Free You Are Mine by Jackie Ashenden Page A

insidious grief wound through her, but she ignored that too.
    Right now she had to be strong, not give in to any weaker feelings.
    â€œFantastic,” she said, hoping she sounded bright and unaffected. “Well, I guess I’ll see you around. I’ll let you know if we catch the murderer and smash the human trafficking ring, huh? Or maybe I won’t since you don’t seem to give a shit.”
    â€œEva—”
    She hit the disconnect button. Probably with more force than strictly necessary but what the hell. Her hand was shaking. Fuck it.
    Furious, she dialed Alex. “Hey,” she said when he answered. “I’ve got our guy. The one in your video. Want to come along and help me interrogate him?”
    There was a silence—clearly Alex needed time to process this. Then at last he said, “Well, obviously. But don’t you usually take Zac with you?”
    She didn’t want to talk about Zac and his stupid ultimatum. Or about the fact that he’d up and left. In fact, let him be the one to tell Alex and Gabe he’d left them all high and dry. She wasn’t going to do his dirty work for him.
    â€œHe’s busy,” she said shortly. “I thought you might like to come along as backup.”
    There was another pause. No, she was not going to say, I need . She didn’t need him. But talking to this guy by herself would be a dumb move, especially with all the threats that had been pointed her way recently. The smart thing to do would be to not go alone. Which meant Alex, because he was a known quantity.
    â€œCount me in then.” Alex’s voice held a steel edge to it. “We’ll bring Katya too. She might be useful when it comes to … interrogating.”
    â€œGreat.” Eva tried to sound bright. “I’ll send you the guy’s address. We should probably move on this now, so what say I meet you outside his apartment building in an hour.”
    Five minutes later, the address sent to Alex and her limo ordered, Eva pulled on a black beanie and shrugged on her leather jacket, stuffing some soft woolen fingerless gloves into her pocket as she took the elevator down to her front door.
    Where she halted, the familiar, crawling sensation that she always got just before she opened the door inching down her spine. Sometimes, if she was very lucky, it wouldn’t be there at all. But lately it seemed that every time she went outside, she’d feel it. As if the crosshairs of a gun were targeted at her back. Normally she’d just grit her teeth and ignore the feeling, forcing herself to pretend it wasn’t there.
    Yet today, now, it felt like the sensation was prickling over her entire body, chilling her skin, sitting coldly in her gut like all her insides had frozen solid.
    You’re scared to go outside.
    No, fuck that, she wasn’t scared. She didn’t know where this feeling had come from or why it was significantly worse today, but she’d do what she always did. Open the damn door and get on with her damn day.
    She put out her hand and quickly keyed in the code that would open the door. Her security system was probably a little over the top for what she needed but Zac had installed it himself and …
    â€œNever. We will never catch up again.”
    Eva made a growling noise in her throat as the cold inside her solidified a little more. She stabbed at the buttons, gritting her teeth as the door unlocked and she was able to pull it open.
    The cold March air flooded in, finding the gaps in her clothing, whispering over her skin. It was a beautiful day. A plane traced a white trail through the sky like icing over a pristine blue cake, and she was conscious of the buildings on either side of her own, reaching like hands to snatch that plane out of the sky.
    She didn’t look at them, keeping her gaze fixed on the long, black limo that waited at the curb. And like it always did, that gnawing, desperate tension