State Machine (Rachel Peng Book 3) by K.B. Spangler

Author:K.B. Spangler [Spangler, K.B.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Published: 2015-05-06T06:00:00+00:00

FOURTEEN

The old front door of their house worked about eight months of the year. Rachel and Santino would ride that sweet spot until mid-May, and then they’d have to wrestle with knobs and shims until early September. Nothing seemed to bring it to square. They had changed out the hinges and planed down the sticky bits, and it still got hung up on the corners.

Rachel opened the door to the season’s first squeak of wood grinding over wood. She glared at the bulky monster; she had no energy to deal with anything else, be it human or humidity.

“I’m going to take a bath,” she said. “And then I’m going to burn my clothes.” The cuffs of her dress shirt had gone stiff as the blood had dried. Whether it was Hill’s or Noura’s was anyone’s guess, and Rachel didn’t much care. She just wanted it off of her body.

“Good. You smell awful,” her partner said, and then surprised her by pulling her into a hug.

Warm relieved blues and the rich reds of belonging swept over her; Rachel returned the hug gladly. They had discussed the car chase on the way back from OACET headquarters, and the reality of what should have happened had finally sunk in. “I could have killed someone,” she said. “It’s a miracle I didn’t.”

“Yeah,” he said. “But…”

He struggled to put a positive spin on it before giving up.

She nodded against his chest. “It’d have been one thing if Noura survived, but… Yeah. That whole mess was a waste.”

“You’re alive. Hill’s alive. Nobody else got hurt, and the Secret Service has eight new people to interrogate. That’s not a waste.”

He didn’t quite believe it—Noura’s poppy-seed gray lingered within storm clouds at the edges of his conversational colors—but Rachel appreciated the sentiment and told him so.

Santino let her go, and she made her way upstairs, a bottle of red wine in one hand and a bell-shaped glass hanging by its stem from the other.

Her bathtub was one of the reasons she had bought the house. The master bath had been renovated by the previous owner, and a freestanding soaker tub took up a third of its footprint. The porcelain tub was shaped like a lady’s slipper, one end higher than the other for safety during those long baths when you couldn’t quite stay awake.

Rachel nudged the lever for the freestanding tub faucet all the way to the right, and dug around under the sink until she found an old bottle of cinnamon-scented bubble bath. She usually avoided bubbles. She didn’t respect them. Bubbles were too scatterbrained to deserve respect.

Today, she needed something to be different.

Her service weapon went into its usual spot in her nightstand, her bloody shirt into a garbage bag. Then she knelt by the edge of the tub and watched the water pour down, down…

She let her mind go within the movement of the water.

Noura.

The thief’s death had hit her harder than she expected. It wasn’t the loss of Noura herself, and God knew that

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.