“Is Jesse safe?” Max asked.
“Yes,” Nicolas answered. “They have him stashed in a good hospital with the best surgeons and he’s well guarded.”
“How can I help find the traitor? You must be going after him if you’re heading to DC. I can help.”
“It’s good to hear you say that, Maxwell,” Nicolas said complacently. “We were hoping you’d be cooperative.”
Max cast him a suspicious glance. “I know the agents in our office in DC. I can’t imagine any of them betraying their country. Or Jesse for that matter. Who are your suspects?”
“Everybody is a suspect until we find otherwise,” Nicolas said. He watched Dahlia closely as he carried on the conversation with the pilot. All the while his thumb brushed back and forth across her inner wrist and he willed her to snap out of her depression. Had they been alone, he was certain he could find a way to make her laugh again, to shake off the melancholy, or maybe it was the seizure. He didn’t know a lot about seizures. That was Lily’s department. He knew seizures were dangerous and that Dahlia was humiliated that they had found her having convulsions. She hadn’t spoken to him all the way back to the Quarter, or even later, in the hotel after her shower when he’d drawn the sheet over her and promised he’d be back with clothes. She’d been so unlike herself, no snappy comebacks, no sassy remarks.
Dahlia, don’t go so far away from me. Nicolas made his tone as intimate as possible. I know you’re tired and upset, and you have every reason to be. If you want to toss your job with the NCIS, I’m behind you all the way. Just don’t put me in with the rest of them.
Dahlia leaned her head back against the seat. His words slipped into her mind almost seductively. His voice was tender, gentle, whispered over her skin and found its way into her heart. Tears burned close, and that was unacceptable to her, not in front of all these people. Not in front of Max. Don’t be nice to me right now, Nicolas. I need you to wait until we’re alone.
His heart nearly stopped. She was telling him things she didn’t even realize herself, but he knew. Deep down, where it counted, he knew. Dahlia wasn’t turning away from him. She didn’t want kindness, she was too vulnerable. She was waiting until they were alone. He tightened his fingers around hers and held her hand for the rest of the flight. He didn’t talk to the pilot again until they were circling above the small, private landing strip.
“Don’t put down yet. Circle low so we can take a look at what we’re up against.” Nicolas bent forward, peering out the window. Kaden and Gator did the same, using high-powered glasses to check the terrain.
Max complied and set the plane down when Nicolas gave the order. He had almost brought the plane to a stop at the end of the runway when Nicolas reached over and removed his gun. “Wouldn’t want you to get any ideas. We’d like you to be our guest for a while.”
“This isn’t necessary. I’d never harm Dahlia, and Jesse’s my friend.”
“Then you won’t mind coming with us for a little while. We won’t be long. The investigation should only take a day and then we’ll need you to fly us out of here.”
“Dahlia,” Max brought the plane to a complete halt and turned off the engine. “You don’t believe I’d hurt you, do you?”
She looked him straight in the eye. “You already have.” She took the hand Nicolas held out to her and swept past the pilot, leaving him to the waiting GhostWalkers.
Nicolas walked her to one of the waiting cars Lily had provided for them. Dahlia hesitated when he opened the passenger door for her. “Where are we going?”
“To a condo. Lily has a couple of places available for us. I asked her to give us one of our own. The others will be close by.”
Dahlia slid in and waited until he was in the driver’s seat. “What about Max? I’m disappointed in him, but I don’t want anything to happen to him.”
“We’ll hold him until we’ve gone in and checked the residences of the agents for anything that might tip us off to who’s behind all this. By now, Lily’s talked to the admiral, and he’ll know what we’re doing.”
She averted her face and stared out into the gathering darkness. She didn’t want to talk about Henderson. He had to have known of the GhostWalker program. He certainly knew Whitney, and he knew about her. If both Jesse and Max had been psychically enhanced, Henderson would have known. And he’d let her believe she was teetering on the brink of insanity, not confirming nor denying Lily and the other girls’ existence. What had been the point? What would it have hurt to tell her the truth?
“Why didn’t he tell me, Nicolas?” Did she want to know? She could feel her insides knotting, tensing, churning with a kind of fear she didn’t want to identify. Was she finally overloading?
He reached over and put his hand over hers. “Dahlia, whatever these people do, they think they’re doing it for their country. It’s never personal with them. Henderson has spent his life in service. He may have thought he was protecting everyone. You’re an unknown to them. If they watched your childhood unfold on those tapes, if they followed your training, they’d see one side of you only. All the times you couldn’t control the energy and accidents occurred are caught on tape. That’s what they’d see. Not the Dahlia who practices with amethyst spheres until she can use the energy up. Or the Dahlia who works at becoming a human superconductor and races up the walls.”
“Floats,” she corrected.
“What?”
“Technically I float, not race,” she explained.
Nicolas smiled. “And they don’t see the scientist in you. They’ve missed all that about you because they see one side. When people don’t understand what’s happening, they’re afraid. Whitney never figured out what was wrong. He didn’t factor in that you would draw energy in complete opposition to the laws of the universe. Because Whitney didn’t know about the energy and couldn’t explain what was wrong, Henderson and his people didn’t know.”
“You always seem to say the right thing to make me feel better.”
Nicolas didn’t think so. She wasn’t feeling any better, but she was making an attempt to make him feel better. He remained quiet until he found the condo and got her inside. Lily had promised there would be clothes for Dahlia and sure enough, the closet in the bedroom had several pairs of jeans, shirts, and a dress or two and the dresser had underwear. Dahlia stared down at it then looked at him inquiringly.