“I wanted to talk with you,” Danny said, taking charge. It was a role that I’d grown used to, but I wasn’t even slightly mad to take a back seat when she took control. Made me wonder what it’d be like if she didn’t submit so prettily in bed. What it might be like for her to take charge there, too. Would I like it, if she choked me?
I’d zoned out, picturing Danny on top of me, using me, abusing me, and wasn’t paying attention to what the girls were saying. I tuned back in just in time to dodge another smack from my sister.
“Pay attention, shithead,” she snapped, a smile playing across her lips. “I asked why you’re here? You could have easily told Danny all this shit yourself.”
I shrugged, taking a few steps out of Mo’s reach, seeing as she was clearly in a violent mood. “It’s your korero, Moana. If you want to tell her, you can.”
Her glare flattened, not buying my shit. But she was right, partly, I could have told Danny myself—had she not pushed all my buttons by pulling a gun on me. But it was her story to tell. Moana was the reason we were systematically burning down the Guild’s empire, one orphanage at a time. And I saw how hurt she was when it seemed like she’d lost her new friend. She needed this opportunity to mend things, because Danny would be in my life for a long time. For forever.
Danny already knew it, too. She just hadn’t admitted it.
“Fine,” Mo huffed, shifting her attention back to Danny. “Let’s go sit down.” She indicated an old restaurant behind where we’d parked. The front windows were all broken, but there were plenty of chairs and tables intact inside.
My sister sat first, and Danny took the seat directly opposite her across the table. Rather than taking the seat perpendicular to both women, I dragged a chair around and sat my surly ass down right beside Danny. I needed to be close to her.
Deep down, or not even so deep, I was scared that if she left my line of sight, I would never see her again.
She cast me a long look from under those mascara-heavy lashes, then turned her attention back to Moana. “Kai mentioned there’s a mole in the Guild.”
“Oh wow,” Mo murmured. “Alright, into the deep end. Yes, there’s a mole in the Guild, and they occasionally slip me intel. Like how we found out that your boyfriend is—”
“An executioner,” I quickly cut her off. Danny didn’t know that snake Leon was on the Circle, and for some reason I didn’t want her to know. “I mentioned that we knew about that.”
Danny shot me a frown but refocused on Mo. “I take it that’s also how you found my home?”
Mo was still staring at me, like she was trying to guess what game I was playing. Then she gave Danny a weak smile. “Something like that. They’ve been feeding us vital info for years, but before you ask, we have no idea who it is.”
“How do you communicate, then?” Danny asked, linking her hands on the dust-covered table. She was still too far away from me. I missed the crackle of electricity when she was close enough to touch with a brush, so I grabbed the edge of her chair and pulled her as close as possible, without sitting her in my lap.
She flicked me an irritated glance but didn’t move away. I called that a win.
“Dead drops,” Mo answered, her curious gaze tracking over me, analyzing my body language. For the first time in forever, I didn’t care what she read from me. All I cared about was how Danny didn’t shrink away when I draped my arm over the back of her chair. “Dark web dead drops, to be specific. And it’s a sporadic thing, too, constantly changing servers and access codes. Honestly, we thought it was a trap until we verified the authenticity of the intel.”
I cleared my throat, seeing the way Danny’s muscles were bunched, her spine straight with tension. As much as I’d love to think she was a part of my team now, she wasn’t. She didn’t want to destroy the Guild, she just wanted to clear her name.
Maybe it’d help her to gain some perspective.
“Mo, why don’t you rewind to the beginning,” I suggested, shifting in my seat so that my thigh rested against Danny’s. “Tell her about Timothy.”
Mo’s easy smile slipped, as it always did when her ex was mentioned. And understandably, too.
“Timothy. Right. I feel like you probably could have filled her in on all of this, Kai.” Her frown was tight and accusatory. “But… whatever.” She cracked her knuckles and stared over at the wall rather than at us.
Danny didn’t offer any polite platitudes like a lot of people would after seeing how uncomfortable the subject was making Mo. Instead, she just waited silently, her expression giving nothing away.
“Timothy was my husband,” Mo started with a small sigh. “We met about eleven years ago while I was visiting Kai in London. He was sweet and kind, a total change from the military men I’d been around since I’d been eighteen. We got married only three months after we met, even though some people said it was too soon.” Her gaze flicked to mine, old pain and regret shining in her dark eyes.
I’d been the one who said it was too soon, that she didn’t know him well enough. I’d never regretted being right so much as I did about that.
Mo swallowed and wet her lips. What happened next had been a dark period for her, but it was important for Danny to hear. So she could understand what we were doing and why she needed to help us rather than get in our way.
Selfishly, I also wanted her to see that the Guild was evil. They used their members as commodities, not people. She shouldn’t owe them loyalty.
“As it turned out, Timothy wasn’t who I thought he was. I didn’t find out until it was too late, though.” She drew a deep breath, shuttering her emotions away like I’d seen her do every day for ten years. “The day my son was born, I realized Timothy was working me. I was thirty-six weeks pregnant and supposed to be at a checkup with my doctor, but I’d left the light on in my car, and the battery was flat. So I had gone back inside to ask Tim for help and overheard him on the phone, talking about how his contract would be completed in just a few weeks.”
“He was Guild?” Danny asked, her voice devoid of any judgment or emotion.
Mo jerked a nod. “As soon as I realized, I tried to run, but he heard me. He knocked me out with something, then the next thing I knew, I was waking up in hospital. My baby was gone, cut out of me while I was sedated, and Timothy was nowhere to be seen.”
Decade-old anger welled up in me again, remembering how broken my sister had been that day. How badly she sunk into depression for months afterward, getting worse with every dead end we hit trying to find her son. My nephew.
“Timothy was a fabrication,” she continued, her voice distant as she removed herself from the pain. “He disappeared so thoroughly it was like I’d imagined him. The hospital tried to tell me that my son had been stillborn, but I knew better. Timothy took him, because someone had paid for him.”
Bile twisted in my stomach. Timothy himself might have disappeared without a trace, but we had resources of our own. It took years, but we eventually pieced together most of the puzzle.
“What do you know about Project Remus, Siren?” I asked softly, my fingertips brushing her arm to bring her attention to me. “About the orphanages owned and run by the Guild, breeding and raising child assassins?”
A flicker of shock passed over her face, almost too quick to notice, then she shook her head. “I’ve never heard of Project Remus before.”
“It’s a breeding program,” Mo explained. “They used to employ women—usually vulnerable ones who could be easily bribed—to be surrogates for Guild babies. Children with no parents, no family, that the Guild could mold and use for profit. Genetically matched up DNA to create children with all the traits valued by the Guild.”
Danny’s face was perfectly emotionless. It made me crazy wanting to know what was going on inside her head.
“I see,” she murmured.
“From what we’ve been able to uncover,” I continued, studying her with intensity, “something happened to see the Guild abandon their IVF surrogacy program, but it didn’t stop them messing around with breeding assets rather than recruiting. They just went about it in harder to trace methods.”
A small frown creased Danny’s brow. “By seducing and impregnating women who had shown the right genetic traits that they want passed on? Then just… stealing the baby? Surely this isn’t the sort of thing anyone can get away with for long.”
Mo gave a bitter snort. “You know the Guild better than us, Danny. Do you think there is anything they couldn’t get away with? Besides, if the other mothers were told their babies were stillborn—like they tried to tell me—then no one would be raising red flags. Or if it’s a woman seducing a man, then he would never even know he’d got her pregnant.”
“If Mo hadn’t overheard Timothy on the phone that day,” I added, “then he probably would have stuck around and played grieving father after the baby was supposedly stillborn.”
Danny was silent for a moment, then she blew out a long breath. “That’s… quite a story.”