The tears Iris had been holding back since the beginning of their conversation came rushing forward, spilling onto her cheeks before she had a chance to brush them away. “You can’t ask me to do that.”
His smile was sad as he looked at their hands, at the barrier between them. “I’m your dad, Iris, and I think it’s time I let you go.”
“Don’t—”
“I love you, Iris. Your mother loved you too. Still does, wherever she is.”
Just as he refused to hear her, she refused to believe this was the end for him. “I’m going to make him confess. You’re going to be free.”
Marvin touched his fingers to his lips before pressing them to the glass, then moved the phone away from his ear and placed it back on the wall.
“Goodbye, Iris.”
“It’s not goodbye!” she yelled at him as he stood, knowing but not caring that others were staring at her, and she was seconds away from having their visit terminated. “It’s see you later.”
But Marvin wasn’t listening, or at least, he was better than she was at pretending because he didn’t turn back once as he slipped through the door back into the prison.
It was never goodbye.
Always see you later.
And she would. No matter what he said.
The next time she saw him, she would make sure he walked out of this place a free man and Spader had paid for what he did.
She just needed to make it happen, but that didn’t stop the tears from tracking down her face with every step she took away from her father.
* * *
Iris didn’t take a proper breath until she was walking out of Sing Sing, clutching her fake ID in one hand, the other hand brushing her long strands of hair back out of her face.
She wasn’t much of a smoker, never had been, but at that moment, the only thing she wished for was a cigarette to take the edge off—or at least a good shot of expensive vodka.
Anything was better than what she was feeling right now.
The visit hadn’t been a total disaster. She had seen that her father was in relatively good health and didn’t look like he was having too much of a hard time, but the idea that he didn’t want to see her anymore because he thought it was too much for her just made her heart feel heavy.
Iris was nearly to her car when the driver’s door eased open, and a long, lean body unfolded itself from inside.
Synek.
It was ridiculous how quickly she walked toward him, but as he rounded the car looking just as dark and curious as he had the first day they met and stopped at the trunk waiting for her, she didn’t care. She threw her arms around him, feeling the unyielding strength of his hold as he returned her embrace, and she couldn’t think of anywhere else she’d rather be.
Synek didn’t ask questions, and she loved him all the more for it. The smell of the leather jacket he wore was just as comforting as the feel of his arms around her.
Jesus, he’d ruined her, but she didn’t mind.
His fingers slipped beneath the fall of her hair as he turned her to look at him, wearing a concerned expression. “What’s wrong?”
She had tried to clean herself up in the restroom, not wanting him to know that she’d been crying at all, but she should have known he would see right through any mask she tried to put up.
He was good at that.
“It’s nothing,” she answered, wishing she could tell him.
But she hardly understood her father’s reasoning herself, let alone enough to explain it for him to understand.
The only thing she knew for sure was that her father was giving up, and she hated that.
His thumb stroked over the nape of her neck. “I don’t like tears, dove. They make me twitchy. Give me a name.”
A startled laugh left her as a genuine smile finally curled her lips. Of course, he could make her feel better without trying. “You can’t solve all my problems by killing them.”
What made it funnier was the shrug he offered as if what he was suggesting made perfect sense. “It’ll end the problem permanently, I’ll say. Come now, dove, a little knife work always does wonders for me.”
“Later,” she said as she reluctantly pulled out of his embrace, mindful that they were still in the prison’s parking lot. “I’ll tell you about it later.”
She didn’t miss the look on his face, but he finally nodded and opened the passenger door for her. He wasn’t going to forget about this anytime soon.
Nearly two weeks to the day, their Wraith problem had come to an end, and the targets on their backs disappeared. And in that time, Synek had made it a point to have her divulge all her secrets. She told him things she never thought she would share with another person.
Telling him about her old childhood home and where she had grown up was easy. Anything she could remember about that old blue house and its white shutters, she described in vivid detail, and it brought a smile to her face. She loved remembering and even talking about that house because, despite everything else, it was still a happy memory.
She could tell him the story about how she had skinned her knee at recess but didn’t cry because she thought everybody would laugh at her—which he found particularly funny.
But whenever she tried to tell him about her father, or about the governor, or about any combination of the two, the words got lost in her throat.
For so long, she had kept everything a secret. Where she had come from. Her father. The governor. Everything.
She wasn’t used to talking about herself, and more, she wasn’t used to confiding in someone about something so personal. Something so important.
Especially not with someone she had known for less than three months. It didn’t matter that it felt like they had known each other for ages.
While she might not have liked many of them, she had considered herself cordial and even friendly with a few Wraiths. But none had ever tempted her to spill her secrets.
Synek … she wanted to tell him everything, but she didn’t know how.
She could try, and she would have to now that her father was stepping back.
Iris buckled in, watching as Synek walked around the car and then slid behind the wheel. He drove like he did everything else—with effortless calm but unwavering attention. His eyes never left the road.
“He doesn’t want me to visit him again,” Iris said before her brain could talk her out of it. “The only reason he saw me today was to tell me he was taking me off the visitor’s list.”
Without taking his eyes off the road in front of him, Synek reached over with one hand and curled his fingers around her thigh.
This, his possessiveness while offering silent comfort, was one of the reasons she liked him so much. He didn’t apologize for things that weren’t his fault, and he didn’t look at her with pity. Instead, he gave her what she never asked for, which made it all the more better.
“Probably for the best,” he said a moment later, his gaze shifting to her only once they stopped at a red light and he felt her tense. “Come now, dove, don’t look at me like that. You know I’m right.”
“How so, exactly?”
“If we go after Spader, he’s going to think of everyone he ever crossed until he figures out where the threat is coming from. You’ve been careful not to get caught thus far, so you don’t want to fuck that up.”
Unfortunately, he wasn’t wrong.
Men like Spader might have spent an exorbitant amount of time racking up enemies, but they usually didn’t forget who they crossed or who crossed them.
She wasn’t sure how long it would take for him to pay her father a visit, but if she started shaking trees, it wouldn’t be long. It was inevitable.
“He would have told me not to come back even if I had told him about going after Spader. I didn’t even get the chance.”
Which explained why he had both been sad and happy to see her.
In another bout of honesty, she told him, “He said he wants me to live my life without
worrying about him, but I don’t know how to turn that off.”
Synek was quiet for a long while before he responded. “Things aren’t always what we’d like them to be, dove.”
Yeah, she knew that all too well.
Because nothing about her life was how she imagined it would be at this point.
Iris had never gotten the chance to think of who or even what she’d wanted to be before the choice was taken away from her. And though she had never admitted it aloud, she missed out on so much.
High school.
College.
Everything.
“Hey.”
She glanced in Synek’s direction, only guessing what her face must have reflected considering the way he was looking at her. He might have rough edges, but in the weeks since Rosalie died, and even the weeks prior to that, he had started showing her there was more to him than that.
He could be soft—if that was even the right word for it.
He liked her, and he wasn’t afraid to show that.
“If you want something done, yeah, that means we have to do it ourselves, don’t we? Don’t worry your pretty little face, dove. If I have to skin that governor alive to get you what you want, consider it done.”
Iris smiled.
She liked his rough edges too.
“Now,” he went on with a smile, “nothing wrong with a bit of torture to lift your spirits.”
Chapter 25
Getting inside a man’s house and severing his carotid was easy for Synek. He could manage it in a handful of minutes without blinking an eye.
Trying to think of a way to explain to Iris that he actually lived in a shit hole compared to the posh brownstone where they were crashing was proving difficult.
She wasn’t the sort to care, he knew, not about material things like that. She would understand, one runaway to another, that the state of his apartment reflected his tattered mind, but he wanted her to see him differently.
See him as he was now rather than the man he had been just weeks ago when they first met.
As more than just a homicidal fuckup.
It wasn’t a question of whether she wanted him, or whether they had a relationship—there bloody well was—but it was easy being who he was when her life was threatened. She might not have always liked his methods, but she understood them.
Now … there wasn’t the same sort of threat.
Of course, it wouldn’t be.
Not when their target was a sitting state governor. With Spader, they would have to tread carefully—more so than Synek ever had in his entire career—and it was still a foreign concept to him.
The complete antithesis of what he was paid to do.
His job was to make people hurt badly. He didn’t play in politics or play the game to his advantage.
A knife in one hand, a gun in the other—he was who he was.
“Where are we going?” Iris asked, glancing over at him, her tears long since dried once they’d cleared the prison grounds and the building had disappeared out of view.
He didn’t answer right away. Not because he didn’t know, but because he wasn’t sure whether he actually wanted to give her an answer.
From the moment he had caught up with her after the Wraiths had tortured him, he’d taken her to a safe house in the Upper West Side worth millions, probably more so considering the level of renovations the property had undergone over the years.
He hadn’t considered what he would tell her after the safe house was no longer needed—he hadn’t thought that far—but he no longer had a choice. Especially since it now looked as if he would be sticking around for the foreseeable future.
“Need to make a quick stop,” he answered vaguely, glancing in the rearview mirror to avoid the questioning gaze she sent his way.
It wouldn’t be the first time he’d used those words, and he doubted she would have forgotten that, though the circumstances were vastly different.
This time when he parked on the street outside his apartment, he wasn’t nearly as careless about her following him once they were out of the car. He was mindful of every glance she took around the street, her curiosity evident the closer they got to his door.
She didn’t question why they were here until they were inside with the door firmly shut behind them. Somehow, the place looked even more resolute in the light of day, managing to make him feel more embarrassed.
“So if this place isn’t a safe house,” Iris said as she turned in a slow circle, looking around as if it was the first time, “what is it?”
Synek didn’t often get uncomfortable, but the idea of answering that question had him scrubbing a hand over his face and wishing the reality wasn’t so ugly. But even if the truth was something she probably didn’t want to hear, he’d tell her anyway. “My flat.”
Iris did her best to hide her surprise, but he had always been good at seeing what others didn’t mean for him to. A talent he both loved and hated at times.
“Had you just moved in?” she asked, referring to the first time he’d brought her here.
If he hadn’t been worried back then that she would run the first chance she got, he wouldn’t have brought her inside—at least then she wouldn’t remember this place and all it said about him.
He’d never explained that he owned it that first time, that this was his space, and he didn’t own anything like the brownstone they were currently squatting in.
Was that something she wanted?
He hadn’t been considering anything outside of the weeks they spent together.
It was all about living in the moment.
Chasing down a problem and putting an end to it before they moved onto the next.
He only knew he wanted her, and the rest was secondary.
Synek cleared his throat as he stepped around her. “I bought it a few years ago. I don’t visit often,” he explained, already making excuses for himself, “but when I do, this is enough for me.”
She frowned as she eyed his couch, and he could guess what she was thinking. “That’s not true. You at least deserve a pillow.”
The tension he hadn’t known had crept in and locked up his shoulders slipped away again. “Is that all?”
“Maybe a little paint but nothing we can’t fix.”
Iris didn’t mention the shit neighborhood or the small size of it. She accepted it as it was.
He couldn’t ask for anyone better than her. “Come on.”
Synek walked into the back bedroom, flipping the switch on the wall before heading for the closed closet door. Identical in color to the one sitting out in the living room, a trunk sat on a shelf, this one far larger than the other.
He set it on the floor, running his hand over the smooth leather before typing in the four-digit code on the security lock and opening the top.
His own personal armory.
Even as scarcely as his apartment was decorated, he had a number of hidden weapons at his disposal.
But nothing like this. This case had all his favorites.
“I think I underestimated your love for knives,” Iris said with a hint of a smile in her voice as she looked over his shoulder at the contents
Rows of them were inside—from pocket knives to industrial-size blades meant for one thing and one thing only. His collection wasn’t full of shiny new toys that only the best money could buy.
Pilfered and curated over the course of ten years in this business, each and every one of them had been tried and proven effective.
These were his favorites.
His babies.
“Be gentle,” he said as she crouched beside him and plucked one out of the box, not missing the way she rolled her eyes at him.
But he didn’t have to tell her to be careful. He wasn’t the only one who knew how to wield a knife properly—which was what had gotten his attention in the very beginning. And how mental did it make him that he found it sexy that she could handle that knife as well as she did?
“Was that conc
ern for your knife or me?” she asked, looking from it to him, then handing it back.
“Depends on which answer gets me into your knickers later.”
“Then I guess you’d better pick the right choice.”
Cheeky. “If you’re done,” he said, closing the case and grabbing the handle, “we have somewhere we need to be.”
“Right. Are you going to tell me where?” she asked.
For what he had planned, the surprise would be better. He hadn’t known what to expect from her visit with her father, but her tears never factored into it. He hadn’t predicted when he would get around to sharing what he had done but now was as good of a time as any.
* * *
Once they left his apartment, Iris relaxed back into the passenger seat of the car, anticipating the left turn Synek would make to take them back to the brownstone, but instead, he kept forward, taking them out of the city and toward the warehouse district.
Synek drove them down a street lined with a mixture of abandoned warehouses. Some were in various states of decay, but a few were still open and running, workers walking in and out of the buildings.
“Where are we going?” she asked, turning her gaze from the view out the window to him.
Synek tried to hide it, but it was hard to miss that little flicker of a smile on his face, the way the expression lit a fire in his eyes. Even if he hadn’t meant to, that told her everything she needed to know. Wherever they were going, whoever was waiting on the other end wouldn’t be happy to see them.
Now she tried a different approach. “Who’s left for you to torture?”
Running through a quick mental list in her head, she crossed out names as she went.
His enemies within the Wraiths were either dead or wishing they were, and the ones he let live were now under new management and no longer a threat. Unless one or both of his biological brothers were strung up in one of these warehouses here, she wasn’t sure just who they were going to see.
It couldn’t be the governor, though a part of her didn’t mind the idea of him being Synek’s victim, but she was sure if Synek had snatched him, his face would have been all over the morning news, and she would have known by now.
Den of Mercenaries [Volume Two] Page 49