Her glare turned venomous. “Like you’d know. Do you have any friends, Leon? Or is that not in the executioner job description?”
The fact that she knew about my real role within the Guild didn’t shock me in the least. Not like she’d clearly been hoping it would. I also wasn’t petty enough to have my feelings hurt by her intended barb. Silly Jude, didn’t she know? I didn’t need friends. I had Danny.
“Tell me about your accident, Judith,” I suggested with a placid smile. “The one that ended your career as an active mercenary. I bet that was devastating for someone like you.”
Her jaw twitched with anger. “What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Someone like me?”
I gave a casual shrug, watching her impassively. “You’re a legacy, like me. How did your parents feel about relegating you to library work when you were on track to be one of the Guild’s brightest stars?”
She was pissed now. “My parents preferred that to the alternative.”
Ah yes, because it was either be useful or get killed. It was kind of sweet that her parents cared enough about her to prefer her new career path. Mine sure as hell hadn’t.
“Still, it can’t be easy,” I pushed harder, picking the scab on her decade-old wound. “You’re stuck in the archives, sniffing thousand-year-old books while your two best friends become the darlings of the mercenary world. Must sting. Especially when you know what some of those contracts pay.”
Her brow creased, but she was spared an immediate response by the waitress delivering our orders. We both waited in tense silence until we were alone once more, then she balled her fist and bared her teeth at me.
“How fucking dare you?” she snarled. “I know exactly what you’re implying Leon Marx, and you couldn’t be further from the truth. You think someone close to Danny is putting her in danger? Maybe take a fucking look in the mirror.”
She wasn’t wrong. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t also a liability. I sipped my coffee, sitting back in my seat to consider her furious, defensive body language. Surprisingly, she was harder to read than Sabine, but I wondered how much of that was her hiding the little affair with her boss.
“You’re the reason why she’s not responding to my messages, aren’t you?” Jude was accusing and looked like she wanted to rip my head off with her bare hands. “Where is she?”
I tipped my head to the side. “I haven’t taken her phone away. If she wanted you to know where she was, I’m sure I couldn’t stop her.” And I loved that. She was so stubborn, so unpredictable. “Tell me about your accident, Judith.”
Her eyes flickered with threats that she was in no fit shape to deliver on, and I waited patiently.
“Why do you want to know?” she finally bit out. “It’s ancient history now.”
I sipped my coffee, then carefully placed it back on the table. “Humor me.”
She glared at me for a moment, then sighed so hard her shoulders slumped. “There’s not much to the story. We were on an assessment contract, with the examiners following via drone footage. One of the guys on our team messed up and tipped the targets off. He got shot and the rest of us scattered. We were in an old warehouse, full of rusty machinery and shit. Somehow in the firefight, a chain supporting a piece of equipment snapped and fell on me. It crushed my leg.”
That matched the files I’d pulled on the botched mission.
“How’d you escape?” I prompted, wanting to hear her version of events.
“I suspect you already know. Danny saved me. She was like something out of a video game, ripping through the targets without even a fraction of hesitation. Then she called in for medical assistance and waited with me until they could lift the machinery off my leg. She graduated to alpha level that night, and the rest of the team got put back into training. Except me, obviously. I went through a bunch of surgeries and rehab, then got shipped here to work the archive.” There was a heavy dose of bitterness in her voice, but none of it was directed at my woman.
That was why I wanted to hear the story from her lips, because I needed to see whether she held any animosity for that pivotal point of her life. What I heard instead was a lot of self-pity and regret, plenty of hatred toward the Guild itself, but for Danny, it was all appreciation and love.
“Thank you, Judith,” I commented, pushing back my seat. “That’s all I needed.”
“Wait, what?” She tried to scramble out of her seat to stop me, but I’d already dismissed her from my attention, striding down the street with a small sense of confidence in Danny’s friends. They still shouldn’t be trusted implicitly, but at least I was confident they both cared about my woman’s well-being. That needed to count for something.
Even so, I called in one of my personal team and put him on Judith’s tail. Just in case.
27
We didn’t have a lot to pack up from the safe house, so we left the bloody mess in the kitchen and drove away, leaving it for the Hestia housekeepers to deal with. It was the least they could do for nearly getting me killed. I’d taken my attacker’s little security system bypass device with me to show Leon. It might come in handy one day.
Kai was quiet as he drove us away from Echo Creek and back toward the more densely populated area of Shadow Grove. It was a few hours away, and I barely lasted twenty minutes before the curiosity got to be too much.
“What happened with your team?” I asked, breaking the quiet. “I hadn’t expected you back for days.”
He shot me a quick glance, looking taken aback. “You think I’d have left you for days that easily? Siren, wake up and smell the obsession. I was so desperate to see you that I had to check my camera after barely being gone for an hour.”
Well, he had a point there. I couldn’t even seem to muster up the appropriate outrage about his hidden camera, because I quietly found it hot as hell that he’d been spying on my show.
“My team wasn’t far from here, doing a deal with some local gangs. Mo dealt with the issue before I even got to them, not long after I switched the car.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “We should probably swap cars again before we get to Shadow Grove, come to think of it. This one might be reported stolen soon.”
“Easily done,” I agreed. “So why did Sam make it all sound so urgent that you needed to deal with it? Mo is your second in command, isn’t she?”
Kai’s hands tightened around the steering wheel, his knuckles paling somewhat, and his expression turned murderous. “Good fucking question, Siren. Something I intend to discuss with him directly.”
So long as I didn’t need to deal with Sam, I didn’t fucking care. He’d have been perfectly happy to kill me to satiate his own desire to punish someone. Anyone. Even despite the fact that I genuinely wasn’t to blame for his loved one dying.
Not that I could hold that against him—I’d killed people for less—but I sure as shit wouldn’t be making friends with him anytime soon.
“Your team has some hacking experience, don’t they?” I asked, changing the subject.
Kai shot me a puzzled look. “Some. Why?”
“I’ve been thinking about how you can help me with my little problem,” I said, giving him a hard glare. “Because as crazy as it might seem, multiple orgasms won’t clear my name with the Guild. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s distracting me from my objective.” Maybe I’d be better off alone so I could focus better.
Kai scowled at the road ahead like he was plotting murder and didn’t respond for a long moment. Then he shook his head. “Too bad, you’re not getting rid of me.”
I scoffed. “You think you can stop me? Don’t kid yourself.”
He licked his lips, like he was putting a huge effort into containing his out of control caveman tendencies. Like he was trying to temper his gut instinct to lock me in his castle dungeon like Belle.
“I’m going to be perfectly clear with you on this, Siren,” he said carefully, his voice threaded with tension. “But I will do whatever is necessary to ensure you never run from me again. There is nowhere you can hide that I won’t find you. Am I understood?”
The big dick energy was so thick I was gagging on it. In the best kind of way.
“It’s cute that you believe that, Big Man.” I grinned, then on an impulse I couldn’t explain even if I wanted to, I leaned over and smacked a kiss on his cheek.
His reflexes were quicker than I gave him credit for, snapping his hand up to grab my face and catching my lips with his own. He didn’t slow the car or even swerve as he kissed me for far longer than was safe, and it got me all kinds of hot and bothered.
Eventually I pulled out of his grip, though, because I valued my life and would be furious if I died in a stupid car crash instead of a high intensity gun fight.