I look back to the balcony, but Falk is no longer there. I catch a glimpse of him heading down the stairs, and my heart starts to beat faster.
“I’ve got to go,” I say.
“Yeah, I’m sure you do.” Caesar lets out a long breath. “Thanks for the coffee.”
“You’re welcome.” I quickly head back to the kitchen area to prepare another pot of coffee. Falk is behind me a moment later.
“What did Caesar want?” he asks.
“I just took him some coffee.” I set the pot over the grate near the coals.
“Answer the damn question, Hannah!” Falk wraps his fingers around my wrist and turns me around to face him. His grip is gentle, like it always is, but it’s unexpected. For a moment, my body tenses, and in my mind there are other hands grasping my wrists. I bite my lip hard and glare at Falk.
“Just stop it!” I yank my wrist out of his hand and step back. “Falk, you can’t keep doing this!”
“Doing what?”
“This!” I throw my hands up into the air and turn away from him. “You can’t keep treating me like this!”
I glance behind Falk and see Caesar eyeing us. I growl under my breath, grab Falk by the hand, and haul him back to the apartment. Once inside, I stalk over to the far side of the living room and turn on him.
“This is all bad enough as it is,” I say. “We still have no idea what’s going on. You’re still claiming it was aliens, for fuck’s sake, and I can’t live what life I have here if you’re going to get on my ass for talking to other people!”
“You don’t know anything about them,” Falk say. “I’m only trying to—”
“I know, I know,” I say, interrupting. “You are just trying to keep me safe, but there isn’t much point in being safe if I can’t act like a normal person!”
“This is far from a normal situation,” Falk argues. “For that matter, you aren’t a normal person anyway.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Are you forgetting the fact that you’ve been hunted for months? There is a reason I was hired, you know.”
“Seriously?” I stare at him with an open mouth. “You think I’d forget about that? I haven’t forgotten, Falk. It just doesn’t seem to matter a whole lot now!”
“If Tyler Hudson walked in here right now, would you still feel that way?”
I can’t respond immediately. He’s put the mental image in my head, and I can’t help but let it play out. Falk and I arguing over my safety, the door opening, and Hudson being there with a gun pointed at my head. Falk wouldn’t even have time to react before he pulled the trigger.
“That’s not going to happen,” I say softly. “Even you said he was dead.”
“He’s probably dead,” Falk says, correcting me. “I still stand by that, but he had a lot of people on his payroll.”
“And you think they’re lurking around here?”
“I would be.”
His words send a chill through me.
“What are you saying?”
Falk mumbles something under his breath, but I don’t catch the words. With an exaggerated sigh, he drops down on the couch and leans his forearms on his knees.
“There were reports of people in his employ in the area,” Falk says. “That’s why you had six guards waiting for you instead of four. I think they were going to try to grab you at the airport.”
I gasp. I always knew there was a possibility that they were coming after me, but no one had ever been caught in the act. Paxton and his uncompromising insistence on top-notch security had made sure of that.
“If the information I received was correct, there was more than one of them, too. If they were nearby when all the shit went down, they could have survived the same way we did. They could be in the area. They could even already be a part of this little camp.”