Her head popped up, her mouth and eyes wide. “I didn’t kill them. I swear.”
Sean huffed. “Yet they’re all dead, you’re not, and you’ve been sneaking about, doing fuck knows what.”
Hana licked her lips as if she knew this would take a while and preparing for the onslaught of words, but it was a few minutes of uncomfortable silence before she began to explain.
“Mum died when I was eight. She’d been on her own with Tony and me for years and worked herself almost to death. Then, she met Preston, who promised her the world, but he was a cold, sick fuck. I don’t really remember what they were like together, and Tony—” she looked around at her audience, “—he was my brother, never liked to talk about it, but Preston camedown one morning and said she’d died in her sleep and had left us in his custody.”
Her eyes glazed over, and I wasn’t sure if she was reliving the memory or fighting to keep her emotions at bay.
“From that moment on, our lives were never the same. Tony started working for him that very day, joining a gang that robbed rich people’s houses. Preston knew a lot of rich people, and this was a fast way for him to earn some money. He’d give the gang the addresses for a cut of what they made. My stepfather had very expensive tastes, and this was, as he called it, ‘a risk-free investment’. He waited until I was ten to start my ‘training’. Stealing, breaking and entering, anything where they needed someone small or wanted a crime committed that no one would ever accuse a child of doing, I was there. Turns out, I’m a bloody good thief.”
Thomas rolled his eyes, but I knew he’d be impressed she managed to break in here, even if it meant security measures would be getting a glow up.
“The jobs got bigger, my part in them riskier. Until being a petty thief wasn’t enough for him. No, daddy-dearest decided he wanted to branch out into espionage, concealment, actually, I don’t know what to call it, but he began to deal in secrets—he collected them, hid them, planted them, made them up and destroyed lives with them. He did that for the most fucked up people who paid him a lot of money to cover up their crimes or destroy the people who tried to take them down.
“He had people help him. High-powered people, rich people, people with connections, but he needed someone to do the grunt work. That’s where I came in.” A tear escaped, rolling down her cheek, and I had to sit on my hands to stop myself reaching out to make this better. No, I needed to hear it all before I trusted myself to react.
“He explained his plan. I’d be responsible for the secrets. I was his fixer. I’d break in to find them, I’d hack computers to leave them behind, I’d listen and learn, I’d do anything I needed to do to make a crime vanish, and I’d get away with it because I was just a kid and no one would believe a kid would do anything so fucked up. I was fifteen.
“I remembered his face when he’d sat me down at the dining table to tell me how my life would look after I agreed to his fucked up plan. No school, no friends, no social life. I owed him my life, and he’d take payment again and again until he deemed my debt paid. If I tried to leave, tried to tell anyone what was going on, tried to ruin what he was building, he wouldn’t kill me, he’d do much, much worse.”
Her face lost all its colour, and she shook her head as if she was trying to rid herself of the memories. Seeing her like this was killing me, but I needed to know who Hana really was because right now, she felt like a stranger, and that hurt more than any admission could.
“I tried to say no, and I really did find some man in my room watching me sleep,” she said, her attention turned to me as if she was reminding me of the story she’d told me, so I knew it was real. “But what I didn’t tell you was that someone had stripped me naked. I had no recollection, so I’m guessing they drugged me, and I found some strange man rubbing his erection while talking about all the things he wanted to do to a fifteen-year-old.”
Tears dripped from her chin that she didn’t even try to wipe away, just as a noise that sounded like I was being tortured ripped from my throat, but Thomas interjected.
“Are you okay to continue? Do you want me to get you a glass of water?” Hana looked at him gratefully, like she needed that moment of humanity.
“He also set Tony up. Had him arrested for the jobhesent him on. And made sure he got maximum jail time. He told me it was my fault. That if I’d just done as he said, none of it needed to happen.” She dropped her head, whispering, “He went to jail because I wouldn’t do as I was told. He died because of me.”
I moved so fast, I didn’t know what was happening until she was wrapped in my arms, sobbing into my neck, letting me absorb her guilt where it formed an alliance with my own, making me wonder if it was now so large it would consume us both.
52
ROMAN
“I’ve fucked up so much,”she mumbled before easing out of my hold, glancing up at me, her guilt-filled eyes red-rimmed. “I was their pawn.”
“What sorts of things did you do, Hana?” Sean asked in a much kinder voice, as if the men in this room were softening after hearing her story.
“Everything. I mean, obviously, the breaking and entering, I learned how to do some basic hacking, I’m pretty amazing at knowing where CCTV is and how to avoid it. Preston used to call me his ghost.” Her face twisted at the sound of his name, like it was poisoning her to say it. “Planting drugs, evidence, compromising crime scenes, setting up alibies for people.” She pushed her hair back from her face. “That was my first job. Larson. You know about him, right?”
Sean nodded.
“Well, he was drunk and ran someone over. Preston arranged for the whole thing to go away. I had to create a narrative so he had an alibi. If you search, you’d find him out for dinner with his wife, even though his wife wasn’t even in the city that night.”
Thomas shifted in his seat, placing his locked hands on the table. “You were fifteen,” he said as a statement of fact ratherthan a question. “That’s a pretty impressive set of skills you have.”
Hana scoffed, her tear-stained face hardening. “It’s amazing what you learn to do to survive, Mr Lanton. You forget that Preston probably killed my mum and sent my brother to prison on a whim. I learned what I had to in order to survive, and I did it well.”
She sniffed, wiping her fingers under her nose before she spoke again. “I hate what I did. What I did helped bad people do more bad things—they brought down businesses, put innocent people in prison and kept guilty ones out. I’ve discredited witnesses, bribed people to change their story, shared secrets that ruined people.” Her voice wavered as if the weight of her past was too heavy to carry any longer. I winced, wondering if we’d ever recover from the lies that formed the foundation of our relationship. Biting the inside of my cheek, I let her continue.
“About six years ago, I started to pay attention. I was desperate to find a way, and I knew Preston’s team was his weakness. I asked my stepfather if I could stop working for him, and he laughed in my face… like me having a choice in it was hysterical. I think that day broke me… or at least highlighted how broken I’d been all those years. He’d blackmailed me to make me do what he wanted, and I refused to do it a moment longer.
“I offered him another chance to let me go, but he ignored me. Two days later, one of his key contacts was arrested for trafficking guns and drugs because of evidence I planted. I mean, this bloke was absolutely trafficking and so much more, but I made sure the police found out, and there was no way for anyone to help him get off on a technicality. Daddy wasn’t impressed, but I think I scared him enough for him to realise he couldn’t control me anymore. I wasn’t the fifteen-year-old hedragged into a life of crime; I was a grown-arse woman who was taking her life back.”
Thomas pushed up from the chair and walked across the room to stand next to the floor-to-ceiling windows, staring out as he crossed his arms over his chest.
