style="font-size:15px;"> This guy? Zero disliked him even more now. His smile, his teeth. He found himself incensed with jealousy. This grinning idiot was close to his daughter. Closer than Zero was allowed to be.
“What are we all standing around here for? Come in, please.” Maria closed the door and led them toward the living room. “Have a seat. Dinner isn’t quite done yet. Can I get you something to drink?”
They responded, but Zero didn’t hear it. He was too busy examining this relative stranger in his house—and he didn’t mean Greg. Maya was flourishing into a young woman, with her new hair and pressed clothes and boyfriend and school and career trajectory… and he wasn’t a part of it. Not any of it.
Despite everything that had happened, Maya hadn’t deterred from the goal she had set for herself almost two years earlier. She wanted to be a CIA agent—more than that, she wanted to become the youngest agent in the CIA’s history. But it had nothing to do with following in her father’s footsteps. She had been through some harrowing experiences of her own, chief among them being kidnapped by a psychopathic assassin and handed over to a human trafficking ring, and she wanted to be among the protectors who would keep such things from happening to other young women.
After testing out of her senior year of high school, and unbeknownst to Zero, Maya applied to the military academy West Point. Even though her grades were excellent, she had no ROTC experience and no plans for military service, and therefore wouldn’t have made the most attractive candidate. But she had a plan for that too.
In an act of cunning and guile that foreshadowed an illustrious career in covert operations, Maya went over her father’s head to fellow agent (and friend) Todd Strickland. Through him, and under the pretense of being Agent Zero’s daughter, she managed to secure a letter of recommendation from then-president Eli Pierson, who thought he was doing Zero a personal favor. She was accepted into West Point, and moved to New York before the end of that first summer after discovering the truth about her mother.
Zero found out all of this while she was packing her bags. By then it was too late to stop her, though not for lack of trying. But no amount of pleading would dissuade her.
She was in her second year now, and even though the ties between father and daughter were nearly severed, Maria kept tabs on Maya as best she could and updated Zero. He knew that she was top of her class, excelling in everything she did, and earning admiration from the faculty. He knew that she was heading toward great things.
He just wished that it wasn’t the same career path that had gotten her mother killed and ruined the relationship with her father.
“So.” Greg cleared his throat, sitting beside Maya on the sofa while Zero sat across from them in a recliner. “Maya tells me you’re an accountant?”
Zero smiled thinly. Of course Maya would choose such a bland occupation as his cover. “That’s right,” he said. “Corporate finance.”
“That’s… interesting.” Greg forced a smile in return.
What a sycophant. What does she see in this guy? “And what about you, Greg?” he asked. “What do you plan to do? Become an officer?”
“No, no, I don’t think that’s for me.” The kid waved a hand as if swatting away the notion. “I plan to go into the NCAVC. Specifically, the BAU…” He trailed off and chuckled lightly to himself. “Sorry, Mr. Lawson, I forgot I was talking to a civilian. I want to be an FBI agent, with their Behavioral Analysis Unit. Violent Crime Division. You know, the guys who hunt serial killers and domestic terrorists and such.”
“Sounds exciting,” Zero said flatly. Of course he knew what the NCAVC was, and the BAU—just about anyone who turned on prime time television knew that—but he didn’t say so. In fact, he had little doubt that if this smarmy kid across from him knew who he was, Agent Zero, he would wipe that unctuous grin off his face and devolve into a slobbering fan in point-five seconds flat.
But he couldn’t say any of that. Instead he added, “Sounds ambitious, too.”
“Greg can do it,” Maya chimed in. “He’s top of second class.”
“That means ‘junior,’” Greg offered to Zero. “But we don’t call them that at The Point. And Maya here is the best in third class.” He reached over and gently squeezed Maya’s knee.
Zero had to physically restrain himself from his lip curling in a snarl. Suddenly he understood why Maya brought this boy with her; he was more than just a buffer between them. With him there, they couldn’t talk openly. There would be no talk of the CIA, no talk of the past. Hell, he wasn’t even sure he could ask the one thing he wanted to ask the most, which was about Sara.
Maya leaving for school crushed him. But Sara… even after all this time, it felt like that nail in the coffin had pierced straight through to his heart.
Greg was still talking, saying something about the FBI and cleaning house in light of the scandal that had rocked the former administration, and how his family had connections, or something of the like. Zero wasn’t listening. He looked over at her, his daughter, the young woman he had raised, given everything he could. He had changed her diapers. Taught her to walk and talk and write and play softball and use a fork. He’d grounded her, hugged her when she cried, brightened her day when she was feeling down, put Band-Aids on scraped knees. He’d saved her life and gotten her mother killed.
When he looked over at her, tried to catch her eye, she looked away.
And in that moment, he knew. There would be no reconciliation, at least not tonight. This was a formality. This was Maya’s way of saying you deserve to know that I’m alive and well, but not much more than that.
She stared at the carpet while Greg droned on about something or other, her gaze pensive. Her smile faltered, and as it vanished, so did Zero’s hope of getting his daughter back.
CHAPTER THREE
Maya dipped a crust of sourdough into the Polish stew and chewed it slowly. It was delicious, better than the food that the academy served, but she didn’t have much of an appetite. Her dad was seated across from her at the small dining table, with Maria on her left and Greg to the right.
He was staring at her again.
She wished she hadn’t come. She didn’t owe him anything. And she knew that she couldn’t bring herself to look up, to look into his eyes and see the unmasked pain of their rift. So instead she stared at a mottled chunk of kielbasa in her bowl.
Being here, in this new house and seeing him living with Maria, dark circles forming under his eyes and weight pinched around his midsection, her own father felt like a stranger to her. He no longer had the youthful, playful light in his eyes like he did when they were growing up. She hadn’t heard his laugh in more than a year. She missed their sarcastic, quipping exchanges and at times heated debates.
“Isn’t that right, Maya?”
“Hmm?” She looked up at the sound of her name to find Greg gazing at her expectantly. “Oh. Yeah. That’s right.” Good god, is he still talking?
Greg was not actually her boyfriend. At least she didn’t think of it like that. They were being casual about it, unofficial. She knew he liked her—they’d made out a few times, though she wouldn’t let him get any farther than that—yet she couldn’t help but think it was more of a status thing for him than anything else. He came from a good family, a mother
