She sat and placed her hands around the ceramic of the mug, warming her skin. She hadn’t realized how cold she’d gotten.
“You don’t know what it was like in there, so get it out of your head. Ian’s a smart man. He’ll figure it out.” The Irishman sat down across from her, his mouth frowning.
“It sounds like he already figured it out.” She felt hollow on the inside. She’d thought for a moment that they were okay. Just for one tiny moment. The whole time she’d been in the shower, she was wondering how they would make it work.
“He’s being a jealous idiot. You have to give him some leeway. The man ain’t been in love before.”
“I slept with two men before Ian and none since.” The words came out as though she simply had to defend herself, but it didn’t matter. “I thought I was in love with one of them. He laughed at me after I gave him my virginity. He had a bet with some of the others that he could fuck the boss’s daughter. I was looking for comfort from the other. I didn’t find it. I certainly never touched Zhukov.”
“How about Nelson?”
She closed her eyes. Of course it had gone there. “Never. It doesn’t matter now.”
Liam watched her carefully, as though searching her face for anything that would tell him she was lying. “He seemed to think he had some sort of evidence.”
“It has to be doctored. I didn’t sleep with Nelson. I didn’t send him love notes. Nothing of the kind. I used the man to save my sister. That was all.” She used Nelson and then she’d stolen his cash.
What the fuck was she going to do now?
Liam’s cell phone buzzed. He looked down at it. “It’s Avery. I’ve got to take it. She’s getting her car looked at today. Thanks for helping her out last night.”
So that’s why he was being nice to her. She nodded as her sister walked in the room and Liam walked out. God, the last thing she needed was an “I told you so” from her sister. She stared down at the coffee, trying not to think about the way Ian had looked at her.
Chelsea slapped a hand on the table. “You can’t do this, Charlotte. We need to get out of here now. Do you honestly believe they won’t turn us over after they’re done with us?”
Charlie looked up and her sister had a stalker. Simon leaned against the doorframe, a guard letting them know they weren’t going anywhere.
“I don’t know,” Charlie replied.
Her sister slid into the chair beside her. “What do you mean you don’t know? I thought everything was hunky dory between you and the man meat.”
Her sister didn’t like Ian. That much was clear. “He thinks I slept with Zhukov.”
Chelsea’s jaw dropped. “Eww, that’s horrible. He’s like five hundred years older than you.”
“And Eli Nelson.”
There was a low “fuck” from the doorway that let Charlie know Simon’s ears worked just fine.
Chelsea frowned his way. “Go away, you pervert.” She reached for Charlie’s hand. “He is never going to trust you again. Can’t you see that? He’s not the kind of man who can forgive you. My god, he believes an assassin over you.”
“Or he needs some bloody time to think about it,” Simon interjected. “Did you consider that? You walked back into his life not two days ago and you expect him to keep up? You can’t give him five seconds to catch his bloody breath, can you?”
Simon had a point. So did Chelsea. One was all about logic and reason and one required some modicum of faith. Faith in Ian. Faith in the fact that she loved him.
“What kind of evidence could Zhukov have on me?” Charlie asked, her eyes coming up. “Ian said something about a computer and a file on me.”
Confusion crossed her sister’s face. “I don’t know.”
“You know everything, Chelsea.”
“I don’t know this.” Her arms crossed stubbornly. “I only know that you’re going to get us killed. Why are you doing this? Can’t you see it’s not worth our lives? It’s not worth our business.”
There was part of the problem. “It wasn’t supposed to be a business, Chelsea. It was supposed to be a way to stay alive. It was supposed to be protection, but you’re in too deep. You’ve gone places that could cost us more than our lives.”
“I did it for us. Information is power. We decided it a long time ago. If we couldn’t get out of this world, then we had to rule it. I figured out how to do that, Charlotte. We needed power to be safe.”
“We were never safe.” Except she’d felt that way last night. Even this morning, she’d felt safe walking away from a problem and leaving it in Ian’s hands.
“We were a hell of a lot safer than we are now. Now we have nothing and it’s all because you can’t keep it in your pants.”
She stared at her sister. When had she become the bad guy? She’d given up Ian for Chelsea. She’d done her duty.
“That’s the way you talk to your sister?” Simon said, frowning Chelsea’s way. “That’s the way you talk to the sister who sacrificed for you?”
“Stay out of it, Weston,” Chelsea shot back. “You don’t know anything.”
Simon wasn’t giving in. “I know enough to see a spoiled brat in front of me. I thought at first that you were just scared and on the run and that you probably needed someone to protect you, but that’s not your story at all.”
Chelsea sighed. “No, that’s not my story. I’m a powerful woman.”
“No, you’re a fucking scared little brat who’s willing to ship the only person who ever loved you out to a torture chamber if it means keeping your precious power. I’ve known men like you. They’re cold inside. They’re dead. Something disconnects and they can’t form bonds anymore so they treat the people around them like chess pieces, and they don’t tend to cry when their pawns die. They just find more.”
Chelsea flushed, her fists coming down on the table. “My sister is not a chess piece.”
“You’re treating her like one,” Simon said. “You hide behind her. You let her take the rap for the things you do and you don’t tell her everything, do you? Because you’re smarter than she is. You know better. She’s just a woman, but you’re something more. No one can touch you. Not really. You let whoever gave you those scars win. You let him turn you into a monster.”
Her sister slapped Simon right across his handsome face, but the Brit didn’t move an inch. “Go away. I am not telling you again.”
“And I’m not leaving you alone. I think I kind of like your sister and I owe my boss the world, so I’ll protect his woman when he can’t. Tell her the truth. Tell her about your connections to Nelson. You didn’t stop talking to him, did you?”
Betrayal bit through Charlie as Chelsea went stark white.
And said nothing.
Simon smiled, but it was a humorless thing. “It made sense. Once I started looking into The Broker, I knew it was you and not Charlotte. Charlotte did stupid shit like stopping terrorist plots and giving a million dollars to animal shelters. That was what you wanted her to think the ‘business’ was about.”
“The fucking poodles weren’t going to protect us,” Chelsea bit back.
“So you contacted Nelson because he knew the business and you wanted in. Tell me, did you contact him as Charlotte?”
“Chelsea?” She waited for her sister to tell her it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true. She couldn’t have been working with Nelson.
A long moment passed. “He didn’t want to talk to me. He always had a thing for Charlotte. She never saw it. If she hadn’t fallen for that Neanderthal, Nelson would have protected us. He had power.”
“What have you done?” At least she knew what kind of evidence Ian would find on her.
Chelsea stepped back. “I was just asking questions. Charlotte, I think he’s bigger than he seems. I think he’s connected to some very important people. I’ve started to see patterns that don’t make sense to me, and they come back to him. If I could get something on him, if I could make him work for us again, we could maybe figure out what’s happening and then we would be in such power.”
Her sister had gotten in far deeper than Charlie had ever imagined and she’d dragged her along. Everything she’d sacrificed was meaningless because her sister had just ensured she could never be redeemed in Ian’s eyes. And she’d placed them in a situation where Charlie couldn’t start a new life.
“You’re a lot like your father,” Simon said.
Chelsea stopped, her body going still. “I am nothing like him.”
“You ruined your sister’s life over power and money. I would say you inherited a lot from him. Did you think about taking over the syndicate yourself?”
“I am nothing like him.” Chelsea said it in an almost disbelieving voice. She turned and walked away.
And Simon stayed.
“I thought you were watching over her.” Charlie wanted to be alone, to let the hollowness sink in. Ian was lost. He would believe what he wanted to believe. He would believe whatever would allow him to go back into his comfortable shell and never come out again. Chelsea was lost, too. Charlie had done it to her. This was her fault. She should have insisted that her sister go to school, but she’d been so alone.
“She doesn’t need watching over. I thought for a minute she did, but that one will always take care of herself. You, on the other hand, you need a keeper, love.” Simon walked to the cupboard and pulled out a pot, filling it with water and placing it on the stove to heat. “Ian should be here, but he needs a minute or two.”
“I think that’s over, Simon.” Everything was over.
“Not at all. A man doesn’t nearly kill another man over a woman he doesn’t love.”
“What about a woman who betrayed him?”
“He’s being quite the drama queen about that. I watched him last night. Oh, he looked very calm and professional, but he was desperate to get you out of that situation with MI6. If he wanted to pay you back, you would be in Europe on your way to Egypt or the UAE right now. He wants you. You just have to make sure he doesn’t forget it.”
“I think I’ve tried everything.”
“How about simply staying?” Simon asked. “How about just giving him time? Just sit here and look pretty and vulnerable and don’t spout shit at him. I assure you he’ll come to the proper conclusions.”
“And what are those?”
“That you’re not capable of sleeping with the same men who broke your sister. You’re beyond that, love. You’re whole in a way she isn’t. I stayed up late last night looking over all your records. Yes, you took money from some corrupt bastards, but you also spread it out to women’s groups and child protection agencies. You’re a warrior, Charlotte. You’re a protector. You’re everything he needs in a partner.”
She shook her head. “I betrayed him. Chelsea’s right. He can’t forgive me.”
“Then he’s an idiot and you move on. You did what you had to do to protect your sister. She was your responsibility.”
“Yeah, I seem to have fucked that up, too.”
“No. She’s the one who chose her path. She should have followed your example. She’s…a very interesting woman, but at the end of the day, she’s been broken and it’s made her cold. You didn’t do that. Forgive yourself and move on. Forgive yourself for Ian, too, and you might have a shot at making it work.” Simon stood up, brushing his dress shirt back to an unwrinkled state. “You did your penance. I’m working on mine. Let’s have a cup of tea, shall we? Tea fixes almost everything, my mother used to say. A bullet tends to fix the rest.”
He went about preparing tea, but Charlie just stared out the window. Nothing was going to fix this, and she wasn’t sure what to do about it.
She looked out at the yard that could have been hers and wished she’d made different choices.
Ian stared at the evidence in front of him, a series of e-mails from his lovely bride to Eli Nelson. He’d read over them three times since they had gotten into the office. There wasn’t anything in those e-mails that truly damned her. They were written in a somewhat flat, intellectual tone with none of Charlie’s sweet flirty nature in them. They were the correspondence of one professional to another.
Simon set his cup down on the conference room table. “My question is how did these assassins know your lovely wife would be in town now? Unless they’ve been here watching for her. Even then, I’m not sure how Denisovitch could be certain. She didn’t fly into Dallas.”
“No,” Adam replied, taking the seat next to Jake. “She drove, and I couldn’t find her face on any of the traffic cameras between here and Florida. If I can’t find her, I doubt they could. Someone had to have very good intelligence. He wouldn’t send so many men in without a relative certainty of where the target was.”
Unless the target had been talking to her former lover. Unless she wasn’t really the target. That red laser line hadn’t shown up on Charlie’s chest. It had shown up on his. Was Eli Nelson using her to take him out? He knew damn well Charlie didn’t like to do her own assassinations.
So why did she take out the man last night? Think for a second. It would have been easy for her to do nothing and let it all play out. Maybe he gets you. Maybe you get him. She didn’t allow that to happen.
Sometimes his dick was too logical.
“The man we caught is Zhukov. I confirmed it with the Agency and with known intelligence we have on him,” Jake said.
Adam placed a file on the desk. “I busted into the feed at immigration at DFW and ran some facial recognition software and found the two we had to bury last night. I think I slipped a disc trying to toss the nail gun victim into the ground, by the way. I’m filing for workers’ comp. I found at least two other known assassins who came into town in the last twenty-four hours. Do you think they got a group rate tourist fare?”
Fuck and double fuck. Why had he even gotten up this morning? “Did the Agency take Zhukov?”
He hadn’t waited around. He’d come straight to the office after his shower. He hadn’t done more than glance Charlie’s way since then, though he wanted to. His eyes kept straying to Phoebe’s office where she was sitting quietly. She hadn’t asked him again. She’d simply followed him, her arms and legs moving but not in their graceful fashion. She’d been like a marionette, and he was the one pulling her strings.
God, she was killing him. He wasn’t sure how much he could take.
“Yeah,” Alex said, his face grim. “After a long discussion with the Brits, a man named Ten took him. Is that some sort of weird CIA name? Like Mr. Black?”