“What’s it about?” I ask, in a raw voice, like I’ve been screaming.
She swallows then says faintly, “Foreplay.”
“That motherfucker!” I growl, hackles bristling, but before I can continue what threatens to be an epic rant, Connor thunders, “Can it, soldier!”
I whip my head around and glare at him.
“You going ballistic isn’t gonna help anything!” he snaps, meeting my blistering glare with a steely one of his own. “Now fucking can it. Your woman needs you steady, not bleeding rage outta your eyes.”
He’s right. He’s right and I know it, but that doesn’t make it any easier to swallow.
I jerk out of my chair and start to pace the floor, dragging my hands through my hair and muttering. I want to kill Moreno, I want to tear him limb from limb, but if I can’t control myself, I’ve got zero chance of doing either.
So I pace and breathe and force myself not to think of the word foreplay and how it’s now ruined for me forever.
Eyeing me with surprise at my forceful reaction, Tabby turns to Mariana. “I’m sure Ryan’s already told you he’s spoken with the FBI about getting all the charges dropped against you in exchange for Moreno.”
Mariana glances at me, hesitates, then nods.
“And he’s told us that you have approximately forty-eight hours to get the diamond to Moreno before the clock runs out on your friend Reynard.”
Mariana nods again.
“Well then, I think we need to give you the diamond and get you on a plane.”
I stop dead in my tracks and stare at Tabby in complete disbelief, my rage erupting all over again. “We’re not sending her back to him! Under no circumstances is she even gonna be in his general vicinity again!”
“The rest of the plan we talked about stays the same, Ryan,” Connor interjects, his voice tight. “The FBI will have whatever meeting place we designate surrounded. Snipers on rooftops, agents ready to swarm in, you know the drill. All she’ll have to do is wear the wire like you were going to, get him to admit a few damning things on tape—”
“Absolutely not,” I say flatly, blood pulsing in my ears. “Fuck no with a capital F. Would you send Tabby in if the situation was reversed?”
“You think it would be up to him?” Tabby asks archly.
Sounding thoughtful, Mariana answers. “Capo’s never searched me before any of our meetings. He trusts me. He’d never know if I was wearing a wire.”
He trusts me. That makes my stomach roll like my breakfast might make a reappearance.
“What would I have to get him to say?”
“No, Angel,” I say, gripping the back of her chair. When she looks up at me, I shake my head to underscore my words. “No. Never. Gonna. Happen.”
The look in her eyes tells me I’ve already lost this fight.
“Reynard bought me from Capo when I was ten years old,” she says, unflinchingly holding my gaze. “Did you know that? Did you find that out in your talks with the FBI?”
The only sound I hear is the pounding of my pulse. The whole room narrows to a small tunnel of black, focused on Mariana’s face. I sink into the chair next to hers.
“What?”
“With money he’d been skimming from Capo’s operation for years,” she continues, as if I haven’t said anything. “Very small amounts, nothing that would raise suspicions. My sister Nina and I were in a group of girls being trafficked to Europe from South America in a shipping container. There was no food, only jugs of water, and no receptacles for waste. Twenty-seven of us went into that shipping container. Twelve of us survived the trip to London. We were all children. The oldest, my sister Nina, was fourteen.”
From the corner of my eye, I glimpse Tabby recoil and cover her mouth with her hand, but I can’t look away from Mariana. I can’t move. I can’t even breathe.
“Normally, girls taken from the villages in my country are smuggled to Tenancingo, Mexico, which is a hub for human trafficking and forced prostitution, but we were sold abroad because we were pretty. Pretty girls get higher prices. And Capo pays the highest prices of them all. Especially for virgins.” She waits a beat, looks at her hands. “He gets a new container every month,” she whispers.
“Jesus Christ,” Connor breathes.
Mariana takes another moment, then shakes her head as if pulling herself from a bad dream. She speaks more briskly, her voice clear and level, but there’s an undercurrent of rage.
“To make a long story short, Reynard went to the docks thinking he was meeting a shipment of stolen paintings, but got the surprise of his life when the workers opened the doors. Somehow the manifests got mixed up, and there we were, a dozen starving, terrified little girls in collars and chains, huddled among corpses.
“Reynard only had enough cash on him to bribe the workers for one of us. They were Capo’s men, of course. The story became that only eleven girls had survived.”
I remember putting a hand around her neck in passion and her stiffly saying “I don’t like to be restrained,” and I have to swallow the bile rising acidly hot in the back of my throat.
“Later I found out that my sister and the others were brutally raped by their transporters before they ever got to Capo. But my sister escaped. She got her hands on one of the men’s guns and blew her brains out. She was lucky, in a way. I understand not one of the other girls made it to sixteen.”
I’m aware that my mouth is open. I’m aware that the silence in the room is one of the most awful sounds I’ve ever heard, filled with the horror of three adults who’ve seen plenty of terrible things in their lives. But I can’t move. I’m frozen. All I can do is stare at Mariana.
She sighs heavily, passing a hand over her face. It’s obvious the toll this tale is taking on her. I wonder if she’s ever spoken about it to anyone before.
“It was another ten years before Capo found out what Reynard had done. I don’t know how. All I know is that one day he came to the shop and said I had a choice to work off Reynard’s debt in one of two ways.”
Her mouth pinches in distaste at some memory. “So instead of becoming Capo’s whore, I became his puppet,” she says, more quietly. “His obedient minion, sent to fetch whatever bauble struck his fancy. I was already an accomplished thief by then. By seven years old I could sneak into any locked room, pinch a wallet or a watch from a man without him knowing it was gone. Reynard only refined my skills. So it made sense for Capo to recruit me, though he would’ve preferred I choose the other path. And all these years later, here we are.”
Mariana looks at Tabby and Connor, both of whom are obviously in the same shock I am. “I’ve wanted to kill him for as long as I can remember. So if there’s anything I can do to help take him down, I’ll do it.”
Tabby and Connor look at me.
“Angel,” I say roughly, hunting for her eyes. When I get them and she looks at me, I say, “Let me kill him for you.”
“If we don’t give the FBI Moreno, she doesn’t get a clean slate,” Connor says quickly.
I’m not really listening. It’s hard enough to concentrate on sitting still when every nerve is screaming for me to go cut off Moreno’s head and present it to Mariana on a silver platter.
I want to destroy him for what he’s done to her. I want to obliterate him. I want to rip him apart with my bare hands and feast on his bones. I’ve never felt such all-consuming fury.
Looking deeply into my eyes, Mariana smiles.
“That might be the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard, cowboy. Thank you. And please, please don’t take this as an insult, or a lack of faith in your abilities, but the possibility of you getting close enough to kill him is very small.”
When I start to protest, she presses a finger against my lips.
I love it when a woman does that. It silences me instantly.
“He travels everywhere with six assassins. He’s never in a public setting where he could be trapped, surrounded, or caught in a sniper’s crosshairs. No one outside of
the assassins—all Sicilians, unimpeachably loyal—knows where he lives.”
She looks at Tabby for confirmation. When Tabby nods regretfully, Mariana turns her attention back to me.
“He’s avoided many different attempts on his life, simply because he’s always expecting the next one. He lives prepared to die. When they invented the term criminal mastermind, they were talking about him. The smartest, most straightforward way to catch him is with bait he already knows and trusts.”
She drops her finger from my lips and speaks with quiet vehemence. “And in my mind, it wouldn’t count as avenging my sister’s death if I had nothing to do with Capo’s demise. I can’t be a spectator, letting everyone else do the work. To use your words from earlier, how would you feel if the situation was reversed?”
I want to answer that the situation is totally different because she’s mine and it’s my job to protect her in any way and every way, but the words are curdling like spoiled milk in my mouth.
Because the truth is that if someone did to one of my sisters what Vincent Moreno did to Mariana’s, to all those nameless girls who were someone’s sisters and daughters and best friends, there’d be no force in heaven or hell that could stop me from getting my revenge.
I swallow hard and think for a long moment, wrestling with my conscience, my ego, and every male instinct in my body.
It might be the hardest battle I’ve ever fought.
Finally, after an eternity of silent debate, the scales tip to one side and I take a deep breath.
“All right.”
I have to force the words past my teeth with an enormous effort of will.
“But if I even get a whiff that things are going sideways, I’m pulling you out and going in myself, guns blazing.” I look at Connor, letting him see the kamikaze warrior in my eyes. “And this plan better be air-fuckin’-tight or I’m not signin’ off on it. You hear me?”
“I hear you, brother,” he says quietly.
I stand, pace around the room a few times, breathing in another few deep breaths as I try to get myself under better control. Everyone watches me, silently waiting.
Eventually I trust myself to talk without blowing up.
“First things first. We need to decide on a place for the meet. It can’t be public, not only because Moreno wouldn’t agree to it, but also because we want to mitigate as much collateral damage as we can if things go south and the guns come out. But it also has to have enough cover for the FBI spooks to hide, and multiple ingress and egress points for them to come in and for us to get out. Somewhere neutral enough that it won’t arouse his suspicions, yet ideally close enough to an airport that he can be moved quickly before his men can regroup and form a counterassault to get him back.”
Mariana’s lips curve into a small, unnerving smile.
“How about an inferno?”
Twenty-Three
Mariana
For the next hour, we talk logistics. Or Connor, Tabby, and I do, while Ryan paces the floor like a caged tiger and tries not to break anything.
His protectiveness shouldn’t surprise me. He’s a soldier, after all. Generally they have no problem putting their lives on the line to protect what they hold dear. He’s trained to think of others first, to focus on the mission first, to focus on goals and outcomes rather than dwelling on feelings and the why.
But his reaction to my story does surprise me. Both his immediate and heartfelt offer to kill Capo for me, and his willingness to swallow his protective urges—and his pride—to allow me to take part in a plan he so obviously doesn’t want me to have anything to do with.
In other words, he’s respecting my wishes. Against his better judgment and what must be a considerable onslaught of testosterone pounding against the inside of his skull. It must be demanding that he lock me in a closet to keep me safe, but he’s going along with what I want. And by the looks of it, it’s killing him to do so.
If I wasn’t already so infatuated with him, that alone would do the trick.
I’ve never met an alpha male who could be described as liberated.
“So just to recap,” I say into a lull in the conversation, “I’ll arrange to meet Capo at the Palace. I’ll come in wearing a wire and an earpiece, which will receive and transmit from an FBI van set up close by. I’ll show Capo the diamond, making sure to mention how he ordered me to take it, like he did with the other jobs. I’ll ask him what my next job will be, make small talk about his business, lead him into discussing our history together or whatever specifics I can to get him to disclose about his criminal activities. If he’s got girls with him, as he usually does, that will be easy. How will I know when you’ve got enough?”
“You’ll hear the agent in charge give the signal to go over your earpiece,” Connor says. “And then all the lights will go out. You need to hit the ground and stay there until we’ve got Moreno in handcuffs.”
“She’ll be a sitting duck!” Ryan interjects hotly. “When the lights go out, he’ll know something’s hinky—and who’s gonna be right there for him to blame it on?”
“I doubt if he’d suspect me, but if he does, I can defend myself. Last time I met with Capo, I walked in wearing half a dozen knives. The main problem is his men. They’re never more than a few feet away from him, and they’re heavily armed.”
“Can you get him alone somehow?” asks Tabby.
Ryan stops pacing, stiffens, and curls his hands to fists.
Glimpsing his murderous expression and nuclear body language, Tabby says, “Whoa. You just went full transformer-mutant mode, dude. Chill for a second. We’re only parsing the possibilities.”
Livid, he answers with a tight jaw. “Parse other possibilities.”
“Sweetie,” I say softly.
Ryan cuts his freezing gaze to me.
Ignoring the fact that there are two other people in the room, I say, “You’re the most amazing man I’ve ever met.”
He blinks, and his iceberg eyes go all melty.
“Thank you for being so protective. I know this is very hard for you.”
His hands slowly unclench. He takes a big breath.
“And I know you’d rather have this go any other way than the way it’s going, and that it’s killing you to think I’ll be in danger.”
He swallows, folds his arms over his chest, and glares at the floor. “Killing is too soft a word,” he says gruffly.
“I know. Look at me.”
He lifts his eyes, but not his head, so he’s standing there glowering at me from under lowered brows.
God, he’s adorable.
“When this is over, we’re going to have that dinner at L’Ami Louis in Paris and gorge ourselves on champagne and oysters and confit canard while we hold hands and watch the sun go down over the Seine. Then we’ll discuss how much of the year we want to live in Morocco versus Manhattan. Then we’ll go back to our hotel and make love. For days. Weeks, maybe. We’ll see how it goes, depending on how many oysters you eat. Deal?”
He toes the floor with his boot and pretends to think about it. He also pretends to scowl to cover the smile that threatens to consume his face. Eventually, he says grudgingly, “Fine. But only because you called me sweetie.”
The astonishment on Connor’s face is epic. Tabby, meanwhile, has little hearts for eyes.
“You guys are too cute!” she exclaims.
“I am not cute,” grumbles Ryan. “Don’t push it.”
He takes my face in his hand and gives me an angry kiss, then goes back to pacing.
I’m considering it a success.
Tabby snaps back into planning mode as if there was no interruption. “Are you sure we have to show Moreno the diamond? What if he hands it off to someone before Mariana gets the information we need? I know Karpov won’t be happy if he doesn’t get that rock back.”
I slowly swivel in my chair and look at Ryan. “So that’s where you got it.”
Ryan nods. “Yeah. Noticed it on display in his mansion when we brought h
is daughter back to St. Petersburg from her kidnappers. His father was the one who originally coordinated the theft from the Smithsonian back in the seventies. Now it’s like a family heirloom. I told him it might lift the curse if he lent it out for a good deed.”
“Curse?” Connor says, intrigued. “What curse?”
Tabby answers as if she wrote the leading book on the history of the stone.
“The one put on it by the priests who discovered it was missing from their Hindu temple in India in the seventeenth century. Jean Baptiste-Tauvernier, its first recorded owner and the man who stole it from the temple, came down with a raging fever soon after. His body was later devoured by wolves. King Louis XIV bought the stone in 1673 from Tauvernier, then died—painfully—of gangrene. Louis XVI inherited it, and he Marie Antoinette lost their heads during the French revolution. It was stolen from Versailles during the revolution and lost for a while, but surfaced many years later when a Dutch jeweler, Wilhelm Fals, recut it and sold it off in two parts. Fals’s son murdered him…and then killed himself.
“There was a Greek merchant who later owned the diamond and then killed himself, his wife, and their child by driving off a cliff. The heiress who owned the Washington Post had the diamond for a while, and everyone in her family died in tragic circumstances—including her—broke and owing huge debts. That heiress’s kids sold the diamond to Harry Winston, who donated it to the Smithsonian by mailing it—and the mailman who delivered it had his leg crushed in an accident right after. And his house burned down. And finally, Sergei Karpov, the Russian oligarch who arranged for the stone to be stolen from the Smithsonian, was poisoned by a business rival. His wife died in a mental hospital. His son and daughter-in-law suffered four stillbirths before finally giving birth to a healthy girl…who wound up getting kidnapped by a brutal gang of thugs.”
“And saved by me,” Ryan says, tidily summing up the tale.
Connor corrects him drily. “Us.”
“Oh. Yeah. That’s what I meant. Us.” He shrugs.
Wicked Intentions: The Wicked Games Series, Book 3 Page 20