Playing God (Helford #2)

(15) Haven

Parker was just as hospitable to me as he always had been—not at all.

“So let me get this straight,” he said late that night in the safe house, in my room where he had barged in while I was sleeping. “You left the hackers in the warehouse to the mercy of Helford so you could go play tag with Shawn Masterson up on the rooftop? You’re trying to tell me that there is nothing else you could have done?”

I could have been handling this situation a lot better, to be honest. But I enjoyed getting under Parker’s skin so much that I simply shrugged with my good shoulder, sending him a smug little smirk that I knew would drive him up a wall.

His nostrils flared.

Parker was one of the few people who had known about who I am all along, having been one of the people that tossed me from that helicopter several years ago, so he had to know that there was something more about the situation he wasn’t hearing, but he just didn’t care enough to spare my feelings. My brain, even muddled with medicine to help ease the pain of my gunshot wound, was just itching with the ability to get under his skin some more, to give back everything that I have to take from his unexplained attitude. I still don’t think he had forgiven me from all of this disappearing I had been doing. I’m sure the fact that I didn’t respect him much anymore wasn’t completely lost on him either.

I, however, held a grudge from something much sooner than a couple of years ago, and he knew it. I just think Parker and I were always going to be allies that bickered with one another and never got along.

I was okay with that. Bickering is better than actually allowing myself to tear his throat out, which would have been possibly a little more than my arm could have handled in this point in time.

I met his eyes, two unmovable objects facing off. I was willing to bet that the chances of this ending in bloodshed were pretty high.

Parker ran both of his hands through his hair, making it look even messier and stick up on end. It made him look a little bit like a lunatic. “This isn’t funny anymore, Nina. I realize that you have a higher clearance than I do when it comes to the Underground, but I would like to know the reason behind why Shawn Masterson, after two years of staying underground, unearthed himself in a warehouse in the middle of industrial Barcelona. Please explain to me at least that much.”

“You and I both know that Shawn doesn’t operate in the ways of a normal human.”

“You do realize that this man that you are protecting is the man who shot you, right?”

“Shawn did more to me than shoot me from a rooftop,” I told him coldly, tensing. “And I’m not protecting him. I would never protect someone or something that isn’t worth my protection.”

“And that’s why you protect Jonathon?” he asked. “Because he’s worth it?”

Parker had never really ever understood why I believed in Jonathon so much, why I always wanted the best for him. Parker found it hard to believe that the killers like me have much of a soul—he believed that some of us did, only joined out of desperation, but he fought on the side of the spectrum that I did it primarily because I enjoyed it, which might not be completely off-base—so Parker refused to think of my having fallen in love with Jonathon once upon a time could be a good enough reason. He thought I ran with logic and survival instincts, and he didn’t quite understand how Jonathon ended up being the perfect ally for me to have in those situations.

And I was getting really sick of having to explain to him that there is no explanation. That something in my stomach, in my instincts, trusts Jonathon like it’s his mission to save the world. I believed in him, but I couldn’t explain why or what I believed in him to do.