Keeping Me (Spy Chronicles Book 2)(23)

I knew that Spy School did a lot of good things, but I guess I didn’t realize how good. Maybe I just imagined everybody being these crazy awesome assassins, working to take down evil villains. But it’s more than that. So much more.

“I want to learn everything that I can,” I say. “I promise to work hard.”

Dad smiles. “I know you will. You’re my daughter, after all.”

I only wish I had gotten to know him sooner.

“There is one other thing,” he says, no longer smiling.

“What?”

“How scared are you of heights?”

I look at him, trying to think.

“I don’t know,” I answer. “I mean, I don’t think I’ve ever been scared of heights before. But I’m not sure a situation has come up when I’ve had a reason to be scared.”

“Good. Because you’re going to have to jump out of an airplane.”

My heart stops. “An airplane?”

“It’s part of training. Facing your fears, plus, you never know when you might need to jump out of a plane,” he says. “We make all of our students do it and I can’t bend the rules for you.”

“Right,” I say, wondering just how many scenarios could make me need to jump out of a plane.

While I don’t think I’m scared of heights, the thought of jumping out of an airplane does frighten me. To be honest, I don’t want to do it, but I can’t tell my dad that. I want him to believe that I can do anything—and I’m certainly going to try.

“Are you guys jumping with me?” I ask, turning around to Jax, Hunter, and Brett.

Brett’s face turns a very pale shade of green.

“You okay, Brett?”

He nods. “I... um... I’ll skydive with you. If you want me to.”

Jax laughs. “Brett is very scared of heights, despite the fact that he’s literally jumped out of a plane fifty times.”

“It’s a Spy School record,” Dad says. “Nobody has ever still been so scared after jumping that many times. We usually would’ve kept going with the training until he wasn’t scared, but he did the jumps. Under pressure, Brett is awesome.”

“Which is why we are on a team together,” Hunter says.

“Our whole team is good under pressure,” Jaxon says.

I wonder what I’m good at. I don’t feel like I’m good at anything. Under pressure, it’s usually somebody else calling the shots. So far, I freak out, and am just dragged along.

It will take a lot of training for me to be more than just an anchor dragging them down. Right now, I’m a liability. And I don’t think I could live with myself if something bad happened to them because of me.





Living.





“Hold on,” I say, taking a seat in the grass.

I’m breathing so hard that it’s actually embarrassing. My heart is racing and I kind of feel like I’m about to pass out.

“How can you not even run half a mile without getting out of breath?” Sebastian asks, obviously annoyed. He looks like he could go on for another few hours. Actually, he looks like he wants to. I hate that I’m holding him back.

“Go without me,” I say, between breaths.

Which makes him roll his eyes.

Dad and the rest of the guys are out doing something. What? I am not sure. But here I am, with Bass, and I’m pretty certain any progress we made while in America was for nothing. He loathes me.

But I don’t focus on that. Instead, I focus on trying to get my heart rate down and my breathing to be steady.

“We have a lot of work to do,” Sebastian says. “You’re going to have to push yourself past your limits if you really want to do this.”

“Do I have a choice?” I ask.

“No, not really,” Bass says, shrugging his shoulders. “Your dad runs Spy School, which makes you a huge target for everybody who hates our organization. You have to learn how to protect yourself. Whether you want to or not, you have to be the best.”

“Or what?”

“You get kidnapped. Or die,” he says, not softening it for me at all.

That’s the thing about Sebastian—he’s always blunt. He tells the truth without holding back. And he follows orders. That is probably why my dad trusts him so much.

“I thought you wanted to learn all this,” Bass says. “You seemed pretty excited about it up until today.”

“I did—do—want to learn,” I say.

“What’s wrong?”

“I just... what if everybody is wrong about me? What if I can’t learn how to do all this? What if I really am just a weak, little girl?” I ask. “Maybe they found the wrong girl. What if I’m not even Serenity Sinclair?”

“Trust me, you are Serenity Sinclair,” Sebastian says. “And you’re not weak. You’re actually the strongest person I know. Everything you went through and endured before coming to Spy School proves that. Just because you’re not strong physically right now doesn’t mean anything.”

His words almost make me smile.

Almost.

“If you really want this, then you’ve got to believe in yourself,” he says.

Believe in myself?