by Lexi Blake
“And then you would have been in danger, too. Or I was too scared at the thought of losing them to think straight. I guess there are some people in the world we can’t risk losing because they hold such dear pieces of our souls. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust you. I feel it even now. I can look at you and know somehow that we were friends. Aye, I trusted you, but I didn’t trust the world not to fall apart if I lost them. It did, you know. It all came crumbling down no matter what I did. I know that deep down too.”
Nick was silent for a moment, Owen’s words sinking in. “I think I have to leave for the same reasons.”
“Because of what happened this afternoon? With the brotherhood?”
So the story was making the rounds even on the lower levels. “Yes. There are some men after me and the only possible way out will put me in a position I promised to never be in. I can’t risk Hayley’s life. She deserves more.”
She deserved a good life.
Did she deserve the chance to decide on what that good life should consist of? Taggart was wrong. Charlotte was built for this world and Hayley wasn’t. It was why he’d left with Desiree in the first place. He’d known she was more suited as a partner, a lover. Des had been born to fit into his dangerous world and he’d lost her, too.
“You’re going to leave? The company?” Owen asked.
“Yes.” It was for the best. He would take a few days, but he was fairly certain that this was the only path he could take. He needed those few days to figure out a way to explain it all to Hayley, but he also needed to put his plans for her in place. He had some money and he would use it to ensure she had something to fall back on when everything was over, and she could go back to her normal, safe life.
“I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” Owen argued. “Why would you leave your family? That’s what we are. I figured that out. We’re not like other people. We mostly don’t have anywhere else to go. Kay’s got parents but she’s worried MSS would hurt them. Ariel has a mom but she doesn’t see her much. Brody’s the same way. We’re all we’ve got in the end. Why would you give that up?”
“To protect them. Like you said, some things are too precious to risk.”
“But they’re always at risk. Every second of every day. If you walk away, how will you be there to protect her? Do you honestly believe you can trust another man to do your job? I think if I could talk to the me I was, I would call him out as a bloody idiot. I would smack him for being so afraid and not trusting his family to take care of him.” In the darkness, Owen took a shaky breath. “I think if I had, they might be alive. Or at the very least I might remember them.”
Nick stood, the air too thick around him. He needed to breathe. He needed to remind himself that this was the right choice. The only choice.
“I never belonged here in the first place. I came here for Des and she’s gone. I should have left then. I’ve been hanging on to something that isn’t truly mine.” He moved toward the door, resolute. He stopped when Owen remained sitting. Guilt plagued him. He was leaving Owen, too. “Do you want me to get Ariel?”
In the low light, Owen turned and shook his head. “Nah. Like I said, it’s good to have a nice brood every now and then. I think I’ll sit for a bit and make up stories in my head. If I pretend hard enough, I can trick myself into thinking they’re memories.”
Nick turned and walked out before Owen would have the chance to see how emotional he was.
Sometimes memories were all a man had.
* * * *
Hayley stared down at the cup in her hand, the silence around her punishing.
It left her far too alone with her own thoughts and they were turning seriously dark.
Nick had almost been killed earlier today. He could still be killed and all because of some dark force she didn’t understand.
It made her depressed, but another emotion was starting to bubble up over the fear and sadness and anxiety.
Now that she’d had time to think about it, to begin to process, she was starting to get pissed.
“Do you mind if I join you?” Ezra Fain stepped into the room, pulling a messenger bag off his shoulder and settling it over the chair across from her.
“Sure.” She put her hands around her own mug.
The handsome CIA guy smiled as he strode over to the coffeemaker. “Excellent. I spent my whole day with lunatics. Seriously, whatever that crazy doctor put in her drugs to turn those men into mindless servants turned them a bit loony. Or she picked the crazy ones on purpose. The world may never know since I don’t think a single one of them is getting their memories back. No matter what Ariel thinks.”
She knew she should go, but she had to wonder about him. Everyone else was so quick to tell her that everything would be all right and she should simply stick close to Nick. That was all she had to do to ensure a positive outcome. Charlotte Taggart had been relentlessly upbeat, but Hayley kind of thought she could use a second opinion.
Should she get one from a man who didn’t like Nick?
Maybe it was time to be bolder. She’d played the mouse a lot lately. She forgave herself for it because it was kind of hard to deal with her house blowing up and the world collapsing.
But when she thought about it, she’d actually done a fairly good job. She’d managed to get herself here in one piece. She’d brought along a valuable clue. Sure, she’d done it by accident, but she’d done it.
She’d faced up to her fears and sexual hang-ups. Why had she allowed Charlotte to deflect her every probing question with a breezy “let us handle it and don’t worry about it”? And a surprising amount of nudity. The hours she’d spent with Charlotte had been spent making her over. There had been lots of wardrobe changes and playing with her babies while she tried to make sure her perfect boobs were evenly placed.
It had been a pleasant way to spend the afternoon, but she wasn’t any closer to real answers about her case or her relationship with Nick. He didn’t want to talk about his past, but it was affecting them. No one else would gossip either. The team had closed ranks around Nick and she understood that. This team was Nick’s family.
Maybe Ezra Fain would talk.
He sat down in front of her, a mug in his hand and a weary expression on his face. “Are you all right? I hear the gang is going to try a retrieval op. Hopefully they’ll have something for you soon.”
“Do you honestly believe they’ll be able to clear my name?”
“Yes, given time,” he said after a moment’s hesitation. “They’re a good group. They know what they’re doing. If Ian Taggart says he’ll find a way to clear your name, he will. It could take a bit of time, but he’ll do it.”
There was something about the way he said it that made her pause. “You think there’s a better way.”
“I think you need to follow your instincts,” he hedged.
She had to laugh at that thought, but it was a bitter sound. “I don’t have instincts. I almost had tenure, but no instincts. I think I’ve proven that by being the world’s biggest doormat.”
“I wouldn’t say that. A woman will do a lot for a man she’s attracted to,” he replied.
She felt herself flush. He would go right there. “I wasn’t talking about Nick. I was talking about Des and my father.”
“Ah, well, Desiree and your father were well trained. They were adept at the art of deception and obfuscation. You can’t blame yourself for losing that particular game. They were professionals. So is Nikolai. That’s why I would advise caution when it comes to him. I know you’re involved and it feels like love, but he’s got a bad history.”
Ah, there it was, that opening she’d been waiting for. “What do you mean by bad history? Why do you hate him? Not that it will change the way I feel about him, but I’m curious.”
“I find it refreshing that after everything you’ve been through, you can still trust a man like him. It gives me hope for the future. All right, all cards on the table, I don’t like Nikolai because he spent far too much
time on the other side from me. It’s like having to welcome a rival football player to your team, one who liked to play dirty and who hurt people you cared about and now you’re expected to make nice because you’re both on the same side.”
“He worked for his country the same way you work for yours.” She wasn’t buying into that argument. “Everyone thinks they’re the hero, Mr. Fain. I assure you no one taught Nick about American freedom and how much more right the American way is while he was growing up. He was educated to think we were the bad guys. When he understood what he was doing, he walked away. I think that says something about him.”
“He walked away because his sister was killed and he couldn’t handle the fact that he was nothing more than a cog in the machine.” Fain’s voice had gone a bit dark. “You say we all want to believe we’re the hero, but I don’t think you understand what that word means to me. It’s certainly not some James Bond level of satisfaction. I work in the shadows and I understand that if I screw up, I’ll be on my own. I understand that if I do my job perfectly, there will be a desk job at the end and a piece of crap government pension, and no one will ever know my real name. If I do my job well, but not perfectly, I’ll be a star carved into the wall at Langley that no one really thinks about because all those stars are is a reminder of what happens the instant you fuck up. Nick wanted to be special. His sister was an operative and he expected the world to stop when she died. He didn’t like the operation they’d been working and expected everything to change because he said so. He wasn’t cut out for this work.”
He seemed a little cold. “Wow, you must never have lost anyone because it does feel like the world should stop.”
“Oh, you have no idea what I’ve lost in my lifetime. I’ve mourned and wept and felt like I lost pieces of my soul. Do you know what I never once did? I never once started a mob war. He and Desiree slashed their way through an entire syndicate to get revenge for his Katja. That’s why they call him the Butcher.”
A chill went through her, but deep down she’d always known what Nick was capable of. He was a man who would love deeply, and he would go dark if that love was taken from him. Like Des had been. She’d accepted that about him long ago. “She was his sister.”
“And I lost my brother. He died serving our country. I didn’t start a land war to avenge him. I honored him in ways most people can’t understand.” Fain placed the coffee mug down slowly, as though he needed the moment to gain control of himself. “I believe in justice, not revenge. I will do a lot to get that justice, but I certainly wouldn’t start a war that could have blown up the streets of Moscow.”
“Could have?”
“All it would have taken was one mistake, killing the wrong person, and you get full-on mob warfare,” Fain continued. “If there had been any question about who was doing the killing, if the syndicate thought for a single second it was another syndicate, you get dead bodies everywhere. You get kids in the streets getting cut down because they’re in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“But that didn’t happen. So that means Nick let them know he was the one involved.” And that had gotten him shot today. A minor injury, but she knew how close he’d come. If he’d moved at the wrong time, it would have been his chest that bullet hit.
“He announced he was going to do it. The fucker walked into a bar in Moscow and tacked up a list of the men he was going to kill and took credit before it happened.”
Yes, that sounded like her Nicky. “So he knew what he was doing and went in and performed a surgical strike, to use a military term.”
“And surgical strikes sometimes go wrong,” Fain replied. “Sometimes, despite our best efforts, we still do damage we don’t mean to do.”
“That’s life. We try our best to mitigate the damages but we make mistakes and people get hurt.” She stopped, a thought racing through her head. Dates were important. Events and their outcomes were tantamount to explaining history. It was what she did every day. She broke down the whys and hows of history, placing them in their proper settings—the dates and places where events happened.
Had she examined her own history? She’d known Nick’s sister had died, but not the hows and whys. She knew Nick had met Des sometime after.
“When did this happen? When did he go after the men who killed his sister?”
Fain frowned for a moment. “It was roughly five years ago. I remember it because I was working in Eastern Europe at the time. It was roughly mid-summer.”
Tears sparked behind her eyes, but she took a long, slow breath to banish them. She’d sought the mysteries of history all her life but never contemplated her own. She’d accepted that Des had crooked her perfectly manicured finger and Nick had gone panting after her. She’d accepted the fact that she was his second choice and when his first had walked back in, she’d lost.
What if it hadn’t been about Desiree but what she’d offered him? When they’d gone to sleep, cuddled up together, he’d been happy. She’d felt it in her bones. There had been no reluctance in him that night, not until he’d walked back in from seeing Desiree.
Had she been so deep into her own misery that she hadn’t seen what was truly happening? Had he thought she wouldn’t want him if he went after the men who killed his sister? Or had he been too worried she would get caught in the crossfire.
Something slid into place, some piece of herself that had been wedged and jangled. It had been an ache she’d had for so long it had become a part of her.
She’d been right to go to him that night. She’d been right to offer him her love. He’d been wrong to turn her down, to not give her the option of choosing her own path. He’d seen her as soft, sweet Hayley who couldn’t handle the world around her, but she wasn’t that person.
She was smart and capable and it was past time for her to start taking back her life. It began with asking the right questions and using her damn brain.
“Are you all right?” Fain asked.
Ezra Fain had an agenda. She needed to figure out if she could use his agenda to further her own. Nick and his colleagues had their own way of looking at this case, but she thought she should come at it from a different angle.
“I’m just realizing that things are not always as they seem,” she said, not willing to go into her romantic life with Fain. “You’re wrong about Nick, but it’s not my job to change your mind. You said something earlier and it’s only now resonating with me. I do this thing where I get depressed and unfocused. I’ve done it since I was a kid and it’s time to stop. So many pieces of the puzzle are there, but I’ve been far too wrapped up in myself to take a look at them. You said Desiree and my father had been trained in deception.”
His head shook. “No, I’m certain I said Desiree had been. MI6 has an excellent training program.”
But that wasn’t what he’d said. “No, you mentioned my father.”
“Well, he was a poker player. There’s an enormous amount of deception in that particular game.”
And there was some going on right now. Ezra Fain had a tell. At least she thought he did. One of the things her father had taught her was how almost everyone had mannerisms they used when they bluffed or lied. Whether it was in the eyes or in the minute tics of the body, there was almost always something in normal people that would tip off the observant to a lie. A sociopath was another story, but Fain wasn’t devoid of humanity. When he’d replied both times to her questions, his hand had tightened around his mug. Why hadn’t she seen it before? Because she’d been worried about whether or not Nick could love her. Silly girl.
“I don’t think that’s what you meant.”
His face went a careful blank, and he removed his hand from the mug as though sensing he was giving something away. “All right, what did I mean?”
Ah, the deflective question. “I suppose I can’t presume to know what’s in your head, Mr. Fain.”
“I prefer Ezra.”
If that made him more comfortable. It occurred to her suddenly that she
was playing a game and Ezra Fain was a master. Life was poker, her father had taught her. It was all about placing careful bets, for the most part, and following your gut when the time came. The master player never played his or her hand. The master played the other players. Her father had kept journals on the players he regularly found himself up against, detailing the hands they’d played and the observations he’d made.
“All right, Ezra. What would you do if you were in my shoes? Would you sit here and wait for your boyfriend to solve the problem for you?”
He relaxed a bit, as though happy she’d switched topics. “I would be unable to. I’m more of a man of action. I would take a look at everything I know and try to complete the puzzle. I think they’re taking the wrong tactic. They’re acting as though you’re off the board, as if you’re incidental to the puzzle at hand.”
“Like the messenger instead of a player. I happened to be the person Desiree sent her crap to.”
“Yes. The question is why. Why, of all the people she knows in this world, would she send it to you? Why not Nikolai?”
“I can answer that one. She knew if she sent it here, whoever she’s trying to hide it from would find out. Nicky’s the obvious choice and so are her parents. So why…” The answer hit her and she closed her eyes because she’d been so stupid not to see it. “My father was still alive when Des set this up. Well, he hadn’t faked his death at that point. She couldn’t have known he would. She arranged to have it sent to me because I’m the easiest way to get to him. Dad lived out of his suitcase. He had an apartment in Vegas for a while, but she couldn’t be certain he would keep it. I was her best bet for him to get it.”
“Yes.” His lips tugged up and even Hayley had to admit the man was gorgeous when he smiled. “I believe you’re right. I believe you were the conduit to your father. Take it further. Question it all and you’ll find the answer to part of this puzzle.”