Leon must have seen the need to try and calm the situation, too, because he stepped forward with a calming gesture. “Beautiful, I think we should—”
“Shut your fucking mouth, Marx,” she snarled, shifting her blazing glare his way. Ouch, I didn’t envy him being on the receiving end of that. “You are far from an innocent bystander here.”
That snapped me free of my shock, and I scoffed. “Quite the opposite; he’s the enemy.”
Danny’s glare snapped back to me, and I straightened my spine. “You’re delusional. Let me guess, your mystery Guild mole told you that? Did you ever stop and think that they could be feeding you false intel to further their own agenda? Fucking hell, Kai, grow a brain. Just because your interests align on Project Remus, doesn’t mean they’re not using you.”
Leon cast me a curious glance but didn’t seem even slightly offended by my accusations. Was I wrong? Fucking hell, I hadn’t even considered the validity of that tip. Everything else our mole had provided was serving to be true… and this information had rocked me so hard I’d just accepted it.
“You have a mole that knows about Remus?” Leon asked, pondering. “And they claim they know who is on the Circle? How interesting.”
Danny shot him a hard look. “You have ideas on who it is.”
He gave a smooth shrug, then grabbed one of Danny’s braids to tip her head back, leaning down to kiss her hard. “Maybe,” he murmured against her lips. “I need to make some calls. Come get me if you decide to kill this idiot. I wanna watch.”
He kissed her again, making me want to snap his lying fucking neck, then shot me a smug wink before casually sauntering out of the room. Totally unconcerned with my revelation of his duplicity.
Danny propped her hands on her hips, giving me the most pointed look. It was genuinely embarrassing. Had my Guild mole played me? But why? What did they have to gain in providing that information?
“Siren,” I said again, my voice rough with the unspoken plea that she believe me. “How can you possibly trust him? He’s a psychopath!”
She huffed a sigh, shaking her head. “No, Kai. That’s where you’re wrong. He’s a sociopath, and he’s my sociopath. You’re going to have to trust my judgment on this, or we have problems. Leon won’t hurt me.”
I swallowed hard, every instinct in my body screaming that she needed to be protected. But she wasn’t some delicate flower with easily crushed petals, she wasn’t Charlotte. This was Danny… my siren. The kind of woman who would lure a man into the water with her beauty and light, then laugh as she drowned him and sank the body.
So I wet my lips and gave a jerking nod. “Fine,” I uttered, aware I was already losing this fight. I needed to withdraw and regroup, because my ace in the hole had just backfired in spectacular fashion.
It was stupid. I should have verified my mole’s intel about Leon being on the Circle. But how the fuck did someone verify one of the best kept secrets in the criminal underworld? Shit. That in itself should have been my first clue. It was one of the best kept secrets; for hundreds of years the Circle had remained anonymous… and my mole just handed his identity over without question?
Fuck. I’d been played, and now Danny was frowning at me like I was a needy, manipulative son of a bitch trying to trap her. I could feel her slipping through my fingers, and it filled me with sheer terror. I couldn’t lose her.
“How do you explain him being able to name Blanchet, though?” I pushed, following her as she exited the kitchen.
She shot a scathing look over her shoulder but didn’t stop as she took the stairs back up to the master suite. “He’s a hacker, Kai. One of the best. Which means that for one thing, he—of anyone—has the skill to be able to uncover the Circle’s identities because somewhere those records are being held, or else any Tom, Dick, or Harry could claim to be Circle. Right?”
Her pause seemed like she actually wanted my response, so I grunted my agreement.
“Which then begs the question, Kai, if he really were Circle, don’t you think he’d have covered his own tracks so well that no one below his expertise could uncover his identity? Fuck me, it’s like you legitimately didn’t even question the information presented to you for a split second. It fit your already formed negative opinion, and so you ran with it. But for what, Kai?” She shoved through the doors to the master bedroom and jerked open a drawer.
I just hovered in the doorway, confused as fuck and feeling like a massive moron.
“Did it ever cross your mind,” she continued, finding whatever she was looking for and tossing it on the bed, “that all the reasons you hate Leon are things he did to save me?”
What? I blinked a couple of times, letting that question sink in. But she didn’t seem to need any other response, because her laugh was all bitterness as she pulled off her yoga pants.
“Think it over a moment, Big Man,” she told me in a dry voice. “Everything Leon’s done since the moment you laid eyes on him… everything you hate him for. It has all been about me, hasn’t it?”
Why was she taking her pants off? Were we gonna hate fuck? I wouldn’t say no… oh damn. She was putting a skirt on.
Wait, shit, what was the question? Leon. Motherfucking Leon.
“The first time I saw that prick,” I growled, “he had his hands all over you at the Halloween party. You slapped him, because clearly you weren’t into it. What kind of man—”
“He was kissing me in an attempt to fuck my mission. He was trying to save me from you.” She zipped up the short black skirt—albeit twice the length of the one she’d worn to Meow Lounge earlier—and propped her hands on her hips. “Next?”
I scowled. “The ear piece.”
A smirk flashed over her lips. “He was listening the whole time. He tried to come and rescue me several times, and I told him not to interrupt because I was having fun.”
Fucking hell. “He killed Mauricio,” I snarled. “He chased Mo and shot at their car, and Mauricio died.”
Her expression softened, and she crossed over to where I leaned against the doorframe. Softly, she cupped my cheek and peered up at me with regret. “You’re an international arms dealer, Kai. Sometimes people get killed… and it doesn’t negate the fact that he was trying to save me.” She gave a sad shake of her head. “Your team means nothing to him—or me—and all he knew was that you had taken me captive.”
I swallowed hard, trying to digest that logic. Then I gritted my teeth, pushing on. “He fired a grenade launcher at my car in Brussels.”
Something way too close to amusement flashed through her eyes at that. “If he wanted to hit your car, he would have. I suspect it was a warning, and a way to spook you so he could trace you back to the island.”
The same thing had crossed my mind, but I’d still held it against him. My sister had been in that car with me, and if I’d been killed, who would have come back to save Danny from Sam?
Herself, obviously. But I didn’t know that then.
“He took you away from me,” I finally mumbled, all the gut-wrenching pain of watching her on that speedboat in Venice returning with vengeance. That was the moment I’d realized I was in love, right when I lost her.
She gave a soft sigh, tugging on my neck to bring my face down to hers. I didn’t resist when she kissed me gently, her lips caressing mine with sadness and regret. I hated those emotions from her. I wanted to wipe them away, replace them with all the admiration, respect and hope I felt when I looked at her.
“Leon never took me away from you,” she whispered, her lips still brushing against mine as she spoke. “I left. He just drove my getaway boat.”
Ouch. That correction cut deeper than a knife.
She kissed me again, then released her hold on my neck with a sigh.
“What are you doing?” I asked when she grabbed a pair of high heeled boots from the closet and sat down to put them on.
She quirked a brow at me, then crossed to the dresser to apply a quick sweep of eyeliner. The way she leaned forward to get close to the mirror should have been illegal, especially in that skirt.
“I need some space,” she announced, effectively gutting me. “This has all been… too fucking much. I don’t deal well with emotion, and I’ll be straight up with you, Big Man, I hadn’t prepared myself for this. Any of this.”
She coated her lips in a bold red, then reached for her sexy leather gun holsters, threading it over her arms to buckle beneath her perfect tits.
“Any of what?” I demanded, folding my arms. I was still blocking the doorway, so surely she couldn’t walk out in the middle of this conversation.