Mind Game (GhostWalkers, #2)(28)

“I steal things.”

“You do what?”

She wanted to smile at the incredulous tone. “Is stealing worse than killing? I thought it was all bad.”

“You just surprised me.” He didn’t flinch at her candid assessment of what he did, but it bothered him—and people’s opinions didn’t bother him. He had his own moral code, a code of strict honor. It shouldn’t matter what she said . . . but it did. She wasn’t accusing or even judgmental, just matter-of-fact and perhaps that was what got under his skin. That she just accepted what he was. One-dimensional, as if that was all he was. And all he would ever be.

“That’s what I do. I ‘recover’ things. Is that a better way of putting it? Data that has been stolen. I slip into offices and retrieve data from private corporations or even small businesses or anyone else that takes things they shouldn’t.”

“Whom do you work for?”

“Do you think all this time I’ve been working against the government instead of for it?” She turned her head and looked at him from beneath the impossibly long fringe of dark lashes.

“It’s possible.” He tried to assess her tone, but there was little inflection in her voice. She was very closed off to him, making it impossible to read her thoughts. “If it’s a splinter branch, they’re working outside the parameters. What about Jesse? What did he say about them? He must have been in direct contact with them.”

“His orders always came from someone in the military. Jesse was a Navy SEAL. He would never, under any circumstances, betray his country. He’s the ultimate patriotic gung ho male.”

“If he’s military and was a SEAL, we’ll be able to find out about him. I know he’s enhanced, yet he wasn’t part of our unit when we trained together. I’d like to know where he came from and where he trained. Lily suspects Whitney performed the experiment first with the children from the orphanages, with us, and with some others. She’s been working to find all the children. Of course, they’d all be grown by now, and she’s looking for information on whether or not Whitney experimented on others.”

“It would make sense, wouldn’t it?” Dahlia looked down at her bare feet. She bent to rub at a smudge on her toenail. “If he believed in what he was doing so much, which he obviously did, would he really allow so many years to go by between experiments? He must have tried it on others.”

Nicolas was listening to the sounds of the bayou. Frogs called to one another. Each group croaked louder than the other, trying to outdo one another, calling for mates. The frogs around the cabin were particularly loud, making a strange, off-key music. Abruptly, the group somewhere out near the strip of land leading to the channel went silent.

Nicolas immediately clapped his hand over Dahlia’s mouth and pulled her backward over the side of the roof. He lay flat, preventing them from being sky-lined. She didn’t struggle. She was familiar with the sounds and knew immediately that something had disturbed the frogs. Nicolas put his mouth against her ear. “Slide down to the window and go in that way. I won’t let you fall. Hand me my rifle. The pack is ready, just get your clothes and be ready to move.”

Dahlia nodded and inched her way down the slope of the roof. Her heart pounded overloud in her ears. The wood scraped her bare thighs and dragged the shirt up over her skin as she slid to the window. She tried not to think about her bare bottom exposed to Nicolas. Surely he had better things to look at or think about. She felt the color rising in her face as she managed to crawl into the cabin through the window.

The rifle lay on the table beside the pack. Everything was exactly as it had been before they entered with the exception of her scattered clothes. She handed the rifle to Nicolas through the window, careful to make no sound. Her jeans were damp and uncomfortable, but she pulled them on just the same. She was not traipsing naked through the bayou with only Nicolas’s shirt to cover her skin. She didn’t bother with the wet underwear, instead stuffed them in the pack. She picked up the belt of ammunition. It was heavy, and the pack was even heavier. Dahlia eased both through the window and onto the ground, hanging out so far she nearly fell headfirst to keep from making a sound. She made a grab at the windowsill, frantically trying to throw herself backward.

Nicolas caught her by the shirt and hauled her up beside him before the weight of the pack had a chance to pull her out. Dahlia closed her eyes in humiliation. She had rare abilities when it came to physical stunts, yet so far, she’d looked an incompetent ninny. Did women become helpless around men? If so, she preferred a solitary existence.

Nicolas made no sound as he moved to the ridge of the roof, rifle to his shoulder, his eye to the scope. Dahlia thought she was quiet in her work, but it wasn’t just that he made no noise, it was the way he moved. Almost as if he flowed like water, so easily he couldn’t possibly draw the eye to him. She watched his hands—rock steady. There was no change of expression, no quickening of breath, no animosity. And then she realized what she must be observing. Nicolas Trevane underwent a metamorphosis with the rifle in his hands and his eye to the scope. He was not completely human, yet not a machine, but something somewhere in between. He closed off emotion and his brain and body functioned at a rapid rate of speed.

He gave off such low levels of energy because he didn’t feel anger when doing his job. He turned everything off. It wasn’t an act of violence, it was something far deeper. Dahlia struggled to understand. Controlling energy was everything to her. Violence always created energy. Even the buildup of anger in a person created the violent waves that often made her ill. Nicolas didn’t have those harsher emotions roiling inside of him. There was no fear. She didn’t even catch a stray swirl slipping toward her. He waited calmly, his heart and lungs working steadily.