“We’re about go into battle. It’s the perfect time to be drinking.”
Aiden took the tumbler without another word and downed the entire thing. It burned his throat, and he welcomed the feeling. Two years ago, the three of them would have happily gunned each other down in the street, and yet here they stood, ready to take on a mutual enemy and trusting one another other not to fuck them over. He looked at Dmitri Romanov and James Halloran and wondered how they’d gotten to this point.
Love, you fool.
His thoughts once again turned to Charlie. He hadn’t toldher he loved her, hadn’t wanted to scare her more than she already was. He regretted that now. Didn’t he know better? There were no guarantees in life—especially a life like theirs. They had to live and love and do whatever it took to keep moving forward.
He had to believe that she’d walk out of that warehouse. She’d faced down more than her fair share of shit, and Mae might be the worst yet, but Charlie was so damn strong. She’d survive. She had to.
Stay strong, bright eyes. Just stay strong.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Charlie had thought she was tough. She might not have always admitted that to herself, but it had been a deep core belief she’d needed to keep moving. Being at Mae’s mercy threatened to prove her wrong a hundred times over. Time lost meaning as Mae asked her questions over and over again. A cut here. A punch there. More questions.
To which she claimed she didn’t know. She denied. She did anything but give Mae the information she wanted.
The woman had taken a call maybe five minutes ago, which was just long enough for the hopelessness of Charlie’s situation to sink in. She shifted and winced. She definitely had a broken rib—or three—and her exposed skin was covered in blood from the shallow cuts Mae seemed to enjoy giving her. It was more blood than she should be losing, but overall she wasn’t in danger of dying. Yet.
With each minute that passed, she was less and less likely to make it out of this warehouse alive.
The door opened, and she tensed. Mae strode in, a smile on her face. “Now that that little task is off my plate, I can devote the rest of the night to you.”
There couldn’t be that much of the night left. She’d been snatched off the street around nine, and it had taken several hours to make the drive to New York from Boston, even if Mae had broken all the speed limits. It might feel like she’d been torturing her forever, but it couldn’t have been more than an hour or two. She didn’t know if that was comforting or if it meant that Mae planned to condense a whole lot of pain into a very short period of time.
Mae disappeared deeper into the warehouse and came back with a giant jug of water and a hand towel. Charlie stared, her entire body shaking. She wasn’t afraid of being cut or beaten. She’d experienced both before and lived to tell the tale. Being shot? It would suck, but it was a risk she’d had to come to terms with before she became a cop.
But drowning?
Drowning scared the shit out of her.
When she was twelve, she’d heard some of the older cops joke about waterboarding terrorists, and she’d even gone so far as to ask her dad about it after. John Finch wasn’t one to coddle his daughter, so he’d sat her down and explained how it worked. She’d had nightmares for weeks afterward, though she’d managed to stifle her screams so that her dad never knew.
Mae saw where her attention was, and her smile widened. “If it’s good enough for the US government, it’s good enough for you, don’t you think?”
“I’m ready to talk.” Anything to keep that water away from her.
“You’re just going to lie some more.” Mae sighed. “Though I suppose you can’t answer questions if you’re hacking up water. Okay, I’ll play. Let’s have a chat.” She grabbed a nearby chair and turned it around so she could straddle it, resting her chin on the back.
The woman looked so…young. Maybe even innocent. She was all smiles and big brown eyes—at least, as long as Charlie didn’t pay attention to the knife she’d set close enough to grab with ease.I’m in a nightmare. I’m going to wake up soon.
She knew it was a lie. This wasn’t some construct of her sleeping brain. This was real.
“How does a cop’s daughter end up engaged to Aiden O’Malley?” Mae picked up the knife and ran her finger along the edge.
Charlie debated lying, but she didn’t see much point in it now. These questions were a formality. If Mae knew who she really was, then she knew that Charlie never would have ended up with Aiden unless there was an ulterior motive involved. “He wanted my help bringing down Dmitri Romanov.”
Mae blinked. “What makes you so special?”
She’d been asking herself that for most of the time they’d been together. As time had gone on, it was clear he hadn’t neededher. Not really. He could have accomplished his goals without the charade of being engaged. It added a layer that didn’t make sense. But she’d been so blinded by her need to make Dmitri pay that she hadn’t cared about the inconsistencies as long as the end result remained the same. Then sex came into the picture and further muddied the waters.
Apparently, she’d taken too long to answer, because Mae swiped out with the knife, leaving another blazing trail inits wake, this time across Charlie’s thigh. “Hey, I’m asking you a question. If you don’t want to talk, we can skip right to the next event.”
Waterboarding.
She tried to swallow her fear, but it lodged in her throat. “I don’t know why he picked me.” There were plenty of women who would have jumped at the chance. Yes, she was qualified because she knew the world he moved in, at least in theory, but since he’d mostly kept her contained to the house, it wasn’t necessary knowledge.
“You don’t seem to know much.” Mae tapped the knife against her lip, leaving dots of Charlie’s blood shining against her red lipstick.
