“No,” I say, ice sliding down my spine with the certainty that comes with my reply. “He was grooming me for the day they came for him or for us because of him.” I fold my arms in front of me and look at Kayden, speaking to him. “I think I was looking into his murder. I don’t know why I chose the present day, so many years after my father died, but whatever the case,” I look between them, “I pissed off the agency, and the result was me taking this schoolteacher job and lying low. But I also don’t know if that was my own choice or the agency trying to get me off the wrong radars.”
“If you were lying low, how did you get into this?” Adriel asks. “It sounds more like you were undercover, to me.”
“Maybe,” I say, my brow furrowing. “But if I was CIA and pursuing the necklace—”
“The necklace?” Adriel asks, his tone sharpening again, his gaze shifting to Kayden. “She knows about the necklace and you didn’t tell me.”
“We’re telling you now,” Kayden states. “Only you, until we decide otherwise.” And just that easily he ends the subject, glancing at me. “Tell him how you got the necklace.”
“David gave it to me as an engagement gift—which makes the idea of me being undercover seem illogical. If I were after the necklace, I wouldn’t have carried it to Europe and risked losing it. But it also seems completely illogical to think that I have a connection to the CIA and just fell into something this big.”
“How did you go from eloping to knowing Neuville and Niccolo?” Adriel asks.
I give him the rundown, including my history with David, what happened at the hotel, and even Neuville showing up, covering pretty much everything. “I didn’t know who Neuville was, beyond being a powerful French businessman.”
“So you were intimately involved with Neuville,” Adriel says, the statement hitting me in every wrong way possible.
My gaze jerks to his and I snap, “I fucked him or I died, so yes. I was intimately involved with him right up until the point that I held a gun on him in front of his people, and ensured he will never fucking stop coming for me.”
“Easy, Ella,” Adriel says, holding up his hands. “I was just trying to understand the dynamics.”
“The dynamics?” I ask. “The dynamics are—”
“You don’t need to do this, Ella,” Kayden says softly, his voice somehow managing to deliver a cool caress I feel in every hot, angry burning nerve ending in my body, of which there are many.
“He’s right,” Adriel states, his hands pressing to the counter. “I get it. Sasha’s told me about his appetites. He needs to pay.”
“He needs to do more than pay,” I say. “He needs to die—but I’m fully aware of the concerns about whoever takes over being worse.”
“Do you remember his second-in-command at all?” Kayden asks.
I shake my head. “No. I know his bodyguard, and I’ve remembered enough in the last few hours to know that he didn’t accidentally meet me—not that we really thought that was a possibility. I also think he planned to kill me when he got the necklace, but changed his mind. He decided he wanted two possessions for the price of one.”
“You hid the necklace from him?” Adriel asks.
“I hid it from everyone,” I say. “I didn’t know why it was important or what it was worth, but I knew at least one person had died because of it. I had to know why, before I knew what to do with it.”
Adriel narrows his gaze one me. “And did you find out?”
“I don’t know that answer yet,” I say.
He studies me more intensely. “Did you offer it to Niccolo to get away from Neuville?”
“I want to say no,” I admit. “I hope I can say no at some point, but Niccolo says that I did. And I was desperate to escape, and I did come to Italy. If I did make a deal with Niccolo, I have to believe I had a plan to protect the necklace.”
“You know what I think about that?” he asks, his expression as indiscernible as his tone.
“That I suck.”
“That you’re honest,” Adriel says, “even if it’s painful, and I respect that. I’ve got your back. And I expect that our gun-wielding Lady Hawk has mine.”
There is no question the “Lady Hawk” reference is about me being Kayden’s woman, and considering all that is wrong between Kayden and me at the moment, it twists me into about twelve knots. “I do,” I promise. “I have your back.”
“We need to talk about Alessandro and Niccolo,” Kayden says.
Adriel’s gaze shoots to Kayden. “What about those two creates one sentence?”
Kayden gives him the rundown on the meeting and the ammunition Niccolo claims he has against Alessandro.
“I’m really fucking curious about what this file entails,” Adriel says, glancing at his watch. “It’s six o’clock now. So it’s supposed to be here in the next two hours.”
“And I want to be ready to act when it does, no matter what it turns out to be or not be,” Kayden says. “I’ve contacted Nathan, Matteo, Sasha, and Carlo and told them to get here for a meeting at seven. I need you to try to get Sasha out of Gallo’s bed in time to be here. I called her on a blocked line so that Gallo wouldn’t recognize the number if he was with her, and she didn’t answer.”