His lips curve. “No. But if it does, and it won’t, you could always just choke me to death, like you promised before.”
I give him a deadpan stare and then, to my surprise, I laugh. “Yes, I could. And I would.”
“I have no doubt that that’s a good thing. You could, but you won’t unless you have to, as proven by the fact that you could have killed every one of those consortium members after your parents’ death.”
“I thought about it. I’ve thought about it often, but each of them has connections outside that group, and I have no idea how many of them know about me. So instead, I gathered resources and prepared for a conclusion, and I planned to follow with revenge. At this point, I just want the conclusion.”
“Which is what?”
“If I knew that, we’d already have one.”
“I might have some ideas on that.”
“You don’t even know what I have. And what were you thinking, making a special appearance at an event you knew a consortium member would be at?”
“We were going to set a trap. Given all that’s happened, they’ll be ready for us now, so we’ll have to think of something else. And as of about fifteen minutes ago, I do know exactly what you have.”
Stunned, I turn to look at him. “How?”
“Dr. Murphy managed to install a bug in Sheridan’s office during her last visit. Derek, who I trust implicitly, is monitoring the feed while Tellar has been occupied. Apparently things just got more complicated. We aren’t in this alone anymore. Derek just overheard Sheridan making a deal with the Chinese, after someone told him Rollin is alive. He didn’t know that before. And I don’t think I have to tell you how big a problem the Chinese suddenly being involved is.”
“Does Amy know?”
He gives a sharp shake of his head. “Not yet. She’s been through hell lately, and I’m not looking forward to the fear this is going to create in her. But we have to tell her. And maybe knowing will stop her damned blackouts. What does Gia know?”
“Everything but where the cylinder is.” I take a risk, testing him by adding, “No one knows that but me.”
And he passes the test with a vehement “Keep it that way,” followed by “What we don’t know, we can’t tell willingly or unwillingly. You can’t give up the cylinder. It’s a nuclear bomb. Industries would crash. Jobs gone. We’re talking complete economic and world collapse. If one man controlled that cylinder he could re-create everything under his power.”
“That’s right. But I can’t destroy it, because one day the world might need it. And they’d never believe I destroyed it, anyway.” My brow furrows as a plan, that damn plan I’ve been looking for forever, comes to me. “But what if we make them all believe someone else has it?”
“Rollin?” Liam supplies.
“He’s the perfect fall guy. He’s faked his death. He’s crossed his father.”
“Agreed,” Liam says. “But we have to find him to use him, and that’s going to be a race against his father. Sheridan was furious about the betrayal. He’s on the hunt for Rollin, with someone feeding him information. That means they’ll either be preoccupied fighting each other, or coming after us from all sides.”
“Sheridan’s the one who grabbed me. Rollin must have someone inside his father’s operation. How else could he promise the cylinder to anyone? We need to know who.”
“I spent time in China for work. I have contacts, people that I trust within certain cautious boundaries—but I can’t make those calls until we get to the safe house and I have privacy.”
Gia’s voice carries in the air, stronger now it seems, with Amy’s laughter on its tail. “Safe house,” I repeat. “It’s not safe. They aren’t safe.”
“No,” he agrees. “They aren’t.”
I look at him. “Then this is war.”
“Yes,” he agrees. “This is war.”
Then Dr. Murphy appears and motions me to the back. “Gia is asking for you.”
I exchange a look with Liam—two men united, fighting for their women—then I head to the back.
Amy smiles at me. “We’re debating the merits of locking Sheridan in one of Dad’s dig sites versus poisoning him with arsenic. Or both.”
“Remind me not to piss you two off.”
“We will,” Amy promises, scooting forward to kiss me on the cheek, whispering in my ear, “I adore her.” Then she leaves to join Dr. Murphy and Liam up front.
I reclaim my spot by Gia.
“I love her,” Gia says. “She’s not an asshole like you, at all.”
I smile. “I love it when you talk dirty to me.”
She laughs and then flinches, her lashes lowering as she whispers, “You haven’t seen anything yet.”
I lean down and kiss her cheek, wishing like hell I could keep her out of this. She knows my sins, and she isn’t afraid. But this is war—a war I have to win, no matter how vicious, illegal, or bloody I have to be. And she’s going to see who I really am.
EIGHTEEN
IT’S NIGHTFALL WHEN WE ARRIVE safely at the sprawling Hamptons beachfront retreat we will call home for an indefinite period. I give Gia my T-shirt and settle her into a real bed, with Dr. Murphy carefully monitoring what becomes her rapid progress, and also tending to the wound on her hand that was becoming infected. By morning we have supplies, clothes, and all the comforts one might want from a vacation home, and I try to keep Gia in bed, focused on recovering, not on the unknowns outside these walls. Not an easy task, considering she wants to get up and join the roundtable in the kitchen Liam has labeled “the War Room.”
Both my sister and I rise to the challenge of occupying Gia in her bedroom “prison” as she calls it, relieved when she agrees to a Matrix movie marathon while I’m present, reverting back to Sex in the City while I spend time chasing leads on Rollin with Liam and Tellar.
I also get a lot of one-on-one time with Amy. We talked for hours on end, and still I hold back information to protect her. I have to protect her. It’s all bittersweet. She’s angry with me and happy to see me. And I’m angry with me, and happy to see her.
Days pass and each morning I wake from nightmares of the fire. And each day I get hungrier for this to end. Day four is the breaking point for me. I jerk upward from the bed, and I am still half-living my sleep-induced fantasy of slamming Rollin’s head into the window as I’d wanted to the last time I’d seen him. If I’d killed him, my parents would be alive.
“Chad. Chad.”
Gia’s voice breaks into the haze of my half-sleep. “Are you okay?” Her hand comes down on my arm, a soft caress over my skin that sends a chill down my spine, but I do not pull her to me or kiss her as I normally would. I am too on edge, too out of myself, and in need of a release that she can’t give me right now.
“Nightmare,” I murmur, throwing off the blankets and walking to the shower, turning on the hot water and climbing inside before it even warms up, shivering in the cold, savoring the heat. The water pours over me, and I do not fight what I feel. I revel in the hatred inside of me, no matter how toxic it might be. I buried it for years. I need to feel it and deal with it now.
The curtain moves and Gia climbs inside, naked and too thin, wrapping her arms around me. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“You should be in bed.”
“I’m feeling better. But you aren’t. Talk to me. Please.”
I could shelter her. I should shelter her, but I do not. “Remember when I told you I strangled the man who set the house fire?”
“Yes. I remember.”
“Liam uncovered some details about Rollin. He was disinherited right before the fire. I gave him money that day. I think he set the fire and then disappeared.”
“That explains so much. It answers questions you needed answered.”
“Knowing who and why only makes me angrier. But father or son almost killed you, too. If I get the chance, I will kill them, Gia. The bruises from my beatings might be fading now, but I’m still broken. I’m tr
ying not to be that man for you and for my sister, but you need to know that the part of me that wants them dead—he’s still a part of me.”
“I know who you are. I know what you are. And I know what you feel more than you realize, I think.”
I study her, this woman who does seem to see me for all that I am, and I don’t know what to make of it. “I am not a scientist or a doctor. Or a billionaire architect. I’m a treasure hunter, a man who walks lines I shouldn’t walk. A thrill seeker. An adrenaline junkie.”
“A man who knows when the payday isn’t all that matters.” She smiles. “And a man who really, really loves the word fuck.”
And just like that, I’m laughing. I’m fucking laughing and pushing her against the wall and kissing her. Gia does that for me. She’s changing me. In this moment, I feel it. I feel her. And us. And I feel something I haven’t dared in a lifetime, it seems. A reason to live that isn’t hate and revenge. But the hate and revenge still feel pretty damn good.
AN HOUR LATER, I leave Gia and Amy for a final checkup with Dr. Murphy before Coco is to pick the doctor up to escort her on an extended vacation meant to ensure her safety. I, in turn, claim a spot at the kitchen table opposite Liam, with Tellar on my left, and join their work to turn Rollin into our endgame. And I do not miss Liam’s intense scowls, or the ridiculous fact that his black T-shirt is perfectly pressed. He knows we don’t have control over this situation, and he’s overcompensating. Nor do I miss the irony of my opposite approach, with my fantasies of banging Rollin’s head into a windshield. Tellar, it seems, is somewhere in the middle of the two of us, and I can only hope that gives us balance.
I’ve barely guzzled the thick syrup Amy calls coffee when I glance up to find Gia standing in the doorway, having traded in her pajamas for faded jeans, a pink T-shirt, and sneakers.
“Gia,” I say, standing, fully intent on insisting she go back to bed, but she is already moving toward the table, planting herself in a chair.
“I’m staying. Amy is with Dr. Murphy, and she says I’m fine to move around a bit.” I arch a disbelieving brow, and she says, “Ask her. She’s still here.” She grabs my coffee cup and sips, then crinkles her nose. “That’s horrible.”
“Hey now,” Amy scolds, entering the room. “I made that.”
“I’ll make the next pot,” Gia volunteers.
“Thank you,” Tellar says. “Amy seems to want to please Chad more than the rest of us, and apparently my last pot wasn’t much better.”
“Welcome back, Ms. Hudson,” Liam says. “Have you been feeling the tingles of architectural creations?”
“No, I have not, Mr. Stone. It appears I will not become a brilliant architect but will remain a humble chemist, damn you.”
“A rather brilliant chemist in your own right, from what I understand,” he replies. “You were on Sheridan’s top secret team.”
“I was,” she confirms. “And it felt like an honor. I really thought he wanted to save the world.”
“How do you think Napoleon and Hitler managed to get so many followers?” Liam replies. “We’re just glad he didn’t brainwash you, or Chad might not be here right now.”
“Right,” she says, twisting her fingers together on top of the table a moment before she looks at me. “Still no idea how Sheridan found you?”
“None,” I confirm.
Her teeth worry her bottom lip a moment before she says, “And no one has contacted us to demand or threaten us to get the cylinder that I don’t know about, right?”
“No,” Liam replies. “We’re on radio silence.”
“We’re certain Sheridan is waiting us out,” Tellar says. “Expecting one of us to surface. We just aren’t sure how long that will last before they get impatient, especially since the Chinese are putting pressure on him.”
“Yes,” she murmurs, her gaze going to me. “They know you’re with Amy and Liam now, so I’m sure they’ll call Liam.”
I arch a brow. “That wasn’t a question, so why does it feels like one?”
“Did you tell Jared where the cylinder is, and that’s the reason we aren’t being contacted? Could he have told Rollin, and Rollin is negotiating a sale?”
My gut twists with what she isn’t saying, but it’s in her eyes, and lingering in the room. “Jared didn’t turn on us. He had six years to give me up to Sheridan, and he didn’t. He escaped and went underground, or he’s dead.” She doesn’t reply, but the room seems to wait in irritating unison for my confirmation. “No, I did not tell him where it is. No one knows where the cylinder is but me.”
Collectively, they all seem to sigh. “As it should be,” Liam says. “You have to be the only one who knows.”
“It can’t stay that way,” Amy argues. “There has to be a way the world gets it if it’s ever needed.”
“I don’t disagree,” Liam says, “nor do I believe Chad would, but now is not that time, and the first order of business is making sure it’s forgotten, assumed lost. Rollin remains our best fall guy, but we have to find him.” Liam motions to the piles of paperwork on the table. “Rollin has to be hiding somewhere in this pile of paperwork.”
I grab a file. “Then I say we all have to look again at everything we’ve already looked at.” I glance around the table and everyone nods in unison and grabs a file.
HOURS LATER, COCO has entertained us and whisked Dr. Murphy away to safety, and we are all exhausted, the sun settled low on the horizon. I glance up and realize that Gia and Amy have disappeared. Concerned that I’ve been too absorbed in the file I’m reading to realize Gia is sick, I push myself to my feet and go in search of her. As I pass through the living area, the drapes flutter, the door opens to the heated porch, and Amy’s voice stops me in my tracks.
“What if I’m pregnant again?” Amy asks, touching on the one subject she hasn’t spoken to me about.
“Getting sick once does not make you pregnant,” Gia assures her. “We’re all under a lot of stress and it wasn’t that long ago that you miscarried. Your body is exhausted.”
“Losing my baby was the worst moment of my life aside from the fire,” Amy says, her pain slicing through me, reminding me that knowledge is helping her cope, but the heartache is far from gone. “It was like I’d been given another chance at a family,” she continues, “only to have it ripped away.”
“I know,” Gia says softly. “That’s how I felt, too. I lost my dad. Then I lost the baby and . . . then . . . I lost the chance to try it again with someone who matters.”
Stunned, I grab the couch. Gia lost a baby?
“He really didn’t care that you lost the baby?” Amy asks.
“He was relieved.”
“While you were destroyed,” Amy supplies, her voice heavy with understanding.
“Yes,” Gia replies, her tone raspy, affected. “And alone, but you aren’t. Not anymore. You have Liam.”
“Gia,” Amy says. “You aren’t alone. You have me and Liam and Tellar. We’re family now. And most of all, you have Chad.”
“Do I?”
“How can you question that?”
“It’s . . . complicated.”
Complicated? What the fuck does she mean by that? I run a hand through my hair, trying to understand what I’ve done wrong in the past few days to make her feel like I’m not here for her. That I don’t want to be with her.
Liam’s voice comes from the kitchen doorway, and Amy and Gia lower their voices, having an exchange I can’t make out, before Amy’s footsteps sound, fading into the closing of the door. It’s then that it hits me that I’ve eavesdropped, like a total dickhead. But I’m here, and she’s spoken that damn word complicated and I intend to know why.
Stepping forward into the line of the curtain, I find her at the railing, under a heater, her dark hair fluttering with the wind off the nearby ocean. “How much did you hear?” she asks without turning.
I step onto the porch and cross the wooden floor to stand next to her, resting my hands on the railing, looking
out at the waves crashing on the sand. “All of it.”
“What do you want to know?” she asks, tilting her head to look at me.
“Everything now, but pretend I just said only when you’re ready.”
She doesn’t laugh, inhaling instead, still not looking at me, seeming to stare at the skyline that is nothing but black speckled with dots of light. “When my father died, I was lost. Jason was my college professor. I guess I needed a father figure, because I thought I loved him.” She laughs without humor. “God. I was so adolescent, giddy in every way. I don’t know how I got pregnant. We used protection, but when it happened it seemed like a gift. I wanted that child. Oh, how I wanted that child.” Her wishful, sad tone turns hard as she adds, “But he didn’t. He told me to get an abortion. I was devastated. I refused.”
I wait, expecting her to go on, finally pressing with a gentle “Gia?”
She lifts her hands and rambles almost matter-of-factly. “My appendix ruptured and I miscarried. A freak thing. I almost died and then they told me that there was damage. You know the rest. I . . . choose the wrong men.”
I grab her, wrapping her in my arms, brushing hair from her face to find pure anguish in her eyes, but I am hurt by her implication that I too am the wrong man. “What did that mean?”
“It means we’re complicated, just like I said to Amy.”
“You think I’ll leave.”
“Of course you’ll leave.”
“I know what I said—”
“Over and over, you said it. I told you alone wasn’t better. I did. I meant it, but we don’t know each other.”
“What? We do. I want to know more.”
“No. No, I don’t. I don’t want to feel what you make me feel.”
“What am I making you feel?”
“Confused.”
I back her against the railing, my legs framing hers, hands cupping her face. “You aren’t pushing me away. I don’t know why you’re trying.”