“It is not!”
Kahlil was adamant, but when her eyes met Brodie’s, she knew who he trusted. “You lost your banker,” Brodie said, coming to the same conclusion she had. Her love became rigid in the way that always made him look like a man out of patience. “You fucking with us?”
“I’m not!” Kahlil insisted and threw a glare at her. “I wouldn’t be telling you the story if the deal was off.”
“So far I haven’t heard shit,” Brodie said. “We knew my father shut down the project and ordered everything shredded.”
“But it was Frank Mitchell!” Kahlil said, maybe as a distraction technique. “He agreed terms, he said if we got rid of your father then he would control the company.”
Shit, that was a shock that would increase Brodie’s volatility. “No,” she said, thinking about what Grant had told her about Frank’s reaction to the loss of his best friend. “Frank Mitchell was against selling Game Time in any form.”
“Not always,” Kahlil said. “He was the one who opened negotiations, and he did it in secret for months. He was convinced that he would be able to talk his friend into selling. I think that Frank’s continued pressure was what caused McCormack to snap and order all evidence of the device destroyed. That was when my boss and Frank Mitchell panicked. McCormack was putting the order through, and if the schematics were destroyed, we would have had no way to develop the device. Mitchell grabbed what he could, put a physical file together and everything digital was destroyed.”
Which explained why Tuck found nothing on the CI system when he went looking. The computer files were already obsolete, but they’d been erased several times through the years. It also explained where Grant had gotten the Game Time file from. He inherited all of Frank’s personal belongings after his death, which would’ve included the physical file.
That betrayal would’ve cut Grant deeper than it would Brodie. But it wasn’t pleasant to know one friend had betrayed another. The Kindred valued loyalty. “So, they killed McCormack Senior and his wife because… they wanted to do the deal with Frank?” she asked.
“Frank was the one who gave my people access to the boat,” Kahlil said. “He was the one who encouraged McCormack Senior to go out on the water that day. He wasn’t supposed to take his wife, Melinda, but her presence didn’t stop them from following through.”
How horrific to know that McCormack Senior’s best friend and confidante had been the one to set him up. Game Time poisoned every person and relationship it touched. Brodie was fixated on Kahlil, and his set expression told its own story. This wasn’t easy for him to hear, but these answers were going to give him closure.
Their relationship had withstood the Game Time curse, at least it had until now. With the revelations of today, they would face their biggest test yet. She had been the one to encourage him to listen to Kahlil, and depending on how he absorbed this news, they could face turbulent times ahead.
Zara maintained her lead on the interrogation. “If he wanted the couple out of the way so he could sell Game Time himself, why didn’t he?”
Kahlil sucked in an expressive breath. “Murder isn’t for everyone,” Kahlil said. “I saw him once after the accident—”
“It wasn’t an accident,” she said. Her defensive anger almost overwhelmed her, and she could only imagine how Brodie was feeling. “They were murdered.”
“I saw him once,” Kahlil said, not acknowledging her statement. “He was a mess. It could’ve been guilt about orphaning his best friend’s kids. But I don’t think anyone anticipated the reaction to the loss. McCormack had a lot of friends, there were tributes and an outcry to find out what happened. The heat was immense. It got to my boss too. Everyone agreed to lay low for a while.”
“Frank could’ve just sold the files with the schematic.”
Though there was heat from law enforcement, Frank wouldn’t want to make any deals that were too lucrative, especially for him personally because that would thrust him into the field of suspicion.
“For a fraction of what he’d get for the device,” Kahlil said. “This was twenty years ago, the technology sucked. CI would’ve had to put all their resources into it, and my boss didn’t have the kind of resources needed to do that. Frank had to get his people to develop it, but like I said, he couldn’t push too hard on that button because the world looked to the kid.”
Grant McCormack Junior. “Grant was in charge at CI,” she whispered.
He’d been hands-on from a young age, almost immediately after losing his parents. She guessed it helped him cope with his grief.
Kahlil’s brow lowered. “He was a dumb teenager, well, not so dumb… his father had taught him so much about running the company, more than even Frank realized. If Melinda hadn’t been on that boat, she would’ve let Frank run things at CI, and she’d have protected her boys from having to take on responsibility too young.”
But with her dead and ownership switching to the boys, Frank didn’t have the leeway he was counting on. The situation would have worsened for him when Brodie and Grant went their separate ways. Frank had to take guardianship of Grant to ensure he kept his position of power at the firm. Getting Brodie out of the way would’ve been a bonus, except the separation of the boys drove them to the extremes of their choices and entrenched Grant further into CI.
Frank didn’t have the influence he needed to divert all of CI’s resources to the development of Game Time. He couldn’t let on to Grant that it existed, or the kid might ask questions about his father’s choices and his father’s death. Grant also had the power to order all remaining information about Game Time destroyed, and Frank had been through that already with Grant Senior.
Killing off a kid was a different ballgame, and if Frank learned he didn’t have the stomach for murder after his complicity in the death of his best friend, he wouldn’t want to repeat that experience with a minor.
Kahlil continued. “Frank saw what my people were capable of when Future’s Hope went up in smoke. He worried for his own safety. If he handed over this device, there was no assurance that he wouldn’t be a victim of it.”
Brodie had explained to her how wireless technology sucked in the days of the original negotiations. A failsafe kill switch would be a pipe dream, as would GPS in the terms they knew it today. Frank was afraid of the people he’d jumped into bed with and racked with guilt over the loss of Brodie’s parents. Then he had a kid looking over his shoulder, breathing down his neck, questioning his every decision. It was no surprise that the deal had fallen apart at that stage, especially with society and the media scrutinizing their every move.
Brodie still hadn’t said anything. She wanted to go over there and hug him, to soothe and stroke him while he told her how this tale altered his mood and his perception of the people in his past. But it wasn’t the time to coddle him, they had to get their money and get out of here.
They had to express interest and give importance to the cash so as not to raise suspicions. What they wanted was for Kahlil to take Game Time to his nest. They would track it there and—a noise startled them all from their reverie.
“What is that?” she asked but knew what it sounded like: an engine.
“It’s the van,” Brodie said.
The sound of the engine made them all start moving, but they quickly came to a halt when Caine entered aiming a gun at them. “Everybody stay still,” Caine said.
His familiar arrogance grated, and his sinister smile spoke of his delight at outmaneuvering them. He didn’t even know that he was being played. It was sad that he thought he was a partner instead of being just a pawn.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“We’re just taking what belongs to us,” Caine said, choosing to move closer to her, although she backed off. “Mischa wants what’s hers.”
“None of this is hers,” Zara said.
Cuckoo was scorned and Game Time was her way of getting revenge. But the couple wasn’t stealing from just them, they were stea
ling from Kahlil, and it was him that lunged at Caine and tried to grab for the gun. “Get out of here,” Brodie called out to her and began to rush forward.
But Caine and Kahlil were locked together, both hands on the gun, right in front of the door. One shot went off and she leapt away. “His watch,” she cried. “There’s poison in the watch!”
Why she warned Caine of that, she didn’t know. It seemed unfair that Cuckoo would get the prize and Caine would receive all the pain. But she wasn’t being selfless, they had to find Game Time and Caine was the only person who could tell them where Cuckoo was and what she was planning.
The gun went off again, and she tried to run forward to get to the door, though she didn’t know where she was planning to go because the van was gone so she had no transportation.
Caine went down, and Kahlil leapt over him to snatch a handful of her hair. Yanking her back, the pain in her head made her scream and grasp for his clenched fist. But he hauled her in front of him, and the barrel of the gun he’d taken from Caine pushed into the back of her skull.
“Get it!” Kahlil hollered, his breathing labored. “You go and get that damned device, or your lady friend gets a bullet.”
Hissing through her teeth at the pain of his fingers tugging on her locks, she watched Brodie’s dark determination taint his features. “You’re a dead man,” Brodie growled.
“We need the device,” she said, still holding onto Kahlil’s hand on top of her head. “You need to get it back from that bitch. We can’t trust her with it.”
“Swift,” Brodie said over his shoulder, but Tuck was already moving forward.
Tuck pulled his phone from his pocket. Caine began to laugh. Kahlil’s grip was so tight that she couldn’t lower her head to see Caine, but the sound came from the floor and with pain in his tone, he sucked in a breath.
Caine’s proud satisfaction made her sick. “You won’t find her with that damn thing,” he said. “You think we didn’t know that you’d use a tracker? Used one of your own devices I stole from you, that thing with the button that sends out a pulse.”
“The EM pulse,” Tuck murmured. “Damn, it will have fried all the circuits.”
Screwing them over pleased Caine. “Swiped it from you a while ago, knew it would come in handy.”
“They’ll have to rebuild the chips before they can use it,” Tuck said, though the Kindred knew the device was lacking key components and carrying a few additions. “I can go back to base, hack her cellphone, we can trace her signal—”
“She’ll be long gone by then,” Caine said, still pleased with himself, which showed a new level of arrogance after he’d just been shot by his own gun.
“Tick, tock,” Kahlil said. “Both of you go, find that woman, bring me my product.”
“Go,” Zara said. “He can’t hurt me or he’ll lose his leverage.”
“I’ll snap his neck now,” Brodie said, and the precision of his focus rivaled Maverick’s sight.
“I’ll shoot her and when she hits the deck, I’ll kill you,” Kahlil said. “Maybe your other lady friend wants to do business.”
Cuckoo wanted to do business that would suit her and only her. Knowing that Kahlil would be unsuccessful in coercing Cuckoo was little consolation to Zara because he’d only find that out after killing all the present Kindred members.
“Go,” Zara said. “Find her. Bring her ass here.”
Kahlil backed away from the door until they were at the bottom of the stairs. “You’ve got one hour. If I don’t hear from you, this woman dies.”
TWENTY-ONE
Tuck went out the door so fast, onlookers may have believed the building was on fire. Brodie was slower, much slower, and seemed pained to take his eyes from her. But they couldn’t say goodbye or reassure each other, Zara just had to hope that they would succeed.
Tuck’s bike started as Brodie crossed the threshold and entered the alley. No one inside said anything else until both bikes sped away.
“You can let me go now,” Zara said to Kahlil. “Caine doesn’t have a weapon, and he wouldn’t risk his life for me.”
Kahlil’s grip did loosen and after a few more seconds of considering it, he shoved her at the bottom stair and marched to the door. “You stay there,” he said to her and took up position against the doorframe.
Caine was lying on the floor in front of the door. It was his body that prevented it from closing. The dark stain on his thigh wasn’t huge, so she guessed Kahlil had missed hitting anything important, but the trickling stain did indicate that the wound was still open.
“You’re some kind of idiot, Caine, you know,” Zara said, rubbing the back of her head and trying to finger comb her matted locks.
“You shut your mouth,” Caine said, pressing a hand to his leg while he tried to better his position by shuffling on the floor.
Zara wasn’t going to let it go. Cutting in on a deal going down was one thing, doing it for a woman who ridiculed you was another. “She’s using you. You think that you’re some kind of team? She took what she wanted and left you here to get shot. What does that say about how much she cares about you?”
The squint of pain he wore didn’t lessen, and he pressed harder on his wound. “She cares. If she knew—”
“What?” Zara asked, pulling her legs up and wrapping her arms around them. “She would come back for you? She would care for you? No, she wouldn’t. She wants what you can give her, she thinks you’re an idiot. She thinks you’re pathetic.”
Pissing him off and telling him the truth were favors. Caine should be more grateful. “No, she—”
“Don’t believe me?” Zara asked. “She told me everything, about how you and she were a thing, but she dumped you for Raven. She told me how you got your scar and how she didn’t care about you until Raven left her. She’s using you to monitor him, and she laughs about your dedication to her.”
His focus rose from his wound, and the squint became a scowl. “No, you’re wrong,” Caine said.
“Am I?” Zara asked, turning her wrist toward him to display her watch. “If you don’t believe me, you can believe her.”
Pressing play on her watch, she let Cuckoo’s words fill the room. “And he’s pathetic, serious self-esteem issues. He believes that I think more of him for being so ridiculous. He honestly thinks we have some kind of relationship, that I value him.”
Zara’s response was on the audio too. “But you don’t. He’s worthless to you.”
“His worth is what he tells me about Raven’s life…” Zara pressed stop and waited for Caine’s reaction. Some of his arrogance receded, and his frown grew deeper.
“Let me see that,” he said, holding out a hand.
They were half a room apart and Kahlil had told her not to move, so after she unfastened the watch, she held it toward him. “It doesn’t serve my purpose to run your errands,” Kahlil said, the gun loose in his hand at his side as he peeked out the door.
“Yes, it does,” Zara said. “If we can make Caine see that the woman who stole your product is not the woman he believes she is, he’ll be more inclined to be helpful. He knows where Cuckoo is going.”
“Why do you call her Cuckoo?” Kahlil asked, and he must have seen her point of view because he came to her and took the proffered timepiece.
“Because she’s insane,” Zara said, moving down from the stair to sit on the dirty floor with her spine against the wall and her legs stretched out in front of her pointing at Kahlil and Caine. “And because she tries to steal the nests of others.” She might not have tried that when she was given the name, but she had McCormack Manor in her sights these days, and that was Zara’s nest, not hers.
Kahlil bent to give Caine her watch. The stalker reached up, but instead of grabbing the watch, he grabbed Kahlil’s gun hand and drove something into Kahlil’s leg that made him scream and release the weapon. Kahlil staggered back and holding one ankle, he hopped then fell to his ass.
“What did you…?” she exclaimed. Cain
e’s smug smile was back, and he held up two watches, hers and Kahlil’s. She gasped. “You stole his watch.”
“You saved my life. I let him get the gun so I could get the watch,” Caine said and turned Kahlil’s watch to show that the crown was missing. “You were right, there was a needle in there.”
A needle loaded with poison that was now coursing through Kahlil. Panic and desperation flitted over Kahlil, but there was nothing any of them could do. She had a cell phone and could call a hospital, but she would have to make a break for it first. Surging onto her feet, she was planning to make a run for it when Caine pulled himself up to sit against the door, with the gun pointed at her.
She stopped. Kahlil didn’t care about the gun now that he knew he was dying. “We’ve been here before,” she said, familiar with being at this end of Caine’s barrel. “You’re not going to shoot me.”
The pain must have numbed because Caine’s smile reached pleased. “You’re my hostage now.”
“But you want Cuckoo to get away, you don’t need me. If I go, Raven’s not coming back here. You can get yourself help, go to a hospital. There’s no reason for you to keep me—”
“I have to keep you. But you have a reason to stay,” Caine said.
At first, she was unsure what he meant, and then he threw Kahlil’s watch to the other side of the room away from them all and turned his attention to hers. If he played that recording and believed Zara’s version, then he might be willing to help her track down Cuckoo. She did have to stay.
As he rewound and began to listen, she observed anger and frustration and shame as they crossed his face. He had to already have suspicions about Cuckoo’s motives for maintaining her relationship with him to be this open about the chance he’d betray her. That Zara had warned him about the poison was another bonus.
Kahlil tried to get up, fumbled, then fell, rolling onto his stomach. He wretched, but used his elbows to drag himself forward and out the door. Caine didn’t even look up, but Kahlil didn’t matter to him. Caine had wanted his gun back, and now that he had it, Kahlil was no threat.
Cuckoo (Kindred Book 3) Page 26