He sat in the middle row of a van, leaning against the window. The dim light outside indicated either morning or dusk. Woods surrounded a cracked and bumpy road. Ben Huntington drove the van, and Maretta sat next to him.
Memory rushed back—kissing Charity, fighting with Milo, and being shot with a tranquilizer dart. Enzo lifted his head and tried to clear his mind.
Not only were his hands cuffed, his feet had been tied together with a scarf. The Huntingtons were taking him somewhere. They had also—ridiculously—secured his seatbelt around him. They wanted him to be safe during the ride before they shot him and dumped his body in the countryside.
No, that wasn’t it. The seatbelt kept him from lunging at the front of the van and disrupting Ben’s driving.
Enzo wore new clothes, and his watch was gone. The Huntingtons suspected, and rightly so, that those items had trackers on them. A slight throbbing in his armpit told him they’d found the one there and removed it too. They must have kept him unconscious for a while. That meant the low light was probably morning, not dusk.
Maretta turned toward him. “Officer Smith is finally awake.” Her voice had a forced cheerfulness. “Although I suppose that’s not actually your name. Perhaps now you can tell us what it really is.”
She held a gun in her lap, loosely pointed at him. Most likely they would wait to shoot him outside somewhere so as not to leave any incriminating bloodstains in their van.
He struggled to sit more upright. A dull ache filled his head, a leftover from his fight with Milo. “If I disappear, the government will know you killed me. They’ll obliterate your whole group. Is that what you want?”
Ben glanced over his shoulder. “We don’t have to kill you. The choice is up to you.”
Enzo tugged at the cuffs around his wrists. “Doesn’t seem like I have much of a choice since you’re the ones holding the gun.”
“In order to bargain with the government,” Maretta interjected, “we need to know your real name. We can’t say we have an Officer Smith. They won’t know who we’re talking about.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Enzo said. “When they don’t hear from me, they’ll contact you.”
Maretta sighed like he was being a difficult child. The gun in her lap seemed so out of place there. She had such a motherly disposition, and somehow, even though she was threatening to kill him, that hadn’t changed.
“They won’t find us,” Ben said. “We’ve already packed up and moved on. We know how to disappear quickly.”
Enzo should’ve expected that. “They have more information on you this time. You won’t get away.”
Maretta looked at him patiently. “We’ve sent your picture to someone and asked them to look into the Kansas City police employment database. We’ll know your real name soon. You might as well tell us.”
Enzo glared at her. “You asked Callum, didn’t you?”
Maretta didn’t answer, just waited.
Of course they’d asked Callum. And he would find out the information for them. The Huntingtons had saved the kid’s life, so he felt he owed them something. “He’s only seventeen,” Enzo said. “Didn’t it bother you to ask him to break the law and risk imprisonment?”
“He doesn’t have to go to the trouble,” she said. “You could tell us instead.”
Enzo considered giving them a fake name. That way they wouldn’t be able to find his mother and threaten her with retribution. But they would get Enzo’s real name from Callum anyway, and besides, a psychic had ways to locate a person’s family. Perhaps if Ben and Maretta thought he was being compliant, they’d let their guard down. “Lorenzo Vasquez,” he said.
Maretta nodded, pulled a medium-sized piece of paper off the dashboard, and wrote something on it.
Someone in the backseat huffed. He turned to see Charity and Reverend Russell sitting there. Charity’s arms were folded, and her eyes icy.
“He probably isn’t telling the truth.”
She was here? The reverend might make sense. Religious people believed in offering last rights to dying people. But why had Charity come?
Perhaps she hadn’t been given a choice. The tight press of her lips said she would rather be anywhere else. Maybe her parents would make her watch his execution as punishment for being foolish enough to kiss him.
The thought made him feel sick—her watching him die. Well, this was one more way this whole mission had gone horribly wrong. If he’d just shot her when she refused to move, he could’ve dispatched Ben, called headquarters, and he’d be on his way back to his old life right now.
But he hadn’t been able to bring himself to shoot her, not even in the knee, disabling her instead of killing her. He was too soft, and he’d gotten attached to her despite knowing better.
“I’m telling the truth,” Enzo said. “I’m a special ops officer sent to investigate an Empowered that the government suspected of hiding in your harvesting group. And now they know. I texted them while I ran after Charity.”
Her eyes narrowed into slits. If she could’ve, she would’ve incinerated him with her gaze.