Chapter 17 #3
I continued gaping. In all the times I’d had my cover blown, it had never happened so calmly and to my face.
The standard—though rare—scenarios usually involved shouting and threats, guns and escape.
Never had I been quietly standing in someone’s immaculate kitchen next to a fruit bowl while my fabricated world unraveled around me.
I could not comprehend what was happening.
Who had slipped? Me? Bray? Wallace? Or perhaps Melanie was just that good.
I thought for a moment of denying everything.
Of asking if she were feeling all right for having come up with such a wild story about her perfectly innocent new nanny.
Perhaps she bumped her head on the Peloton or was fever dreaming.
But given the obvious depth of her research—to infiltrate a cover story miles deep—and the very real threat on my life, and, not to mention the fact that Melanie would probably kill me with a serving spoon for putting her family in harm’s way, I decided to go with a version of the truth.
“You’re right. I’m not here entirely willfully, and you don’t know who I really am. And for everyone’s best interest, it needs to stay that way.”
She stared at me so intently, I felt like I was being X-rayed.
Her eyebrow twitched and her jaw clenched.
What she was considering, I could only imagine: calling the police; where she would dump my body when she killed me.
With all the hardened criminals I’d dealt with, never would I have thought the Queen of Suburbia would be my demise.
To my surprise, her rigid gaze softened around the edges. A moment passed between us, something unspoken but profound, where I got the sudden sense we were equals.
“How much trouble are you in?” She said it less as an accusation and more like a concern she could relate to.
Knowing she could relate to it, and looking for any way to keep the upper hand in this conversation before it completely derailed, I countered with, “Probably as much as you are in. I know about Montrose.”
Her face morphed into shock before settling into a clearly feigned calmness. She roughly cleared her throat. “And what exactly do you know?”
“That you’re in enough debt to have put a lien on your house. What was in that seized shipment?”
At this, her face completely drained of color.
“Did you trust the wrong guy? Because I sure as hell know what that’s like.” I kept pushing, thinking of my father, and to some extent, Wallace.
Melanie looked like the truth was ready to leap from her tongue, but she wouldn’t let it. I was apparently more of a threat than she’d realized. But perhaps not entirely a threat, based on the look on her face. Maybe more of an equal, and from what I could tell, that scared her even more.
“Look, I know you don’t trust me, but maybe there’s a way we could—”
“You need to leave.” She cut off my offer.
“But I—”
“Get out!” she snapped. The threat in her voice was ice-cold, and I knew if I stayed, things would get ugly.
She knew we didn’t have enough to arrest her, otherwise DSA agents would have been swarming the place.
And given her knife block full of stainless-steel blades sitting about a foot away, the Brownings’ house was no longer a safe harbor for me.
Out of options, I turned to leave. In a state of shock that my cover had been blown, I headed for the front door. The ache in my ankle throbbed with each step and I had the sudden and embarrassing urge to cry.
It had all been fake. As someone who lied for a living, it shouldn’t have hurt at all, but I’d thought the moms had actually liked me.
That they’d genuinely been welcoming me into their world, but it had all been a scheme to keep tabs on me.
They had known from the very start I wasn’t who I said I was.
And that was mostly Bray’s fault for being so obvious.
I grumbled in frustration as I opened the front door, ready to call Bray and yell at him for blowing my cover. To my surprise, a man in a suit stood there waiting for me.
“Ms. Daniels,” he said.
I startled at the sound of my real name.
A few seconds passed as I tried to assess the threat this stranger posed.
He had a familiar air about him, but I couldn’t place it.
He was stocky and solidly built. Like the kind of guy who threw heavy weights around a gym and could kick down a door.
In truth, he was the same shape as Bray only shorter and more compact.
I eyed his hip and noted the telltale bulge of a weapon.
Then I saw the discreet coil of an earpiece disappearing down his collar and understood he was not here to harm me.
I closed the front door and stepped out onto the porch with him. “Yes?”
“I need you to come with me,” he said and pointed at the SUV.
I noted it was empty, and realized he was the driver I’d been seeing through the window for the past few days.
I took a step back, alarmed. “Why?”
“Because Agent Bray said so.”
The sound of his name reminded me I was annoyed with him. Even so, I wasn’t about to pass up an opportunity for a free ride away from here. “What’s going on?” I said and started down the front path alongside him.
Instead of answering, he pulled his phone from his jacket pocket. I watched him dial it and press it to his ear. It rang only once before someone answered.
“Do you have her?” Bray’s voice came through the other end. My heart stuttered at the urgency it carried.
“Yes, sir,” the other agent said.
“Let me talk to her.”
He held the phone out to me.
I took it. “What’s going on, Bray?”
“I need you to go with Agent Simmons,” he said. The note of alarm in his voice made my stomach clench with worry.
“I am, but why?”
“I’ll tell you when you get here.”
“Get where?”
“We don’t have time for questions right now. Just please, get in the car with Agent Simmons.”
I glanced up and down the street and saw nothing out of place. No immediate threat other than a gardener buzzing a Weedwacker over the neighbor’s lawn. Still, my curiosity was too strong.
“Okay, but I’d like to know—”
“Wallace was murdered!” he blurted.
I stopped in my tracks. The air in my lungs became solid.
Bray continued, his voice strained with fear and urgency. “I just obtained information Agent Wallace was murdered, Olena Nova’s prison sentence was shortened, and she is being released today, and there’s a hit out on you, so get in the fucking car, Erin!”
A loud ringing filled my head as if a gunshot had gone off nearby. I wasn’t sure if it was memory, a premonition, or just plain fear, but I handed the phone to Agent Simmons and walked straight for the SUV.