Once she had the answer she wanted, she continued through the room, and though Iris hardly had any idea what was coming next, she dutifully followed.
Finally, as they reached a set of ornate doors with a symbol in gold in the very center of them—a snake eating itself—Belladonna walked her inside her actual office.
Her desk looked like white marble with steel legs and no laptop or computer that she could see. Blue roses sat in a white pitcher near the window, and etched into the wall, just above where Belladonna’s head would be if she was sitting, was one word.
Legend.
“What was that?”
“What was what?” Belladonna asked, though it was pretty clear she knew exactly what. It was written all over her face.
“He doesn’t know his own name?”
His voice held genuine confusion as if his name had been just as much a mystery as the men who had used it.
“I doubt he is truly any concern of yours.”
“He’s not really.”
“Then why are you—”
“I’m trying to understand. You say your beef is with the Kingmaker, but you had my father put in prison, Syn’s friends are missing, and you trained a man to forget himself and fight his own brothers. I’m trying to figure out what makes you so different from the man you hate so much.”
Iris didn’t know why she was trying to goad her—to see her finally react. Maybe it was because that was who the Kingmaker was. A man who reacted to even the slightest provocation. She wanted to see for herself that they were the same. She needed an excuse.
Her weapons had been left back in the hotel room since today was visitation day, and she had a feeling Belladonna was aware of that fact, but she didn’t need weapons. She only needed opportunity.
Belladonna stared at her a long while, dark hair falling over her shoulder as she leaned forward. “It’s easy to make monsters out of men when you only see what’s right in front of you.”
“I—”
“But it’s not my concern whether you like what I have done or not,” Belladonna said, and it was clear from the way she had shut down that she wasn’t as unfeeling as Iris had first believed.
Seeing the Jackal hurt had affected her.
“You either want what I can give you, or you don’t. The choice, as always, is yours.”
“How do I know?” Iris asked, folding her arms across her chest. “How do I know that you can really free him? Someone else made the same promise to me.”
Someone she had trusted far more than she trusted Belladonna … even as a small part of her knew that some things were out of his control. That the blame couldn’t be squarely placed at his feet.
Belladonna reached into her desk, pulling out a slim, silver remote before pointing it at the screen behind Iris’s head. She turned, ever so slightly, to glance at it, but spun completely around when she saw the man depicted on the screen.
Michael Spader.
His eyes were clear, his chin tilted up just a fraction, managing to look as condescending in the recorded video as he did in real life. Seeing this tape, she could almost feel that same disgust she’d always felt when she was forced to look at him before she remembered that this was a recording.
Spader wouldn’t wear this expression anymore now that he was dead.
“My name is Michael Spader, and of a sound mind and healthy body, I confess to my crimes.”
Her legs, at that moment, felt like jelly, and she had no choice but to sink down into the chair behind her and watch.
The former governor didn’t confess to what she just knew about; he confessed to things she didn’t.
Murder.
Money laundering.
Drugs.
Weapons.
Everything. He confessed to everything.
But it wasn’t until he said her father’s name that Iris’s hands fisted in her lap. Her heart was thundering in her ears, nearly drowning out everything the man was saying, but she’d heard enough.
Enough to know that this tape was everything she needed to finish what she started.
And enough to know that Belladonna was a lot smarter than she had given her credit for.
“You knew he would kill him,” Iris said flatly once the tape clicked off and she turned back to face Belladonna. “You had already accounted for it.”
Belladonna didn’t respond immediately, but once she did, she shrugged as if what she had done was nothing earth shattering at all. “Spend enough time with a man and he’ll tell you all his secrets without ever opening his mouth.”
“Then that means this was all by design, right?” Iris asked. “You helping the Wraiths, getting me here … you planned all this.”
“My mother always told me there’s only six degrees of separation between one person and the next. If you find all six, you’ll have everything you need.”
Iris thought of the Kingmaker and his mercenaries. Of how they operated and how close they all were.
“So what is it?” Iris asked. “What do you want from me?”
“Tell me, what would you do to save your father?”
Anything sat at the tip of her tongue, just needing to be voiced, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. “I won’t betray Synek. That’s … it’s just not going to happen.”
She couldn’t.
Belladonna leaned forward, resting her elbows on the desk in front of her as she pinned Iris with a stare. “Are you willing to die for him?”
Synek parked and killed the engine, stuffing his hands in his pockets as he walked the short distance around the side of the building until he reached the maintenance lift. Of all the mercenaries in the Den, no one was as paranoid about their security as Celt was. The Irishman took extreme measures to make sure no one could breach his home, and even if they did, they would learn to regret it. He had hardwired each of the elevators inside his loft with a kill switch and should someone unauthorized get on one, he could drop the lift and kill anyone inside.
He was extreme that way.
Synek stood in front of the security camera built into the keypad of the door and rang the bell, making sure his face was clearly seen. Not even a minute later, a buzzer went off and the gate lifted, allowing him entry. No matter how many times he rode this very elevator up to the main floor, a part of him was always on edge until the car stopped and he could walk off.
It wasn’t often he put his life in another man’s hands.
Moments later, the lift stopped, and he could see the vague outline of someone standing on the other side before the gate was lifted and he got his first look at Celt’s bruised face. But while he might have looked like the one who had gotten the shite kicked out of him, Celt still had the audacity to look him over as if he was roadkill.
“You look like shite,” he mumbled in that ever-familiar Irish lilt, stepping aside to let Synek pass.
Even with a crutch under one arm and a boot on his right leg, he still held a Glock in his left hand.
They were who they were.
Synek scratched at his facial hair before mumbling an annoyed, “Fuck off,” before slipping into the loft.
It wasn’t often, especially in recent years, that he came to visit Celt’s place on the outskirts of Brooklyn. While he used to open the doors of his loft and let any one of them stay a while until they were on their way, that had changed when he’d found his current wife who was circling around the living room with the same look of worry Iris wore when she was nervous.
From what he could see, Red was stretched out on an aged brown leather sofa, though he wasn’t as bruised as Celt, and the woman Synek thought was his wife was seated beside him, both of her hands clasped around his. And on the other side of them was a blond man Synek had only ever met once in his life—back when they extracted him from a remote location in Albania.
“Where the fuck have you lot been?” Synek asked, glad that, at least for the time being, he could focus on something other than the complete shit show that was his
life.
Celt blew out a breath as he limped past, looking as disgruntled as Synek felt. “Fucking Jackal. Romanian bastard can throw a punch.”
Yeah, Synek knew the sentiment well. “Is that why you look like you’ve been ’round the bend, mate? ’Cause I have to say, you look like shite warmed over.”
The blond on the couch snorted out a laugh, drawing Synek’s attention to him. It was instinct to scan over the vibrant tattoos covering nearly every inch of his skin for any affiliations, but from what he could see, the man just liked his ink. Just above the V-neck of his shirt, a tiger’s head poked out.
“What’s he here for?” Synek asked with a jerk of his thumb in the man’s direction.
“He’s here for guard duty,” the man answered, still smiling, though there was an edge to it now—as though waiting for a challenge and ready to respond to it.
Huh. “Couldn’t’ve called one of your own?” Synek asked, posing the question to Celt, though he didn’t take his eyes off the man.
“Better question is who the fuck are you?” the man asked before cracking his knuckles.
“Luka, reel yourself in.” Red sighed from the couch, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. “I’d tell you both to go play with knives, but you’d probably enjoy it too much.”
The Albanian looked back at Synek, seeming to size him up in a glance. And before he even realized what the other man was doing, he pulled a knife from somewhere on his body and launched it across the room.
Synek barely caught the handle of the blade before it would have stabbed him in the eye, pulling it away to read the manufacturer along the black blade. “If you’re not buying from Ramon”—and there was only one Ramon worth knowing in the trade of knives—”you’re missing out.”
Luka’s grin was slight. “I don’t think I’m emotionally available for a new relationship, but you’re not half bad.”
Red, who looked from one to the other, gingerly slid away from his wife to head to the kitchen. “I need a drink.”
Synek, now grabbing the lone chair in the room, collapsed onto it and looked over at Celt. “So what the hell happened to you?”
He tried not to show it, the moment when he started reliving that day in his head, but it was impossible not to notice the way he tensed, and how Amber came to perch on the side of the couch next to him. “They tailed me from the facility. They needed to get me alone.” He shook his head, his gaze faraway. “Fucker was just standing in the middle of the road. Might have nearly run him down if I hadn’t swerved when I did. Fucking regretting that now,” he muttered to himself, finally coming back to the present. “Apparently, he had a message for me.”
From Belladonna, he knew.
The Jackal didn’t work on anyone’s orders but hers, and Synek wished he knew why. Seeing that he was fighting against his own brothers hadn’t seem to penetrate that head of his—he’d fought them just as hard as he had the mercenaries.
It was clear he was minding his words from the way he glanced at Amber. She tried to hide it—for Celt’s sake, Synek imagined—but he could tell it bothered her still.
“What was the message?” Synek asked, curious.
“It all leads back to him,” Red said before Celt could, unmistakable bitterness coloring his tone. “He’s behind all of it.”
“All of what?” Synek asked, not understanding.
“When I was twenty-one, I was taken by some Albanians who tortured me for three days—”
“Torture is such a strong word,” Luka butted in with a sad shake of his head.
“Regardless,” Red went on, glaring at him, “it wasn’t mistaken identity like I thought. I was targeted.”
“By the Kingmaker …?”
Synek tried to wrap his mind around that, to process what they were getting at.
It didn’t seem possible for a man who could only be in his late twenties to do what they were suggesting—manipulating lives back when he’d been that age or younger. Then again, Synek knew what the man was capable of.
He saw it every day.
He remembered when the man had appeared before him, making him an offer he couldn’t refuse and turning his own life on its head.
“After I came to the hospital,” Celt tacked on, “Kava was there. She told me about a program the Kingmaker had attempted to launch. His thought was to make a soldier from scratch. Children are easier to train,” he said, almost as an afterthought. “Z didn’t like to use children, though, so the idea was scrapped, but I was kept.”
And that was just the pair of them.
Synek knew, though he wasn’t clear on the details, that something had happened to Calavera as well—that her introduction to the Den hadn’t come easily.
But with that realization came a twitch in his chest. A thought that maybe his being in the Den wasn’t as simple as he thought it was.
What the hell had he done?
“I guess the question is,” Synek said, looking at each of them in turn, “what the hell are we going to do about it?”
Red shrugged as he sat back, his face a mask of unapologetic annoyance. “He promised me vengeance. I think I’ll have it.”
Chapter 19
Calavera
Belladonna wasn’t to be trusted.
Not only because of the things she said, but because of what she didn’t.
Luna Runehart made it a point to keep her opinions to herself when it came to the other woman, mostly because she didn’t feel the same way as the others. She didn’t hate her on principle. She didn’t think she was a, “Bitch that needed to be stoned,” as she’d overheard someone say.
As far as she could tell, nothing at all was simple about the woman currently languishing away in the cell below. Belladonna might very well be plotting against the Kingmaker and making it a point to make his life a living hell, but she couldn’t help but think whatever the reason behind her actions, at the very least, she felt they were valid.
What could he have possibly done to make her react this way? To make Belladonna want to hurt him by any means necessary?
Luna thought she knew betrayal when she learned the truth about her husband and the secrets he’d been keeping from her, but in the end, she had only walked away from Kit—she hadn’t tried to destroy him.
Which was how she knew, despite all evidence to the contrary, some part of Belladonna still loved the Kingmaker.
It was the only thing that made sense.
Her phone’s sudden chiming made her blink twice, dragging her gaze away from the tiny window to her left down to the sat phone in her lap. Her cell was on airplane mode while flying, but she knew that leaving without giving Kit a way to get a hold of her wouldn’t go over well at all.
He would be liable to send the Wild Bunch out looking for her, and that would just derail what she was supposed to do.
“Kit, before you—”
“Where are you?” he asked, his words sharp as glass.
There were very few instances when he used that tone with her, and only when he was truly upset with her. With the way this tended to go, there was a chance he would still send them anyway.
The last thing she wanted to do was tell him the truth, that she was willfully following Belladonna down the rabbit hole after the concierge handed her an envelope with her name on it the morning before last. She had known, even before flipping it over and finding the ‘K’ inscribed in the wax seal, who it was from. The only thing she didn’t know was what the address she found inside meant.
The only thing she could find when she’d looked up the address was the address’s country of origin.
Wales.
Luna could have lied and made up a story so he wouldn’t worry, but after Celt’s disappearance and Red’s arrest, she didn’t have that luxury. “She sent me an address,” Luna said, not having to give him a name. “I’m going to find out what’s on the other end of it.”
“Have you lost your fucking mind?” he replied sharply.
She actu
ally had to move the phone away from her ear with how loud he was speaking. “You, better than anyone, have to know that if she wanted to hurt me, she could have done that long before now.”
Unlike the other mercenaries, this wasn’t her first meeting with Belladonna. Not even the second. Years ago, back when the ring on her finger had still been fresh out of its box and she was less knowledgeable of the kind of men the Runehart brothers were, she had met Belladonna in a now abandoned office where she had sat across from her without ever knowing who she truly was.
Luna had thought she’d only been a client, but that had all changed in less than a week. Not only had Belladonna revealed the truth of just how she had become a mercenary, but she’d also opened Pandora’s box.
“Things have changed,” Kit returned tightly.
He wasn’t saying anything she didn’t already know.
Things changed the moment Belladonna had been walked into the compound wearing chains and a sardonic smile. She had warned the Kingmaker that if he didn’t follow her rules, she would make him pay for it.
He chose not to listen.
“She’s not going to hurt me,” Luna said with a sigh, looking back out the window. “You told me that, remember?”
The thing about assassins—they had a way of analyzing a situation and finding reason within the smallest of details. While his brother faced the enemy head-on, Kit analyzed their pasts and actions.
He saw what they often didn’t want him to see.
And nearly six months ago now, he had seen that Belladonna seemed to have a soft spot where women were concerned.
Men, she sent her Jackal after, but women, she spoke to personally. Just from the way Iris and Ada had described their interactions with her, Belladonna had always been kind to a ridiculous degree, and even aided them all in some way.
She could have let the Kingmaker do what he wanted with Ada, knowing that she would have been harmed even if she hadn’t known any pertinent information on her. Instead, she had found a way to make the woman useful and save her life in the process.
Iris. (Den of Mercenaries Book 7) Page 22