Traitor Darling E-Book

Valerie Best

• Herausgeber: 8th Note Press
• Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
• Serie: Immune
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 254

Beschreibung

 To save the world, they'll need to save each other first. Even though working with the boy that broke her heart is the last thing Hannah wants, she needs Anthony's help to protect the people from a generation of leaders who've given up on saving what's left of the world.The world believes Hannah Darling is dead. And still reeling from torture and taking a bullet for the boy who betrayed her, the Hannah that survived isn't quite the same. With the remains of New York still under the grip of the fascist Keepers, vaccines to distribute, people to evacuate, and a new crisis on the horizon, her fellow resistance members are beginning to wonder:  Can  Hannah still resist the Keepers?Anthony, under house arrest and wracked with guilt over leaving Hannah behind, is doing penance for his betrayal by distributing stolen vaccines to the vulnerable. As his powerful father's health declines, Anthony is drawn into the sinister web of the Keeper hierarchy who plan to abandon the city to restart humanity with only the elite. And they want him to help.But an even bigger threat is facing the remnants of New York City: a new and resistant wave of the deadly plague that destroyed their world and raised the Strangers is coming. Full of defiance, breathless action, and romance, Traitor Darling is the epic conclusion of the story that began with Rebel Darling. 

Leseprobe

Traitor Darling

Immune

Book 2

Valerie Best

8th Note Press

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

Published by 8th Note Press

Text Copyright © 2024 by Valerie Best

All rights reserved.

ISBN 978-1-961795-12-9

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission from the publisher.

Cover Design by Marshall Peschell

Cover Illustration by MadliArts

Contents

1. Monsters

2. Suspicions

3. What’s Wrong with Hannah?

4. School Friends

5. She Didn’t Stand a Chance

6. Out to Sea without Her

7. A Wolf Is Not a Pet

8. Upper Floor

9. The New Hannah

10. Raid Siren

11. Sudden Movements

12. What’s the Time, Mr. Wolf?

13. There Is a Door

14. Good Influence

15. Loyalties

16. You Shouldn’t Speak Like That

17. How Bad Is It Getting?

18. You Can Trust Me

19. Ignition Switch

20. What Makes You So Sure You’re Not the Right Thing?

21. When to Worry

22. I Need You to Do Something for Me

23. A Day of Pleas

24. I Thought That Was a Nightmare

25. The Screams in the Silences

26. We Don’t Have the Option of Feeling Good about This

27. Spring Comes Slowly

Acknowledgments

About the Author

Chapter1

Monsters

“I think he’s doing okay today.”

Fletcher looked up. Caroline was standing in front of him, framed by the golden light of the sun setting through the window behind her. The young nurse was nearly as tall as he was, but willowy and slight. He’d noticed she hardly made any sound as she moved around the large house.

“What?” he finally asked.

A look of concern flashed across her eyes. They were blue, and always looked timid. “Your dad. I think he’s doing okay today. He seemed more aware.”

Fletcher nodded. “Good,” he said, though the words were hollow. He looked back out the window.

Caroline turned, her gaze following his onto the quiet street. “Do you know what day it is?”

Fletcher shook his head. “Tuesday?” he hazarded.

She looked over at him with an indulgent smile, then, as her eyes flickered down to the electronic tracker around his ankle, visible beneath his jeans, the smile disappeared. She looked back out the window. “It’s Thursday, actually. It’s October thirty-first.”

“Oh.” Fletcher was unmoved by this information.

She looked over, smiling again. “Don’t you remember?”

“Remember what?”

“October thirty-first is Halloween.”

Halloween. The images came back, blurry. He was a kid. A little kid, clinging to his mother’s hand. Leaves scuttled on the ground. Kids raced through the streets, screaming with laughter. He held on to a paper sack heavy with apples and chocolate bars. His mother had laughed when he’d dumped it all out on his bed. Only one, she’d said, smiling. He’d eaten one and snuck more from the kitchen drawer where she’d hidden the rest of the bag. He thought he’d been sly, but looking back, he realized she must have known.

“No one trick-or-treating now,” Fletcher said, looking out on the empty street. The leaves still scuttled, drifting high against the buildings, but no one walked among them.

“No,” Caroline said quietly.

“What did it mean?”

She looked over, politely curious. “What?”

“Halloween. What did it mean? Why did people celebrate it?” Fletcher asked, hearing the irritation that always edged his voice these days.

Caroline seemed not to notice. She shrugged. “That was before my time. I’ve only read a little about it.”

“And?” he asked shortly.

She paused before she answered. “People would dress up as monsters and ghosts so the evil spirits would get confused and let them pass.”

Fletcher looked at her for a moment, then gave a bark of laughter. “To blend in with the dead?”

Caroline gave a small shrug. “And maybe to prove the monsters weren’t so scary after all.”

He turned back to the window. “Well, we can see how well that’s worked out.”

Neither of them spoke. After a long moment Caroline looked down at her watch. It was a thin golden bracelet around her delicate wrist.

“You’re leaving then?” he asked, clearing his throat.

Caroline hesitated for a moment, as though she wanted to say something, then nodded. “It’s that time. He’s in bed already. He should stay asleep all night.”

“Okay. Thanks.” Fletcher turned. “I’ll walk you to the door.”

He led her through the study to the main entryway. When Fletcher was growing up in this house, a brownstone in what used to be called Brooklyn Heights, they had always used the ground floor entrance—the garden entrance, his mother had called it. But sometime after he’d left home, his father had started using the grander entrance with its glass-paneled oak doors. He opened one for Caroline as she gathered her bag and coat.

She stopped just in front of him. “Have a good night, Anthony.” She gave him a small smile. “Happy Halloween.”

He stared at her smile for a moment and she paused, waiting for him to respond. But when he didn’t, she ducked her head and headed out the door. He watched as she went down the steps of the brownstone to the empty sidewalk. She hesitated a moment, and—with a backward glance at him—headed down the block.

Fletcher watched her until she disappeared around the corner, then he turned his eyes up to the sky, which was now growing dark. He walked downstairs to the quiet kitchen where he made himself a sandwich and a cup of tea. The water still ran and the solar-powered generators made the refrigerator light turn on. Its pre-plague normalcy was jarring, and Fletcher still wasn’t used to it, even after three months. In his father’s house he could almost forget that the population was decimated, almost forget that the Keepers ran what was left of the government, and almost forget that he was on house arrest. He tried to remember the sound of the doorbell. Tried to imagine opening the door and finding children dressed in costumes, their faces rosy from the cold.

But there were no trick-or-treaters, and he couldn’t forget the rest—refrigerator light or not. He braced his hands against the cold granite of the kitchen counter and breathed hard through his nose. The sandwich sat heavy in his belly, but he knew later on he’d be grateful he’d eaten.

He walked up the back stairs to the second floor. His father was tucked into bed, and just as Caroline had said, asleep. Fletcher looked at him as the very last light of the day came through the windows. He had a new bruise on his arm, his papery skin already turning purple. He must have bumped into a wall as Caroline trundled him through the house. The man was like a peach these days.

But Fletcher wasn’t there to check on him. He wouldn’t have cared if the old man died in his sleep, but for one thing. Fletcher sat on the edge of the bed and leaned over, disengaging the tracker from his own ankle and, flipping up the blankets at the end of the bed, clipped it on his father’s ankle.

The Keeper captain who’d placed it on his ankle had been Fletcher’s own ranking officer before Fletcher had decided to leave New City without authorization. The captain had done the job with few words and a sour look on his face, apparently forgetting that Fletcher had helped design the device.

At the time, he’d figured it was only a matter of time before someone remembered he had been on the team that had designed the tracker, but two months later, no one had remembered. That was the benefit of living in a martial state in which no one bothered to keep any records. In the kind of power structure where those with institutional knowledge sometimes just disappeared, you ended up getting away with things.

Fletcher looked at the tracker, now blinking benignly on his father’s pale, wasted ankle. He had only been a teenager when he’d helped with the design. He’d gotten pulled into the project, a special security initiative, just after he’d become a Keeper, likely because of his father. Back then he hadn’t thought of what purpose the device would end up serving, he just liked the science of it. There were precious few resources back then, even for someone like him, and it had felt special to have access to the tech.

The design flaws embarrassed him now, but—as he adjusted the tracker on his father’s ankle—he had to admit those flaws had their benefits. The tracking program was rudimentary—the location was messaged back to Keeper Headquarters through a radio frequency and the service occasionally kicked off. It didn’t raise a red flag if it didn’t happen at the same time every day and if it kicked right back on. The device was sensitive to heat and motion, so as long as Anton Fletcher stayed alive until morning, Fletcher was free until he woke up.

Fletcher flipped the blankets back over his father and headed upstairs to his room. He tugged on a black knit cap and pulled his stocked backpack out from under the bed.

Now it was just a matter of avoiding the attention of nosy neighbors and Keeper patrols. That was also not particularly hard. He just avoided the front doors and slipped out the back. Quiet as a cat on his black-market rubber-soled sneakers—a gift from his father upon his return—he made no noise as he scaled the old wooden fence into the neighboring yard. The yard used to belong to Miranda Cook, a woman a little older than his own mother. She’d been an ER doctor who’d lived through the first outbreak and died in the second, along with her two kids, one of them still a baby.

Fletcher broke quietly through her overgrown garden, hopped over her fence to the street, turned in the direction of the wall, and disappeared into the night.

Chapter2

Suspicions

The first time he’d snuck out he’d been terrified. Anton Fletcher’s son or not, if he was caught violating his house arrest, he’d have been thrown in prison. Especially now.

And prison would have been the best-case scenario.

So he’d taken his time that first night. He’d waited until almost midnight before he’d left the house and moved under the cover of a moonless sky. He’d moved through the city silently, watchfully, until he’d hit the wall. He’d kept his eyes open, his whole body tensed, waiting to see the Keeper patrols. But he never saw them. Not once that first night, and infrequently in the nights that followed. He had spent so many years pacing New City on street patrol with the Keeper Guards, checking papers and rousing drunks, and now there didn’t seem to be any guards out anywhere.

He wanted to ask someone about it—find out why the Keepers were no longer actively trying to control their citizens—but it wasn’t a natural question for someone who had been on house arrest since the moment they’d arrived back in town, so he kept his suspicions to himself.

Besides, he had other things to think about.

There was an easy exit point in the wall near his father’s house, and he headed straight there. It had taken a week to work out and verify the pattern, but the guard that worked nights fell asleep. Every night, just after eleven. Like clockwork. So Fletcher just waited until his head dropped back and then strolled through the metal gateway. There was a closed-circuit camera with an ominously blinking light trained on the pathway, but he ignored it. The feed displayed only on the staticky screen in front of the sleeping guard and wasn’t recorded anywhere else, so as long as the guard stayed asleep, he was in the clear.

He walked a mile into the woods. The moon was out tonight, and he could see the well-worn path.

“Anthony?” a low voice called out from the darkness.

“Yeah, it’s me,” Fletcher said.

Cleo Lila stepped out from the shadow of a tree. “You have the doses?”

Fletcher nodded. “I’ve got fifteen.”

“Fifteen?” Cleo asked.

“It was all I was able to get.”

Cleo’s lips pressed into a thin line. “I’ve got a hundred people lined up for it.”

Fletcher adjusted his backpack on his shoulders. It was a cool night, but humid and close, and he was sweaty from the walk. “It’s all I could get,” he repeated, the irritation back in his voice.

Cleo regarded him for a moment, then gave him a nod and turned on her heel. He followed her another half mile to where the Lilas’ wagon stood. Like Cleo had said, there were about a hundred people standing, clumped together in a vague suggestion of a line.

“Ben Martin’s here too,” Cleo said, nodding over at a tall young man with sandy brown hair near the back of the group.

Ben was an organizer, like Hannah, but from across the river, from the place they had once called New Jersey. There was a smaller population there, and virtually no Keeper presence, so Ben lacked Hannah’s killer instincts, but he was good with people. He had appeared sometime at the end of the summer and connected with the Lilas.

Fletcher watched as Ben spoke quietly to the people gathered, guiding them into a more ordered line, smiling often.

He hated the guy.

Fletcher looked down the long line of people who were now all looking up at him with interest, their faces shadowy in the light of the fires from the Lila camp. With a sigh, he heaved his pack off his back and onto the gate of the wagon. He pulled out the bottle of vodka he’d pinched from his father’s study, the small bag of cotton squares, and—clinking musically—the fifteen doses of the vaccine. “I don’t have enough for everyone,” he announced, opening the slim cases containing the shots, “so I’m only doing children tonight. The first fifteen.” He looked up at Ben Martin. “Just kids.”

Ben nodded. “Okay,” he said, and turned to speak to the people gathered.

Fletcher turned his back, letting Ben do the dirty work as the people in line grumbled and shifted and worked out who was getting the vaccine.

“We need it, too!” someone yelled. “It’s not just the fucking kids who are getting sick!”

Fletcher ignored the voice. He looked at Cleo, who was standing near him, now holding one of her children. “How’s he doing?” he asked, tilting his chin toward the little boy in Cleo’s arms.

“Better. Thanks,” Cleo said, shifting the small boy’s weight in her arms. “He’s stopped throwing up.”

“Where was the water?” Fletcher asked, wetting the cotton patches with the vodka.

Cleo gestured vaguely east. “Down a ways. We all drank it. He was just too far downstream.” She shook her head. “Dirty water. I’m sure that was it.”

Fletcher stared at the little boy for a moment. “Does he still have the fever?”

“It comes and goes,” she said, pressing her cheek to his, like she was checking his temperature.

“You’re still giving him the antibiotics?”

“Yeah.”

“You have to finish it. If you don’t give him the full course, it’s not going to do him any good.”

“The whole thing, Anthony. I told you we would when you gave it to me.”

“And the tea? With goldenseal?” Fletcher readied the first dose.

Cleo nodded. She looked at him for a moment, her eyes appraising. “We’ve all been wondering where you learned about goldenseal?”

“It came to me in a dream,” Fletcher said waspishly. Cleo was fine. She wasn’t a friend—he didn’t have any of those—but she was reliable and useful and probably could be trusted. But he didn’t feel like telling her that he spent his days poring over any text he could find with even a passing reference to medicine or public health or disease management. He glanced over as the adults who’d come without kids—looking mutinous—started moving out of line. They were the survivors who lived outside the walls of New City. Most of them lived in small groups, but they’d somehow heard that he was around, and had traveled who the hell knew how far to try to get the vaccine. 

He looked away, shaking his head in disgust. It was all so useless. He turned to the first child in line. She was a small girl, the size of a six-year-old or so, but the wariness in her inky black eyes made her look older. She seemed to be by herself. “Nine?” Fletcher guessed.

“Twelve,” the girl rasped, and pulled up the sleeve of her dirty T-shirt.

Fletcher wiped a patch of her arm clean with the vodka-soaked cotton, pinched at the small muscle, and pushed the needle in. The girl didn’t even flinch. He pushed the cotton back onto the spot. “Hold this for a few minutes. But don’t walk away with it. I need the cotton back.” He’d bundle it into his backpack and carefully wash and sanitize the squares so he could use them again, the next time he got his hands on vaccines.

“You’re not a kid,” Fletcher said to the next person, a wiry man with an angry face. “Kids only tonight.” He looked around for Ben, who was supposed to handle shit like this, but he was busy talking to an old couple.

“Just stick me,” the man growled, stepping close to Fletcher. “My brother got the virus. My mom and dad too. Everyone’s gone. Just give it to me!”

“Get the fuck out of my face,” Fletcher said calmly, looking around the man to the woman behind him pressing two children to her sides.

The wiry man grabbed for Fletcher’s black T-shirt with a hell of a lot of force for someone so skinny, and Fletcher heaved a sigh, ready for his face to absorb this guy’s impotent anger, but Cleo cleared her throat and two Lila brothers appeared and yanked the man back. He screamed and swore as he was dragged away, into the trees, but Fletcher ignored him and impatiently motioned for the woman to bring her children forward.

“I don’t have all night,” he snapped.

“We haven’t seen a Keeper patrol in a week,” Cleo told him as he worked on the two children, both of whom had started to cry.

“A week?” Fletcher asked, surprised.

Cleo nodded. “Might have been ten days. And the one we saw before that didn’t even come close.”

Fletcher took in this information. It tallied with what he’d seen in New City. The strange absence of Keeper presence. But he still didn’t know what it meant.

He dropped a used needle into the cardboard box he’d brought for that purpose. “Hear anything else?” he asked.

“This and that,” Cleo said, vaguely. “The Roman family is moving closer. Lots of people are. Trying to get that,” she said, watching as Fletcher injected the clear liquid of the vaccine into the thin arm of a baby. “Word’s spread.”

Fletcher grunted as he pressed an alcohol-soaked pad onto the baby’s arm. The baby hadn’t cried either, just watched him with her wide blue eyes. “You see any Strangers?”

She shook her head. “None. The Romans said they didn’t see hardly any on the way up either.” She paused. “Think they’re dying out?”

“No idea.” He dropped the vial into his box. “Heard anything else lately?” he asked, not looking at Cleo.

The woman gave a quiet, irritated sigh as she shifted the sleeping boy on her shoulder. “No, Anthony, I still haven’t heard if Hannah Darling is alive.”

Chapter3

What’s Wrong with Hannah?

Hannah Darling was alive.

Furious, but very much alive.

The bullet hole in her hip was mostly healed, though she still limped when she got tired, and she was tired all the time. She didn’t mind it, though. She liked being reminded of how she had gotten it.

And who she had gotten it for.

She sat before the small fire, staring into it, flipping the one remaining vial of vaccine in her dirty fingers.

“I still think it’s a mistake.”

Hannah didn’t answer.

“Hannah?”

“Charlie,” Sharra said, her usually mild voice hard-edged. “She knows you think it’s a mistake. Leave it.”

“I just don’t see why we have to go in there. Fletcher’s made the vaccine. He’s giving it to people. What do we need to get in there for? Let’s just get the hell out of here. He’s got access to stuff we couldn’t even dream of. Just let him keep taking the risks if that’s what he wants to do,” Charlie said, pacing around the fire.

Hannah looked up. “What makes you so sure he’s giving the vaccine?” she asked coldly.

Charlie stopped and stared at her. “What?”

“What makes you think that he’s giving people the real vaccine?” Hannah asked again, still flipping the vial in her fingers.

“He’s giving them something,” Charlie said, still confused. “We’ve been hearing about it for a month. We know he has the vaccine. Has access to equipment to reproduce it. What else could it be?”

Theo, who was sitting next to Hannah in front of the fire, stretched his legs out long. “Could be anything.”

Charlie looked over to Sharra, who was standing a little away from the group, and rolled his eyes. “So what do you want to do?” he asked, looking back at Hannah. “You want to hop the wall? Get back into New City? Hold some cut-rate Keeper scientist hostage until he makes your vaccine? Go back to running like rats, hiding from the Keepers?”

“Doesn’t seem much different from what we’re doing out here,” Sharra said with a gusty sigh, looking around at the dark trees surrounding them. They were in the densely wooded area of what used to be the edge of New Jersey. There used to be a large encampment of survivors in the area, but they’d yet to see anyone.

“What does Fletcher have to gain by pretending he’s giving vaccines to Susceptibles?!” Charlie asked, looking crazed.

Hannah shook her head, her jaw clenched. “I don’t know,” she admitted, “but it feels like a trap. Fletcher doesn’t do anything unless there’s something in it for him.”

“He took care of you,” Charlie said sharply. “Helped you hide for a month while Oliver Shaw was scouring the streets for you.”

Hannah didn’t answer. She watched the flames leap, her face burning hot, her back cold in the sharp autumn wind.

“Maybe there was something for him in that,” Theo said quietly.

Hannah looked over sharply, into Theo’s shadowy face. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“Nothing. He didn’t mean anything, did you, Theo?” Sharra said quickly, stepping toward the fire, but Theo didn’t answer.

Hannah was surprised to find herself on her feet, glaring at Theo, her hands clenched into fists. “What’s your fucking problem, man?” she demanded.

The mangy dog who’d been following Hannah for three states now got to her feet and began to growl, her mean, rheumy eyes trained on Theo.

Theo stood too, towering over her, and glared right back. “What’s yours, Hannah? You’ve had a bug up your ass for weeks. We had no good reason to come back to New City, but here we are. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you wanted to come back to see him. Goddammit!” he bellowed, stepping back as Dog lunged at him, snapping her broken teeth around his hand.

Theo shook his hand free of Dog’s foaming mouth and glowered accusingly at Hannah, like she was the one who had bitten him.

“Go to hell, Theo,” Hannah snapped. “If you don’t like the plan of our little ragtag gang, then get the fuck out.”

“What?” he spat, looking incredulous.

“You heard me. You don’t belong anywhere near New City. Get the hell out of here,” she snarled, and stormed into the density of trees beyond the clearing.

Her whole body was tense as she charged through the woods, making too much noise to hear the conversation she knew was happening behind her in the clearing. But she didn’t need to hear it to know what they were saying. It had been the same conversation she’d been overhearing for two months.

What’s wrong with Hannah?

It had been a hard, grinding journey north. Exhausting physically, but it was more than that. No one knew that Hannah was still alive, and they’d been working hard to make sure it stayed that way. Reasoning it was safer, they hadn’t contacted anyone, and after they had dropped off their new recruits with a band of Wanderers Theo knew, they had avoided camps of survivors and other Wanderers. It had been desolate and lonely, and they’d all been sniping at each other for weeks.

“Hey.”

Hannah looked up. Vic was sitting on a fallen log, leaning against the trunk of a tree. He’d been with them the whole journey, but he’d kept to himself, spending a lot of time alone, away from the fire—and the fights.

“Hey,” Hannah breathed. The anger pulsing through her veins made her feel winded. She felt like she hadn’t taken a deep breath in weeks.

“Your wolf looks pissed.”

She glanced down. She hadn’t noticed the dog following her through the trees, but she was standing at Hannah’s side, her eyes narrowed at Vic. “It’s a dog.”

Vic gave the filthy animal a long look. “If you say so.” He heaved a sigh and cast his eyes into the star-studded sky. “Almost there, aren’t we? New City?”

Hannah nodded, her jaw tightening.

Vic leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees. “Fucking Fletcher, man.”

There was a pulse of pain in Hannah’s temple and she pushed her finger against it. “I don’t want to talk about him.”

The dog growled, the sound low in her throat.

Vic glanced down at the animal, then up to Hannah. “You think I do? We’re within shouting distance of New City. You think we’re going to be able to avoid this?”

Hannah pushed her finger harder into her temple. Her head throbbed now.

“Did you know?” Vic asked, his voice quiet. “That he was playing both sides? Did you suspect?”

“I knew who he was,” Hannah snapped. “Knew it when I walked in.”

Vic stared at her. “Did you suspect?” he asked again, in the same quiet tone.

Hannah swallowed hard. She shook her head. “No,” she said heavily, sitting next to Vic. She put her hand on the dog’s matted head and the dog sat down, contented as a cat. “I didn’t even suspect it. I should have, but I didn’t.”

Vic nodded. “So what are we going to do?” he asked, leaning back again, tucking his hands behind his head as he looked up at the moon. “Just storm back in there?”

Hannah looked at the ground. “We’re going back in. I want to get my hands on that vaccine they’ve made. Figure out if it’s the real stuff.”

“It’s got to be,” Vic said mildly. “Keepers don’t have the resources to make fakes. I’m surprised they’ve got what they need to make the real stuff.”

Hannah worried her lip. “There’s something going on, though. I can just feel it. We should have run into Susceptible camps by now. We haven’t seen anything. No Keeper Patrols. Not even any Strangers. It’s weird, right?”

Vic didn’t respond for a moment. Then he nodded, keeping his eyes on the moon. “It’s weird. Something’s going on.”

Hannah shrugged. “So, we go find out what it is. If it’s not the vaccine, it’s something. The Keepers being up to something shady is the only thing you can depend on.”

Vic smiled. They sat quietly together for a moment. 

Away from the fire Hannah had grown truly cold and she pulled her knees to her chest. “I told Theo to leave,” she said, after a long while.

Vic didn’t answer right away. “He could be useful in there. He’s strong. Fast.”

“He’s not going to be any help to me once we get in there,” Hannah said, her voice tight. “He doesn’t listen to a word I say.”

“No,” Vic said, looking at Hannah, “not in the way you want him to.”

She ignored this. “He was only going in because he wanted a chance to kill Fletch.”

Vic raised his eyebrows. “He told you that?”

Hannah didn’t answer.

Vic smiled. “He didn’t really have to, did he?”

Hannah shook her head.

“So you just sent him on his way?” Vic asked.

“He’s part of the Roman family. He can go back to them. Theo’s strong, but he doesn’t care about this. Not like the rest of us do. He’s just been around because . . .” she trailed off.

“Because of you?” Vic ventured.

She didn’t answer again.

Vic gave a short laugh. “So you’re sending your boyfriend away to protect Fletch. That’s something.”

“I told him to leave because I don’t want him getting in my way. I don’t want Theo to kill Fletcher.” Hannah got to her feet. “I’m going to do it myself.”

Chapter4

School Friends

Fletcher slept late the next day, so Caroline was already there when he walked into the kitchen.

She looked up from the counter where she was chopping carrots on a wooden cutting board. “Good morning, Anthony.”

Fletcher glanced outside at the weak November sun. “Is it still morning?” he muttered.

Caroline smiled. “Not really.”