Boarlander Silverback (Boarlander Bears #3)(51)

“Finn?”

“No.”

She’d expected that clipped response. It was his go-to whenever she tried to talk to him. Alison screwed her face up with concern and pitched her voice higher. “Look what I found in the woods.”

He dropped the tennis ball and turned in his chair, his eyes flashing with worry. And for an instant, when he locked eyes on the device on her palm, there was a spark of recognition. Mother f*cker.

“Where did you find that?”

“In a tree. Finn, someone is watching us. Why do you think they would do that? Who would do that?”

His bright blue eyes tightened at the corners, and he stood and retrieved his ball. “Hell if I know, Holman.” Now he wasn’t meeting her gaze, and she had to hold back huffing a breath. Un-freakin-believable. She didn’t know why they were really stationed here, but that didn’t mean Finn wasn’t aware.

He wasn’t her partner at all. Maybe he was the one sent to babysit her. But for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out why.

“Do you think there are more?” she asked, still feigning worry. This was the part she was good at. Acting scared, acting stupid, wondering out loud. Ask a human a direct question and their instinct was to answer. Every time. Too bad for Finn she was almost as good as a shifter at sniffing out a lie. Years undercover had honed her instincts for people.

“Probably not. It’s probably Damon keeping tabs on us.”

If Finn really believed it was Damon, he would be pitching a way bigger fit and searching the woods for more. He was full up to his eyeballs with bullshit.

“Sooo,” she drawled out, “this is nothing to worry about?”

“I don’t know, Holman. I mean, shit! Do you expect me to know every answer in the goddamned world?” Defensiveness—a huge counterpart to lying. Get angry and take the focus off the fib. “What are you so worried the dragon will see, Holman? Your boyfriend sneaking in here to f*ck you like an animal every night? Huh? You worried he’ll see you drying your laundry, drinking a beer, or taking a f*cking hike?”

She leveled him with an empty smile. “I didn’t tell you where I’d found the camera, Finn.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But the whites in his eyes said he knew he was busted.

“I drink an occasional beer on the back porch. I keep the back door unlocked for Kirk to come spend time with me as he pleases. I hike in the back woods and dry my laundry on a line out behind my cabin. And somehow you knew where the camera was placed.” He knew where all of them had been placed. She wanted to strangle him for whatever betrayal he was pulling. “Good f*cking guess, partner. Get out.”

“This is my post too—”

“Get out of my cabin!” she screamed, shaking with rage as she jammed her finger toward the door.

Finn stood, hate in his eyes, teeth gritted like he loathed the sight of her. The feeling was mutual. “Our superiors have to watch you to make sure you don’t f*ck up again, Holman. They’re making sure you’re safe to be in the field. I’m here because you can’t be trusted not to go psychotic again.”

Lies.

Finn strode to the door and opened it wide, allowing the saturated afternoon light in. “If you hadn’t f*cked everything up, if you hadn’t been a colossal failure, neither of us would be up here in this hell. The cameras are here because you’re a worthless undercover cop who can’t be integrated back into society without parameters. PTSD.” Finn spat on the wooden floor. “Fuckin’ weak.”

He slammed the door behind him so hard it rattled the cabin. Alison squatted down and covered her ears with her hands as an anguished sob wrenched from her throat.

Lies, lies, lies!

Finn was blaming her because he was busted. This wasn’t her fault. Not her fault. Riggs’s gasping face slashed across her mind, and she shook her head hard to rattle the vision away. His eyes had been so scared, but he’d shaken his head slightly. Don’t help me. They’ll kill you. Don’t blow your cover. Don’t do anything.

And she was supposed to allow his murderer to kill the last good parts of her, too? No. She didn’t regret going cold. Didn’t regret going numb. Didn’t regret choking the life from that man. She’d done it tearless because she’d seen too much by that time to feel pain anymore, emotional or otherwise. Kirk had watched Kong tortured, and he’d said he went dead inside…well, she knew that feeling intimately. Knew what it was like to snap. To have enough and not want to feel pain anymore, so she’d turned it off. Her feelings, her humanity, all of it. And now, her flashbacks were always the same. Riggs’s face. Riggs’s pain. She barely remembered killing his murderer, and for the life of her, she couldn’t bring herself to feel guilty.

Oh, she knew what that said about her. She’d taken a life remorselessly.

She wasn’t Ghost. She was Monster.

Finn was good at games. He knew which buttons to push. Mock her pain, mock what she’d been through, and suddenly she was falling apart instead of focusing on what she’d just learned. If he didn’t place the cameras, he knew who did. Well, f*ck him and whatever sketchy mission he was on.

Alison stood and strode for her room. Where there was fire, there was gasoline. Cameras wouldn’t be the only thing she had to worry about. She wiped the sleeve of her hoodie over her cheeks and rifled through her drawers, turned over the bedside table, searched the lamp, the mattress, the bedframe, her suitcase. After turning her room upside down, and then the rest of the house, she found three bugs, which meant someone had been listening to every word she said to Finn. Every word she said to Kirk when he’d spent the night in here with her. They’d listened to Kirk’s first I love you. They’d stolen private moments from her, and for what? There was no reason for her and Finn to even be here! The shifters posed no threat to anyone. They never had.