Siege of Shadows (Effigies #2)(42)

She was trying, Belle. Every once in a while, she’d set her grief aside and try. And I always appreciated it. But when her smile disappeared, the knit in her eyebrows returned quickly as if to make up lost ground.

“I’m sorry,” Belle said. “I know I’ve been acting . . . strange lately.” She said nothing else, but I already understood. As she brushed back some loose strands of hair streaming down her forehead, I stared at my knees.

“It’s okay,” I said as an insidious whisper of guilt taunted me. “And you’re right about the mission. I guess I’m just nervous. I don’t know if I’m really ready to face Saul again.”

“You should be. This isn’t your first mission,” Rhys said flatly, watching the monitor as he twisted the sheathed tip of his favorite knife against his finger. “Haven’t you been training? You should have toughened up by now.”

That childishness was back, the same defiance masked as innocence while he pretended to be interested in his knife, twisting it against his finger. My hands clenched against my knees as we crossed through a Sect-controlled toll. I heard Eveline’s voice from inside my comm.

“Entering the underground tunnel,” she said. I could see that much on the monitor. The two-way highway stretched on in the darkness, speckled by the small lights lining the wall.

“Well, Rhys,” I said finally with a bitter curl of my bottom lip. “Seems you’ve been reading some of my criticism online. Nice to know you found something to do back home for all those weeks.”

“You mean aside from recovering?”

Recovering from his injuries—the injuries he’d gotten trying to protect me from Saul. I couldn’t forget. A knife plunged into his chest close to his heart.

He’d done that for me.

He wasn’t a bad guy. I knew that in my heart. He’d shown me as much while we were together. It was my head that needed convincing—not easy when there were other people living in it.

“Anyway, this is a mission, Maia.” Rhys faced me with nonchalant eyes. “So let’s stop this here, okay? No one’s out to get you. Stop being ridiculous.”

“Ridiculous?” I sat up straight on my bench. “How about you stop being a jerk?”

Rhys’s jaw went rigid. His shoulders slumped. “Jerk,” he repeated quietly. It seemed as though he wanted to say something else, but he thought better of it. Instead, he turned away with a pained expression that still didn’t reveal his guilt one way or the other.

I heard Belle’s quiet sigh before the road split off from the main highway down a closed-off path: Route L-9. The tunnel was available for commercial and civilian use, but the Sect’s Route L-9 remained hidden from prying eyes. And it wasn’t difficult to see how.

Our path was blocked. The wall stretched up from the paved road to the tunnel ceiling. For a moment, both delivery vans had to slow to a stop—that is before the solid wall smoothly shifted to the side, revealing the Sect’s secret, expansive two-way network. It wasn’t so much a tunnel as it was a miles-long underground bunker.

“We’ve reached the route without any issue,” said Rhys in his usual, mission-fit tone as if he hadn’t just sucker punched me.

“Good.” The tension in Sibyl’s voice was audible. “We haven’t been able to detect any kind of dangerous frequencies on our end either. Checkpoint one, report.”

Checkpoints. Sibyl must have meant the booth on the second-floor walkway above us, blocked off with a safety railing. It could have been either of the two agents standing at attention by the railing who answered, “No hostile sightings. Route is secure.”

“There’s a secret facility outside a small village in Oxfordshire,” Rhys explained to us. “Only a select few agents know about it. Heavily fortified. This tunnel is a direct pipeline.”

“And the ring will be safe there?” Belle crossed her legs, watching the monitor. “What of the other carrier?”

“On their way to another secret location,” Rhys answered. “Everything seems all right on their end. Though their route is a little shorter than ours.”

“Sounds like you missed out.” It was lame, but I couldn’t stop myself.

“Maia, look, I really don’t know what’s been up with you, and I don’t know why you’ve been acting up around me or what I did to you that you can’t stand to be around me. But whatever your deal is, it isn’t my problem.”

“Isn’t your problem?” The dam broke. My voice rose several decibels. “Like hell it isn’t. You of all people don’t have the right to judge me. For anything.”

Rhys’s lips snapped shut as he looked at me in silence.

I could feel Belle’s attention on me without looking. It was then that I realized the situation I was in. Rhys, a potential murderer. Belle, his potential executioner. With jittery hands, I clenched my teeth, thinking of a way out.

“Maia?” Belle leaned over when I turned my head and hid my expression with my thick bush of hair. “Are you okay?”

We crossed another checkpoint. Voices rang through our comms as various people reported in. Agents stood at attention as we passed, firearms ready at their sides.

With trembling fingers, I touched the scarf around my neck, hiding the neck-band keeping Natalya under control. All those weeks having the same nightmare tearing me apart every day and still no answers. No answer I wanted to believe, anyway.