"You've been shot twice and beaten up. I won't wait for you to recover before I go after my brother."
"They probably moved him."
"Then I will find out where to," I vow. I've lost Nico once. It won't happen again.
"That will take time. I will be ready." She promises.
I don't doubt that she will be. She's like a goddam zombie, only a clean shot to the head will stop her. And it impresses the hell out of me.
She eyes me again sharply, "Do we have a deal?"
"I don't deal with people I don't know."
"Too bad. You’d better get over it, or I won't tell you anything more."
Heat flares in my stomach. God help me, but she is pushing my buttons. She watches me, and for the first time, there’s a weird, private truce in her eye, an admission that she needs me as much as I need a direction.
Something ugly rears inside me. Something sharp and biting. "What is my brother to you that you're willing to risk your life for him?"
I steel my expression, myself for her answer. Because if she and Nico… fuck, that thought alone is enough to drive me insane.
"I couldn't get Nico out. That's a failure. And I don't do failures," she retorts. Of all the answers she could have given, this one relieves me the most and is the most believable, given what I know about her.
I nod. "If we are to work on this together. I need more from you. Go through it again, slower this time."
She nods, "My name is Ana Volcov. I work freelance."
I pretend to believe her and listen while she tells me that she was at the wrong place at the wrong time when the cartel needed a pilot. She explains she does odd jobs, legal or not; she's not choosy. I don't call her out on her bullshit—a woman as trained as her is doing more thanodd jobs—and let her keep going.
"So you just happened to notice an American among the prisoners and decided, out of the goodness of your heart, that you needed to rescue him after they took you to the mine." I slowly begin to pick her story apart before she's even finished.
She raises her hands in defeat. "What can I say. I'm a bleeding heart for my fellow countrymen."
The wordbullshitlies on the tip of my tongue, but I push it down.Let's see how far she's going to take this.I wonder what makes her think I'll believe a word she says when she is so obviously lying to me. Her good eye is challenging me to challenge her. I nod, but a derisive snort from me tells her that I don't believe her. At least not this part. She was there for a reason, and I will find out what that reason is. God help her if she knew. If she went there looking for Nico, only to fuck it up because she didn't involve me in the first place.
The rest of the story is hard to hear. My mind tries to conjure up an image of Nico, what he looks like now, three years later. He was barely nineteen when he vanished, right after his birthday. And now, right after his twenty-second birthday, he resurfaces. I don't thinkAnarealizes it, but the details she's giving me make me believe this part of her story. She says Nico must have been working out; he was fit. That soothes parts of me. I can't help but wonder if my father knows all this, if his payments to the Venezuelans were to keep him alive. But why the hell wouldn't he have told me? Why would he let me believe my brother is dead?
Her story gets harder when she gets to the part where Nico sacrificed himself so that she could get away.
"I would have driven the jeep, I swear," she looks at me, and I see nothing but truth that I know will haunt me forever. "Had he known how to fly the plane. As it was, one of us had to make it out."
A deep breath grounds me. I hate to admit it, but she's right. They did the right thing. The only thing that made sense given the situation they were in. The fact that she came to me after buys her a certain amount of… credibility. She didn't have to do that.
"Why were the Venezuelans after you, when you say he was imprisoned by a Mexican cartel?" I ask not just to challenge her story, but because the Venezuelans and the Mexicans working together? That's a whole other Pandora's Box I'd like to keep a lid on.
She surprises me when she fills me in. "Now that is an interesting question. First, Nico is Don Aurelio Valverde's prisoner," she probes me, as if to see if that name means anything to me, and I nod. "A woman, Donna Margarita," she pauses as I nod again, "and Don Aurelio's father are working together. Have been working together for a long time. Decades. During that time, they've not only been undermining and infiltrating the Bratva here in New York, but La Famiglia as well."
Her information sounds solid. Some of it I already knew, some is new. But she still hasn't answered my question about how the Mexicans fit into this. I'm about to ask, when she continues, "Second, about the Mexicans?" She shakes her head. "I don't know yet how they fit in. But I will."
I sit back and run a hand over the stubble growth on my cheeks. "You do realize that what you're telling me, what you know, is a lot for a woman doingodd jobs?"
She shrugs without wincing. Whoever she is, she's got more balls than most men. "Let's say I have certain… loyalties."
"So you know everything about me, but you're keeping yourself under a shroud?" I challenge.
"Take it or leave it." She throws the towel right back at me.
"I'll take it," I agree. If she's done her homework, she'll know that I won't stop until I find out who she is. She’s dropping more clues than she realizes, and I have my ways of finding those things out, too. Some say I'm the best in the country, but I don't agree. If I were, I would have found Nico a lot sooner.
