Patriot Acts Read Free Page B

the room, shutting the door behind him.
    Natalie and I stared at each other. After a couple of seconds of silence, I said, “I’m not sure it’s safe to leave the two of you alone. I’m thinking I’ll come back to find a gaggle of little red-haired Russian thugs-to-be shaking down the nearest kindergarten.”
    “He’s Georgian, not Russian.”
    “He’s also got a nineteen-year-old son behind a rifle in a tree house outside. Talk about a motivated family.”
    Natalie grinned, but then it froze. She shook her head slightly. She didn’t want to banter, she didn’t want the jokes. I didn’t blame her. There was a lot of history between us, history that stretched back to a time and a place where we had been very different people. Her father, Elliot Trent, and his company, Sentinel Guards, was
the
be-all and end-all of security firms in Manhattan. She’d left his company to form a new one with me. She’d turned her back on her father and his Secret Service connections and his five hundred employees and the corporate accounts, and instead thrown her lot in with me when we hadn’t stood a chance in hell of surviving.
    It was the way she was, always looking to pursue a challenge, maybe because it would have been so very easy for her to live a life with no challenges in it at all. She was beautiful, she was smart, and Elliot Trent was a wealthy man. He hadn’t even wanted her to join Sentinel, and when she’d gone into business with me, he’d all but disowned her. As far as Elliot Trent was concerned, I was a danger not just to myself and others, but to the profession as well. If anyone had told him that my profession seemed to have changed recently, he would have taken it as proof confirming all of his worst suspicions.
    “You don’t have to go,” Natalie said, finally. “You can stay.”
    “I’m not going to take the risk.”
    “You think maybe, just maybe, you’re being paranoid?”
    I nodded. “But that doesn’t mean I’m wrong.”
    “Oxford’s dead.”
    “But not whoever the hell it was who hired him in the first place. That threat is still out there, and I want it bearing down on me, not on her and not on you.”
    Her brow furrowed as she considered her possible counterarguments, and then she sighed sadly. “Any messages?”
    I thought about it, then shook my head. My association with Alena had already cost me all of my friends but Natalie; what relationships remained wouldn’t survive what would happen next. I’d disappeared once without a trace. Doing it again was going to be one time too many.
    “You’re sure?” Natalie asked.
    “There’s nothing I can say.”
    “Not even to her?” She indicated the floor above us with her head.
    “There’s nothing I can say.”
    “Maybe you should think of something. It was her idea to go back for you, Atticus, not mine.”
    I shook my head again, hoping Natalie would take that as my request to let the matter drop. I wasn’t surprised when she didn’t.
    “She’s in love with you, you know that, right? That’s why she made me turn around, why we came back.”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    “Of course it matters, Atticus.” She looked at me with honest incredulity. “It’s the only thing that matters.”
    “Don’t be a fucking idiot.”
    “What?”
    “Give me a goddamn break, Nat,” I said. “You don’t really believe that. It’s all that matters? It doesn’t matter at all. Not at all, not one bit. Not to Oxford or Bowles or any of that lot, and sure as hell not to Scott. What matters is survival. That’s all that fucking matters.”
    “Don’t tell me what I do or don’t believe.” Her look reflected my sudden anger, turned it back on me, and it crept into her voice even though I knew she was fighting to keep it out. “Survival isn’t just drawing another breath. It has to be more than that.”
    “Then I’m right,” I said. “You are a fucking idiot.”
    She shook her head, hard, as if trying to knock the words I’d said