named Jacob Baridon. Even though X had been resistant to the whole thing, Joey had tracked down the location for him behind his back.

Had he caught up to his father?

Was that what had pushed him over the edge?

Or was it something worse?

And if he had disappeared ’cuz of something to do with his bio dad, did that mean this was all her fault?