“The soldier pointed his gun right here,” Gino said, pointing to the spot on his own brain.
“The where wouldn’t matter if it’s Bluetooth,” Trap said. “And password protected. We know it is and the device is named Fiore Brillante.” Again, the last was said speculatively, as if he was turning something over and over in his mind.
“Why make it difficult?” Ezekiel asked. “Whitney knows she can’t get away. He has the virus. He has the other women. She’s not going to give him any real trouble.”
Gino added his assessment of Zara. “She’s the gentle soul. The one that wants the best for the other women. She follows the rules.”
“She didn’t,” Bellisia objected. “She brought us contraband and spent weeks in solitary.”
“He would expect that. Those small rebellions were nothing to him. He wanted her to break the rules that didn’t matter to him so he could punish her,” Wyatt theorized. “Did she ever do anything that caused him to hurt her physically?”
Zara’s stomach clenched hard. She pressed her hand there and once more looked to Gino. Of course she had. Once. One time. She looked down at her hands. It had only taken one time of Whitney inflicting real pain on her and she’d never gone so far again. In fact, she’d stopped bringing in contraband for the girls for nearly a year—until her anger at Whitney for his injustices and at herself for letting him make her a weakling overcame her fear.
“Zara?” Wyatt prompted. “I’m asking for a reason. He put the device in your head. This all centers around you. The more we know about you and your life there, the better the chance we have of figuring out Whitney’s password.”
She kept looking at Gino, eyes unconsciously pleading with him. She’d told him. That one time she’d rebelled against Whitney’s authority.
Gino cleared his throat, got up casually, in that fluid, catlike way he had that always made him look more dangerous and lethal than ever. “The girls wanted pictures of a real college party. They wanted photographs of the college boys.” He stalked across the room, his body moving in very close to hers. He stopped right behind her, one hand sliding up her back, under her hair, to curl around the nape of her neck.
The hold felt claiming. Possessive. It also felt protective. The moment he was close to her, Zara felt safe and almost comfortable in spite of being under such scrutiny. She wanted to wrap herself around him, melt her body right into his. Be that close. Maybe others wouldn’t like the way he took care of her, but she needed it and he gave it to her.
“She was young, only fourteen, but she snuck out of her apartment, right past three of Whitney’s supersoldiers. At that time, she always had guards around her.”
Gino leaned down and brushed the top of her head with a kiss. Zara knew he did it because he could feel the tension rising in her. “At fourteen, she was already outthinking her guards. She got past them just after midnight, snuck into the party and took lots of pictures, using her phone. She went through the rooms until she found a computer open, sent the pictures to her email and then stored them on a very small thumb drive. She wiped them off the computer and from her phone and snuck back into her room. She thought she was safe.”
“I should have known better,” Zara whispered.
Bellisia put a comforting hand on her knee. “You did it for us, honey.”
“I know.”
“Whitney, of course monitored everything. He knew she had pictures. She refused to give them up, telling him she didn’t have them, but it didn’t matter. He had the three men who had failed in guarding her punish her.”
“They used hoses,” Bellisia said, her voice very low. “He made all of us watch.”
“After,” Gino took up the story, “he forced the girls to watch as he had each of the soldiers killed for failure to ensure Zara’s compliance.” He slipped both arms around her.
“So, you never defied him like that again,” Ezekiel said.
Bellisia and Zara exchanged a long look. “I never got caught again,” Zara clarified. She glanced over her shoulder at Gino, leveled her gaze on him and told the absolute truth. A warning. “I follow someone’s lead until they prove to me they aren’t worth it and then I don’t.”
“I got that,” Gino said. “I’m crazy, baby, not stupid.”
“Whitney’s lulled into a false sense of security with her, thinking she’ll obey his every directive in order not to get punished. So, he uses Bluetooth,” Trap mused aloud. “Easiest way. He just knocks her out, puts his device near the SSD and types in his password and they connect. He keeps her under just long enough to extract the information and he’s got what he wants. You didn’t ask him questions, did you? By that time, he’d intimidated you enough that you wouldn’t go against him.”
She licked her lips, hating that her mouth was dry. “I didn’t. Never. Not once.” Mostly she hated that she hadn’t even tried to figure it out herself. She was smart. She should have.
“So, we need the password,” Wyatt said.
Trap continued to pace back and forth. He fascinated Zara. Everything about him. The way he moved. The total concentration. He was absolutely silent. Zara became aware of how the room stilled. The clock seemed very loud as it ticked out the seconds. She held her breath, the beating of her heart overly loud in her ears. Gino’s arms remained around her, but he also was barely breathing.
Trap moved with unbelievable precision, almost as if his brain was moving so fast, his body had to try to keep up and had become a machine. Trap passed the three barstools sitting in the middle of the room several times. He circled them and came to stand in front of Zara, using his long fingers like two rakes, shoving them through his hair until he looked wild.
“Simple. Simple,” he repeated under his breath. “Fiore Brillante.” He muttered the phrase over and over, looking directly at her. “Zara. Your name has several meanings. Gino calls you princess. He’s Italian, but in Russian, Zara means ‘princess.’” He looked to Gino for added confirmation.
Gino nodded.
“In Hebrew, it means ‘seed,’” Trap said. “I’m not going there. Don’t want to give Gino any more ideas than he already has. In Arabic, Zara means ‘flower’ or ‘star.’ In this case, I would say flower. It’s spelled differently sometimes—Zahra.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Ezekiel asked. “Enlighten us and maybe we’ll be able to help you with this line of thinking.”
Trap shrugged. “I’m not certain myself yet. Just mulling things around in my head.”
“In Italian, it would be spelled differently but it means ‘orange flower,’” Gino said.
“That’s a possibility, if he actually paired the two of you. He might go with that …” He broke off to look straight at Gino. “You think Whitney paired the two of you?”
“Yeah,” Gino said, shocking Zara.
She whirled around on the barstool to stare at him in total astonishment. “You do?”
“Babe, we light up the world when we go at it. Been with a lot of women, no one does it for me like you. Might be the emotion, that’s probably a good part of it, but”—he shrugged like it was no big deal—“chances are good he created a pairing.”
“I thought the chances were slim,” Trap contradicted. “Lately he hasn’t been bothering unless he wants a specific genetic pairing for a child. Was the attraction between you instant and physical?”