I wait for her in another room down the hall from the first. In almost two hours of pacing, I manage to convince myself that I’ll let her go when she asks me to.
Because she will ask me to. That’s a given. There’s no way in hell she can ever trust me again, not after this.
I can’t let myself think about what she might have been through in the past few days. Deprived of food and water, thrown into a cold, black, windowless cell, threatened with who knows what… I can’t think about how she must’ve suffered.
How she must hate me.
I just have to focus on getting her off this bloody ship and safely onto dry land.
A door finally opens. I spin around and see her standing in the open doorway. Our eyes lock. My heart stops dead in my chest.
She’s barefoot. Wearing jeans and a red sweater, both wrinkled and stained. Her hair is a mess of snarls. Her face is pale and drawn.
Her gaze is haunted. She looks like she might have recently been crying.
My heart starts up again, beating painfully hard. I cross the room in a few long strides and swing her up into my arms. Without a word, she buries her face in my neck, shivering.
We take an elevator up to the flight deck. Neither of us speaks. I walk down a short passageway, then we’re out in the cold ocean air.
I cross the flight deck to where the bird awaits. I help her in, buckle the safety harness around her, and put the headphones over her ears.
She closes her eyes and tilts her face toward the sun.
The flight back to the house seems endless. Mile after mile of ocean stretches beneath us before the shoreline finally comes into view. I land on the helipad and barely take the time to shut everything down before I’ve got her in my arms again.
I pass a shell-shocked-looking Kieran and Spider on my way into the house.
Kieran says in Gaelic, “How is the wee lass?”
“Alive,” I answer curtly.
I leave them behind, wondering. They won’t ask more, and I won’t offer any other information. They think it was one of our enemies who rose from the sea to take her. They think I made a deal to get her back.
They can never find out otherwise.
Oh, what tangled webs we weave.
In the master bedroom, I ease Sloane onto the bed. She lies there looking up at me with those haunted eyes.
Why isn’t she talking? Why won’t she say anything? How the fuck did I let it come to this?
I sit on the edge of the bed beside her and carefully take her cold hand. “Are you hurt?”
She’s silent for so long it scares me.
“They tried to make me talk about you.”
I’ve never heard her sound like this. Weak. Hollow. Defeated. “I know,” I say, stroking a strand of hair off her forehead. “I’m so sorry. There’s a lot I need to explain.”
I have no idea where to start, though. Maybe it would help if I knew what they told her in the debrief. Or maybe I should stop worrying about myself for a change.
“Do you want to talk about this now? Do you need food? Should I let you rest?”
“I’m not hungry. I am tired, though. And I think it might be best if we didn’t talk about it at all.”
I say vehemently, “If they hurt you, I’ll kill every one of them.”
She closes her eyes and inhales slowly. Then she turns her head to the windows and gently pulls her hand from mine.
It feels like a kick to the chest.
“Sloane. Baby. Please talk to me.”
She moistens her cracked lips. Sounding a thousand years old, she says, “I can’t right now. I’m…I don’t know what I am. Mainly tired. I really need to sleep.”
All the breath in my lungs leaves in a rush. “Bloody hell. I’m so sorry. I had no idea they’d do this. I—”
“Stop.”
I clench my jaw and sit stiffly, waiting. It’s one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done.
After a fraught pause, she opens her eyes and looks at the ceiling. She says flatly, “I’ve had some quality thinking time over the past few days.”
The tone of her voice makes my stomach roll over.
She’s ending it.
“Sloane—”
“Just let me get it out.”
“I can explain everything—”
“There’s nothing to explain. If we stay together, I’ll always be a target for stuff like this. First, it was MS-13. Now, it’s the government. Someone will always be trying to get to me because of you.”
“Hold on. Just tell me what they told you.”
Her voice rises. “They threatened my dad and my siblings. And Nat, Declan. They threatened Nat. I can’t risk their safety. And I won’t go through something like that again.”
She stops to take a breath. “So I’m going to take you up on that promise you made that you’d let me leave if I asked you to.”
The floor drops out from under me. My entire body goes cold. When I speak, my voice is rough with pain. “Just like that?”
“It’s like that Sun Tzu quote you told me when you found me watching TV after you were gone for three days. ‘The wise warrior avoids the battle.’ I’m gonna sit this whole battle out.”
She turns her head and looks me square in the eye. Looks at me with piercing intensity.
My heart skips a beat. The cold in my body thaws, then turns boiling.
That wasn’t the quote I told her. I know it. She knows it, too.
She’s trying to tell me something.
But I need more information to understand what it is. I need to ask her more questions.
“Where will you go?”
“To see Nat first. After that, I’ll go back home to Tahoe.” A flicker of laughter shines in her eyes, but her face remains impassive. “It’s time for me to settle down with a real boyfriend, not one of you mafia types. Someone a little more boring.”
Boyfriend? Boring? She hates both those words. What the bloody hell is going on?
She sees my confusion. Moving casually, she encircles her right wrist with the thumb and index fingers of her left hand. The other three fingers she spreads out like a fan.
I recognize the sign instantly. It’s a tactical signal members of the military use to communicate silently with each other.
She’s making the sign for enemy.
When my gaze flashes up to meet hers, she tugs on her left earlobe.
I put it together: an enemy is listening.
Then I remember Grayson telling me that the deputy director was impressed with her, and it all clicks.
That bloody cunt tried to make my woman turn on me.
But he doesn’t know my lion like I do. He doesn’t know how much she hates to be told what to do. How strong or fearless she is. How impossible it is to make her bend to your will.
She only bends willingly. Even then, she’s still holding a sword.
Adrenaline floods my veins. My clever, clever girl. I want to laugh out loud, but that urge is cancelled by the rage I feel when I think of what I’m going to do to that son of a bitch.
Only, I have to be careful. I have to assume he’s got ears everywhere. Maybe eyes, too. Kieran did a full security sweep before we moved in, but I don’t know if he’s been doing them every day, as he should. Over the past few days, I haven’t exactly been on top of my game.
The only thing I could think of was Sloane.
Playing along, I say solemnly, “If that’s what you really want.”
When she exhales a slow, relieved breath, I know she can tell I understood her. She says, “It is.”
“All right. I’ll make the arrangements.”
I stand, lean down and kiss her cheek, then whisper gruffly into her ear, “I adore you.”
I leave the room without looking back. I go into my office, lock the door, and remove a small radiofrequency detector from a bottom drawer in my desk. I take my time sweeping the room for bugs. When I’m satisfied the space is clear, I take my cell phone from my pocket and dial a number I’ve memorized.
When the line is answered, I say, “Hello, Kazimir. This is Declan. I have a proposition for you.”
