Calculated Risk. Janie Crouch

Bree and coo over the babies. They probably wouldn’t even let him pay them back.

      “Yeah, okay. Maybe.”

      She looked so fragile. He wanted to do more. But sometimes pushing did more harm than good.

      “Good luck to you, Bree, and your babies. I hope you get to where you’re going before you run out again.” He wasn’t just talking about running out of baby supplies.

      “Me, too,” she whispered. Then she got in the car and drove away.

      * * *

      BREE’S WHOLE BODY was shaking so badly she could barely make it out of the parking lot. If the cop hadn’t been there, she wouldn’t even have tried. But there was no way she could stay there and continue to talk to him.

      Talking to anyone was almost impossible for her. But then to have been caught red-handed and almost been arrested? She couldn’t believe she’d been so stupid.

      If law enforcement got her name and ran a background check on her, the name Bree Daniels would be fine and shouldn’t alert anyone in the Organization. But if they took her fingerprints and ran her through any database?

      She was as good as dead.

      But shoplifting had been her only option. Six weeks on the run with two newborns had depleted nearly everything of Bree’s. Almost all her money. Then all her energy and stamina. And maybe now her sanity.

      She felt one breath away from a breakdown.

      She didn’t know what to do. They’d burned through her saved money much faster than she’d anticipated. Who knew that tiny little humans could need so much stuff?

      She’d stayed near Kansas City the first few days after the twins had been left in her care. It was a little risky, but Bree was familiar with the city and had been praying the phone Melissa had provided would ring. But it didn’t.

      Bree could write elaborate computer code, had an innate ability at developing software and could hack into some of the most secure databases on the planet if she wanted to.

      But babies? Bree had no idea.

      She wasn’t good with people on any day. She definitely wasn’t equipped to provide 24/7 care for two beings whose only method of communicating was screaming their heads off when they weren’t happy.

      Diaper changing, feeding schedules, holding, swaddling, sleeping on their back, buckling in car seats, burping...

      She’d rather try to hack Department of Defense nuclear codes. It would take less time and energy.

      From a purely intellectual level, Bree could understand why Melissa had chosen her to care for the babies. Bree was quite possibly the only person in the world who was living completely free of the Organization but still knew how dangerous they were. How important it was to keep away from them.

      But just because she knew that didn’t mean she wasn’t ruining these children’s lives. For six weeks Bree had barely kept the three of them above water. And things were just getting worse.

      If Melissa could see them all now, both kids starting to wail from the back seat, Bree barely able to make it out of a parking lot after almost being arrested—Melissa would know she’d made the wrong choice by asking Bree to help.

      She’d stayed at hotels at first, paying with cash, not realizing how much the babies would need and how much it would cost.

      In the third week, low on cash, she’d made the biggest mistake of all. She’d decided to use her credit card. It wasn’t under the name Bree Daniels—it wasn’t under a name associated with her at all.

      But in her exhaustion she forgot it had been linked to her address in Kansas City.

      If they hadn’t run out of diapers, forcing an emergency trip to the local supercenter in the middle of the night, she would’ve been there when the Organization’s hired thugs came crashing into the hotel room.

      As it was, she’d narrowly escaped. The number of sedans in the hotel parking lot—and the fact that her mother, in all her paranoia, had taught Bree to notice these types of things—had tipped her off.

      Once again she’d forced herself to drive sedately by as the most hideous type of danger surrounded her.

      Then they’d left town. It didn’t matter if Melissa might call or not, they couldn’t stay in Kansas City.

      She drove west, since it was in the opposite direction from the Northeast, where the Organization’s main office was located. Or, at least the main office where they showed their public face.

      It wouldn’t have mattered which direction she drove. The days wore on her. Lack of finances wore on her.

      Why were baby formula and diapers so damn expensive?

      Even only eating one meal a day herself and spending every night they possibly could in the car, she was still down to her last twenty dollars just outside Denver.

      Desperate, she’d taken to shoplifting the stuff she could for the babies, using all her spare cash for gas, and had been successful a few times.

      But it looked like her luck had run out today here in the tiny town of Risk Peak.

      At least she wasn’t in jail waiting for someone from the Organization to come kill her—or worse, take her back into captivity with them—so maybe her luck wasn’t completely gone.

      Not that the screaming in the back seat was any indication of that. Bree gripped the steering wheel tighter, feeling pressure sitting like a hundred-pound weight on her chest. Breathing was becoming harder.

      She tried to think rationally. She couldn’t go any farther right now. Christian and Beth were hungry and needed to be changed. And she couldn’t drive in this condition. She was too strung out, her body crashing now that the adrenaline wasn’t coursing through her system.

      When she saw the diner the cop had mentioned, she pulled in. Might as well take him up on his offer of a free meal. For the past week she’d been living off a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and what food she could steal from sneaking into the lobbies of hotels that offered free breakfasts.

      God, she was so tired. When was the last time she got more than two hours of sleep in a row? Maybe food would help. It couldn’t possibly hurt.

      She grabbed the diaper bag filled with the shoplifted formula packets. If she’d known someone was going to buy her formula, she would’ve gotten the cans of the powder. Those were so much more economical.

      Bree was now an expert on finding the cheapest possible formula.

      She got out and hefted Beth in her carrier up with one arm, then walked around to get Christian with the other. She only made it a couple of steps before she had to stop, dizziness assailing her. She took deep breaths, trying to force strength into her limbs. She could not pass out here, leaving the babies defenseless. The door got more blurry as she moved toward it, but she forced herself to take the steps. She just needed to get inside and sit down. Then she would be okay.

      She had to be okay. She didn’t have any other option.

      The bell that clanked against the door as she opened it seemed almost at a distance. Bree walked as straight as she could, trying not to stumble, toward the first booth she saw.

      She almost cried in relief when she put the carriers down on the booth with a thump. Neither twin liked being set down so hard, and they began crying harder.

      “Shh, it’s okay,” she whispered, the words sounding garbled to her own ears.

      She half sat, half fell into the booth next to one of the babies. At this point she couldn’t even tell which one it was.

      “Good thing one of you is a boy and one is a girl, or I would never know who was who,” she whispered.

      They both just kept screaming.

      For the life of her,