False Hearts (False Hearts #1)(61)

I open up the second file. I suck in my breath. I open more, reading through them quickly.

I’ve struck gold.

It’s Tila’s notes on the Ratel, all written in our hidden alphabet and scanned, the originals destroyed. Tears prick my eyes as I read them. Yes, it’s proof she was working with them, but more than that: it’s proof she was really working against them. She’d hidden the notes in a place I knew about—if I’d come to leave a message and found these, would she have told me everything? I hide all the files in an encrypted subfolder, deep within my implants. I thank whatever fate or stars aligned that I found these before I went back in. These notes might just save my life.

I sift through more of Tila’s notes in my mind’s eye. I come across something that makes me both furious and shamed:

There’s a delivery boy/security Knight I’m going to use to get closer to Verve, she wrote, about four months ago. His name is Skel. There’s a party tonight. I’ll turn on the charm and get him to take me back to his. After, I’ll convince him to introduce me to Malka, and then I can prove I can lucid dream. I force down a flush.

The doorbell rings. I jerk in surprise. Hurriedly, I finish hiding the files in my implants and take the datapod out of my ear.

“Coming!” I call as I run to the guest room, stash the sketchbook and the pod in the cubby hole, and push the bed back into place. A few days ago, this would have winded me. Thank you, gym practice and muscle mods.

I peer through the peephole. It’s Nazarin. I take a breath, composing myself.

I open the door and Nazarin pushes past me, closing the door behind him.

“Why are you here rather than your place, like you said?” he asks.

I look around, shrugging. It’s a way to avoid meeting his eyes. “I realized I hadn’t been here since it all went down. And I needed more clothes.”

“Let’s head back to the safe house. We have your VeriChip putting a false signal here most of the time, in case the Ratel decide to track you, but you actually being here has messed with it.”

“There’s cameras there, right? In the wallscreens?”

“Yeah?” His forehead crinkles in confusion.

“Not here?”

A beat as Nazarin accesses his implants to scan the apartment. “No.”

“Then we should speak here for a moment.”

Nazarin opens his mouth to ask why, but I hold up my hand, cutting him off. My anger over what I discovered in the notes crystallizes to a fury just as strong as I felt in Mia’s dream world. I lead him to the living room.

“How well do you really know my sister, Skel?” I ask. I had hoped I’d somehow been wrong, or read the notes wrong, but his sheepish face shows I’m right. My gut twists. “Spill, and you better not tell me a word of a lie, or I’m out.” It’s an empty threat, but I still cross my arms. “You haven’t just met her once or twice.”

He swallows, looking down and away. “I have only met her a few times. I just didn’t clarify what … happened during one of them.” He licks his lips, trying to figure out what to say.

I pour another glass of SynthWine, but don’t drink it. I’ve had enough, but at least it’s something to do with my hands. Anger bubbles inside me. No one trusts me to have all the information. The decisions I’ve made without knowing the full story …

“I first met her a few months ago. She was at one of the parties for Knights, Rooks and Pawns. I thought she was a young hopeful, trying to get into the Ratel, get a taste of power by latching onto a powerful member. She had a way of drawing the eye. I guess she would, being a hostess and all.”

He stares into space. He’s still standing in the middle of the kitchen. He takes the chair across from me, its legs screeching softly against the linoleum.

I say nothing, letting him find the words. “Near the end of the party, we were both pretty drunk. Real alcohol at those things, and neither of us were used to it. Whatever she’d been there for, she hadn’t found it. But she took a shine to me. I didn’t understand why. It’s not like I was important. She asked me to go to a hotel with her.”

I feel like I’ve been punched. I should have seen it, guessed it. I try not to think about his hands on my waist when we danced at Zenith. I try not to think about how he took off my clothes, so expertly. How well he seemed to know my body.

Tila got to him first. She always gets there first. And if he was attracted to me, it wasn’t actually for me. It was because I look like her. In a surge of paranoia, I wonder if my sister slept with any of my exes. David? Simone? I shake my head. The constant lies are getting to me, and I’m not even undercover yet.

I pick up my glass, the wine within sloshing. I set it to the side.

It’s always weird, when Tila or I meet someone the other has been sleeping with. It’s knowing that this other person, this stranger, has a pretty good idea what you look like naked, even if they haven’t slept with you. It’s the worry that they’ll look at one the same way they look at the other.

This is so much worse than any of those other times.

“I didn’t go with her,” Nazarin says, calmly. I look up, confused.

“I was tempted, but I went home alone. In the end, I knew that sleeping with her was a bad idea. My orders were clear: not to become involved with anyone in the Ratel. Yet she stuck in my mind.”