Read Versions (The Blacklist Series Book 1) for Free Online Page B

soul.”
    A tiny tear trickled from the side of his eyes. “I’ve given up hating you. You’re the only family I have. The only person on earth I can trust completely…and you can’t even understand what I’m saying. But, Paw-Paw, you’re not the only one who believes Cara Lee isn’t dead. There are people close to me who are trying to find her and I don’t think it’s to catch up on old times. I think they want to hurt her.”
    Nothing. The senator’s eyes didn’t flash in recognition. In fact, a hint of drool collected at the corner of his mouth. Rin crossed the tidy room, snagged a washcloth from the bathroom, and wet it. She returned and wiped at his drooping lip.
    “Versions. Everyone had their own version of the story,” he rasped. “She jumped because of unrequited love. She jumped because she couldn’t deal with life. She was pushed. People forced her to jump. But there are no versions to the truth. Just find the truth.”
    “Paw-Paw?”
    “See I…” A cough drew his shoulders.
    “Here.” Rin grabbed the plastic cup with a lid and straw combo and held it to his mouth.
    He shoved it away. “See I A,” he croaked.
    Realization stole her breath for several seconds. “Yes, they are CIA.”
    “Your mother,” he heaved a breath and hacked.
    “My mother…what?” she whispered.
    “Your mother was…” His pruned lips firmed in a smooth, almost straight, line. “She was too brave to kill herself and too smart to be forced to do it.”
    She blinked. “What aren’t you telling me?”
    “Too much will get you hurt.”
    “I need to know,” she begged.
    “Not all of it. But some things,” he admitted. “Your father was a bad man. He didn’t force her, but their union,” he choked on the word, “wasn’t voluntary.” A fat tear, and then another, slipped from her grandfather’s eyes.
    Rin muffled her disbelief.
    “He deserved killing,” Cotton Lee, a staunch opponent of the death penalty, growled the words.
    “You really don’t think she’s dead?”
    His intellect glazed.
    “Why would she pretend to be dead for so long? Why does the CIA want her dead?”
    Rin swallowed past a knot, but before she could form another question, Cotton Lee’s gaze thinned to slits and his head shook back and forth. “My Cara. She’s no longer with me. My Vanessa’s gone too.”
    And just like that, so was he. “Paw-Paw, can you tell me about Cara? Please, a little more?”
    “Not much to hold on to these days,” he warbled.
    She sandwiched his chilled hand between hers. “Hold on to me.”

6
    T he dried exoskeleton of a common housefly caught in a slender web wafted in the air current at the edge of the vent above her desk. In the three hours and fifty-five minutes that she’d watched it since lunch nothing about it had changed… While so many things about her life had hooked a u-ey and left her choking in a plume of dust and smoke.
    The electronic chirp of her desk phone sent a ripple of shock through her. Rin looked at the time on her monitor and then at the phone. Damn those four minutes. She snatched the receiver.
    “Department of Defense, Accounts Analysis, Darinda Lee.”
    “Babe,” Nate’s upbeat voice filtered through the line.
    Her impulse control sure was getting a workout today. Instead of slamming the phone in his ear—the only benefit of having a desk phone—she strangled the hard plastic. Anger churned, but she managed to breathe through the worst of it. “Hey. You never call me at work. Is everything okay?”
    “Yeah, Zach’s team has a big game tomorrow night and he needs some help seeing the weakness in their defense. So, I’ll be home late tonight.”
    “But you’re a football coach, not basketball.”
    “Defense is defense, babe. And you’re talking to the champ.”
    She only hoped he had a weakness she could exploit. Drilling an opponent’s weak spot was the only thing that had kept her alive during junior high and high school. His overinflated ego deserved