Page 55 of Nothing to Fear

It was the only thing not on her.

As she ducked into the car and grabbed the backpack, he checked his wound. The blood flow was cause for concern. He needed to clean and suture the wound. Sooner rather than later.

Holding up her handbag, she spun around to face him. He unzipped the bag and stuck the black wand inside.

A high-pitched chirp bleeped.

“How?” she breathed.

He yanked out her wallet and dropped the bag. The chirps grew louder in a rising crescendo.

Damn it. He should have swept her at the mall before they’d nabbed a vehicle. He never made mistakes like this, always saw every angle. Closed every loophole. Every mission completed.

This was his fault they’d found her, even though the question of how pricked his mind. “I don’t know how this made it past our security protocol.”

He chucked the wallet over the balcony toward the outdoor platform for the Metro trains.

Willow’s eyes grew wide as she gasped. “No.”

He steered her into the car.

“My pictures,” she breathed.

“Pictures?” He sped down the exit ramp, tires screeching on every sharp turn.

“Of my parents, in my wallet.” She squeezed her eyes shut.

Grimacing at his lack of sensitivity, he tore out of the parking garage. “I’m sorry. There was no time. I wasn’t thinking about—”

“Don’t apologize. You did what was best.” She wrung her hands, opening her eyes. “There’s R&D on stealth surveillance. Expensive, next-gen tech that’s not on the market. Designed to avoid detection unless activated.”

Gideon swore under his breath in four languages. Even if he had swept her at the mall, the bug might not have been active then. “We’ll worry about the tech later. For now, we need to get the hell out of Dodge.”

“Why do people use that phrase? What’s wrong with Dodge that people always want to leave it?”

“It’s from Gunsmoke, an old show.” Reruns used to play on TV when he was little. “It was set in Dodge City, Kansas, during the settlement of the American West. Nothing was wrong with Dodge—the opposite, in fact. The sheriff always warned the villain to get out of town, to protect the city.”

“Seems odd for you to use it in this context.”

Perhaps it did. He’d said it without thinking.

He made a beeline for I-95. The interstate was a straight shot southbound to the Occoquan River neighborhood he’d scoped out online. His exit strategy from Virginia was still solid.

Willow opened the med kit, grabbing an all-in-one adhesive gauze pad, the perfect solution to get him through until he could properly tend to his wound. The pads were pretreated with a microdispersed oxidized cellulose called Celox—a blood-clotting agent to temporarily stop the bleeding. He should’ve thought of it. Basic Survival 101. And he would’ve too, if his brain wasn’t misfiring.

What in the hell was wrong with him?

Rookie mistakes like these put operatives in body bags.

She ripped open a packet of Sani-Hands wipes and cleaned her hands. Leaning over, she tucked his jacket to the side and peeled his shirt gingerly away from the gummy blood with her fingers. It didn’t seem to make her squeamish.

The more he learned about her, the more he admired her. She kept her head in life-or-death situations, sharp-witted enough to patch him up, and she was a fighter.

She’d apparently set a merc on fire from the looks of his torched face. A quick-thinking, ballsy move. And when that fucker had grabbed her, she’d clawed like a rabid alley cat scrapping for all nine lives. He never would’ve guessed, before all this went down, that such a fierce spirit lurked beneath her shy veneer.

She dabbed away blood from around the wound and put the pad on with a tender touch, patting the edges to seal it.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood. Are you light-headed?”