Remember Jamie Baker (Jamie Baker #3)(16)

“Please, don’t.” My voice quivered as I fought the urge to cry again. “I…I…”

I wanted to run. I wanted to get out of the truck and run back to my desert house, where I would never see him again. But he held the keys to my past, and I couldn’t walk away from that. I wiped my face again, frustrated and embarrassed that they were all watching me cry. Unfortunately, emotional is on my personality traits list. Actually, it’s on there twice. “Can we please just go?”

Everyone looked at Major Wilks. He stood there quietly for a moment, and then said, “Angel, we need to go get him. Do you know where he is now?”

I shook my head. “No. I mean, yeah, I know where he is, but he’s not like me. He’ll never agree to come with you. Not in a million years. He’s beyond paranoid.”

The tension increased again, and I knew from the grim expression in Major Wilks’s eyes that I wasn’t going to like what he was about to say. “We don’t want him to join us, Angel; we need to detain him.”

I hadn’t quite figured out what he was trying to tell me, but already denial was taking over. I may have been so angry at Tony, maybe even hated him for what he’d done to me, but he was still the person who’d helped me after the explosion. He’d taken care of me for six months, was the only person I knew—my family. “Detain him?” I shook my head. “No, that can’t be right. Why would you need to do that?”

“We need to question him.” Major Wilks sighed. “Your friend has been keeping a lot more than your identity from you, I’m afraid.”

“Teddy betrayed you, Jamie,” Ryan whispered. “He was the one who sent you to the Visticorp lab that day. It was a setup. He was working with Donovan to capture you.”





I hadn’t said a word since giving up the coordinates to the desert safe house. After telling Major Wilks how to get there, I climbed back in the truck and shut everyone out. I’d been through a lot in this one day, and I had a concussion migraine on top of it all.

The ACEs let me be; they were afraid of me. Whether it was because I was having a hard time controlling my powers or because I was acting like an emotional girl, I wasn’t sure, but none of them dared breathe a word the entire drive. They wouldn’t even look in my direction. Only Ryan would do that, and every time he did I’d accidentally stall the engine of the truck. We were lucky I didn’t fry us all.

I simply couldn’t deal. With the way Tony was so paranoid about Visticorp finding us, I didn’t understand how his betrayal could even be possible, but Ryan’s devastation was too sincere. He was telling the truth. Deep down in my gut, I knew it somehow. Tony had betrayed me. The explosion, my amnesia…it was his fault.

As much as I dreaded seeing Tony after everything I’d learned, I still nearly had a heart attack when we got there and realized something had gone terribly wrong in my absence. Sure, I’d damaged the front door when I’d slammed it on my way out, but now it had been torn off its hinges and the front window had been blown out. Our living room couch lay overturned in the front yard. While Tony was a bit dramatic, he wouldn’t have destroyed the house in some sort of temper tantrum after I left. “They’ve been here.” My heart began to beat in overdrive to match my spike in anxiety. “They got him.”

I stopped and listened for a minute. All was quiet. I took a deep breath, looking for any unfamiliar scents. Nothing. The place was empty. Tony was gone. When I started for the door, Major Wilks threw a hand out to block my path. “Careful, Angel. There could be supersoldiers inside.”

“I’ll do a sweep,” Tyson offered.

The major started to nod, but I shook my head. “If there were people inside, I’d hear them. I’m positive it’s empty.”

I walked in without waiting for permission, ignoring the major’s protests. It was my house, after all, and I wasn’t going to start letting the man think I obeyed his orders. Inside, the house looked as if a tornado had come through and ripped it apart. Windows were broken. Furniture was turned over. Our kitchen had vomited the contents of all its cupboards onto the floor. The place was trashed.

Judging from the mess, Tony had used his telekinesis to put up quite a fight. I hoped he managed to get to the basement bunker somehow, but the tranquilizer darts littered throughout the house gave me little faith.

As I headed toward my bedroom, Ryan fell into step beside me. He kept looking around as if he were trying to solve a very complicated puzzle. “It’s not usually such a mess,” I deadpanned.

Chuckling, Ryan shook his head. “I guess I just expected something more from the place you used to refer to as ‘The Lair.’”

It was such a simple statement, but it caused a flurry of emotion inside me. Right after the explosion I used to ask Tony all kinds of questions, but he never really had any good answers for me. He told me what life was like at the labs and how we lived there together, but his stories always felt hollow because he couldn’t flesh them out with the simple details—like how I would refer to the bunker as “The Lair.” I’d always assumed Tony’s stories felt that way because I didn’t remember them myself, but somehow I doubted Ryan’s memories would feel as empty.

My brain exploded with curiosity, and my heart pounded with excitement and hope. This guy held the keys to my past. There was so much I wanted to know, so much I wished I could ask him. Before I could ask anything, Major Wilks stepped up to us. “Let’s go. The house is clear. He’s not here. Let’s move, before Donovan’s supersoldiers decide to come back.”