The couples sat next to each other, flanking Zave who sat at the head of the table. Devon sat beside Zara with Rig opposite her, next to Kadie. Bess had been at her side until she departed.
In the modern age, she couldn’t believe they had to be face-to-face just to convey a message. “Thad must know how to contact us here,” she said. “He must have your numbers and emails.”
Zave shook his head. “We killed those the minute he turned his back on us.”
“We’ve done it so many times, it only takes a few seconds. We keep our devices, but all the numbers change,” Tuck explained. “Numbers can be traced, cloned, monitored. It’s too much of a risk to leave them the same.”
“But don’t we want their message?” Kadie asked him. “What if they’re trying to make peace?”
Brodie scoffed. “Mitchell won’t make peace,” he said. “He might negotiate or he might start a war, but he’s not going to come to us hat in hand.”
Taking Grant was an excellent move. Terrifying as it had been for her at the time, she understood now why it made sense. In retrospect, it was a calculated risk where benefit outweighed cost. But now that they had this advantageous strategic position, they couldn’t be complacent and had to remain on the offensive.
An idea had been formulating in her mind since they’d returned. While she completed her chores, she’d been constantly aware of every external sound and paranoid enough that she believed more than once there were boats or planes approaching that could be law enforcement coming to take her man away.
Devon didn’t want to hear the pounding on the door and didn’t want to cry in this house without him, knowing he was wasting away in a cell. She had Zave at the head of the table and Rig opposite her, and as much as she’d expect her husband and brother to support her, she was a rookie and aware that her idea might be dismissed without consideration.
Except the solidarity of the women on the plane had bolstered her. If these guys disagreed, she’d fight her corner. If she was ultimately overruled, she would go with the group decision, as she’d been told that was how the Kindred worked. They brainstormed, tossed ideas around, sometimes mixing one suggestion with another until they eventually came to a conclusion.
But she would make them hear her first. “I don’t want to wait and see,” Devon said, maintaining her attention on her husband who slowly lifted his eyes to hers. “I don’t want to wait and see if they’re going to attack us.”
“What do you suggest?” Zara asked, open to the possibilities.
There was no judgement or impatience in her tone. She wasn’t overjoyed, but she was certainly receptive. “A preemptive strike,” Devon said, trying to figure out how everyone felt about the idea. But they were all so good at shuttering their true thoughts, it was impossible to anticipate their reactions.
Rig was the first to respond, giving the others time to organize their thoughts. “We don’t know where they are,” her brother said. “How can we hit them—”
“I’m not talking about an assault,” she said.
Because if nothing else, it would take too much time to prepare and fly back to the city. Syn had almost a day of advantage over them if they were retrenching or planning their own attack. Syn knew where they were, yet the Kindred were still unaware of Syn’s location and it would take time to torture it out of Grant. Besides, a direct assault would cost lives, and Devon couldn’t guarantee which side would be victorious. There were different kinds of victory, and one Kindred life lost was too many.
“Then what kind of strike?” Kadie asked.
“Syn’s warning shot was the media,” Devon said. “So instead of waiting for them to send Jennifer to the cops or for them to go to the next news outlet, I say we tell the truth.”
“To the press?” Brodie asked. Just three words, but he managed to convey how ridiculous he thought the suggestion was and how unimpressed he was by it, while keeping his tone level and deep.
Zara patted her hand in a gesture that came off as patronizing. “The Kindred don’t advertise.”
This was the cusp, the threshold of the moment when they would dismiss her, so she had to speak up. “Not your story, mine,” Devon said, and although she knew Zave was still looking at her, she chose to focus on her brother. “I’ll go alone, tell them it was random. Everybody wants to know how I met my husband. Well I’ll tell them that he rescued me from that hellish place. I’ll tell them what happened to me. They’ll think that I’m new money on a crusade, but the truth will seep through. Then even if Jennifer does go to the police, she’ll just look like she’d jumping on the bandwagon or trying to extort money.”
“That’s not assured,” Kadie said. “The press could just as easily turn on us.”
Devon loved how she used the word “us.” She and Kadie were probably the two least connected at the table, and yet Kadie accepted Devon’s pain as her own.
“No,” Zave said in that clipped, monotone. “I will not have my wife paraded on television or our intimacy discussed—”
“I’ll go alone,” she said again. “I go and I tell them the truth. Then it doesn’t matter what Syn do, because we got there first. It will just sound like people trying to make hay out of nothing. Even if the cops try to investigate or try to question you, at least you would have an explanation. If they ask you about Jennifer, we deny that she was here. No one is going to admit having laid eyes on her. You tell the cops how you found me, but tell them that Jennifer is a crazy person who heard the story and decided to parrot it.”
This time when she stopped talking, nobody jumped up with a contradiction. She gave them time to consider the idea. That was when Bess came back in, approached the table, one careful step at a time and put her hands on the back of the chair next to Rigor’s.
“I expected debate,” Bess said, “maybe even spirited argument. The Kindred are rarely silent.”
“Devon has an idea,” Zara said. “She doesn’t think we should sit around and wait for Syn to tell tales. She’s offering to go to the media, to tell the truth about how she and Zave got together. So Jennifer will look like a crackpot.”
Devon expected Bess to keep her opinion to herself, if she had one, because her loyalty had to be stretched. Not that she would ever turn her back on the Kindred. But if anything happened to Syn, her son would be finished.
“I’ll go with her,” Bess said. Devon was stunned, so much so that she couldn’t even begin to think about how the others felt about Bess’ vehemence. “If I tell them the truth about what happened with Bronwyn while sitting beside her, they’ll understand where it started.”
That was excellent and exactly what Devon needed to hear. Not only could she use the moral support, but it would further justify Zave’s presence in that place and the cops could investigate all they wanted, all they would ever find was the truth.
“What about Thad?” Zara asked. “He won’t be happy if you parade his business on the national news channels.”
“Except that’s what he’s threatening to do with Kindred business, what he allowed to happen when Syn leaked Devon and Zave’s marriage. We have to fight fire with fire. We can’t just sit and wait to see if Grant is right. Devon and I spoke,” Bess said, making eye contact. “What you said in the apartment was right. I can’t go to Syn just to be close to Thad, to sit by and watch them destroy everything I love. But I can take a more active role. Maybe if I’d done that, if I’d been more involved, my son wouldn’t have run away from me.”
Devon hadn’t meant to hurt her. “Bess, what he did wasn’t your fault.”
But the woman was determined when she addressed the lord of the manor. “You can afford the best lawyers, Zave.”
“Yes,” Kadie said, “you can.” Devon was encouraged that they were rallying. Even if she had to do it inch by inch, she was getting Kindred members onside. It was progress. “Your lawyers can talk to Devon and to Bess before they do it. They can even warn, I don’t know, the cops or the DA, whoever has to know beforehand. And
if Jennifer comes out, even if it’s five minutes later, your lawyers will make mincemeat of her. You can hire PR and—”
“We have all that through KC,” Zave said.
Devon didn’t know if that was acceptance that this was going to happen or simply an observation. “That takes care of Zave’s situation, but Brodie will still go to jail,” Zara said, taking her husband’s hand although he took it straight back.
Brodie wasn’t even worried; Devon was impressed by how casual he could be about his freedom. “I told you the first weekend you stayed at my place, if I go to prison, I go to prison,” Brodie said.
“Fuck that,” Zara said. “You think you’re some big, hard man who’d sail through jail time? Oh yeah, you’ll be fine showering with a hundred other guys who all want to be your bitch.” She poked his shoulder. “I’m your bitch. Not them. You want somebody to suck you off, you call my number. Not theirs.”
Brodie slid an arm around the back of her chair. Devon leaned forward to see the slant of a sinister smile focused on his wife. “You’re not worried about me living in a concrete cage. You worried there might be competition for space in my bed? You’re jealous that all those other eyes will see my cock every day while you’re drooling over pictures.”
With a stubborn chin, Zara didn’t flinch. “Pictures don’t satisfy me, beau. I need the real thing.”
Passion sparked again between the couple, but it was only a brief kiss Brodie gave to his wife before he curled his fingers around the back of her neck. “To tell the truth, I’m not worried. Art taught me to treat every kill like the first. To be as paranoid as I was when I was a scared kid pulling that trigger for the first time. I make it look easy. But I’m paying attention.”
Tuck pointed at the sniper. “That’s true. If the cops could put a case together, they would’ve. Syn can call the cops, and they can question us. Hell, they can even try to gather evidence.”
Brodie locked his fingers deeper in the hair he’d trapped at Zara’s neck. “If I’ve left evidence, I deserve to go to prison. That’s exactly what Art would tell me.”
But Zara was shaking her head. “Don’t give me that bullshit. I won’t let you go to prison. I don’t give a fuck what we have to do. If we have to live in the Andes and shoot elk for a living, we will.”
Brodie sniggered before he kissed her again. “They don’t got elk in the Andes, sweetheart.”
“See, you know shit like that. You can look after me.”
Kadie laughed. “You’re going to go live in a cave? Get back to your primitive roots?”
She was still laughing while Zara smiled and Tuck stroked the back of her head. “You wouldn’t have to go on the run forever,” the hacker said. “You can piss off out the country for a year or two. Both the manors are secure enough. Once the heat dies down and they’ve searched the place, you can come back and split your time between our manor and this one. They’ll never pin you down, we’ve got enough surveillance on both places that we’ll see them coming a mile away.”
No longer laughing, Kadie’s concern grew for her own man. “And you?” she asked her lover. “You always told me that if Brodie went down, you’d be going down too.”
He smiled and touched her chin. “There are plenty of caves out there, Toots, you take your pick.”
“You’ll be like the fucking Flintstones,” Rig laughed, slapping a hand onto the table.
Devon laughed, too, but the urge to relax didn’t last long. Bess was staring at the table again, wearing that same forlorn expression.
“Devon’s idea was great,” Zara said, snatching her arm to link it around her own, bringing Devon’s focus back to the others. “Except if we’re going to be preemptive, we don’t have to expose ourselves. How about we expose them?”
This intrigued not only Zara’s husband, but Devon’s too. “What do you mean?” Zave asked.
“You’re all forgetting that the major secret here is that Grant and Frank are alive.”
“So we just drop Grant off at CNN and wait for him to tell his stories?” Brodie asked.
He was always quick to shoot down an idea, although Devon was learning it was sense of humor, rather than a desire to ridicule, even though the two sort of went hand in hand.
“Are you forgetting who was closest to Grant for half a decade before he died?” Zara said, going so far as to use air quotes around the final word. “We don’t have to drop Grant off anywhere; we can make his name mud. You know I still talk to Julian, one of the CI lawyers, all the time. He knows about Grant’s personal and professional finances overlapping. We have all the accounts to prove it. We can publicize what he was doing with Game Time, not what the device is or its schematics, but its capabilities and why he wanted to do it. We can even implicate him in the death of Albert Sutcliffe. There were four people in the room when Sutcliffe went down.”
“And two of them are fucking,” Tuck said, interested in Zara’s plan.
So this was a Kindred strategy meeting, one person’s idea led to another person’s, and suddenly they had options that left Devon feeling much more optimistic. “Who?” Devon asked.
Tuck took a breath. “Brodie, Zara, Grant, and Sutcliffe were in the bunker,” he said. “Sutcliffe never made it out.”
He and Zara were fixated on each other, and for the longest time they said nothing. Kadie leaned toward her. “Tuck’s in crash mode now trying to figure this out, and Zara’s glaring at him like that because this is how she gets into his brain. After this, they’ll start agreeing with each other, which basically means Brodie is screwed.”
Kadie’s smile grew wide and smug as she landed it on the sniper, who was scowling at the hacker’s girl. Even if Tuck and Zara agreed, that didn’t mean Zave would get onboard. “If we expose them, they expose us,” Zave said, and just as she’d thought before about the whole situation being a house of cards, she knew he was right.
While Zara’s plan was a good one, Devon still believed in her own because it wasn’t attacking Syn directly, giving them an opportunity to lob their own grenade back. It was attacking while protecting themselves.
“We’re going to give Grant the night,” Zave said. “Let him pace and shout. Mitchell’s either already followed through or he’s waiting for our next move. Let them drive themselves insane about what might happen while we all get a good night’s sleep.”
“Regroup at breakfast,” Zara said.
Devon wanted to fight for her plan, but it was late, probably too late to start piecing a strategy together, and they would need a precise game plan, not one they rushed to assemble because it was bedtime and everyone wanted to get to sleep.
Even if they chose to follow through with her suggestion, before she uttered a word to the press, she would have to speak to Zave’s lawyers. They would have to warn the KC PR department, too, because they may be inundated with questions and requests after any interviews. Needless to say, neither of those things could be done tonight.
Everyone else must have agreed with him, and tiredness had settled over the group anyway. So after the women finished cleaning up from dinner, they retired to bed. Bess went first, then Rig, with Tuck and Kadie not too far behind. Brodie said something to Zara, sending her away, and he stayed to whisper with Zave for another minute before tipping his invisible hat at Devon and leaving the room.
She remained beside the table, looking at her husband, who was facing the night beyond the window. “What are you looking for when you do that?” she asked. “You stare out there like you’re expecting some sort of answer to leap out of the waves.”
He couldn’t see anything, as it was light inside and dark out, so even if something did emerge from the water, it would be invisible to them. “Do you want to sleep alone?” she asked when he didn’t respond.
Zave dropped his linked hands from the small of his back, and they swung at his sides as he turned. “You would really go to the media and tell them what you went through?” he asked.
That was an easy question
to answer. “Yes.”
He didn’t understand. “You didn’t even want to tell me.” He began to approach. “We sat at this table, and you couldn’t even get the words out. I told you to speak to a therapist—”
“Are you angry?” she asked, trying to understand his objection. “I understand you don’t want the world to know our secrets, and they won’t. You have to trust me that I won’t talk about our relationship like that. But if you’re asking me to do nothing, to just watch the police take you away to punish you for being a good man doing a righteous thing… I can’t, lord. I won’t.”
Stopping a few feet from her, anger hardened his form. “You don’t have a fucking choice, shy. Have you forgotten where you are?”
Throwing his weight around or shutting her out, it wouldn’t make any difference to her determination. “I’m in my home,” she said because she wouldn’t be intimidated by him. “My home doesn’t frighten me. And yeah, you can lock me up. Except my brother’s here and he’s not gonna let you throw me in a pit and forget about me.”
Scoffing, he looked down his nose. “You think Rigor could take on me, Brodie, and Tuck?”
Playing it coy instead of confronting his anger with hers, she tilted her chin. “Maybe not, so you’ll have to take him prisoner,” she said, pushing away from the table. “So while you have Grant locked up with me next door and Rig smashing the place up demanding to get out, how long before Bess reminds you how much you love me and tells you that you’re being unreasonable? And who’s going to feed me?” Bess would, they both knew that. “So when I convince Bess I’m right, she’ll convince Zara and Kadie, and then you’ll have to lock all three of them up too. Hmm…” she pressed a fingertip to her cheek. “But Brodie’s gonna want to get his, Tuck too. They’re not used to being celibate. How many people will you lock up before you realize it’s ok to let others help you?”
Putting her hands on his chest, she could feel how averse he was to having her this close. But he wasn’t angry anymore. “You’ve come a long way from the girl who blushed when I said the word ‘sex’,” he said.
Finch (Kindred #6) Page 23