“They are twice the size of your feet.”
The other women laughed along with Bellisia. “My feet are twice the size of her feet,” Cayenne shocked her by saying. “She’s teeny.” Zara knew Cayenne was a couple of inches taller than Bellisia, but not much more, not six or seven inches taller.
“But lethal,” Bellisia pointed out. “Zara, your feet are just fine. Whitney is an ass. He likes to be the smartest man in the room, and a woman having your kind of brains didn’t fit with his concept of women being disposable. He had to make you feel inferior to him—probably to convince himself as well. He did it from the time we were toddlers. I remember him talking about your feet and your hair and what a mess you were even then.”
That didn’t make her feel any better, now that everyone in the room knew Whitney despised her from the time she was a baby. She couldn’t remember a single word of praise from him. Also, Bellisia was teeny, even smaller than the other two women. If Zara was standing, she would have appeared a giant next to the others. The Amazon woman. The giant woman in the movies that stepped on cities.
Nonny applied a soothing cloth to Zara’s feet and then straightened. She was taller than Zara realized because she was so thin and fragile. She held herself straight, unbending, and she clearly didn’t care that she was taller than Pepper, Cayenne and Bellisia. She exuded a quiet confidence that Zara wished she could have.
“I was just asking Zara how long Whitney gave her before the virus is activated,” Bellisia said to Gino. “I imagine you or Zeke are going to go in after the capsule.”
“He’s hiding them now,” Gino said. His arms tightened fractionally around Zara, as if he didn’t like the idea that she could be in any kind of danger. “He put two capsules in Zara, not just one. I’m going to look again, now that I know what I’m looking for. She told me she had about another week and a half.”
The room went silent. She tried hard not to tense up when Gino talked about looking again. She had to confess. Tell him everything before he found the SSD in her brain, but not in front of everyone. She desperately needed to talk to Bellisia alone. “Whitney always gave me extra time to get back just in case something went wrong. If it did, Damon came to me to give me the antidote and he’d inject another capsule to give me the time needed.”
“Your time was pretty exact, wasn’t it, Bellisia?” Gino asked.
Zara did stiffen. There was no way to help it. He knew she was holding something important back, and he wasn’t going to let up until he knew what it was. She had to have a little time to think things through. People killed over the kind of information she carried in her head. Certainly, covert agencies would do anything to get their hands on it. She needed alone time with Bellisia to ask her advice. She knew these people and whether or not they could be trusted.
Bellisia nodded. “Whitney liked us to keep to a timetable, but Zara was different in that she was very exposed publicly. He sent her all over the world, not to spy on governments, but mostly research centers and businesses. He likes to know what others are doing and project further out. He is brilliant, I have to give him that.”
Bellisia had inadvertently given Zara some breathing room. She still held herself away from Gino. She didn’t know if he could be counted on her side now that he knew she was hiding something from him. He didn’t like it, that was for certain. She really wished she was a badass agent like Bellisia. The woman could hold her own with anyone. She wouldn’t be trembling and sick because Zhu beat the holy hell out of her. She wouldn’t be so frightened that she could barely breathe unless a man held her. She wouldn’t be upset that she had disappointed the man she had come to care about. More than any other thing, that was what she hated the most—that she knew she’d disappointed him.
“Lean back,” Gino instructed.
She sent him one look over her shoulder, intending to tell him silently to back off. Gino’s dark eyes glinted with warning. She refused to be intimidated. What could he do to her when they were surrounded by women, including Nonny, Wyatt’s grandmother? A wicked gleam shone in the depths of all that obsidian, and he brushed her hair from the nape of her neck with gentle fingers. He leaned into her, his face disappearing. Zara held her breath. His teeth bit into the nape of her neck. She yelped and muffled the sound by putting her hand over her mouth.
“Something wrong?” Bellisia asked.
Zara glared at her. “You snicker and I’m going to build a robot that gobbles water faster than you can run a bath.”
It was a long-standing joke between them. Zara had actually done it and placed the robot in their shared bathroom. It hadn’t been easy either. She had to figure out how to dispose of the water and yet not give the robotics’ secrets away. She also had to steal the tools to make the robot, one at a time over a period of weeks and months. That was the most difficult part, since Whitney was very precise in his accounting. Fortunately, Zara had learned how to doctor the inventory books without his knowledge—she’d been doing it from the time she was a teenager.
“Not that.” Bellisia gave a pretend shudder, her smile wide. It faded fast. “Nonny, can’t you make the swelling go down on her face faster? That looks like it hurts.”
Weirdly, her face hurt the least of any place on her body. Still, she didn’t want Bellisia to call attention to the swelling in front of Gino, not that he couldn’t see it. He’d seen her so much worse, but it felt worse in front of the other women.
Gino tugged until she found herself relaxing back into his hold. Now that he was there, she was determined to enjoy herself a little with the other women. “Seriously, Bellisia,” she assured. “Gino got rid of most of the swelling in my eyes. I know they’re both black and blue, but my face doesn’t hurt nearly as much as the rest of me.” She wanted them to give him more credit than they were. It almost sounded as if Bellisia had been complaining that he hadn’t taken proper care of her.
“Cheng did this to you?” Bellisia asked, her small hands closing into tight fists.
“It was his partner, Bolan Zhu,” Zara corrected. “He’s a very scary man.”
“Cheng doesn’t have a partner,” Bellisia said. “I read all the data on him. Zhu works for him as a kind of enforcer.”
Zara shook her head. “Zhu is definitely more than an employee. If anything, he’s the senior partner. Not in terms of age, but certainly in every other way. Cheng pays him deference.” She frowned, unsure whether she should share the speculations she’d been turning over and over in her mind with them. On the surface, they seemed far-fetched, given the amount of information on Cheng and the little they had on Zhu. In the end, she decided it would be good to at least give that much to Gino. “I think there’s a possibility that they’re related.”
Gino and Bellisia shared a look, but Zara told herself she didn’t care whether or not they believed her, but she really did. Bellisia knew her. She would know she picked up details no one else did. She noticed things. More, she had a feeling about the two men. Her feelings were nearly almost always right.
A small tremor ran through her body at the thought of Zhu. She wished she could forget the look on his face when he promised her that if she didn’t do exactly what he said, when he returned, her punishment would be so much worse and she’d suffer for a long time. She was certain running away with the GhostWalker team qualified as not obeying him. He was so handsome and so deadly. For some reason, his good looks made it so much worse that his actions were so horrifying. He terrified her, and she knew it would be years before she dared fall asleep without taking safety precautions.