Read Online Don't Let Go by Skye Warren - Free Book Online Page A

on the location so we could watch guard activity and learn their security protocols. With painstaking timing and coordination, we established a plan to bypass the outer perimeter and then confront each inner level until all opposing forces were subdued. That was the hard part.
    We’d find out then if Laguardia was among them. Only after would we know if we’d caught our prey. We didn’t have anything as precise as a harpoon. We had a net that would scoop out fish and debris and a hundred other things—and hopefully the shark as well.
    Hennessey headed joint task force meetings with the DEA and the local police. Together, we planned the operation with cunning and expertise, and the entire time, I waited for Brody to tell me there’d been a mistake. I wasn’t meant to be part of something this big, this important. I waited for Hennessey to ask Brody for another partner, and for real this time. He’d be better off with someone more experienced than me, wouldn’t he?
    But neither of those things happened. Someone else served up the cold reminder of how poorly suited I was for the job. Lance.
    “You seem tense,” he mumbled when I’d fallen back in my chair on a rare break in my cubicle. Hennessey had disappeared for some meeting with the bigwigs, so for the umpteenth time, I was left to go over the plans by myself.
    I shrugged. “It’s a big deal.”
    “For the Bureau or for your career?”
    The venom in Lance’s voice shocked me. I sat forward slowly, focusing on him. “For both. Is that a problem?”
    He shook his head and disappeared behind the cloth divider, but I wouldn’t be that easily put off. For months, he had been my only friend here. And now, was he turning his back on me? Or had I turned my back on him?
    I hadn’t meant to abandon him when I got this assignment. I’d been busy as hell, and Lance had been working in the same conference room for most of the time. But we didn’t have the private talks over the cubicle walls anymore. And if Lance were a little jealous of me getting to do fieldwork, it would only be natural. After all, he’d started here before me.
    So why had I gotten the assignment?
    I shook the thought away and focused on the problem at hand. Namely, Lance, resolutely staring at his desk as if it held the answers to the universe instead of his timesheet.
    “Hey,” I said softly. “I need your help with something, if you’re up for it.”
    He tilted his head without looking at me. “Help with what?”
    “It’s for the case. But Hennessey wouldn’t approve.” That got his attention. “He might be mad, actually. So you can’t tell him. It’s okay if you don’t want to do it.”
    When he turned, he had a faint smile. “Let’s go. You can fill me in on the way.”
    “You sure you aren’t worried about Hennessey?”
    A snort. “He can kiss my ass.”
    Definitely jealous.
    Though it occurred to me for the first time that maybe he wasn’t only jealous of my assignment. The quiet talks, the lunches spent together, the casual invitations to a weekend movie if I didn’t have anything else to do. If I wasn’t mistaken, Lance had a crush on me.
    Shit. I hadn’t realized it, because I never thought of him that way. It was fine, I supposed, as long as he knew nothing would come of it. Not on this field trip, certainly. Not ever. I suspected he’d come along to piss off Hennessey more than anything. That was fine too. A little professional competition never hurt anybody.
    The raid was tomorrow night. We had planned it down to the minute. Since tomorrow would be a long, exhausting day, we’d all been dismissed early. Go home, get some sleep. Officially the goal was to make sure the agents were well-rested for a raid, not edging toward exhaustion. Unofficially, a grim undertone reminded us that everyone might not make it through.
    We maintained every safety protocol from full shields to tight formations on entry, but these situations were always chaotic. Or so I had heard.