Read Online Kindred Intentions by Rita Carla Francesca Monticelli - Free Book Online

“Let’s
take a break.” He sat on a layer of dead leaves under a big tree.
    Amelia was undecided. She was doing her best
to ignore the rain, but stopping meant extending that ordeal. Then she saw he
was pulling something out from his rucksack. A little water bottle. As she recognised
it, she dashed herself to the ground beside him and snatched it out of his
hands.
    Mike started laughing, while she unscrewed its
cap and gulped its contents. “You could have told me before.”
    She stopped to take a breath. “You could have
told me before that you had water.” Then her gaze focused on his hand, which
was offering her something.
    “It’s an energy bar; it should keep your blood
sugar level topped up, until we reach our destination.”
    Amelia snapped and clawed it, as if it was
able to escape, but then she found herself in difficulty, given that she was
holding the bottle with her other hand.
    Mike made a funny face. He took the bottle and
the cap trapped by her fingers holding the energy bar, and closed it.
    Finally she could tear the wrapper off and
bite into her prey. It wasn’t bad. It tasted like chocolate. She finished it
off in a wink. It was so small that it didn’t give her any sensation of
satiety.
    “You’ll be better in a while,” he said, almost
reading her thoughts.
    She decide to trust him, not that she had any
other choice. “Aren’t you eating?” He hadn’t even drunk anything.
    “I’m good for now.” Mike put the bottle back
in his rucksack and closed it, then he rose. “We’d better go. Once we get
there, I’ll be able to offer you something more filling to eat.”
    That stirred Amelia’s interest and she leapt
to her feet. They still had a long way to walk. They’d better get moving. She
reached him and they started walking side by side. The rain had abated again
and, with a strange sense of modesty, she didn’t feel like clinging to him
again that way.
    For all these hours she had been reflecting on
the incredible situation she was in. She had imagined the most fanciful
scenarios to try to comprehend why someone had such a rage against her. Just
because she had seen the killer in the face? But then, what had happened in the
cottage? There were many details eluding her, and in fact the entire case of
the killings wasn’t clear to her at all, but it was her fault, too. She hadn’t
studied it enough.
    And then there was Mike. If he really was a
former spy, what had he to do with all that? Had he really ended up in the
middle of that mess just by coincidence? His presence at the job interview had
already been an abnormal circumstance. The police had ensured that she was the
only one supposed to show up, a matter arranged with the cooperation of the
Human Resources manager. So it hadn’t been the latter who invited him. He had
got the interview by other means. She scrutinised him in secret. What if he
wasn’t a former spy at all, but a spy on active duty? What if the law firms
involved in the murders had something to do with some terror organisation?
Perhaps, also, his purpose was to infiltrate. But usually, to her knowledge,
MI6 spies were active abroad, not in the homeland. Perhaps he belonged to MI5,
which dealt with homeland security.
    “But once we are there, what do we do?” It was
a reasonable question.
    “We wait for someone to come and get us.”
    “Who will come and get us?”
    “Some friends.”
    “More spies?” She tried a direct approach.
    Again that smile from him. “Sorry, I can’t
tell you, otherwise I’d have to kill you.” It was the second time in the span
of a few hours that she’d been threatened like that. In this case, however, the
menacing sentence didn’t match with the expression on the face of the one who
had pronounced it.
    “Ah, okay, never mind.” She would’ve liked to
ask him how his friends knew they had to come and get them, but he
wouldn’t explain anything to her anyway. She suspected he was having fun in
letting her fantasise.