You Are Mine (4 page)

He was tired of putting his needs second. Tired of wanting something he couldn't have. Tired of giving everything he was to a woman for whom it seemed to make no difference at all. Both of them were caught in a holding pattern and he needed to change it.

Gabriel gave him a dark look. “No, fuck that. Like I said, we need everything,
all
the info we can get our hands on, not just a name.”

The tension in the room tightened a notch.

He didn't like the way Gabriel was pushing, even though the other man was right and Zac knew it. “I said I'll get it.” He met Gabriel's dark eyes, letting his friend see his anger. “Or do you not trust me?”

A silence fell.

“Yes, of course we trust you.” Alex sounded bored as he shifted on the couch, another flash of pain crossing his face. “Don't get your panties in a twist. Anyway, I hope she's being careful. That fucking mercenary Elijah wasn't kidding when he said he wanted you two to drop the investigation.”

Zac let his anger die down a little. “This is Eva, remember? If she doesn't want to be found, she won't be.” And she wouldn't. She was the equivalent of a digital ghost.

Alex frowned. “So we don't know what resources they have. Whoever the fuck ‘they' are. If they're involved in human trafficking, then they're bound to have some pretty sophisticated systems in place, especially if they've managed to go so long without being caught. And shit, if they can shoot Tremain in the middle of Central Park in broad daylight, they could catch Eva too. We can't underestimate them.”

“And we won't. But if there's one thing Eva knows, it's code.”

The other man's blue gaze narrowed. “Speaking of Elijah, did you ever turn up any info on him?”

His friend hadn't given him much to go on, but Zac had sent out extensive feelers trying to find any information he could about the mercenary that Alex had met in Monaco. Yet his contacts had all come up empty. It didn't surprise him. If a man didn't want to be found, there were ways and means of going about it.

“No,” he said. “Not a thing. I would have told you if I had.”

“Shit. Well there goes that avenue.” Alex leaned back against the couch cushions. “What about that girl I sent back to you?”

The young woman Alex and Katya had rescued from the casino a week ago. Zac had got her sorted with new documents and money and a safe place to live while she went about trying to find her family. It had been distressing, especially because she'd had very similar mannerisms to Eva, which only made the suspicions he already had about his friend worse.

“She's okay. At least as well as can be expected.”

Alex nodded. “Good.

Zac reached into the pockets of his overcoat and brought out his gloves. “We won't mention this meeting to Eva, are we clear?”

“Zac.” Gabriel's voice was flat.

“What?” He met the other man's dark eyes.

“Settle the fuck down.”

And he realized, with a kind of shock, how tense he was. That his hands were in fists. That he was ready to fight, to impress his authority and his dominance on the other two.

He'd never done that before. He was normally the one who calmed the situation, who got others back on track, not himself.

Bloody Christ. This was worse than he thought.

It took a supreme effort of will to not stare Gabriel down like he would a sub questioning his authority. To relax the tension in his shoulders and neck.

“What about the other Devils?” he asked the other man curtly in a graceless change of subject. He wouldn't apologize. That was one concession too far. “Any leads on them?”

Gabriel shook his head. “With Elliot and Jordan dead, there's only Mantel and Fitzgerald left. And nothing major's come up so far. Inherited wealth in both cases; Mantel took on his daddy's manufacturing empire, while Fitzgerald expanded the family real-estate portfolio.”

So pretty much what Zac had already discovered for himself. Powerful men from powerful families, aristocrats in a country with apparently no class system. What a joke.

Money
was
a class system. And the Seven Devils had apparently been at the top of it, just like his parents. And given what he knew about his parents, that made the surviving Devils dodgy as fuck, no matter that Gabriel hadn't been able to find anything on them.

“Keep looking,” he said, putting his gloves on. “Men like that don't get to be where they are without some kind of casualties.”

“Apparently.” Gabriel's voice was expressionless, but Zac heard the undertone anyway.
Don't tell me what to fucking do.

“I should go,” Zac said curtly, before he could make the situation any worse. “There are some leads with the players in that game I need to follow up on.”

Dear God. It was clear he had to do something about this obsession. Maybe he should just overcome his fucking scruples and accept the offer from that little sub in Limbo.

Or maybe you should just collect what you're owed from Eva. After seven years, don't you think you deserve it?

Ah, but he couldn't think like that. That was the mercenary in him doing the talking. The man who wanted payment for his services, whose only loyalty was to the dollar. Yes, he'd been that man for years after the army had let him down. But then he'd met Eva and he'd found himself a new loyalty.

He couldn't selfishly take from her like all the rest. What kind of gentleman did that to a woman?

How long are you going to persist with that nonsense? You know what you are at heart. What you need. You need to break her.

And then, perhaps finally, you can both move on.

*   *   *

Eva let herself into her apartment—the top-floor penthouse of a building she leased with a view over the Brooklyn Bridge—but she didn't bother with the lights. She never did. It made her feel too much on display, and this way she had the sense of looking out while being able to stay hidden, a far better feeling.

She dumped the battered satchel that doubled as her purse on the floor of her lounge and went over to the only piece of furniture in the vast space. A massive desk with a bank of computer monitors set up on it, all showing different things. Newsfeeds and stock tickers. Camera feeds and YouTube videos. Email programs. And one monitor entirely devoted to a computer game she was currently playing—an online role-playing game.

Her window onto the world.

Because you can't go through the door anymore, right?

Eva ignored the thought. Her head often said the most ridiculous things.

Dropping into her chair, she let out a sigh as the constant tension she always felt when she was out of her apartment fell away. Like hands that had been squeezing her tight had suddenly let go, allowing her to breathe normally.

Thank God for this place. It was her sanctuary. Her haven. Her refuge. She never invited anyone here, never had guests of any kind. Not even Zac. This place was hers and hers alone. And since she'd never had anything that was hers alone, it was precious.

She leaned back in the chair and reflexively checked her feeds. Nothing of note had happened since she'd been out having drinks with Honor at the Second Circle. Alex's sister was making an effort to befriend her for no good reason that Eva could see. Honor was a nice woman but Eva preferred Katya's approach. Which was a brisk nod of greeting then silence.

Eva had never been one for girly chats. Then again, she'd never had a girl as a friend to have girly chats with so she was kind of out of practice.

Reaching for her mouse, she checked the search she'd plugged into one of the computers earlier that day, the one running the still taken from the security video. She'd put it through some of Void Angel's specialized facial recognition software—programs she'd designed herself—and was now in the process of checking it against various classified databases.

Still nothing.

She nibbled on a nail, staring at one of the monitors. Really, she should be checking her email and her schedule since she had a teleconference with some of the research team in LA, Void Angel's Silicon Valley offices. Problem was, she was finding it difficult to concentrate.

Had been finding it difficult to concentrate ever since she'd recognized the man in Alex's video—one of the guards in the house she'd been imprisoned in for two years.

Zac's response to the meeting yesterday hadn't helped.

She'd let him down, she knew that. And he had every right to be pissed with her for withholding the information he wanted.

The last piece of your soul.

Eva pushed her chair back and walked soundlessly over the thick dark-charcoal carpet to the massive floor-to-ceiling windows.

It was night and yet the sky was full of light. Manhattan in all its glory.

Man, she loved this view. At this height, with the dark apartment behind her, it was like she was hovering in the blackness, floating in the void. Able to see everything and yet remaining unseen. Hidden. Safe.

The rest of the world was a busy abstraction of light, a galaxy, and she could see the connections between the stars like the connections between chips on a motherboard. Binary. Pure code. So much better than being on the ground among the noise and sweaty masses of people.

She'd once lived on those streets, a runaway, a lost girl, fighting every day for just the right to exist. Yet now she couldn't even remember what that had felt like.

And you'd swap that existence for the one you have now in a second.

Eva gritted her teeth. No, she wouldn't. She had money, she had her haven, and she had Zac. What else did she even need?

A proper life?

Yeah, well, no point in wishing for that. Any chance she'd had of a normal life had been taken from her the moment those men had pulled her kicking and screaming from the streets. What she had now was her best approximation.

And that's so well adjusted and normal.

“Shut up,” Eva said into the darkness, to the city outside her window. To herself and her stupid fucking thoughts.

That was part of the problem of being alone sometimes. Her brain would get on a mouse wheel, thoughts going around and around in her head, a spiral she couldn't escape from or break. And when it got bad, there was only one person who could help her.

She tugged her phone out of her pocket and looked down at the screen, her finger hovering above the button that would call his number.

He always answered, no matter where he was, what he was doing, or what time it was. His dark, deep voice a reassurance that steadied her. That broke the thought spiral.

“You won't even trust me with this?”

She knew that voice. In seven years she'd come to learn its many textures and timbres: smooth velvet when he was calm, shot through with steel when he was angry, a deep, lazy thickness when he was amused. But she hadn't heard that edge in it before. An edge she thought was probably pain.

Are you surprised? Seven years and you can't even trust him with this.

Her throat tightened. She'd hurt him and she knew it, and yet she couldn't bring herself to say the words that would fix it. She'd been guarding herself, protecting herself for far too long to give in so easily now.

She had very little left of herself. She couldn't give those last few pieces away just like that. Not even to the man who'd been at her side for the past seven years. Giving her everything she asked for and yet asking for nothing in return. Not once.

Ever wonder why that is?

Eva stuffed her phone back in her pocket. No, she didn't. And maybe she could handle the night and all the thoughts that came along with it without him. She'd done it before. She could do it again.

At that point a soft chiming noise came from the bank of computers on her desk. Turning from the window, she crossed back to it and bent down, hitting one of the keys on her keyboard.

An email flashed up on one of her screens and her whole body went cold.

You think you're invisible but you're not. I know where you live, Eva King. Stop hunting. Otherwise those angel wings of yours are going to get clipped.

Fear gripped her, so tight it was like her chest had suddenly been encased in concrete.

Somehow she'd been discovered. How the
fuck
had that happened? How had they found her?

She stared at the screen, trying to get a handle on the fear racing through her, trying to think clearly and logically.

There was no name on the email, the address something meaningless, probably run through an email router somewhere to hide the identity of the person sending it. But she knew where it had come from anyway: the mercenary who'd threatened her and Zac through Alex. Or at least the people behind him. The people who didn't want her and Zac digging into Conrad's poker game. The people who'd wanted to destroy copies of that security tape.

The fear began to spread inside her as another thought took hold.

If they'd wanted to destroy that tape, it was because there was something incriminating on it.

Not something. Someone.

Her brain sparked, making connections in the way it sometimes did, a wild leap in the dark.

Was it because of the guard she'd recognized? The same guard from the house. Who'd blindfolded her and taken her to The Man. Was it him?

Holy shit. Were they connected?

She tried to breathe normally, tried to think beyond the shakes that were taking hold of her.

Because if they were connected … Did that mean that the email had come from … him? The man who'd taken her and forced her into sexual slavery?

You know it did.

Shock coiled inside her as her brain made another leap. If it
was
him, it meant he was somehow connected with the Lucky Seven casino. With Conrad South's poker game. With Alex's family.