Months of training and years of practice made it easy for Kit to slip into the glass and steel building, his movements seamless and not noteworthy. To the few who walked the lobby, he might as well have been any other rich businessman in the state of New York.
No one looked at him twice.
“The elevators,” Kit said quietly, just loud enough to be picked up over the comm in his ear. Winter was on the other end, feeding him navigation.
He hadn’t explained the extent of what he was planning to do here today, but she could probably guess, and he also knew that some answers he sought would be just as important to her as they were to him. For that reason alone, he suspected, she was aiding him.
He rode the elevator up seven floors before stepping off again, switching to the next one, and then rode it down twelve floors onto the secret level that many didn’t know about. This lift had specifically converted to take him down to the private floors not listed on the blueprints to the building.
There were very few things Kit couldn’t find when properly motivated, and Belladonna was one of them.
Removing his gloves as the elevator stopped once more and the doors eased open, Kit took a step forward, not surprised in the slightest to find the men waiting for him on the other side, their guns trained on him.
Wisely, they stood immobile, neither willing to make the first move.
Belladonna had taught them well.
“Take me to her,” he said, not having to give a name. They all knew who he had come to see.
Neither moved, at least until one’s head tilted ever so slightly, telling him the man was listening to someone he couldn’t hear. After a moment, the guard nodded once and straightened, gesturing for Kit to follow.
He might not have known her during the days in which his brother had fallen in love with her, but it was nearly impossible for him to picture a girl who had been as innocent as Uilleam had proclaimed her to be.
Not only had she posed as a journalist, but she had managed to keep up the lie for more than a year. That took a level of commitment not many could sustain.
He couldn’t help but wonder now whether he would have noticed her deception from the beginning.
To his surprise, as Kit was led into an office of grays and white marble, the only guards Belladonna had with her were the two currently walking on either side of him.
“Quite foolish to have so little security,” Kit remarked as he stepped farther into the room, his gaze assessing and evaluating until they landed on her.
“If you were here to kill me,” Belladonna said with a ghost of a smile. “I wouldn’t have seen you coming.”
Dark hair fell over her shoulders as she reclined, watching him from the moment he crossed the floor until he sat in the chair opposite her desk.
“That’s true.”
And it was.
They both knew what he was capable of.
“So sure that I don’t intend to harm you?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“I doubt Luna would forgive you if you murdered me.”
Perhaps. Perhaps not. “Her capacity for forgiveness is unparalleled.”
But for now, it wasn’t a question he needed an answer to.
“I imagine your brother doesn’t know you’re here,” she said with a tilt of her head, glancing down at the page number of the book she’d been reading before he came in.
The Art of War.
How appropriate.
“What do I owe the pleasure of your company, Kit?” she asked, folding her arms across her chest as she regarded him.
Her gaze shifted to the right, enough to send her security walking back out the door and closing it behind them. Kit removed the comm from his ear, switching it off before setting it on the desk for her to see.
This meeting would go no further than this room.
Had he not been studying her so closely, he might not have noticed the way her gaze flickered and the slight tightening of her shoulders. Belladonna—Karina—could pretend as much as she wanted, but he saw the truth she didn’t mean to show.
Some part of her feared him and how this meeting would end, but she was too proud to put an end to it.
Or perhaps she had a strategy?
It was what his brother would do had he gone to see Uilleam instead of coming to see her.
It was clear, after he’d taken the flight to Wales after Luna, that she wanted his attention.
Now she had it.
“How long have you known,” he asked, “that my mother was alive?”
It was clear from the expression on her face that she wasn’t expecting this question, but even still, she answered. “Since the beginning. He told me what she had done to you—how she treated you, rather, but even with his loyalty to you, surely you couldn’t have truly thought he would be able to murder his own mother?”
No, he hadn’t.
While every man’s moral compass was different, Uilleam’s began and ended with those he considered family. If someone wasn’t family to him, he didn’t care very much about their life.
For all Uilleam cared, the world was expendable.
He had been as surprised as anyone when Uilleam had confessed what he had done, or rather, confessed to what he thought Kit wanted to hear.
“I didn’t need for him to kill her.”
“No, I’m sure you didn’t,” Belladonna said as she shook her head, now sitting up as straight as he, hands folded primly in her lap. “Of course, an assassin wouldn’t need anyone’s aid in taking a life, but that isn’t the point, is it? Despite the deplorable woman she is, Uilleam couldn’t bring himself to harm her. Force her into exile, however? He could manage that.”
“I take it that was your doing.”
Just as she had stopped him from taking Luna’s life so long ago. The thought was enough to bring a pang to his chest. No matter what she had done, without her, Kit wouldn’t have his wife or the wee baby growing inside her.
For that reason alone, he would spare her life.
“He provided the lie,” Kit said a moment later, still watching her. Studying her for the tells she probably didn’t realize she had.
But he had learned long enough how to find one’s secrets and exploit them.
“He gave you the answer you wanted,” Belladonna retorted, a new fire in her eyes. “Uilleam only had you and your mother left after you murdered your father. Your sister walked away from the family long before she could ever see the mess the two of you made of it. Now imagine, just for a moment, that he had killed your mother, who would he have then? How many times have you abandoned him over the years? Threatened him. Betrayed him?”
Curious. “I only did to him what he did to me.”
“If ever there was a crime Uilleam committed against you, it was loving you too much.”
“As I recall, he betrayed me first,” Kit responded, not because he actually believed that, but because he wanted to see what her reaction would be. He was finding that everything she was saying was in complete contradiction to what she had tried to make them all believe.
This, he thought, was why she hadn’t wanted to see him.
She had baited each and every one of the mercenaries deliberately, saving his mother for last … That wasn’t for Luna—she hadn’t even known who the woman was. Sending her there had been Belladonna’s attempt at sparking a reaction from Kit.
Undoubtedly, she had known that he would follow Luna there, and already enraged, he would have murdered his mother where she stood.
The thought had crossed his mind, and the mental image had been enough to put a smile on his face, but he’d understood then just as he understood now that she had wanted exactly that.
“You left him when he needed you most,” Belladonna returned. “You were older, and he looked up to you. He even believed that once you finished with the Lotus Society, you would come back for him.”
“And I did.”
“But only after that bastard of a father nearly killed him.”
“Curious, isn’t it?”
She blinked, her gaze lifting to his. “I’m sorry?”
“I didn’t understand your angle with the mercenaries at first. Anyone in your position would have had them all killed or, at the very least, hurt their family in some way. It’s not as if you didn’t have someone capable.”
She had the Jackal—Sebastian—and others, he assumed.
Men just as strong and capable as any Uilleam had.
It would have been the most logical move. She could match wits with the Kingmaker, but she would need someone else to take on his mercenaries should there be a need.
“You spared all of them.”
“Is that truly surprising to you, Kit?” she asked, mock curiosity in her tone. “I thought I made it clear that I held no ill will toward the mercenaries. I’ve said that from the beginning.”
“Yet while you set out to prove that my brother was the person they needed to fear, you’re not doing that with me.”
“Because you’re well aware of who your brother is.”
“So you needed to find another reason to get me out of the way.” He leaned toward her. “Which tells me this isn’t business for you, Karina, as you might want me to believe. It’s not about me, or the mercenaries, or anyone else. It’s about you and him. It’s personal.”
Her mouth fell open, a retort sitting there on the tip of her tongue, at least until she processed what he had said. Her expression finally registered exactly his reason for being here and what she had inadvertently told him.
“Before coming to see you, I asked myself three questions. Why did you leave him the first time? If you were never a journalist, if the Karina Ashworth he knew had never existed, then why would anyone think you ran because you feared him? You already knew his secrets before he ever told you. You targeted him.”
Her hands clenched, a slight movement he noted before she settled again. “Is this meant to impress me?”
“But whatever you were meant to do, you failed.”
“Are you—”
“Because you fell in love with him,” Kit finished as if she hadn’t spoken. “That was never part of the plan, was it?”
Defiance lit up her eyes—righteous indignation—but she didn’t deny what he said. He wasn’t wrong.
“Perhaps it’s time you leave, Kit,” she said as she stood. She was all of five-foot-nothing, yet she wasn’t afraid to stare him down, daring him to continue.
But he saw now what she didn’t want him to see—the pieces of the truth dangling there for him to put together.
He saw it all.
“Perhaps it was sacrifice or Uilleam himself that made you leave him the first time. Perhaps it was a part of the plan, but something convinced you to try to fix things with him. Someone.”
This time, there was something else gleaming in her eyes. A trace of fear. “Leave.”
Kit already knew he was close to the answer, had known it from the moment he’d arrived on his mother’s doorstep. The answer had been right in front of him the entire time. He just hadn’t been able to put it together.
“August eleventh, you told him, was the day you called but he told you he was busy. That he didn’t need to see you. What did you want to tell him?”
He didn’t know now whether it was fear or disbelief that kept her quiet, but her silence was an answer in and of itself.
“And not even six months to the day, he found what he thought was your broken body on the floor of your home covered in blood,” he continued, “and ever since, you’ve been determined to destroy him. Which brought me to my next question … what on earth would possibly make a woman in our profession fake her death, then stalk the man she wanted to hurt?”
Belladonna didn’t respond, but it was there in her gaze. The truth.
She was just waiting for him to say it.
“For years, you’ve carried this on, baiting him, toying with him, and even going so far as to aid others in their quest to harm him, but no one was allowed to hurt him. Or is that not why you had Elias Harrington fed to pigs? It takes quite a lot of love to hate him the way you do.”
“What is your point, Kit?”
“You spared his mercenaries.”
“As I’ve said, you can’t always blame a man for the orders he takes. They don’t have a choice.”
“But you gave them one. Each and every single one of them. You were the one who found the contingency in the contract. Not Winter. You led her to it.”
She didn’t have to agree for him to know. Instead, she didn’t respond to that at all. “What do you care, Kit? The mercenaries don’t mean anything to you.”
“You told Luna that you didn’t offer her the truth because it would hurt Uilleam. You offered her the truth because you knew what it felt like to have your life manipulated by my brother, isn’t that right?”
“That’s not a big mystery.”
“You’re not offering anyone the truth because it would hurt Uilleam,” Kit said, “you’re offering it because each person has someone to lose. Families. Wives. Husbands. Children. You want us to leave him to his fate.”
The dip of her eyes was almost imperceptible. “It’s what he deserves.”
“Which still begs the question, what would cause a woman to go on a years’ long vendetta offering truths and aids that no one asked for? What would cause a woman who still loves a man to this day to want to hurt him as badly as she does? You see, I know my brother—I know who he was back then. He didn’t think before he acted. More often than not, he said fuck the consequences and attacked those in his way without caring about the collateral damage.”
For a moment, the mask she held so carefully in place slipped. He saw the raw anguish. The pain. The hurt. The tears. He had grown cold over the years, uncaring of another’s pain except for his wife, but at that moment, he felt for her.
He finally understood what she had lost.
Because as he spoke, her hand had lifted to cover her front, an unconscious movement she probably hadn’t noticed, but he understood what it meant. The way a person’s psyche would remember old pain … and what they might have lost.
“I’m sorry,” he said, even before he’d meant to apologize. “I’m so sorry for what you lost.”
He didn’t know how.
He didn’t know when.
But the knowledge was enough to make his cold heart seize.
Kit opened his mouth again to speak but before he could, her voice stopped him.
“Don’t.” She said it with such venom that he immediately clamped his mouth shut. “Don’t say it. Don’t even think it.”
That arrogant façade was gone.
She reminded him of Luna at that moment—her pain as visceral to him as his wife’s—and he wished he could take this pain from her.
Perhaps it wouldn’t have come to this if someone had stripped her of the agony she’d turned into armor, but the only person who might have been able to still didn’t understand what he had done.
He didn’t realize that just as Kit had issued an order that almost cost him Luna, Uilleam had done the same at one time or another.
Back before there was a Den when there were only two mercenaries to his name.
One of whom was still missing …
The only one to have gone up against the Jackal and lived.
Only those she deemed responsible would suffer was what Luna had told him when she’d recounted their second meeting together.
One man was the bullet, the other was the executioner.
“I’ve always told him,” Karina said quietly, her gaze now on the floor, “his actions have consequences. He can’t account for human error. He can’t see when a meeting gets changed, and the company his target is with is the last person he would suspect.”
Kit could almost picture it in his mind. He had seen Uilleam with his mercenaries now, carelessly sending them out to carry out his orders and, on the rare occasion, make sure no witnesses were left behind.
But that was the cost of being the Kingmaker.
That was the cost she was making him rethink.
Belladonna tucked her hair behind her ear, her tear-filled gaze still on his face. “Are you going to tell him?”
“This … this is not my secret to tell. This has always been a problem that needed to be resolved between you and Uilleam. It’s time I acknowledged that.”
He’d told himself long ago that he needed to distance himself from his brother’s business. He had to stop helping him clean up messes of his own making.
Now, he had another good reason.
He could no longer afford to risk Luna, or the life they had created inside her.
“I would be remiss if I didn’t tell you this won’t bring you closure.”
“It’s too late to turn back now. I have to see this done.”
Kit could almost imagine that his brother would have said the same. He was stubborn that way—refusing to bend even when he needed to. Perhaps it was from him that she had learned this.
Either way, he didn’t intend to stick around watch it unfold.
“Then it ends here for us, I’m afraid.” If they wanted to destroy each other, he could no longer afford to stand in the middle.
Kit turned then, intending to leave, ready to leave this all behind him until her voice made him pause.
“Sebastian went home.”
He turned to spear her with a glance, but there was no smug grin on her face, nor did she look thrilled that she had knowledge he wanted.
“That is his name, is it not?”
Kit knew then that even for as long as the Jackal—Sebastian—had worked for her, she hadn’t known the truth about him. He hadn’t been a pawn for her to use against them. It might have been easier to hate her if he was. She could be painted with the same broad stroke of ruthlessness as his brother.
But she wasn’t.
She was just a woman hurt by the man she loved the most.
“When I found him, he didn’t remember much about who he was or where he’d come from. At the time, I thought it might be easier for him, knowing how he had suffered. Sometimes, I wish I could forget.”
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked, even as he was grateful.
Den of Mercenaries: Volume Two Page 73