All Chapters of Mated To My Captor: Chapter 121 - Chapter 130

 She reads me the address after a silence long enough that I count my own heartbeats waiting for it, and I say it back once to confirm and she says yes and I step out into the corridor and pull the hotel room door closed behind me.My phone buzzes before I reach the elevator.A text from the same landline number: Randy Peterson first. Not Elias. Call me when you're outside.I press the elevator button and call her back.She picks up before the first ring finishes. "Elias is too dangerous to approach alone.""We already established I'm doing this alone.""Kira, Elias shot Leo in an alley and walked away and has been building a network for twenty years and has compound security intelligence." She is talking fast, faster than usual, and I can hear her moving, a door, footsteps. "Randy Peterson is a delivery driver who has been running a route for eight years and may or may not have known what he was part of. If he didn't know, he's

 The wrong address bothers me more than it should.I'm sitting at my archive terminal with Kira's text on my personal phone beside the keyboard and I keep coming back to it between pulling utility records, the woman in the dressing gown who has lived at that address for three years, which means the address in the contractor vetting system was either entered incorrectly fourteen months ago, or it was entered incorrectly on purpose. Randy Peterson has been a MediSupply employee for eight years. Eight years of correctly filed records and then a residential address that leads to the wrong house.I pull his full contractor file and go through it from the beginning, the original vetting submission, the annual renewals, the address history, and the address has been the same since his first filing, number 34, the blue door, the woman in the dressing gown. Which means either he has never lived there and someone filed a false address eight years ago and no one caugh

 I go back to the archive first, not because I need anything from it but because I need somewhere to be for five minutes that isn't a corridor, and I sit in my chair and look at the screen and the screen looks back at me with the contractor log still open, Cassidy's identifier code sitting in the filter field, and I close the window and open it again and close it properly this time.Then I go to my room.It's quieter on the residential floor than the operational corridors, fewer people moving, and I get to my door and go inside and sit on the edge of the bed and take my phone off the nightstand where I left it charging this morning, a lifetime ago, before the diner and the hotel and Garrett and the archive and Cassidy's voice saying Mara in the corridor with everything she usually keeps out of her voice suddenly in it.I call Kira.She answers on the third ring and she sounds like she's outside, a slight wind on the line, her breathing the pa

 The meeting is called for ten in the morning and everyone is there when I arrive, which is how it should be. Garrett at the far end of the table, Harmon beside him, the three senior enforcers whose names the compound has been running on for the past eighteen hours, and two senior council members who received my summons at seven AM and came without asking questions, which is also how it should be.I sit down and nobody speaks and I look at the table for a moment, at the tactical map Cassidy has laid out with the current Silas sighting markers and the summit venue diagram beside it, and then I look at the people around the table."My son came to me with a claim," I say. "I want to address it before we proceed to summit security, because several of you will have heard some version of it through the compound channels by now and I want the record to be clear." I look at Garrett. "Dante presented a text message allegedly sent by Leo Volkov, a human civilian kil

 "Miss Volkov," Reyes says. "Don't run."I look at his hand on my arm and then at his face and then past his shoulder at the preserves stall where Randy Peterson was standing thirty seconds ago, and the space where Randy was is now occupied by a woman in a yellow raincoat examining the same honey jars, and beyond her the northern end of the market is thinning out into the street and Randy's blue waterproof jacket is not visible anywhere in what I can see of it.I stop pulling against Reyes's grip.He lets go of my arm when I stop pulling, dropping his hand and taking a small step back, giving me room without giving me enough room to actually go anywhere useful, and he looks at me with his hands loose at his sides and waits."You were following someone," he says."I was shopping.""You haven't bought anything.""I was looking."He glances at the preserves stall and then back at me. "Who was the man at the honey jars