Free Dying by the Hour (A Jesse Sullivan Novel Book 2) by Kory M. Shrum Page A

pops back into place. Winston lets out a startled grunt from the floor and I give him a reassuring nudge with my foot.
    Her cheeks redden. “Brinkley should have planned this better. The three of us are not enough.”
    “Don’t Black Ops operate in small tactical units?”
    “You, Brinkley and I do not make a tactical unit. I’m surprised Lane and Ally aren’t doing more.”
    “Lane would help but he’s trying to get his certification and Ally—” I say. “I think she needs a vacation, not more work.”
    Gloria’s gaze narrows. “She still loves you.”
    I shrug and force a tight laugh. “Yeah, she’s just tired of my shit.”
    “She just has her own way of doing things,” Gloria says, twisting open a new 2-liter of Coke.
    Yeah, without me , I think. And then, it’s your own damn fault. Did you think she’d be happy you got all monogamous with Lane? Would you be happy?
    “No,” I murmur to myself because Gloria has stopped listening to my girl problems. Something else has darkened her features.
    “Any signs of the other player?” I ask, taking a guess.
    The other player is what we’ve taken to calling the mystery A.M.P. up Caldwell’s sleeve. He—or she—has already managed to outsmart Gloria a couple of times. That can’t be easy on the ego.
    “I want to be sure,” she says.
    “You’re the best at what you do, G,” I say. “You were just caught off guard. We all were.
    How they hell were we supposed to know someone was viewing you ? We couldn’t have.”
    I try to reassure her, but she still looks so defeated, standing in her yellow kitchen with its aged yellow counter tops and yellow-brown floor. Even the fridge is the color of spicy mustard and the cabinets—you guessed it—yellow metal matching her card table turned dining set. Only the white sheer curtain covering the small window above the kitchen sink looks like it’s been bought in this decade.
    My phone goes off and Lane’s picture appears in the screen. It hits me like a thump in the chest that Ally hasn’t called me all day. She used to call multiple times a day to check on me, and that was only when she couldn’t be with me.
    Maybe she really is, slowly and painfully, untangling herself from my life.
     

Ally
     
    I ’m exhausted. My limbs are little more than wet bags of sand.
    The stairwell to my apartment building is dim and quiet as I trudge my grocery bags up the stairs and then down the narrow hallway to my door. My keys are impossibly loud as they jingle and clank against the wooden frame and metal lock.
    As soon as I close the door behind me, I fall against it. Home .
    I feel like I haven’t seen it for years.
    Immediately, I dig through the bags for the chocolate and cleave a giant truffle in half with my teeth. I put on the kettle for a cup of tea and while it builds steam, I put away my groceries.
    Only then do I settle into my fluffy chaise by the balcony. The heat of the tea warms the cup and my hands. There are no windows because my apartment is an interior room, but the balcony lets in the light of orange streetlamps framing the parking lot and the high half-moon above.
    Jesse may not have a choice.
    I remember the night of her suicide. I’ve played it over and over in my head many times. I said go to sleep. We’ll talk at school . Because it was in the middle of the night and my mom had yelled at me because she’d called so late. But I should have known something was wrong. I should have known that slur in her voice wasn’t sleepiness. But how could I have known she was calling to tell me goodbye.
    And then there were the dreams. Jesse is always in this white night gown. The blaze of the pole barn her father built before we met, before he died, lit up the whole night. In the dream, she is always walking toward it, slowly, deliberately, as if entranced.
    I’m always behind, screaming and screaming her name. I beg her to stop, beg her not to go into the fire but she does anyway.
    Every time.
    And I can