Free A Gift of Thought by Sarah Wynde Page B

working with the cartels.”
    Andy shook his head. “And all you’ve got is what you heard?”
    Lucas grimaced. “I know, I know. Not admissible. Not enough for a wiretap, not enough for a search warrant, not enough for anything. But selling guns to drug dealers is about as low as a human being can go these days.”
    “The Zetas deserve their reputation.”
    “Only thing worse would be dumping guns into Somalia. And I wouldn’t put that past him.”
    Andy sighed as he turned onto the bridge into downtown DC.
    Dillon sighed, too. He desperately wanted to ask his dad questions, starting with the first one that had occurred to him: why was his mom working for a bad guy?
    *****
    Sylvie stumbled over the box on her way out the door for her morning run on Wednesday.
    Lucas.
    It had to be. Who else would find a way to get a box into a secure building and then leave it lying in the hallway?
    Not that it mattered. She wasn’t going to let him get to her.
    Bending over, she picked up the box. It was silver, light cardboard, a gift box from a department store if she had to guess. An envelope taped to the outside had her name on it. With a sigh, Sylvie tossed the box, Frisbee-style, into her apartment before closing and locking the door.
    She’d look at it after her run.
    Maybe.
    If she felt like it.
    Or maybe she’d just ignore it, try to stuff it out of her mind the way she’d been trying to stuff Lucas out for the past forty-some hours, ever since Monday morning.
    Running, though, didn’t work the way it should have. She couldn’t find the sweet spot, the place where her brain went quiet and all that mattered was the thud of her feet against the ground, the burn of her breath in her lungs, the pleasant stretch of the muscles down the back of her legs. Instead her mind kept churning.
    Lucas.
    The first time she’d met him, she hadn’t known it was him. She’d been panicking during a math final. It was the end of her junior year; she’d been in Tassamara for about six weeks; and she was about to fail geometry for the second time. And she’d studied, she had, but the classroom was so noisy, she couldn’t concentrate, and the more she stared at the paper and thought about how bad it was going to be if she failed again, the less she could remember. Then suddenly the answer to the first question was in her head. ‘42. Write it down.’
    One after another, the answers came to her. She didn’t ask questions, she just wrote them down. And that was that. End of the school year, she’d passed geometry. She was thankful for the miracle, but she tried not to think too hard about it. Because if she questioned it—well, who could she ask? Her mom had enough to worry about without thinking that her daughter might be going crazy.
    But then she met Lucas. Really met him. She’d gotten a summer job at the concession stand at the state park. She’d been storing a kayak, lifting it above her head to slot it into the storage rack, when suddenly he was helping her.
    “Thanks, but I had it,” she’d said.
    “I like helping you,” he’d answered.
    Great. Another tourist looking for a vacation fling, she’d thought. “I don’t need help.” The words were dismissive, and she’d turned her back on him without waiting for a response.
    “Ouch,” he’d said . ‘I cheated on a test for you,’ he’d thought, and she’d whirled around at the words.
    He’d grinned at her, and that was it. The dark hair, the bright blue eyes, the even features—sure, they added up to handsome, but Sylvie didn’t trust handsome. Yet when Lucas smiled it was like the sun breaking through the clouds on an overcast day.
    Never once, never, had he told her he was fifteen. And he’d been in her math class.
    Not that it would have mattered if he had. Lucas didn’t look at her like she was insane. He had his own gift and understood hers and together they were stronger; thoughts flowed back and forth between them like water running