“Dead, you mean.”
“Sometimes,” he admitted.
“So you’ve been working for them,” she said bitterly.
“No.” His eyes were fierce. “I told you I wasn’t dirty.”
“Continue,” she said, falling back on the language she used when interrogating a witness, trying not to think too hard about the relief she felt hearing him reaffirm that he hadn’t been a dirty agent while at the Bureau.
“Nico told me about someone, someone who was like them but more… focused.”
“Focused?”
“On justice,” he said. “The Syndicate has an honor code, but their primary goal is profit and power. Although to be honest, I’m not sure either of those things are more dangerous in their hands than in the hands of the Bureau or the government or law enforcement.”
“We can debate that another time.” Her voice was hard. There was no question in her mind that profit and power was more dangerous in the hands of criminals, but now wasn’t the time for that discussion. “Tell me the rest.”
“This other… individual was a vigilante of sorts. Not a killer, but someone who did other things to even the scales, to right wrongs that had already been committed against people who were innocent.”
“What kinds of things?” she asked.
He met her eyes. “Thefts, hacks, dissemination of private information…”
A pit opened up in her stomach, expanding like a pool of quicksand threatening to pull her under. She heard the things he was saying — the things he’d been saying — as if underwater.
Thefts… La Jolla… San Diego County…
“Thefts?” She could barely get the word out.
He nodded. “Among other things.”
She stood, pacing the room. “Are you telling me you quit the Bureau to join some… band of thieves?”
He sighed. “That’s a little more poetic than I would have put it, but yes.”
“And did these people rob the First National Bank in Chula Vista last year?”
His face was perfectly still, revealing nothing. “You know I can’t tell you that.”
“What can you tell me, Braden?” She was fighting the abyss now, dropping like a stone in the sea, kicking for the surface, hoping desperately for a breath she knew wouldn’t come.
“Not much,” he admitted. “It will only compromise you.”
“Compromise me?” She laughed, but it was so brittle she thought it might break her in two on its way out of her body. “I was compromised the minute you fucked me.”
He clenched his jaw. “Well, you can take comfort in the fact that you’re not the only one who’s compromised at the Bureau.”
She stopped pacing. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I wasn’t dirty,” he said. “But someone is, someone on the Kalashnik sting.”
She shook her head. “That’s such bullshit, Braden. You’re just deflecting.”
“No,” he said. “It’s why I left when I did. I found something, and that guy who shot at us last night is proof.”
“That guy who shot at us last night was probably someone on the other end of your new business venture.”
He shook his head. “No one knows about that except you, and I haven’t done anything yet.”
His last words were like a lifeline. He hadn’t done anything illegal yet. It wasn’t too late to stop him.
“Then there’s still time to stop this,” she said.
“No.” His voice was firm.
“No, there’s not time? Or no, you don’t want to stop it?” she asked.
He hesitated. “Both.”
“Great. That’s just great. What exactly am I supposed to do with this information, Braden?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “You wanted the truth. This is the truth. The rest is up to you.”
“It’s up to me?” She shook her head, stalked to her bag on a bench in the foyer. She pulled out the file she’d packed at the last minute, walked back into the living room, threw it on the coffee table in front of Braden. Some of the papers spilled out. “It’s not up to me. Not anymore.”
He looked down at the file, reached for it slowly, like he knew it would change everything.
“What is this?” he asked, flipping through the pages.
“That’s the file for the new case I’ve been assigned to work with Shields.” She drew in a shaky breath before continuing. “It’s a series of thefts in San Diego County. A group of showy vigilantes. Oh, and they shot a guard last year. Does that ring any bells?”
29
He stared at the papers in his hands. Locke hadn’t gone into detail about his previous operations, but Braden would have bet his life that most of the crimes in the folder had been perpetrated by Locke and his men.
And Nora was investigating them — with Mike-fucking-Shields of all people.
The dead guard… that was a surprise. Locke was adamantly anti-violence. He’d made that clear. Which meant that particular crime either hadn’t been committed by Locke’s group or something had gone very, very wrong.
He threw the folder back on the coffee table. “Shields is the last person who should be investigating this.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked. “He’s as good an agent as me. Probably better.”
“He’s not better.”
She took a deep breath. “Regardless, we were both assigned to the case by Alvarez.”
“Yeah, well there’s a big difference between you and Shields.”
“Care to enlighten me?” she asked, arms crossed over her chest.
“Shields is dirty, for one.”
She laughed. “Is this really where we’re at now? Painting Shields as dirty to cover your own lapse in character?”
The words were like an ice pick to his heart. He’d known she would feel this way about him, but hearing her say it was even worse than he’d expected.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t… I didn’t mean that.”
“Yes, you did.”
She brought her hand to her forehead. “I’m just confused. I don’t understand why you’d do this, Braden. Why did you have to do this to us? Why now when we finally — ”
“Go on.”
“When we finally found each other.”
He thought about it, tried to find the words to explain. “It’s something I had to do.”
“This thing in San Diego or me?” she asked. “Us?”
“Both,” he said. “But I know that was selfish. I should have kept you out of it. Should have stayed away from you.”
“But you didn’t,” she said. “You didn’t.”
“I couldn’t. I couldn’t stay away any longer.” There was no hiding the raw emotion in his voice, even from himself.
She shook her head. “I can’t do this, Braden. You know I can’t. This… this isn’t me. It goes against everything I believe in.”
“And what do you believe in, Nora?” He hadn’t meant for it to come out so harsh.
“I believe in the rule of law,” she said. “I believe in the work we do at the Bureau.”
“And when it doesn’t work?” he asked. “When someone like Kalashnik goes free because of a fucking rat?”
“Then it doesn’t work. We do what we can within the limits of the law.”
“And there’s never a good reason to go outside those limits?”
He wanted her to say it. Wanted her to come clean so he didn’t have to say it for her. So he didn’t have to throw it in her face.
“No,” she said. “I understand wanting to go around the law, but that’s not the answer.”
Loss swept over her face all at once, and he thought about the information Locke had collected. Thought about Nora’s sister and how Nora had never told him she had OD’ed on heroin. How she’d been carrying it alone all this time.
The knowledge made what he would say next even worse.
“I assume the rest of your family doesn’t feel this way?” He
asked the question gently. It wouldn’t help in the end, but it was all he could do.
She froze. “What do you mean?”
He forced himself to say it. “Your brothers. They don’t seem to take the law as seriously as you do.”
Her face flushed, and she wrapped her arms around her body. “What are you talking about? What do you know about my brothers?”
He paused, choosing his words carefully. “I know they don’t work within the law. And you know it too.”
“How do you know that?” Her voice shook when she asked the question, and he was surprised a moment later when she shouted it. “How do you know that?”
“I didn’t do any background on you, if that’s what you’re wondering,” he said. “But apparently my new business partner felt he needed to know more about the people in my life.”
“You’re saying someone dug through my past? Through my family?” There was so much hurt in her eyes he almost couldn’t bear it. He wanted to take it all — the hurt she was feeling now and all the hurt she’d felt since her mother died of cancer. Since her sister OD’ed. “Someone gave you information on me?”
“I didn’t ask for it,” he said. “I would never, ever do that to you, Nora. But now that I know, I’m having a hard time understanding your position.”
She wrapped her arms more tightly around her shoulders, like they would somehow protect her from him. It was all he could do not to go to her, unwrap her arms, pull her into his own, show her that she had nothing to fear from him. That she didn’t have to protect herself anymore.
“I’m not my brothers,” she said. “They chose…” She took a deep breath. “They dealt with our sister’s death their way. I dealt with it mine. And yeah, I’m sure you know all about Erin, too.”
Tears leaked from her eyes, her shoulders shuddering. He stepped toward her, but she held up a hand to stop him.
“Don’t. Just… don’t.”
“I’m sorry,” Braden said. “I’m so, so sorry about your sister, Nora. I wish I could take back what I know. That I could wait until you felt safe enough to tell me yourself. But I can’t.”
“I can’t take back what I know about you either.” She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweater. “And I don’t know what I’m going to do about that.”
She turned and hurried from the room. The front door slammed a moment later, leaving him alone.
30
She didn’t know if it was the rain or tears streaming down her face that made it hard to see. She only knew that she needed to get away from the house. Away from Braden and the way he looked at her now that he knew all her deepest secrets.
She hurried down the path leading to the beach, made her way onto the private cove near the dock where the boat was tied. The moon was hidden behind a solid wall of cloud cover, but enough light leaked from the house to give her a view of the angry waves crashing onto the sand. She watched them surge toward her feet before they withdrew to gather more power from the storm churning at sea.
Her clothes were soaked, clinging to her skin, but she was too numb to feel the cold. She stood there for a moment, sobs racking her body, the urge to flee so overpowering she wanted to jump in the boat, point it into the darkness, hope for the best.
It was a foolish idea, so she turned for the rocks lining the shore instead, hurrying along the sand, anxious to get out of the light spilling from the house before Braden came after her.
She reached the rocks and picked her way among them, glad they were high enough to avoid the most ferocious of the waves. The process was meditative — looking carefully for the next place to step, placing her foot on the flattest part of the rock, propelling herself forward to the next one. She was too busy making sure she didn’t fall into the surf to think about Braden. About the fact that he was working for the same people she was supposed to apprehend. About the fact that Mike — for all his faults, her friend — might be dirty. Most of all she didn’t want to think about the shame of Braden knowing about her sister’s addiction and death, the decision by her brothers to abandon their family legacy in favor of something not unlike what Braden was doing now.
The rocks became more spread out, the amount of space increasing between them until she found herself standing back on solid ground, a grove of trees hugging the shoreline. She ducked under one of them, aware now that she was shivering, her hands aching from the cold. The tree’s branches gave her a respite from the rain, and she stuffed her hands into her armpits as she caught her breath.
The lack of movement brought everything back, made it impossible to avoid the truth; she was a fraud, pretending to care about the law when every day she knew her brothers ran a high-end personal services firm that was really a front for their own strain of vigilanteism. A way to save people like their sister outside the bounds of the law.
She’d known for years and she hadn’t done a thing about it. She’d lived in fear of being found out, of having her connection to their activities revealed in spite of the legitimate businesses that acted as fronts for their off-the-books work.
But she hadn’t reported them. Hadn’t taken her knowledge to Alvarez or anyone else at the Bureau. Had never told a single soul.
She thought about her father, about the sadness in his eyes. She’d been telling herself it was because of her mother’s death. Because of what had happened to Erin. But while those things were a part of his burden, she had always known that he was aware of her brothers’ illegal activity. Wasn’t that why she’d joined the Bureau? Tried to keep alive the family’s commitment to justice? Kept her brothers’ secret?
Or was it something else? Was all that talk about honor just cover for the fact that deep down, she knew what she did wasn’t enough? Knew that people like her couldn’t save everyone like Erin in the world?
Wasn't her silence an implicit stamp of approval on her brothers’ business? And how could she be angry that Braden had chosen the same path when she’d kept quiet all these years about her brothers? When she’d sheltered them from consequences?
The questions threatened to overwhelm her, and she felt her brain shutting down along with her body. She thought about Shields instead, a surprisingly manageable quandary in light of everything else.
Was it possible he was dirty? That he’d been informing to Kalashnik about the arms raid all along? She replayed the moments they’d spent together on the case, tried to remember if there had been anything suspicious, anything he’d known that he shouldn’t have known.
There was nothing. He’d behaved exactly as she expected, with the disarming combination of flirtatiousness and competence that had been his hallmark since she was first assigned to the L.A. office.
And yet it didn’t seem possible that Braden was lying. He’d chosen a path that was counter to the one she was on at the Bureau — but he was no liar.
It was all jumbled together in her mind: Braden’s going rogue, his suspicions about Shields, the man who’d shot at them, the fact that Braden knew everything she’d worked so hard to hide.
All the things she’d anchored herself to were drifting out to sea. All her conviction, her faith in the law, in justice, in the truth. How could she lay claim to any of it when she was willing to turn her back on what she knew about her brothers? When even now she was thinking about how to protect Braden?
Because that’s what it came down to — it was easier to imagine herself protecting him than giving him up.
It wasn’t just the hypocrisy of it. After all, she hadn’t disowned her brothers. She still saw them at Christmas and in the summer, still texted them and sent pictures from California, still pretended their business was above-board even when they all knew it was a lie. All things that now made it difficult to claim the moral high ground with Braden.
But if she was being honest with herself — and it was time for that kind of honesty — it wasn’t the hypocrisy she couldn’t live with.
It was the idea of leaving him. The thought of living without him.
For years she’d kept her distance. Had been careful not to brush up against him when they were alone. Had avoided asking about his personal life. Had never told him a thing about hers.
Then he’d left the Bureau and the floodgates had opened, first on the beach and later when she’d spent the night in his arms, opening her body to him.
Her soul.
It had been easy. Frighteningly easy. Like her heart had been standing at the brink all those years, waiting for a strong wind to tip it into his hands.
He had it now. She suddenly knew it with more certainty than she’d ever known anything. He had her heart, and it wasn’t an easy thing to imagine taking it back, cutting him out of her life because he’d failed a purity test that her own family chose to ignore.
That she chose to ignore.
Because couldn’t she admit that there were times when she felt the futility of their work? When it seemed pointless to take one bad guy off the streets only to see him replaced with three more? To watch them go free because someone forgot to file a motion by a certain date or get permission before looking in someone’s trunk?
The part of her mind that had been trained at Quantico rebelled against the idea. It was true that she struggled with feelings of futility, but she hadn’t abandoned the quest for justice. She’d chosen something different than her brothers. Something different than Braden.
She’d chosen to keep trying. To do what she could.
Did that make her right and them wrong? Was it possible they both served a purpose? How was she supposed to know when to buy into the absolutism of right and wrong and when to fall back on the belief that the messy truth was somewhere in the middle?
Everything you need to know is right in front of you.
She wished her mother was here. Wished she could tell her mother that it wasn’t true. All the things she needed to know were hidden good and deep, so far under the surface Nora didn’t know if she would ever find them.
There was only one thing she knew for sure and that was the way she felt about Braden. It was complicated and dangerous, probably doomed to fail. Maybe even doomed to destroy them both.
Rogue Love (Kings of Corruption Book 1) Page 12