Free Taming the Fire by Sydney Croft

sip of her Caramel Macchiato and glancing around the outdoor café in Frankfurt, where she'd been spending the past month. “Obviously, I'm fine.”
    Mose—or ML, as he called himself these days—sighed on the other end of the line. Nothing she hadn't heard before from him, the same way she'd heard it from her mother and father years earlier. “You're never fine. Don't you think you've been on the run long enough?”
    “I don't consider it running.” As she spoke, she typed in the code that allowed her to access the bank accounts of some of the richest men in Germany. She had no plans to change their status, but knowing she could satisfied her almost as much as the caffeine.
    Why she did it was more of a mystery than the how—numbers had always been her thing, had come as easily to her as breathing from the time she was a little girl. When her formal education ended in eighth grade, as was the tradition in her Amish sect, she'd continued studying everything she could in mathematics and science, using books and papers smuggled to her from other Amish teens, fresh from their rumspringa . Mose helped her with this—had made friends with a group of older boys who roamed through the Amish areas riding their dirt bikes. He'd sneak out with them at night and come home with various gifts for Meg, like the laptop he'd brought her.
    At night, she'd connect to the single working phone line in the house—used for emergencies only—and she'd learned about the world beyond her narrow one.
    Her earliest memory was of wanting independence so fiercely it made her teeth ache.
    Growing up, she and Mose never seemed to fit in with the community. At times, her parents would stare at them as if they were aliens.
    They'd done the same to her sister, Mary. Like their sister before them, Meg and Mose had left their community and been ostracized.
    The big difference was that they were alive. Mary had gotten sick—cancer—and her parents had refused to help her. To even take her calls.
    Meg spoke to her once—Mary's voice was barely a whisper. And then their mother had come by and hung up the phone.
    Later, Meg caught her mother crying, and Meg's young mind couldn't rectify believing in something that forced you to act so cruelly.
    “How can something that professes to be all about goodness have so much bad in it?” she'd asked her brother once, after they'd been on their own for five years.
    “It's their belief system, Meg. Sometimes people need something to hold on to,” Mose had said.
    “You don't hate them anymore?”
    “For years, I thought I did. But then, well, everyone needs something to believe in.”
    Everything she did for a long time was to defy her parents and her old faith—these days, it was all about repenting for her own wrongs.
    When she and Mose finished their rumspringa , they'd chosen not to go back and be baptized. Which meant they were both shunned by their family and the entire community, as was the tradition. As painful as that break was, for Meg—for Mose as well—there had been no other choice.
    And so, she'd been freed—free, scared and exhilarated at the same time.
    The woman Mose loved did return to the community, no matter how hard he'd tried to convince her not to. Meg knew that had broken Mose's heart—that he still didn't trust any woman, beyond Meg, to keep her word.
    They'd waited six hours for her to show before Mose finally started the old car he'd rebuilt from scrap and headed toward Florida.
    The easygoing surfer-boy attitude covered the man of steel, the one who'd always needed to prove that he could be good enough. And he had proven it, the way he'd learned from Abe Goldman, a man he'd met as soon as they'd gotten to Miami.
    Abe's pawnshop fronted a money-laundering operation in the back. At first, she and Mose only worked the front of the store, but eventually Mose was let in on the illegal business.
    Abe left the store—the money operation—to Mose when he died. Had thought of Mose