Thin Lines (The Child Thief #3)(101)

I’d agreed to that part of the plan extremely reluctantly. Though, it had also been a distant possibility at the time, as we’d still had to actually get to the distribution center and then find a truck.

Now that we were here, and I could see the size of these things, I was starting to really rethink how cooperative I’d been.

I threw open the blue truck’s door and hurled myself up into the seat, then started digging around for the keys. On the floorboard beneath the seat. No. Up above me, tucked into the visor. No. I threw myself across to the other seat and tugged at the handle of the glove compartment, trying desperately to think of where else someone might hide keys. But there was nothing in there but a bunch of paperwork, which I pulled out in a rush and then left all over the floor.

I jumped to my feet and turned toward the back of the cab, wondering desperately if the driver, smarter than the guy who owned the red truck, had kept the keys on him rather than leaving them lying around.

I rushed into the back compartment—no wall this time—and looked quickly around, my gaze rushing over more bunk beds, also empty, and another tiny bathroom. No one here. Well, that solved the key problem, then. Without the driver, this truck was a no-go.

I was just turning to get back out of the truck when I heard a scuffle going on outside, along with several shouts—and then Jace calling my name, his voice hoarse with something that sounded an awful lot like panic.

I rushed out of the back compartment of the truck, horrified at the idea that something had gone wrong and we were caught, and then came skidding to a halt in the space between the two seats.

There, standing on the ground outside the truck and staring up at me, his soft brown eyes wide with shock, surprise, and horror… was Henry.





40





“Robin?” he gasped, his forehead suddenly creasing into a frown. “What on earth are you doing in my truck? And who are these people?”

He gestured to my friends, who were standing behind him with their mouths open—either from the shock of the truck’s driver suddenly showing up… or the shock of him knowing my name. I couldn’t tell which. Jace, I saw, had his gun out and was pointing it directly at the back of Henry’s head.

Crap.

I stepped quickly past the driver’s seat of the truck and onto the sideboard, and then jumped down to the ground. Jace and Henry both immediately put hands out to catch me, then glanced at the other and dropped their hands awkwardly.

I felt about the same, and looked from one of them to the other, my mouth opening and closing like a gaping fish’s. Of all the gin joints in all the world, I suddenly thought, the line from some old movie coming rapidly into my mind. This didn’t make any sense whatsoever. The last time I’d seen Henry, he’d been on his way out the door, having just told me that he’d taken a transfer to another factory far away from me—and that he was leaving me there with his parents, my life ruined, my own family nothing but a memory, all my schooling gone to waste.

And my daughter gone, too, courtesy of the Ministry and the poverty-stricken life I’d managed to get myself into.

I never thought I’d see him again. Not in a million years. Particularly not now, when we were in the middle of something so important.

And that was the thought that suddenly got me moving again. I didn’t have time to stand around gaping at him.

“Henry, what the hell are you doing here?” I asked.

“What am I doing here? What are you doing here? And what are you doing in my truck?”

He looked past me and up into the cab, as if he was suspicious that I’d done something to it, and I almost laughed. Because there was no way in hell that I could tell him what I’d been doing in his truck. Unless…

Suddenly, I realized that there might be an easy way to tell him what I’d been doing, and a way to solve the problem we were currently in.

We’d been planning to kidnap a driver… So now it turned out that my ex-boyfriend was the driver of the truck in question. Why not just kidnap Henry?

I stared at him, wondering how much we could trust him.

“This is your truck?” I asked, turning around to look back up into it. “You drive trucks now?”

“I do,” he said shortly. “And I’m not telling you anything else until you tell me what the hell is going on. And you should know that your face, and your friends’ faces”—he gestured to the people standing behind him—“are all over the inside of the truck stop over there. They’re labeling you a… a terrorist.”

He ended the sentence weakly, almost as a question, and I stared at him for a minute, then gave him a nod. Right. Well, the whole story it was, then. I didn’t see any way around it. This boy had been my first love, and he’d loved me once. Or at least he’d come close. He’d been shot trying to defend me, for goodness’ sake.

Surely he still had a little bit of feeling for me. I’d trusted him with my life, once.

“Yes,” I said, not bothering to look at the others. I reached forward and took Henry’s hand, summoning all the emotion I could find, and wishing I could cry on command, the way some of my friends had been able to do when we were young. “You have to understand, when they took Hope, something inside me broke. It was… I know you lost her too, and I know how much that upset you. But for me, it was even bigger. She was a part of me, Henry, and they just tore her out of my arms. I never got to hear her speak, will never get to see how she grows up! She’ll never know that I even existed!” My voice broke, and the tears did start, then, and I swallowed heavily. These weren’t things I often said out loud, and somehow hearing them as I spoke them made it seem even more terrible.