Wicked Games: The Complete Wicked Games Series Box Set

by J. T. Geissinger

  Her mouth pinches in distaste at some memory. More quietly, she says, “So instead of becoming Capo’s whore, I became his puppet. 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. She says, “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.”

  Connor says quickly, “If we don’t give the FBI Moreno, she doesn’t get a clean slate.”

  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 adds 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?”

  He says quietly, “I hear you, brother.”

  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?”

  23

  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 and 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,” says Connor. “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.

  I say, “Thank you for being so protective. I kno
w 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. He says gruffly, “Killing is too soft a word.”

  “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 his 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,” says Ryan, tidily summing up the tale.

  Connor corrects him drily. “Us.”

  “Oh. Yeah. That’s what I meant. Us.” He shrugs.

  Connor shakes his head and sighs.

  “Capo won’t hand off the diamond to anyone,” I say. “He will be curious about why I want to meet at the Palace to give it to him instead of him picking it up from Reynard’s like he usually does and meeting him there afterward, so I’ll have to come up with something plausible.”

  I look at Tabby and Connor for ideas. Tabby answers first.

  “Because you’re worried Reynard’s place is bugged. Yes, this is good,” she says, warming to the idea as the rest of us stare at her like she’s been drinking. “It will appeal to his paranoia, make you look trustworthy, and deflect suspicion, all at once. You can say you saw a man who looked strange hanging around the utility box down the street, heard an odd click on the phone when you last spoke, whatever. It’s a classic hide-in-plain-sight diversion technique. Look at this suspicious thing over here so you don’t notice this even more suspicious thing happening right under your nose.”

  I say, “If I tell him that before the meet, he’ll just send his guys over and sweep the shop for bugs.”

  “So tell him you can’t discuss over the phone why you need to change the meet spot. Make it sound like you think your call is being monitored. Then use some kind of code only he would know to suggest the Palace.”

  “That won’t work,” Ryan interrupts. “He’ll suggest a meeting place of his own, somewhere he can control, somewhere probably on his turf.”

  My brain turning, I say slowly, “Unless I give him a more compelling reason to meet me at the Palace. A reason he won’t be able to resist.”

  Ryan and I lock eyes. When he reads what I’m thinking, he says loudly, “No.”

  “I’d be able to get him away from his men that way, too.”

  Another no, even louder, punctuated by an index finger pointing at my face and a thundered, “DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT!”

  Connor says, “I feel like I’m missing something.”

  Tabby responds, “Mariana wants to use herself as bait.”

  “She’s already doing that.”

  “No, honey.” She looks at him meaningfully. “Bait bait. The kind a sadist with a yen for virgins can’t resist.”

  “Ah. Gotcha.” Drumming his fingers on the desk, he glances at Ryan, at me, then back at Ryan. To me, he says, “I can’t sign off on that unless your man does.”

  “He doesn’t!” hollers Ryan, rattling the framed picture of the American flag on the wall.

  Connor leans back in his chair and laces his hands together over his flat stomach. “Any other ideas?” he asks me mildly. “’Cause that one’s not gonna fly.”

  I hold Ryan’s supercharged gaze for a moment. Finally, I say, “I’ll think of something. Let’s talk about the rest of the plan. What happens after the FBI has Capo in custody? Won’t they want to keep the diamond and return it to the Smithsonian? How are you going to explain that?”

  Ryan says, “The FBI doesn’t give two shits about the diamond. They want Moreno.”

  Tabby asks, “Why do you have to bring the real thing to the meet? Wouldn’t a fake suffice if he’s not even going to keep it?”

  I shake my head. “He can spot a fake a mile away. Gemology is one of his passions. He’ll have a jeweler’s loupe to magnify it, but there are a dozen easy ways to test a phony diamond without bringing it to a lab. He’ll know as soon as I set it in his hands.”

  “We need to put her in body armor,” says Ryan abruptly. “She’s gonna be in a room with six armed assassins, then the FBI’s gonna blow down the doors—”

  “Like a bulletproof vest wouldn’t be obvious,” says Connor, dismissing the idea with a shake of his head.

  “I don’t need body armor. I’ll have my seamstress make me a dress.”

  When everyone looks at me blankly, I smile. “She’s not a regular seamstress.”

  Tabby asks, “Nanotechnology?”

  I take a moment to marvel at how she seems to know something about everything, then say, “Yes, exactly.”

  Ryan asks
, “Like the Kevlar suits the troops used in Iraq?”

  I nod. “Only the fabric is much thinner, and far more stylish. It will look like just a regular dress, not impenetrable body armor.”

  “Cool.”

  I can’t help but smile at Ryan’s and Connor’s identical expressions of awe. “Just one of the perks of being an international criminal, guys.”

  Something happens to Ryan’s face. His expression changes, but I can’t tell what he’s thinking until he says, “You gonna miss that? Your old life? Your old friends?”

  “I don’t have any friends, or what you could call an actual life.” I answer more sharply than I intend because I’m still rattled by all the terrible memories that talking about Nina and Capo have evoked.

  But Ryan softens all my sharp edges when he says, “You have friends, Angel. They’re right here in this room.”

  My throat tightens. The hot prick of tears threatens at the back of my eyes.

  Connor drawls, “And as for a life, it sounds like you and lover boy here got all sorts of plans for that already. Paris, Morocco, oysters…” His grin is huge. “He’s not ever gonna want to come back to work.”

  “That’s right,” says Ryan, staring hard at me. “Gonna need some paid sick leave, ’cause I’ll be too chapped and dehydrated to work for a few months.”

  Tabby wrinkles her nose. “Yuck. Just got a gnarly visual of your chapped junk. Thanks for that.”

  “We done for now?” says Ryan to Connor, but he’s still looking at me.

  “Yeah, go on. I’ll call the agency and get it together. Mariana, what’s the address of this joint you call the Palace?”

  I give it to him.

  “They’re gonna need to meet with all of us before the op. Paperwork, briefing, the whole enchilada. Seeing as how we don’t have much time until you need to be in London, it’ll be soon. Why don’t you both go home and get some rest.” Connor chuckles as Ryan and I continue to stare at each other. “Or whatever.”