The ring sat like a rock in my pocket. All I had to do was turn to her and drop to one knee, but fucking Payne and Jones had planted the doubt that would eventually be my downfall.
I didn’t propose to her.
And two weeks later I was arrested. That night was the beginning of the end.
Chapter Nineteen
Caroline
Present Day
After a morning of discussing exactly what Sayer had given Mason, devising a plan and pouring over blueprints, I found myself in front of the dated building that housed FBI Headquarters. Juliet clutched my hand and asked me for the hundredth time what we were doing today.
Playing Russian roulette, I wanted to tell her. But I didn’t. I decided it was probably best to keep my fatalistic thoughts to myself.
Tugging on her hand, I led her into the building and through the metal detectors. I told the front desk guard that I was here to see Mason Payne. He made a series of calls until he finally reached the right agent. After thirty seconds of talking, the desk agent hung up the phone and handed over visitor badges to us. I signed in under my alias.
The guard was shaped like a box and had the kind of biceps that told you he didn’t have a social life. He only lifted weights. That was all he did. He went to work, and he deadlifted six thousand pounds. He pointed to a bank of elevators. “He’ll meet you there.”
Juliet played with her badge while we waited for Mason to appear. Nerves bubbled inside me like boiling acid. I couldn’t shake the anxiety that had wrapped so completely around every inch of me.
Most people naturally hated this sensation. They hated the way their hands would turn to ice and their heart would beat three times its normal speed. They hated feeling nervous so badly that they avoided the miserable sensation as often as possible.
Public speaking, heights, spiders… whatever it was that brought out their worst fears, people tended to do whatever it took to skip those miserable feelings.
I wasn’t one of them. I relished the feelings, the intense adrenaline running full blast inside my body. It made me feel alive, awake, totally and completely the person I was supposed to be.
I’d become a master at honing all the excess emotions into tools at my disposal. I needed the adrenaline to amp my performance. I needed the anxiety to make me sharp, attentive. I needed the fear to remind me of the consequences if I messed up.
The fear was probably the most important part. If I forgot the fear, then I would forget why I couldn’t get caught.
Fear reminded me every single second of how important it was to succeed.
The brassy elevator doors opened and Mason Payne kept them from closing with one long outstretched arm. “I had my doubts that you would show up.”
Nudging Juliet into the elevator, I avoided his eyes. “Me too.”
“Where’s Augustus?”
“He’s coming in a little bit.”
Mason’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t believe me.
And so the game began. If Mason was a smarter man, he would realize that Gus and I coming in separately was nothing more than classic misdirection. Mason was hyper-focused on what he considered a lie. What he should have been paying attention to was what would happen after Gus arrived.
Our ride upstairs was quiet, packed with tension and hatred for each other. Neither of us felt the social cues to speak nor were we in any kind of hurry to have a conversation that wouldn’t be admissible in court because it wasn’t recorded.
Still, I came here willingly and would hopefully leave of my own free will. This was a show of good faith that Mason had kept his promise to Sayer. My freedom had indeed been bought and paid for.
And for all the other voices in my head that refused to listen, I had Juliet.
She was my insurance.
The elevator stopped at Mason’s floor and he again held the door back with his arm until Juliet and I had stepped off. We waited for him to lead us through a maze of cubicles and glass-walled offices. The walk to the interrogation room provided an interesting but brief social study on how an agency like this operated.
I couldn’t help but be fascinated by the agents sitting behind cluttered desks and stacks of paperwork. The smell of burnt coffee and freshly printed copy paper filled the air in a space I instinctively knew was never completely quiet, no matter what time of day or night.
I absorbed what I could in the time it took to walk the length of the office. Conference room. Break room. Storage room.
“Which one’s yours?” I asked nonchalantly.
“The big one,” he said by way of explanation.
He thought he was clever. He had no idea.
There were three big offices on this floor. In three different corners. He might not have given me the exact location, but he’d narrowed down my search significantly.
Finally, we turned down an isolated hallway that led to the opposite end of the large space. There were doors on either side and none of them had windows. One side of the hallway had numbers next to the doorframes. The other side had nameplates and no numbers— evidence lockers.
He nodded his head toward the room. “In here.”
With my hand on Juliet’s back, I ushered her into the room and we sat down at a metal table with lock hooks in the middle for handcuffs. The rest of the room was bare, save for the requisite double-sided mirror.
Cue the theme music, because clearly this meeting was going to be a fantastic episode of Law and Order.
Mason sat down on the other side of the table from me, smiling slightly as if to help me feel at ease inside such a scary place.
I met his gaze and asked, “Do you remember the first time you brought me to a room like this?”
He flinched.
“I was fifteen.”
Something like regret flashed in his eyes, but I knew it was only for show. Not for the first time in my life, I admitted that Mason and I had the same kind of talents. Liars, both of us. We manipulated and conned and put on a show to get what we wanted. We just lived on opposite sides of the law.
His was a tolerated style of thieving. And he never went after anything as simple as material possessions.
Mason wanted something bigger, harder to acquire. He hunted futures and freedom.
“Should we begin?” he asked casually, as if I had a choice. He smiled at my daughter in a way I knew he thought was pleasant. I saw a wolf. Or a bloodthirsty shark. “Hi, Juliet. My name is Mason.”
She looked at him without saying anything. I suppressed a smile.
He held out his hand and she glanced at me for permission. “No?” he asked when she made no move to take it. He made a high five, she still didn’t give him anything. Without losing any confidence, he closed his hand into a fist. “Fist bump? Let’s see how you bump it. Come on now, don’t leave a guy hanging.”
She giggled, he’d broken through. She pushed her tiny fist against Mason’s and it was all I could do not to dive between them and break it up. He pulled his hand back with an explosion sound. Juliet laughed harder.
Leave it to Mason Payne to charm my daughter.
He grinned at her. “This is a boring room, isn’t it, Juliet?”
She looked around and nodded. “Why is it so dark?”
“I guess it is kind of dim,” he agreed. “Well, I’ll tell you what. If you answer some of my questions, I’ll have one of my friends take you to where we keep the snacks. Would that be okay?”
She nibbled her bottom lip and rocked in her chair. “I have to ask my mommy.”
Smiling down at her, I nodded. “It’s okay with me. You just need to be honest with Mason, okay? Can you answer his questions?”
“Yes,” she said immediately, like it was the silliest question she’d ever heard. Obviously, there wasn’t much she wouldn’t do for snacks. She probably got that from Sayer.
Just kidding. She got it from me.
When Mason had her attention again, he asked. “Did someone take you away from your mommy the other day, Juliet? When you were at
school?”
“A bad man,” she told him.
Mason seemed genuinely upset for her. “He was a very bad man. Did he hurt you when you were with him?”
She shook her head both ways, so it wasn’t clear what she meant. I gripped the bottom of my metal chair until it cut into my palms. I would kill him if he touched her. Atticus the asshole.
“Tell him, sweetheart. He’s going to help us so that it never happens again.”
“He pushed me,” she said quietly. “And he wouldn’t let me go to the bathroom when I wanted to. He said I had to be quiet all the time.”
I felt violently ill, immediately. I couldn’t suck in enough air or keep my body from shaking. Mason noticed and poured me a glass of room temperature water. Gripping the Styrofoam cup in an effort to ground myself, I sipped it carefully.
“Why did he let you go back to your mommy?” Mason asked, ignoring my maternal breakdown.
She shrugged, lifting her shoulders up to her ears. “I don’t know. We drove in a car and then he made me go with Max’s daddy.”
Mason turned to me. It was my turn to shrug. “A friend from Frisco. Max goes to preschool with Juliet. His dad Josh Cage is ex-military and asked if he could help us with Juliet. We weren’t in a place to turn down help.”
His eyes narrowed, but he turned back to Juliet. “What did the man that took you look like?”
Juliet tilted her head, thinking about the question. “He was big. Bigger than my daddy. And he was always mad.”
“Did you ever hear his name?”
“It was a weird name,” she said. Her mouth opened and closed uncertainly. Finally she settled on, “Ambulance.” In five-year-old speak that meant Atticus.
Mason wrote something down on his clipboard. “Was he the only person you saw when you were away from your mommy?”
She shook her head. “There were other people. Mean people.”
“Was everyone mean?”
She shook her head again. “No, there was one nice man.”
“What was his name?”
“Grandpa,” Juliet said confidently.
We both stared at her. I was the first one to find my voice. “Was that his name, honey? Or is that what he told you to call him?”
She shrugged helplessly. She didn’t know.
I did though. I resisted the urge to bang my head against the table.
“Okay, Juliet, you’ve done such a good job, I’m going to have Mr. Jones give you two snacks and let you pick out a show on the TV in the breakroom. Does that sound good?”
She looked to me again. “It’s okay, baby. I’m going to stay here and answer a few grown-up questions, yeah? Mr. Jones will keep you safe in another room.”
The promise of snacks and TV had lost their appeal. “I want to stay with you!”
I hated the panic in her voice, the desperate way she clung to me. I pulled her into a hug and pressed a kiss to the top of her head. “I want to stay with you too. And I will. I need to talk to Mason for a few minutes first. Then I’ll come get you and we’ll go have lunch at a brand-new restaurant.”
“Really?”
I kissed the top of her head again. “Really. I promise.”
“Is Daddy going to come too?”
Her question made me uncomfortable in front of Mason. He knew too much about us, too much about our past. Maybe Mason wasn’t going after me, at least not yet, but it still felt like he was going to do whatever he could to put Sayer and me away.
We were still on the wrong side of the law. We would always be on the wrong side of the law.
Besides, Sayer and I were only just reunited. I didn’t know what we were doing. Were we dating again? Were we serious again? Were we just having the most amazing sex and parenting our daughter at the same time? For all of four days?
Oh my God, this was the definition of complicated.
My heart knew the answer, knew that whatever we were was forever. But my brain hadn’t found a word to define us yet and so I internally flailed and panicked and prayed Sayer had a better idea of what we were doing.
Making my answer just as convoluted as the question, I said, “Uh, maybe. I didn’t invite him. But I could if you want him to be there.”
Her eyebrow raised, and she gave me an annoyed look. “Of course I do.” She had so much attitude for such a little person. She’d even plop her hand on her hip when she got really into it. She reminded me of Frankie like that.
I couldn’t help but smile. “Okay then. I’ll text him and see if he can meet us.”
The attitude dissipated, and a bright, innocent smile appeared in its place. “Thank you, Mommy! Thank you so much!”
“All right, but let Mr. Jones get you some snacks now, okay?”
Her eyes flashed with uncertainty, but she stood up bravely. Jones appeared in the doorway with a younger female agent. She wasn’t young. Just younger than him, since Jones had been born in the age of the dinosaurs.
Juliet left with them, throwing me a fearful look over her shoulder and it was enough to toss the entire game plan out the window so I could get to her quicker. God, it actually hurt to be separated from her.
Especially in this building.
“I’ll get her back, won’t I?” I asked Mason, waiting for the guillotine to drop.
“Are you expecting me to kidnap her too? That seems unnecessarily traumatizing.”
I expected him to make my life as difficult as possible. That had always been his MO. “Obviously I’m not expecting you to kidnap her. But I wouldn’t put it past you to call social services.”
He regarded me carefully. “Why would I call them? Are you an unfit mother?”
My jaw clenched so hard I thought I was going to break a tooth. Apparently he was incapable of giving me a straight answer. “Don’t mess with me, Mason. I don’t have the patience for that right now. Start the interview.”
He didn’t back down. His expression somehow got harder, fiercer—more annoying than ever. “Caro, I know this is hard for you to believe, but I’m here to help you. And more than that, I’m here to help your daughter. Whatever happened in our past, my fight is not with you. At least not anymore. If you could remember that, we could work together to take the bratva down. You could do something on the right side of the law for once.” His voice dropped, taking on a more serious tone. “You could keep your daughter safe forever.”
“That’s exactly why I can’t work with you. You think putting Atticus in prison is going to keep us safe. You think the law is the answer. The Volkov are sitting in prison right now and I have never been more threatened.”
He flinched, exposing his guilt. And possibly frustration and anger by the red twin flags rising on his cheeks. “Do not put that on me, Valero. You can’t blame the law for sinful men. The law exists to keep people safe from men like them. The problem is that there are only so many of us and a hell of a lot more of you.”
Anger simmered in my blood, making my skin turn overly hot. “Don’t lump me in with them. Don’t you dare put me in the same category as the men that took my daughter. I never wanted this life. And maybe that’s hard for someone as lily white as you to understand, but it’s true. I was a prisoner. They sealed my fate when I was a child. From day one, I knew they would come after me if I ever left, I knew they would punish me, make me suffer. And here we are.”
His expression softened, his shoulders slumped, and he let out a deep sigh. “I know. Trust me, I get it.” He held my gaze, his eyes softening again, showing me some sympathetic side of him that could have been sincere. It also could have just as easily been a trap. “That’s why I picked you, kiddo. That’s why I gave you every opportunity I could to get out.” His head tilted toward the door. “Thank God for ordained surprises, yeah?”
He meant Juliet. I bit my lip and stifled tears that wanted to leak from my eyes. Leave it up to Mason Payne to piss me the hell off and then tug at my heartstrings. Bastard.
I scratched my nose and avoided looking directly at
him. “Let’s get to the point, yeah? What are you going to do about Atticus Usenko?”
He sat back in his chair and stretched his long legs in front of him. He rested his hands casually in his lap and stared at the file folder on the table. He appeared relaxed, thoughtful, totally calm. Only I knew him better.
The straight line of his mouth twitched once, furious and frustrated. His eyes were laser beams, boring holes in the table. And the color of his face had turned a speckled red. “I can’t touch him,” he said in a low voice.
I shook my head and leaned forward, convinced I hadn’t heard him correctly. “I’m sorry, what?”
“He’s turned CI.”
Those words didn’t make sense. “I don’t understand.”
“Atticus is a snitch, Caro. A criminal informant. A cooperating witness.”
My heart punched at my chest, kicking and scratching and desperately trying to make sense of this news. “For who?”
“He has invaluable information on the Cuban drug highway that runs from Florida to New York.”
“He’s playing you,” I growled. This was unbelievable. Too insane to believe. I breathed in slowly, struggling to keep my calm. “Mason, he kidnapped my daughter. He’s still working with the Volkov. His association with the Cubans, however big or small, is fake.”
His hands squeezed together, turning his knuckles white. “I’ve vetted him myself. His information has checked out.”
“It’s a con. You have to know you’re being played.”
His expression became apologetic, furious still, but sad at the same time. “There is nothing I can do about him. He’s not my CI. I’ve been ordered to leave him alone.”
“Leave it up to the FBI to work with snakes and expect not to get bitten.”
His lips twitched, but he worked hard to hide his amusement. “That’s the thing about criminal informants… they’re all criminals.”
I let out a sigh of frustration. “What are my options?”
He leaned forward. “Let me help you. You and I both know Atticus is not going to stop harassing you. Leave the Volkov alone and let me put you guys somewhere safe.”
I shook my head. “You can’t. Even after all this time, even after you have Atticus in your own house, you still don’t get it.”