Page 20 of Duality (The Archers #1)

EVELYN

B efore any good B&E, there is always the stakeout.

Admittedly, stakeouts were not my favorite, even on the rare occasion I had to do them.

It was a lot of sitting around and waiting, and I wasn’t used to being still for that long.

Still, we had decided our best bet for breaking into this Citadel building was Sunday evening, and I hated going in blind.

So we had two days to watch and observe all the comings and goings.

It wasn’t as much time as I would have liked, but I was only able to get the contacts I reached out to hold off on taking the hit for a week, and even that wasn’t a guarantee.

Damn me for caring about people.

Life would be a lot easier if I was a cold, unfeeling bitch, but alas, I had a heart and, dare I say, some empathy, and even if my bosses were pissed at me, I still didn’t want them to die .

Okay, I didn’t know if they were all pissed at me.

Adrian hadn’t said much, just watched me with his all-too-knowing eyes.

Sebastian didn’t seem to get angry about anything.

Marcus was definitely pissed, and Alexander…

Well, he stared at me like I was a puzzle he needed to solve.

It made me itch. His blue eyes were bright and piercing as they tried to penetrate the walls I had spent years building.

He was constantly watching me. Even now.

“You’re supposed to be watching the building,” I said, peering through the lens of the camera I held in my hands.

Through the small square, I watched as Citadel employees came and went from the concrete building, which looked more like a prison than a security firm.

I snapped a picture of their faces, the camera attached to a laptop that was running Liam’s facial recognition program.

Unlike SDS, Citadel’s buildings were spread out across the city.

We weren’t attempting to break into their main building, but instead a smaller administrative building only a few miles from their main headquarters.

It wasn’t as guarded as it mainly held administrative staff like accounting, HR, and marketing, but it was still on the same closed network as the other buildings. Thus, it was perfect for our purposes.

“I am,” Alexander said from my left.

I lowered the camera and glanced at him. His body was angled so he could watch me and the front of the building at the same time.

“Mmhmm,” I hummed disbelievingly. I lifted the camera again, feeling his eyes on me. I gritted my teeth. He wasn’t doing anything, but between his pointed silence and having had to sit in this car for the last thirty-six hours, my patience was growing thin.

“Here.” I handed the camera to him. His brow furrowed. “If you want to take a picture, it’ll last longer,” I gestured up and down my body. His lips cracked in the tiniest of smiles, then he shook his head. It was my turn to frown at him, pursing my lips before turning my attention back to the task.

Maybe I would take the picture and make four copies so they would stop staring at me like I was a bug under their microscope.

It didn’t help that they were still living with me.

While I had gotten word out they were under the Archers’ protection, it still wasn’t a guarantee that they weren’t still a target because of the hit.

For the most part, they were polite house guests and cleaned up after themselves.

But after such a long time of being on my own, it was weird having people in my space.

Alexander cooked almost every meal. Gone were the frozen pizzas I used to scarf down at the end of the night.

Now we had gourmet meals with ingredients my kitchen had never seen.

I wasn’t much of a breakfast person, usually because I didn’t have time for it.

But now when I exited my bedroom in the morning, a full spread was set out with a cup of coffee made just how I liked it.

It was weird.

I felt like I was part feral cat. I wanted to hiss at them in my space, and my fur rankled when something was out of place, but the other part of me was getting used to having them being there, and that was more dangerous.

After this was over, they would move back to their penthouse apartment downtown, and I would still be puttering around my huge house alone.

Not that I had a lot of time to putter around…

I had to remind myself that we were only aligned because of Citadel.

After Citadel was dealt with, it was very possible they would turn on me.

Grace and Izzy had brought it up more than once, and we were being careful with how much we disclosed around the guys.

Yes, we shared information about Citadel, but we were keeping the bulk of our operations hidden.

The less they knew, the safer it was for the Archers when this was over.

“So…” I had never heard Alexander sound this hesitant. “You’ve had run-ins with Citadel before?”

He knew we had. That wasn’t the question he wanted to ask, though.

I debated letting it slide and answering his question with a vague reason.

I hadn’t told the guys about Eric and Brittany yet.

I didn’t know why I was keeping it close to the chest. Okay, I did.

I didn’t want them to know about my failures.

I didn’t want them to know I hadn’t been able to keep my people safe.

Although if anyone understood the weight of responsibility, it was the man sitting next to me.

“What do you really want to know?” I asked. I wasn’t ready to talk about Citadel yet.

“Why did you start the Archers?” Alexander asked. “I mean, I know the Archers protect the people the system fails, but why start the Archers? Why not become a lawyer or detective and fix the system that way?”

I couldn’t help but judge a little. How very silver spoon of him.

People who looked like Alexander and came from an upper-class family had privileges that they were usually not aware of.

They thought the system could be fixed internally, and maybe it could.

But internal change took too long when people were already suffering.

I weighed how much I wanted to tell him.

My reasons for starting the Archers were personal and few people outside the Archers knew.

I probably shouldn’t tell him, especially if I wasn’t sure they were sticking around after this.

By telling Alexander, I was really telling all of them, because he would definitely tell the others.

But at the same time, maybe Marcus would stop looking at me like I killed his dog if they knew more about why I was doing what I did.

Maybe after this was all over, if they knew why the work we did was so important, they wouldn’t turn the information they’d gathered on the Archers over to the authorities.

At the same time, did I want to split open my veins and bleed out emotionally all over the seat? I really didn’t.

I sighed. Damned if I do, and damned if I don’t.

“I was sixteen years old,” I began, my muscles stiffening as memories assailed me.

Telling this story never got easier. “I had just been invited to my first high-school party. I wasn’t popular in high school, but I wasn’t a nobody, either.

I had a small group of friends I got along well with. I blended in.”

“I can’t imagine you ever blending in,” Alexander said when I paused.

I smiled weakly at him but didn’t reply to his comment. Once I got started, I couldn’t stop without breaking down.

“The party was hosted by a senior whose parents were out of town. I wasn’t drinking as I was DDing for my friends. I got separated from them during the party, but it was fine. A boy in one of my classes came up to me, and we started to chat.”

I closed my eyes briefly and swallowed, the memories flashing in my mind clear as if it had happened yesterday. That was the thing about trauma. The bitch liked to make you relive it.

“He suggested we step out onto the back porch where it was quieter so we could hear each other. I didn’t think anything of it. I was a na?ve sixteen-year-old girl whose parents had done a great job sheltering me about what the world was really like.”

Flashes of his hands turning rough. I had tried to fight him off, but he was a football player and outweighed me. I’d gotten away briefly, and he had tackled me to the ground, knocking the breath out of me and pinning me down. I’d tried to struggle, and he’d choked me until I was unconscious.

A warm hand on my knee startled me out of the memories, and I jumped in my seat.

Alexander withdrew his hand quickly, holding it up in a placating gesture, his blue eyes warm with concern as he watched me carefully, abandoning the stakeout.

I forced myself back to the present, lifting the camera to continue snapping pictures of the employees entering and exiting the building.

My voice was robotic, even to my own ears, as I continued.

“He raped me. I drove myself to the police station that night to report him.” I left out the part of going home and my parents yelling at me for being at a party, not caring I had been violated.

“But when I said his name, the officers clammed up. They didn’t even do a rape kit, although I insisted.

They just told me I was mistaken, and I shouldn’t be running around throwing out accusations like that.

I tried to report him to the school, and they didn’t do anything either.

He was a star football player and the son of a prominent judge.

His father visited my parents at our house a week later.

I don’t know what they talked about, as my parents sent me to my room, but when he left, they told me if I didn’t drop it, they were going to kick me out and refuse to fund my college tuition. ”