Kiss Me Harder: Unbreakable Series

by Cole, Aja

  “I don’t know who the hell he is, but he…” Kane’s jaw tightens. “He looks a lot like Cameron, our team leader that was killed in the ambush.”

  “He’s pretty friendly with Vincent. They just walked off to a corner together, and they’re having a pretty intent talk.” Trevor’s voice comes in again.

  “Derek, were you able to clone his phone?”

  “Yes.” He pauses. “Heads up. Natalie took out her comms. She just left the ballroom.”

  “Fuck.” Kane curses lightly, taking off his headset. I stand, stopping him.

  “I got it. Let me go to her.”

  “Elias.” He rubs a hand down his face, sighing. “I don’t know how much she’s told you, bu—”

  “I know she’s in love with someone else.” I interrupt him impatiently, the words sour on my tongue. “That…I don’t care about that right now. It sounds like she’s hurting, and I just want to…just let me be there.”

  “I don’t know if you’re good for her yet, Elias, but what I do think is that she can’t keep living like this. You obviously care a shit-ton and that’s the only reason I haven’t kicked your ass for that tracking shit you pulled.” He crosses his arms, glancing back at the computer screen with Christopher’s pictures on them. “Cameron and Naja’s relationship was forged in adrenaline, loyalty…respect. I miss him every day, but I know that woman, and she has too much to give to let the potential for something more go because she thinks she isn’t allowed to love again.”

  Slowly, it dawns on me that when Naja said she was still in love with someone else, she meant him. Cameron. I don’t know if it’s better or worse that I’m fighting for space in her life with a dead man.

  It’s something to mull over at a later time. For now, I understand even more why it’s been important for her to figure out what happened. I’ve lost people, but I’ve never lost someone that I loved in that way. I can’t imagine what it was like, suddenly having someone in front of her who looked like him after so long.

  “I don’t know what’s going to happen with us, or if she’ll let me in. It hurt, hearing her say that she loves someone else, and even being caught in my feelings since then, I only know that I still want her. However she’ll have me.”

  We’ve never been on a date. We haven’t talked about our dreams and fears, how we imagine our futures. Hell, there’s a lot of shit I don’t know about her and vice versa.

  And yet, I’ve never been more certain about anyone in my life.

  “She just got back to the room.” Xander, who’s perfected the art of silence, interrupts us. “And I’ll bet you she’s about to lock that door over there, so you might want to finish this chat later.”

  “Good luck,” Hayes throws out, and I push open the door just as she pulls up short, obviously intending to do exactly as Xander predicted. I slip inside the room and close the door behind me, locking the deadbolt and watching her silently.

  “I’m claiming one of my days.”

  She doesn’t rail at me. She doesn’t tell me to get out, and her face doesn’t do so much as twitch. It’s scarier than anything I’ve ever seen from her, from anyone.

  She sits on the bed, pulling up her dress to undo the ties at her ankles, but I kneel to the floor, taking her ankle gently in my hands and releasing the ties. I remove her shoe and do the same to the other foot. Reaching around her, I pull down the zipper on her dress and peel her arms from the mesh sleeves. I take off the simple emeralds in her ears, and remove the knife strapped to her thigh. Pulling her to standing and growing increasingly worried about her silence, I get rid of the bra and panties she’s wearing, pressing a tender kiss to the middle of her back as I let the garments fall to the floor.

  “I want to shower. Alone, please.” Low, almost defeated, it kills me to hear her like this, to see it. And her adding a please doesn’t do anything but gut me.

  For a minute, I let her out of my sight. I stand in front of the closed bathroom door and hear the shower turn on, and I heed her request.

  Until I don’t.

  I open the door and see her standing under the spray, one hand braced against the wall, and wet strands of her hair beginning to curl up from the water. She doesn’t move a muscle when I close the door, or while I strip my clothes off and drop them in a heap on the floor.

  It’s only when I step into the shower and wrap my arms around her that she wilts, going completely boneless, her body shaking like she’s being battered by hurricane force winds. I sink down onto the wooden shower bench, and she curls into me.

  For her, I hold back my own emotion, because I need to be the strong one this time. I told her she can be vulnerable with me, that she doesn’t need walls when she’s in my arms, and I meant every damn word.

  Even though with every tortured cry that falls from her lips, every sob and pained wail that echoes against the shower walls, I shatter a little bit more.

  25

  Elias

  I close the adjoining door quietly behind me the next morning, seeing everyone sprawled in various places in the hotel suite.

  “Sleep?” Bali questions, worry on her face. All of them look tired.

  “Yeah.” I drop down into an empty armchair, shaking my head. “It was…a lot. She needs the rest. What happened after I left?”

  “Well, the girlfriend was a lightweight. I got her to a sitting room and she was very talkative, even after I plied her with water and hors d’oeuvres. She’s miserable. I recorded everything. Basically, he’s damn near blackmailing her into staying with him. She’s unable to have children now, but she froze her eggs a few years back. After she tried to break up with him the first time, he somehow got possession of them and threatens to get rid of them when she decides to stand up to him.”

  “Holy shit.” I lean forward. “I can’t believe you still left him standing after hearing that.”

  “She didn’t.” Roan smirks, yawning. His smooth Midwestern accent from last night is nowhere to be found. “Suddenly, in the middle of dinner and the speakers, Mr. Carmichael rushed off to the little man’s room.”

  “Sometimes you’ve just gotta go,” Bali says innocently. “For a while…explosively.”

  “I don’t even feel sorry for the man.” Hayes blinks sleep away from his eyes. “But we went through his phone last night; he had a few encrypted things on there, but nothing Roan couldn’t handle. Among the shit we got off there…were some deleted messages between him and Shadi.”

  I steel myself, alternatively dreading and needing to know what was said.

  “He recorded them having sex and threatened to send it to everyone. Her parents, her job, charities she’s involved with. She never said over text what it was that she had on him, but she broke up with him because of something she found out; that’s clear. His threats were to stop her from doing anything with it.”

  “That’s what I needed to talk about this morning actually.” Roan opens the laptop he has with him, typing quickly and then passing it to me. “A little digging on my side in the drive you gave us from your initial investigation, a little hacking, and I figured out that somehow, she came across him being paid by Nathan Lewis. Everyone knows that he’s into some bad shit. I think your girl thought he was being paid off for lawyer shit, consulting, maybe manipulating documents. What she didn’t know was that Nathan was paying Vincent for the girls he sold to him, the girls that he wanted to get rid of because of the shit he did. Th—”

  “I’ve heard enough,” I interrupt him, feeling like I could crawl out of my skin. All Shadi was guilty of was getting involved with the wrong guy, and it cost her way too damn much.

  Maybe if I’d just touched base, been there for her, she would’ve confided in me about what was going on. Obviously she didn’t feel like she could tell anyone, and that feels like I let her down.

  Why didn’t I do more? Why didn’t I see her more, pry into her love life, just be present? Xander said that nothing good comes from thinking like this, but how can I not? I’ve devot
ed my career to making sure I’m doing everything I can to protect other people, and I couldn’t for someone who was essential to me not getting wrapped up in the wrong crowd growing up.

  “Let’s talk about what we discovered about Christopher Brooks.” Hayes shifts the conversation. “I thought he looked familiar and I know you did too, but not for the reasons that they,” He inclines his head to the rest of the group, “did. He’s currently a partner at Goldman-Sachs, and rumors are circling that he’s about to be tapped for Secretary of Treasury since Monroe might be stepping down.”

  “He’s also their guy Cameron’s older brother.” Xander jumps in. “Which is news to everyone, apparently.”

  “We always thought Cameron was an only child. He always talked like he was, never mentioned a sibling,” Bali says.

  “So we did some more digging. When Cameron died, all his assets and trusts went to Christopher because their parents died too. Among the things that went to Christopher were the controlling stocks to their grandparents’ holding company—which has stock in almost every big corp you can think of. We’re talking billions of dollars.” Trevor shakes his head. “Obscene amounts of money.”

  A disturbing thought starts to rear its head the more I listen.

  “I really hope you’re not about to say what I think you are, because that would be some real evil shit.”

  “If you’re guessing that we’re almost one-hundred percent positive that Christopher hired that team to kill us just to get rid of his brother and get his shares—then yes, it’s as evil as it sounds.” Trevor grimaces.

  “But Cameron was with your team, right? It doesn’t sound like he’d have been interested in any of that. Why the hell wouldn’t Christopher just buy some of the shares from Cameron?”

  “He wouldn’t sell,” Bali says somberly, a hard glint in her eyes. “Cameron was very close to his grandparents, I know that much. Whatever he did or decided not to do, it was based on their wishes for the company, and they probably didn’t want Christopher anywhere near it if they didn’t leave him anything in the first place.”

  “This story gets more fucked up as it goes on. Just tell me there’s proof and we can lay all of this to rest, move on with our lives.” I rub my eyes because they’re starting to burn from all the sleep I didn’t get last night.

  “Well…we can get proof. It just might take a bit of subterfuge and potential breaking and entering to do it.,” Kane points out. “If you’re okay with that, then we can get going and fuck up both of these bastards’ lives the way they’ve fucked up ours.”

  “What do Vincent and Christopher have to do with each other?”

  Everyone in the room seems to share a glance but me.

  “Birds of a feather,” Derek, who I think nodded off at some point, adds. “Chatter says he’s got a temper on him behind closed doors, and he has a thing for maids.”

  “Joder,” Bali swears. “Don’t tell me I’m going to have to play that immigrant maid shit again.” She curses a bit more in Spanish, and I bite my lip to keep from laughing.

  “I’d take one for the team for you, but uh, he’s not into men,” Kane says unhelpfully.

  She rolls her eyes, grumbling, and it’s the first semi lighthearted moment since I stepped into the room today.

  I just want this to be over with. I want justice to be served, and I want…I want to finally have the time to get to know Naja in a more normal way.

  “Good morning.” Everyone’s eyes fly to the connecting door that we weren’t paying attention to, to see Naja standing in the doorway. There are subtle dark circles under her eyes, and the slight downturn of her mouth tells me she’s still riding her emotions from last night.

  Everyone returns her greeting, and to my surprise, she comes and sits beside me instead of in one of the other empty spaces where she could have.

  I don’t say anything, because I don’t want to make her uncomfortable or tease her about it. I silently open my hand on my thigh, though I don’t know if I’m really expecting her to take it.

  She does.

  And the spark of hope shimmering in the back of my mind gets a little bit brighter.

  “I’m sorry for running out last night. It was irresponsible of me.” She looks to Roan. “You never leave a partner like that.”

  “I think you’re forgiven under the circumstances, little soldier.” Roan inclines his head. “I suffered enough through that miserable dinner for the both of us.”

  “Did we get what we needed?”

  “We did,” Kane assures her. “We can brief you on it later, but honestly, I think everyone deserves some time off.” He points a thumb to Derek, whose head is nodding to his chest. “Case in point. If you want to stay, stay; we’ll start going over plans. But we don’t need everyone for that.”

  “There’s something I need to do today, so I’ll take the reprieve,” Naja answers. “And stop looking at me like that, I’m fine.”

  “I’ll believe it when you mean it.”

  “Cute,” she deadpans, and it’s the first hint of her normal smartass-ness. “I’ll check in later.”

  “Roger that.”

  After everyone else decides what they’re doing, she keeps a hold on my hand and tugs me up with her. I follow and wait until we’re in the other room to ask what’s on her agenda for the day.

  I don’t think talking about last night is on the table yet.

  “I want to show you something.” She ties her sneakers and grabs her wallet and phone off the nightstand.

  “You sure you don’t want to rest a little more?”

  “I’m sure. Now bring your ass, Elias. We don’t have all day.”

  26

  Naja

  I can tell that Elias wants to talk about last night, but I can’t indulge him in that. I still feel too raw, too flayed open. Interestingly enough, I never felt this way until I met him.

  I woke up this morning with my eyes crusted together and puffy, my sinuses congested, and missing Elias’s warmth because he held me all night. When I clocked what I was feeling as disappointment at not finding him next to me, I knew I couldn’t keep lying to myself or him.

  My wavering, my indecision, my hot one day and cold another…that has to be exhausting for him, because it’s exhausting for me. I’ve never been one of those women who’s gotten confused about stuff like this. I’ve always just been certain, or I thought I was.

  I don’t know what to do.

  The answer should be simple, right? Tell him I’ve seen the error in my ways and I’m ready to be all in with him the same way he’s willing to take a chance on me.

  But then I think about Cameron…and I don’t know how to let go. I don’t know if I can let go. I don’t know if it would be right…

  I just don’t know.

  Seeing that man’s face last night, so similar to the man that I loved…it shocked me down to my soul. That’s why I need to do what I’m doing today.

  And because of how open Elias was, because I can’t say the words back to him yet…it’s something I can give to him, too. Maybe it’ll pale in comparison to knowing that I’m prepared to let myself love again, but I hope he understands just how close to my heart this is.

  Some part of me needs him to.

  “You gonna keep me in suspense?” He turns the radio down, the tool I’d been using to avoid talking just yet.

  “Yep.” I’m grateful for the shades I’m wearing, because Elias reads me a little too well otherwise.

  “How much longer?”

  “Are you ten years old?”

  “Are we there yet?” he teases, and I turn the radio back on, swatting his hand away when he moves to mess with the dial again.

  When I eventually pull onto the dirt road that opens up into a long paved road, Elias peers out the window.

  “Who do you know in Virginia?”

  “I know a lot of people.” If he’s frustrated by my vague answers, he doesn’t say anything. I know it’s killing him to not completely hou
nd me, too.

  “You’re building up a lot of suspense right now; I hope you deliver.”

  I stop the SUV in front of the main house, taking in the familiar columns and red brick. It’s a large property, and a working farm. I used to spend all my free time riding the horses and exploring the trails and fields. Finishing up high school at home wasn’t too hard, and I had some pretty damned good teachers.

  “Come on; let me show you around.” I hop out and round the front of the car, walking ahead and waiting for Elias to catch up. I walk to the side of the house, brushing my fingers lightly on the fading red of the brick, and I feel Elias’s eyes on me.

  I always feel his eyes on me.

  “I don’t think I’ve seen you like this yet,” he says quietly, matching my stride easily.

  “Like what?”

  “A little normal.” He laughs a little. “There’s something going on most of the time we see each other. But this, you right now…you look like you’re just…at home.”

  “I am, kind of.” I stop in front of the horse stables, turning to him and taking off my shades. “I still think of the house I grew up in as home, but from sixteen to nineteen—this place was home for me. I haven’t made it back as much as I’d like, but I’m looking forward to it after this is all over with.”

  “You mean you’re telling me something about your life?” He puts a dramatic hand on his chest, drawing attention to what I know is taut muscle underneath that shirt.

  When he claimed one of his nights last night, I thought he would try to distract me with sex. Instead, he was just…there. I might’ve been riding my own wave of self-pity and pain, but it’s hard not to notice that the man doesn’t seem to mind just being there for me.

  “I figure you deserve that much, with you declaring your intentions and all that.”

  “Oh, are we actually going to have an adult conversation about that?” He falls into step beside me again as I walk towards the cedar gazebo where I used to take my homework on cool days.