A wild look on her face.
We gaze into each other’s eyes for a moment.
I don’t dare break the moment.
“The day I broke into the FBI,” she finally says. “She shouldn’t have been there. I went to her house earlier to convince her to do it with me. It was too easy. And then she—anyway, I decided to do it solo. Which is why I wasn’t on top of my game. We had been drinking; I didn’t plan properly?—“
Her voice trails off again. A rock appears in my throat, and I don’t know why.
“And then she came to your rescue?” I ask.
“She did. She shouldn’t have known. She shouldn’t have agreed. She told me she took the same route I came through, the one she said she’d never use. She said the best way was through the front entrance.”
The hair on my arms stands up.
“We can’t find her, because we have been looking in all the wrong places,” she says and finally stops pacing.
I stare at her. Her eyes are wide. Flushed cheeks. She is worked up. Emotional. Moved. Her chest is heaving up and down. It is such an emotionally loaded topic for her. I have never seen her this emotional before, and there is only one thing I can imagine someone cold like her would be this emotional about.
I have a million other questions about where she’s heading, but there is only one I need an answer to right now.
I close the distance between her and me.
“Avery,” I breathe out. “Did Hedda ever touch you?”
The reaction happens in real time, in slow motion. Her pupils dilate, followed by a swallow, a twitch of her head, the rollingof her shoulders, before she slips back into her baseline of cold arrogance.
I know the next thing I will hear is a lie, because I got too close to her.
“No,” she says distantly.
“Liar,” I say.
A derogatory look radiates over me.
“Are you here to pretend to trust me?” she asks.
“No,” I say, and scoff.
“Who’s the liar now?” she says derogatorily and turns away.
So she knows.
She knows why I came here.
But right now, I am not playing her.
But I will not let her get away with this.
I grab her shoulder.
She reacts fast.
Turns, hits my arm away, and pushes me backward into the wall with her forearm pressing against my throat.
Her lips purse in pure disdain.
I could free myself, but I don’t want to. Anger is good. Anger is what makes people reckless with their secrets.