Girl Takes The Oath (An Emily Kane Adventure Book 5) by Jacques Antoine Read Free Book Online

casual eavesdroppers, but she had little confidence in its sound-muffling capabilities. What she had to tell her mother, if once she let the words pass her teeth… how could anything drown it out ever again?
    “You didn’t kill those guys, did you?” Theo asked, in a tone of voice hardly in keeping with what one might expect from a Navy SEAL. “I mean, I’m sure they were security operatives, if they were in Nepal,” he added, in an attempt to palliate whatever they might hear next. But they heard nothing.
    “Well?” he said, gripping the table with both hands.
    “No… maybe… I don’t know,” she finally replied.
    “What do you mean, you don’t know?” Theo asked, now demanding the sort of clarity a SEAL would expect in an after-action report. Yuki, meanwhile, had melted back into her seat, eyes beginning to glaze over, no longer able to hear what was said.
    “I’m sorry, Mom, for not telling you when I got back. There was an incident in Kathmandu, and it was nasty.”
    “How nasty?” Theo pressed.
    “A little boy, caught between rival street gangs, each side trying to use him to hurt the other. I couldn’t sit by and do nothing.”
    “What did you do?” Yuki asked, revived by the news that a child provided the occasion for whatever happened. Finally, something in those events sounded like her daughter.
    “What could I do? I stepped into the middle of it. One of the gangs, Sherpas and Tibetans, they grabbed me, and a young man I met there. And they tried to force the boy to hack off our heads with a khukri.”
    “A khukri?” Theo asked with more than professional curiosity. “What’s that?”
    “You know, those huge knives the Ghurkas carry, the ones with the curve in the blade.”
    “I’m afraid to ask what happened next,” Theo said.
    “I’m almost afraid to tell it, but maybe I should just get it out there. I… I… killed them… all of them, with their own blade,” she said, and then fell silent, her eyes smoldering, glowering at the world for transforming her once again into a goddess of death. “But I don’t remember seeing any Chinese operatives in that crowd,” she added after a moment.
    “Holy crap,” Theo said, finally relaxing his grip on the edge of the table. Yuki reached out to touch her daughter, almost as if she wanted reassurance of her physical reality.
    “Now you know,” Emily growled. “I’m a monster. Everywhere I go, death follows right behind, haunting me, oozing out of my pores, dripping through my fingers… and it seems to be getting worse. All those people…”
    “No,” Theo said sharply. “I’ve seen you go to war, and you are the most righteous soldier I know. You protected a child in Nepal, just like you did that same summer at Michael’s house, and before that at Burzynski’s house. You faced the devil then, the real monster, in the form of your uncle, and you risked everything to protect others, even safeguarding the lives of the stooges he’d enlisted to kill us all. I’ve never seen anything like it, and as far as I’m concerned, there’s nothing more to say about this story either.”
    Emily thought about Theo’s little vote of confidence as she walked back along Maryland Avenue. Her reflection peeked out of shop windows at her, and she noticed the little spark in her eyes, the glimmer of satisfaction at Theo’s words. A delivery van rumbled by, belching exhaust fumes, and she hardly noticed. Of course, the ominous content of his news hung there in the back of her mood, like decaying hydrocarbons, feeding on whatever oxygen they could find. But facing a past she had buried so deeply, and finding it didn’t disgust the people she cared about, gave her the wherewithal to work through the thought of a Chinese conspiracy, no matter what its import may turn out to be. Could this be the danger Kano wanted to warn her about? And did it have anything to do with whatever threatened Toshi’s safety?
    Behind one of her shop-window