Page 57 of Destroyed With You

“All right. I’ll concede that Seagrave won’t look here. But what about somebody else? What if it’s Collins? He or Hawthorne search for Winston Starr, track down your family, and there you go.”

He clears his throat, the tips of his ears turning slightly red.

I lift a brow. “Winston?”

“Yeah, well, there’s something else I need to tell you.”

I shift in the seat to look more directly at him. “All right. You have my attention.”

“My last name isn’t really Starr.”

“Oh.” That one genuinely surprises me. Especially since I have a marriage certificate with that name on it. “What is it?”

“It’s complicated.”

“I’m a good listener and reasonably clever. Try me.”

He grimaces, but complies. “I applied to be an FBI agent right out of college. I was actually at Quantico when I got recruited into the SOC. And, I don’t know. Maybe I’d seen too many movies, but when they described the kinds of missions I could expect, I started to worry. Not about me, but about my family.”

“Good God,” I say. “What kind of insane recruitment films do they show over at the SOC?”

“It was all my imagination, but it was vivid. I had visions of me hanging by my toenails, finally managing to get free only to find out that my parents were in a cage in the basement, and the only way I could save them was if I shared state secrets.”

I smirk, genuinely amused. But I also understand. “So you changed your name?”

“That was one of my prerequisites to agreeing to sign on with the SOC,” he says. “I told the recruiting officer that I wanted to make sure my parents wouldn’t get drawn in if I was tortured. I think he was just amused enough to agree to my demand.”

I nod, fascinated.

“He helped me set up an essentially unbreakable alias. My brother had always teased me calling me too noble for my own good, and so I started going by the last name of Noble.”

“I thought your middle name was Noble.”

He shrugs. “I took on Starr for the Hades mission. When we got married, I wanted you to at least have heard the name I’d chosen for myself, so I told you it was my middle name. And now—well, now I mostly go by Starr, anyway. I wanted to keep it after … well, just after.”

“After me,” I say softly.

He nods, and I feel that little twinge in my heart.

“On paper, I’m Winston Noble. But my friends know me as Starr.”

“Sounds confusing.”

He smiles. “It’s really not.”

“Well, it explains a lot. After you left Orange County I couldn’t find you anymore.”

“You looked for me?”

“I did.”

Our eyes meet and hold for a moment until I glance away. I clear my throat. “But what’s your actual birth last name?”

“Kellogg,” he says.

“I like it. It’s a nice strong name. But I like Noble and Starr better.” I frown as something else occurs to me. “What about your parents. Do they know about the name?”

He shrugs. “I just played it up to paranoia in law enforcement. They watch a lot of movies. Wasn’t hard to make the case that the point of my alias was to protect my family from bad guys.” He glances at me. “To be honest, I think my dad suspects my law enforcement career goes beyond the Sheriff’s Department. But he’s cool enough not to have ever asked.”