Reagan Through the Looking Glass (Hacking Wonderland, #1)

by Allyson Lindt

  The building they pulled up in front of was brick, in the middle of a block of shops with bars over windows sporting For Lease signs. “Do you people do anything in places that aren’t surrounded by squatters?”

  “If you haven’t figured it out yet, a lot of what we do is about appearances.” Dormouse looked Reagan over, then reached past her, to push the cab door open. “Building straight ahead, with the tattered awning.”

  “Swell.” Reagan stepped onto the sidewalk and waited for her current friend to lead the way. Her heart hammered so hard, she swore everyone could hear it. That now-familiar rush of endorphins pulsed in her veins, beating in time to the mantra in her head. Freedom. Soon. Finally.

  Dormouse bypassed the glass door and walked through a metal one to the side. As it swung shut behind them, the street noise from outside vanished, and the faint sound of music reached Reagan’s ears.

  Dim lights lined wooden steps, the shadows hinting at deep scratches and scuffs. Reagan and Dormouse walked downstairs, twisting around three corners before reaching the landing. The music had grown to a beat that thumped through Reagan’s feet.

  A neon sign hung over a second door, and two doormen guarded it. Dormouse nodded to them, and they moved aside, so the women could enter.

  “You’re not my problem for the evening,” Dormouse whispered in Reagan’s ear.

  Reagan looked up to see Hare a few feet away, casual smile in place. He extended his arm. “You look stunning, my dear.”

  Reagan should have thought this plan through a little better. She didn’t know how she was going to slip out of this place, with him by her side and the fact they were at least a story underground.

  Her plan slipped to her gut, churning with sick frustration. She’d had a chance, and it was gone. Hare kept his gun in a holster under his jacket. Could she get to it before him? Would she dare use it?

  If she turned and ran, would everyone be shocked long enough for her to make it to the street? Would she be tackled before she reached the stairs? Shot in the back when she cleared the door?

  She pulled out her brightest grin and hooked her hand around Hare’s elbow. Maybe she could lure him someplace private and get the drop on him. And until then, while she was here, she could try to get answers about how he knew Alex.

  Chapter Twelve

  The first thing Reagan noticed when Hare led her through a flimsy curtain was how the neon lights clashed with the pastel upholstery. It took less than a second for her attention to be drawn to the patrons. People in various states of undress lounged on sofas. Some wore what looked like virtual reality goggles, while others seemed to be observing the scene.

  A few feet away, a woman reclined in her seat, wearing nothing but the VR glasses. One leg was slung over the arm of her chair, and eat me was written on her stomach. Her head was tilted back, her legs slightly parted, and her nipples were swollen and pink, blending into tan skin. A second woman knelt between her legs. Reagan wasn’t at the right angle to see what she was doing, but their moans, loud enough to overlap the dance beat in the room, filled in the details.

  Reagan wanted to look away, but the moment held her captivated. Thoughts of fleeing lingered in the back of her mind, but they were overshadowed by the rush of heat flowing through her veins. She squeezed her legs together, but it didn’t relieve the throb between. The public display both embarrassed and fascinated her.

  “Eat me. Appropriate.” Hare’s voice in her ear mingled with her awe, rather than disrupting it.

  She forced herself to stop staring, but focusing on his pale blue stare was its own distraction, and the other pockets of guests were at least as lewd. She turned her gaze to her feet instead.

  “Don’t do that.” Hare placed a finger under her chin and raised her head so she’d look back at the two women. “Not if you like what you see.”

  As she watched, her body reacted to every touch and groan. The phantom graze of fingers on nipples. The velvety swipe of a tongue along her pussy. The arch of her back with pleasure. “I’m not—”

  “A prude. I know that.” His voice was heavy, and free of accusation. “If they didn’t want to be seen, they wouldn’t be in a place like this. They probably enjoy being the show as much as you enjoy observing them.” He moved behind her and trailed his fingers along the back of her neck. He tugged at the zipper of her corset to tighten the fabric around her breasts, but not enough to undo anything. “Would you like to become one of the displays? You’ve drawn some attention.”

  Her heart slammed into her ribs, and the pulse from her belly to her sex increased. Everywhere he touched tugged a cord that raced to her core, making her want more. This was the same rush she got before. The surge of lust that buried her fear and ate at her adrenaline until it became euphoria.

  It would be easy to drown in those sensations. She could push aside the last several days and let this go where it would. Would she let him strip off her top? Expose her like that? The hopeful gazes watching her from the shadows made the idea both terrifying and arousing.

  And if she let Hare distract her like this every time they spoke, she’d never get anywhere. She forced resolution through her veins and turned to face him, taking her attention off the seductive room. “No. I’d like to talk.”

  “That’s fine. There’s a seat over there.” He nodded in the direction of the two women behind her.

  She refused to follow his line of sight. “Someplace quiet. If you’re working, I’ll wait. In an office maybe? Even a dressing room.” Which could be what she needed, in order to slip away.

  He waved, and a moment later, Dormouse joined them.

  “I have to cut out for a little while. Are you good here?” Hare asked.

  “Better than parked outside that fucking motel,” Dormouse said.

  Hare smiled and grasped Reagan’s hand. “I was hoping you’d feel that way.” He led Reagan to the other side of the room, through another set of flimsy curtains, and down a long hallway. As they walked further from the club, the decor shifted from plush pastels and stucco walls to brick and concrete. There was no single point where it changed. It was more like someone tried to smear the surroundings but didn’t manage to do it uniformly.

  He led her into a room at the end of the hall, and the world vanished behind them when the door closed. “Have a seat.”

  She dropped onto an overstuffed easy chair. Simply being in here was enough to bring her pulse down and smooth her fractured thoughts. The carpet was beige, and the kind of thick that feet sank into. The walls were a shade paler, and the furniture a shade darker. But rather than looking like it was off a showroom floor, the space felt used and lived in. Comfortable.

  He sat across from her, which was a relief. “I hope you had a chance to catch up with Hatter.”

  “I did.” She kept the response intentionally short, trying to limit it to information Hare already had. Letting too much out felt like giving him leverage, and since she didn’t have any idea what he wanted—what Jabberwock wanted—everything she knew had to be held close.

  “How’d that go?”

  “We caught up.” If she was lucky, the vague answers would frustrate him as much as they did her.

  His smile disrupted that hope. “Good. Then you probably figured it out by now.”

  Her stomach clenched. She had suspicions about a lot of things but wouldn’t tip her hand. “What’s that?”

  “That one of us always lies and one of us always tells the truth.”

  “Nice.” Her sarcasm dripped from the word. That was what she needed—more cryptic Alice-in-Wonderland shit. “Also, ridiculous. I mean the entire concept, by the way.”

  “Good point. It’s from a story about a girl who gets bored with her own life and lands in an alternate world, where so many things are familiar but nothing is quite what she expects.” He studied her for a moment. “Is it really that ridiculous?”

  She didn’t appreciate the parallel drawn to her life, but she couldn’t argue it. “I mean the
one of us lies concept, which I don’t even know if that originated with Alice. Let’s start with, the two doors take turns sharing the riddle. If one of them is lying, then the riddle becomes gibberish. There’s no need for fancy questions; they already broke their own rules.”

  “So what you’re saying is you don’t trust either one of us.”

  That wasn’t her point, but it was true. “I don’t.”

  “Smart. Like your logicked out interpretation of the riddle, we both have our lies and our truths, but one of us is being more honest with you than the other. Did you get the phone?” he asked.

  The sharp change in subjects jarred her, but it was also a reminder she had questions about the photos. “I did...” She pulled it from her purse. “Do you know what was on it?”

  “I was sincere when I said I didn’t look, but I have a few guesses. That’s why I figured you’d want it back.”

  Would he give her a straight answer about Alex? Because that was one thing she wanted to know rather than assuming. “I’d like to hear why.”

  “Besides the fact it’s your phone, and most people store everything on those devices...” He sighed and tugged his ponytail as his gaze flitted around the room. Odd. He finally focused on her again. “Right before he died, he sent you a folder of photos. I screened them, to make sure there wasn’t anything damning in them. I assume you still have them, given how driven you are for answers.”

  “So you realize you’re in several of them?”

  Hare nodded. “Alex was one of us. He was White Rabbit.”

  Fuck. Reagan’s head exploded with questions and shattered expectations. She thought maybe Alex had borrowed money from the wrong people or gotten stuck in the middle of a deal he couldn’t get out of. One of those was more likely than this out-of-nowhere story. “My brother wasn’t a ranking officer for an underground crime syndicate.”

  “He was. I’m in those pictures because we were close. I loved Alex dearly as a friend, and I trusted him with my life.”

  “If he’d gotten the same from you, would he still be alive?” She couldn’t keep the bitterness from her voice. The revelation overwhelmed her. She wasn’t sure she could believe it, but if it was true, she was further than ever from understanding the situation.

  “There are some things that can’t be stopped. Even those of us at the top have to follow the rules.”

  Reagan shook her head. The stress of the past week threatened to break her. Her skull felt like it was miles from her body, severing, looking down, not understanding how immensely fucked up the world around her had become. “He wasn’t White Rabbit. He couldn’t have been.”

  Hare’s eyes shone with sympathy and hurt. “Is it harder to believe that than to think he was a low-end thug, picking up the crumbs to survive?” Disdain leaked into his words.

  “Yes.” She didn’t feel as much conviction as she should.

  “Why?”

  It was obvious, wasn’t it? Perhaps not from Hare’s twisted world-view. She struggled for the words to defend her belief. “Because at the bottom, he did what he needed to, in order to survive. At the top...” This was coming out wrong.

  “He enjoyed it? He paid for your college. He made sure you didn’t go without. He found what he was good at, did what was needed to rise in the ranks, and excelled.”

  Alex didn’t pay for her college, she was there on scholarship, and her spending money came from work. Did Hare know that and was trying to trip her up, or was this a secret of Alex’s?

  “He couldn’t have been that good; it got him killed.” Why did learning this hurt so much? Her throat was raw, and her hand clenched into an involuntary fist. Alex was good and kind, and—sure—he had his rough patches, but he was her brother.

  Hare frowned. “Believe what you want. I can’t change that.”

  “But you can. It would help if you told me a consistent story. For instance, why you never mentioned any of this before. Why you keep turning me away from answers to most of the questions I ask. At least add some continuity to your lies. Then I might be suckered in a little longer.”

  He held up a finger. “I told you up front I didn’t know if I could trust you. I still don’t. I twisted some things, to find out what you knew. Honestly, I expected it to be a little more, but I’ve tried not to deceive you. Someone is working this organization from the inside; it’s just not me. Someone is hunting you. It’s not us, though. I swore to Alex I’d keep you safe.”

  “Why did you tell me this had to do with Wayne?” She didn’t know where one lie ended and the next began. If she tugged the right thread, would it all unravel?

  “Would you have believed me if I told you otherwise? You had the pictures. I thought you’d recognize me at the funeral. When you didn’t, I had to figure out where to go next. You refused to talk to me. When you finally did, you had an entire alternate reality already created that I had to break through. It’s not easy to chip away at the foundations of someone’s beliefs.”

  There were so many holes in his explanation, Reagan didn’t know where to start. Part of what he said rang true. For the first time since she met him, she felt like he wasn’t hiding everything.

  Only most things.

  “Hatter and Dormouse told me their orders come from the top. They’re not following me around, pretending to be my bestest friends, because of something you promised,” she said.

  Hare winced. “Do you know who wants to kill you?”

  “No.”

  “Neither do we. We also can’t determine why you weren’t taken out at the same time as Wayne.”

  Because I was with Hatter. How did she know that was true? “Jabberwock had Wayne killed.”

  Hare shrugged. “We can hash this out all night, and it’s still going to take time for you to absorb it.”

  Another brush-off. So much for getting the whole truth. “What do you suggest I do? I’m not going to sit in that fucking motel room for the rest of my life.”

  “Stay with me tonight.”

  That held its own set of problems. “So we can go another round of fucking masks the stress?”

  “If you’d like. But I don’t think that’s a good idea. It’s a change of scenery and a chance to regroup and see if I can plead to have your circumstances changed.”

  “No. I’m sick of someone I’ve never met determining my fate because... I don’t even know why. If it was to keep me out of danger, I wouldn’t be holed up less than twenty miles from home.”

  “And if I was told to stick you on a plane to the Dominican Republic, to start a new life, would you go without arguing?”

  She crossed her arms and pouted as she sank lower in her chair. It was a childish reaction, but she was coming up short on rational ones. “No.”

  “If you leave with me tonight, I can take some of the pressure off for a few days. Give you a little more freedom and throw the dogs off your scent until we have a longer-term solution.”

  This was too easy. “What do I have to do?”

  “Take off your dress.”

  She raised her brows. “We already had that part of the conversation.”

  “I’ll turn around, if you’d like to pick now to be modest. I’ll have one of the girls bring you something else to wear. She’ll put on your clothes and leave with Dormouse, and you’ll exit through the rear door with me, while she’ll hang out in your motel room for a few days, pretending to be you.”

  It was a good plan. Enough like hers she didn’t have any arguments with it, except that it was under someone else’s watch. “If I say no?”

  “You can go back to the motel. Fuck—you can walk out the front door alone, if you’d like.”

  That didn’t sound right. “I thought there were orders from the top to keep me safe. And the promise you made Alex.”

  “I’ll take the heat for letting you go, and if you’re miserable, I haven’t kept my promise anyway.”

  More freedom meant more chances to run, and so far, though Hare made her pulse race and her
head spin, he’d never threatened her. “All right.”

  She felt like she was signing away a piece of her life she didn’t understand, but deciding was better than sitting and waiting for something to happen.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Hare’s idea of getting Reagan someplace safe was to hop on a private jet waiting for them at the municipal airport.

  She sat in the back seat of the car and eyed the small plane with suspicion. “I’m not going to the Dominican Republic.” She kept her tone light, but she was prepared to put her foot down if that was his actual plan.

  He helped her from the car and pointed her toward the stairs leading up. “Seattle. That’s where my condo is.”

  “Oh.” She didn’t trust him, but if he intended to hurt her, he was going to a lot of effort. Though maybe that was part of the game. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  Hare’s shoulders slumped. “You’re not happy here, because you’re too close to the danger. You don’t want to be left alone. You don’t want to be cooped up in a motel room. And now you’re hesitating to get out of town. What do you think the right answer is?”

  “Seattle sounds great.” It didn’t, but he had a point about her options.

  The trip was the most calming thing she’d done all week. In the air, she didn’t have to worry about who wanted to talk to her, who was watching her room, or if she needed to be looking over her shoulder for a gunman. Hare told her to get some sleep, and for the first time in days, it felt all right to do so.

  It wasn’t that she trusted him any more than before, but there were fewer variables here, and if harm was his intent, she didn’t think he’d get his kicks offing her in her sleep, after all the trouble he’d gone through.

  She closed her eyes and let sleep overtake her.

  It felt like only a few seconds later someone was shaking her awake. “Reagan.” Hare’s voice was soft. “We’re landing.”