Gorya sighed. “Yes. He can be adamant with his opinion at times. Over the years we have had many discussions. I’ve had no one else to talk things out with, so it has become a bad habit to let him voice his concerns at the worst possible times, like when we’re in the middle of an important talk.”
Her eyes narrowed, focused sharply on his, all too intelligent. He cursed his cat.She’s going to question me.
That won’t matter. Tell her what she wants to hear.
Gorya cursed the cat again. That was his inclination. Lying. Deceiving. That was who he was. What he did.
“Are you going to tell me what you were arguing about, or do you want me to take a stab at guessing?”
Her tone was mild. She was giving him every opportunity to come clean. To tell the truth. He had no doubt he could convince her with a lie. He was adept at it, but once he told a lie to her, he would tell another and then another. Their relationship would be built on lies. There would be no real foundation, and those lies would always be between them.
“Rogue believes it’s safest for me to kill your friend. He’s afraid eventually thebratvawill find her and tortureher. That in doing so, they’ll be able to locate you. His concern is for your safety.”
Her expression didn’t change. She didn’t blink. She looked more leopard than she ever had, yet he knew Wraith wasn’t close.
“Naturally my first thought was to protect you, but I’ve never killed an innocent that I know of. That would be murder and make me as low as Patva. Aside from that, you consider this woman family. If that’s the case, there should be a way to protect her. I may not have figured out how, but you must have. You’re intelligent and you’ve lived in the situation a long time. I didn’t have a chance to voice that to Rogue, but I will. I have faith in you. I don’t in this woman, but I do in you. If I’m being strictly honest, if it became evident to me that she was a threat to you and I couldn’t protect her, I would kill her.”
He wasn’t going to lie to her no matter how tempted he was. He was ruthless. He didn’t pull his gaze from hers. He wanted her to know he meant it. She had to see the real person she was dealing with. Know who he was. He wanted to show her. She had to know if she could live with him. He had to know.
It took what seemed a lifetime, but eventually her eyes brightened to silvery blue. A hint of laughter crept in. “It seems we think alike. I’ve thought of quite a few ways to take out your bodyguard Gedeon before he can kill you when you order him to shoot you. I have to always know where his wife is. That makes it difficult because she’s very good at concealing herself.”
“You plan on killing Gedeon?”
She shrugged. “Only if you insist on your idiotic suicidal plan. It isn’t that I want to. He seems like he’s willing to protect you, but he’s all business, and I have no doubt that he’d shoot you in a heartbeat if you ordered it.”
“That’s the reason I hired him.”
“There you go. It’s my job to have your back. I have afew concerns for your safety just like you have for mine. If Wraith wasn’t so lazy right now, we’d be having arguments as well.”
“That’s the reason you’ve been so reluctant to see anything good in Meiling. You don’t want to chance liking her because you’re afraid you might have to kill her.”
Maya nodded. “I can’t be friends with either of them.”
“I should have known. I thought because Wraith was in heat you were reacting to a female being around.” He felt the smile before it flashed briefly on his face. “You wanted me to think that. All this time when I’ve been showing you the house and you were going to the windows, you weren’t looking at the view so much as studying where Meiling would position herself to cover Gedeon in any situation, weren’t you?”
Gorya couldn’t keep the admiration out of his voice. She really was good. Excellent, in fact. As for an asset, he couldn’t ask for a better one. No one would ever have an idea that his mate was as deadly as she was. She looked sweet and innocent, just about as nonlethal as one could get. More, she really could disappear into the shadows. And she could soothe a leopard into ignoring her presence.
“Naturally.”
“I don’t want you to think that my leopard did anything I didn’t do. My first thought, really, was that I would have to hunt down your friend. He would have come to the same conclusion I did.”
You still are not certain,Rogue interjected.
Shut the hell up.
“It’s nice that Rogue is looking out for me, but Lexie doesn’t know my real name. She doesn’t even know where I’m originally from.”
He didn’t mind playing devil’s advocate even as he filed the woman’s name away to make certain he could find her. “Yet she is presumably good on a computer if you learned your skills from her.”
“Not just good, Gorya, she’s elite. The best. Incredible. And so are her friends. She taught me everything I know. It was just luck that I had a knack for computers and caught on fast.”
“How are you safe, then? She has to be able to find you. That means if she’s discovered, you’re at risk.”
She rolled her eyes at him. “I didn’t give her my real name. The minute I hit the streets I became someone else. I knew they’d look for me. I told you I listened to every conversation. I heard about all the freighters coming in. Also, there were refugees, families coming in from other countries, paying to get papers to be able to work in the States. It was a pretty brisk business to enslave them to work for years to pay off the papers. I had heard of a family, parents and a daughter about my age, who came from Ukraine. The father refused to hand over their money, and when they threatened to put his wife and daughter into the whorehouse to pay off his debts, he shot his wife, his daughter and himself. His daughter ran, she was bleeding profusely, but she jumped into the water and was washed away. They didn’t recover her body. Some said she lived, that they saw her on the streets. Her name was Teona Kyva. I became Teona Kyva.”
She’d been no more than twelve or thirteen when she’d left the house after Polina had been taken, and yet she’d had a cover in place. Gorya admired her even more.
“I suppose Lexie helped you get identification because you had none.”
