Page 54 of The Darkest Chase

Iam a secret agent.

I am a smart, sexy secret agent who is totally ready for this.

I am a smart, sexy secret agent who is so totally ready to blindside Xavier Arrendell. Dazzle him. Completely bamboozle him.

I am—

I’m staring at myself in the mirror with my hair a frizzy mess around my face, my skirt seam ripped up one side, and my pantyhose completely ruined.

I’m supposed to meet Xavier to tell him we’ll take the job, discuss details, and finalize the contract proposal in forty-five minutes.

And I look like I just tumbled out of an industrial dryer.

I’ve been a mess since last night.

Too many things whirling through my head.

Memories of the feral way Micah moved in the dark, like a snow leopard prowling through the trees, pure animal.

The shock at seeing Chief Bowden in the woods, helping the Jacobins hide their dirty laundry. Impossibly more sinister than the man who used to play Santa Claus for the kids a few Christmases ago.

It’s changed everything, knowing that our seedy little underbelly involves more than bad whiskey that could fry your gut bacteria.

Then there’s the skepticism at myself. I just took Micah’s word for everything, his explanations about what I saw.

And the uneasy feeling that it really is believable.

Because there’s something off about Xavier.

There’s something off about Redhaven, too, and everyone who’s lived here for more than a few years knows it. They’ve learned to live with it the way people near a factory learn to live with industrial smells and noise.

You know it’s always there, but eventually you get desensitized. You stop asking questions if it doesn’t affect you directly. You shrug when you read articles about groundwater getting tainted with cancer-causing chemicals.

Maybe we should wake up.

Maybe we should start asking more questions around here.

My only question now, though, is how I’m going to make myself presentable enough to get away with this fraud.

Originally, I had this idea of going in all sleek and sexy, rocking the femme fatale look. Xavier did look at me with—you know, the way men do—so I thought maybe if I made myself pretty it’d be easier to distract him and get him to slip up.

I’m bad at this, okay?

Right now, I’m less worried about making myself pretty and more concerned with looking human and professional.

I barely slept a wink last night.

That’s why I wound up steaming my hair into a coppery-red Brillo cloud. Trying to tame it with a flat-iron just heat-crackled it into something that looks like the fiber stuffing inside a duvet, and then I went and made it worse by going out in the early morning dew to fetch the repaired truck from Mort’s garage. With all this fumbling around, now my whole outfit sucks.

Yeah, I’m so not ready for this.

Not sure I’ll ever be.

I sink down on my bed with a groan, fumbling for my phone and staring down at Micah’s contact. He’s listed under V for Vampire Man.

Seriously, I don’t want to disappoint him.

But I’m clearly not cut out for this, and if I screw up, there’s no denying the risks.