Would Avery Charles be one more woman on a slab? He didn’t remember the other girl, but he would die with the feel of Avery’s arms around him. He would always be able to taste her on his tongue.
“O’Donnell?” Weston’s voice seemed to come from far away, but it pulled him out of that very dark place. Somewhere in the background, he could hear a phone ringing. It wasn’t real. He knew that. That phone was in his head. In his nightmares. Who had called him? Had it been Ian Taggart? Why couldn’t he remember?
Liam forced himself back into the present. He had enough shit to deal with in the here and now. He didn’t need to get lost in the past. He schooled his expression. No matter what, he wasn’t about to make an emotional decision. He needed time. He needed to sort this out. He’d been played before and people had died. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake again.
“I can help you.” Weston’s voice was smooth, friendly. “I know what it means to be that piece of crap expendable asset. I’ve had to fight the same shit over here.”
Liam doubted that the second son of a duke was really so fucking expendable. Liam had grown up rough. He knew what it meant to go to sleep with an empty belly and rats skittering across the floor. Whatever worth he’d had in this world, he’d had to fight for.
Weston had no idea what it meant to be utterly expendable.
The door opened abruptly, and his evening was complete. Damon Knight walked in looking utterly different than he did at The Garden. His leathers were gone, replaced with a perfectly cut suit and a frown that could freeze a man from ten feet away. He walked in like he owned the place.
“Do you want to explain this to me, Weston?”
Weston glared back. His eyes had flared, and there had been just a second’s worth of panic on the agent’s face before he settled back into a calm but annoyed look. And it was brutally obvious they knew each other. If Weston was shocked the owner of a BDSM club had come walking into his safe house, it didn’t show. “He’s sleeping with my target. I investigated him and discovered he has ties to an American security firm. Not that it was easy to figure that out. They did a pretty good job of trying to hide his true name.”
“Yes, McKay-Taggart,” Knight shot back. “I am well aware.”
Weston stopped for a minute. Yeah, he hadn’t known that. It was obvious in the flare of his eyes before the agent moved on. “I had tech pull some CCTV footage of him.” He glanced back at Liam. “You were pretty good about keeping your head down, but I found a moment when you looked up at something Avery was trying to show you.”
Liam could guess what had happened from there. “You ran my face through facial recognition software and you got a hit from G2.”
“From a couple of places, really,” Weston admitted.
Knight didn’t look like he gave a shit. “Agent Weston, would you please repeat back to me the parameters of your mission. I think you’ve forgotten. I know damn well you weren’t cleared to interrogate this man.”
Weston’s frustration hardened his face. “He’s in her bed. What the fuck was I supposed to do? Was I not supposed to run a trace on him?”
“You didn’t just run a trace, did you?” Knight argued. “If you had run a trace, you would have discovered his very solid cover.”
Liam looked up at the Dom unwilling to leave it a second longer. “You’re MI6. Any reason you didn’t bother to mention that to me?”
Knight’s shoulders squared. “Talk to Ian.”
Well, of course Ian knew. Ian knew everything.
“We’re not enemies, Liam,” Knight said. “It’s precisely why I’m having this fight with junior here in front of you. You’ll have to forgive His Lordship. He wasn’t given the information because he didn’t need to know. He’s been a little too thorough, and he does a lot of work on his own. If he’d followed protocol and contacted his handler like he should have, we would have avoided this little scene.”
Knight’s eyes went to the file folder, flaring briefly before he scooped it up. “What the fuck have you done, Weston?”
“I did my job,” the Englishman ground back, and Liam finally understood that maybe Weston did get what it meant to be left out of the information loop like a cog in the wheel that could be easily replaced.
“Your job was to get the information on Molina, not to screw one of our allies.”
“I’m not so sure Taggart is an ally. Why is he here? Why is he jumping into the middle of my operation?” Weston asked, his fists clenched.
“This is not your operation. It’s mine and if you don’t like it, you can take a nice long vacation, Your Lordship. I will deal with you in a minute.” Knight turned back to Liam. “You screwing the girl yet?”
He had the wildest urge to pound the fucker’s face until he caught sight of bone, but he shrugged negligently. “Yeah. I’ll get what we need.”