He forced himself to keep his eyes locked on the gray metal door marked “No admittance. Authorized personnel only.” He was damn well authorizing himself, but he didn’t want to see the smug look on the Indian woman’s face. Maybe she was the one who was really playing him for a fool. Her and the old fed.

He reached out for the door’s handle, took a deep breath, and pulled it open.

He expected a stern dressing down from his superior officer for disobeying orders. But he heard nothing.

He expected to see a large and terrifying South African man with an annoyed look on his face. He saw no one.

“Hello? Doc? Mr. K?” he called out to the empty room.

He moved inside, checking everywhere, not that there were many spots where a seven-foot mercenary could hide.

They were gone. They had simply vanished. And they had abandoned him to take the fall.

Chapter 48

Elisabetta Juliano had never met someone quite like August Burke. She had crushes before—famous actors, boy bands, the running back of the high school football team—but none of those infatuations had gripped her thirteen-year-old mind quite like August Burke.

He was everything she imagined her husband would be like someday. He was gorgeous with his dirty blond mop of hair and piercing blue eyes. But he was also intelligent, funny, and a little shy and awkward. But the thing she liked most about him was that he knew what it was like to be a freak, to be bullied and pushed out by the normals just because he was born different. She could definitely relate, and he was one of the only people she had ever met who could understand that pain.

They sat at the bar in Uncle Romeo’s club. The place smelled to her like someone had dumped an ashtray into a sweaty gym sock. The room was nearly empty. A few old drunks sat at one end of the dark wood bar, which she suspected had been beautiful at one time. She could tell it had been carved by a craftsman who knew his trade and notched each piece with intricate detail. But now the old bar looked as scuffed up and gouged out as the prune-faced bartender who had poured her soda.

Burke had requested a chocolate milk, but he had to settle for root beer. He was so strange, in an awesome sort of way. A walking contradiction.

He had his iPad out on the surface of the bar and was staring at it with a brooding intensity. She tapped him and signed, “You okay? What are you looking at?”

With a crooked smile that made her heart flutter, he pushed the iPad in her direction and signed, “My notes on the case.”

What she saw on the screen didn’t look like any kind of notes she had ever seen. The view was zoomed out, showing several interconnected panels of sketches, boxes, text, pictures, lines, and arrows. The detail of the drawings was incredible, but she couldn’t make much sense of it all. It looked more like a giant mural she had once seen on the side of a building rather than notes for such a serious and dangerous case.