He rolled his eyes. “I never said I wasn’t, but I own my darkness. You hide in yours.”
I almost smiled at his honesty. “Why? Why is she here?”
“I like you, Roman. You remind me of me.” I laughed. “And while I might look like a hard bastard, I have a giant heart. I waited such a long time for my Lissa, and I know what that feels like. I didn’t want you to have to wait for her, or worse, watch her from a distance anymore. You helped me once. I wanted to do the same for you.”
Curling my lips into an expression I wasn’t sure was a smile or a snarl, I continued to glare at him. I knew all about his past. I’d been the one who fitted a tracker to his now-wife’s engagement ring that saved her life, but this was different. I was different. This man faked his own death in the name of love. I wasn’t that crazy. I shook my head. “Difference is, I’m not in love with her. I’m watching out for her. I’m keeping a promise. Paying a debt.”
I tried not to think about how it felt to be in front of Hana last night. To finally see her in person, to notice the flecks of gold in her hazel eyes and to have her smile at me—actually at me and not down the lens of a camera… it hit me like a punch. The realisation that I was a goner for this woman. My promise to watch her had morphed into something more, but I wasn’t admitting that to anyone, especially not Thomas.
“Well, I would bet my business on the fact you’re full of shit, and you’re so in love with the woman you can barely think straight.”
I pushed up from my chair, slamming my hands on the desk, but the fucker didn’t even flinch. “What the hell do you want, Thomas, because I know this isn’t about my supposed love life?”
“It’s simple. I want you to work for me. You’re the best, and we’re the best, so it’s a shame we don’t join forces.”
I knew it was what he wanted, but hearing him say it caused my temples to throb. “And? I know that can’t be it.”
“I want you to move here. Move here and work for me.”
“To this shithole?” I straightened, looking out the wall of windows over this tiny town. I’d lived in the city for years. Lost in a sea of faces. If I lived here, I would stand out like a sore thumb. Thomas would drag me out of my solitude. Demand I participate in real life when what I wanted was to stay holed up behind a screen. Life was so much easier that way.
I let out a sigh because now there was another thing to consider in his offer.
Hana was here.
I didn’t need to think about my answer. It was a no-brainer.
“If I say yes, I want eyes on her again. Cameras. I need to keep my promise and keep her safe. You owe me that.” Even saying it caused relief to flood my veins like ice water on a summer’s day.
“Walk with me.” Before I could answer, Thomas was moving from his office through reception to the lift. “I’m showing our guest downstairs,” he announced to the receptionist before holding his keycard to a reader on the wall.
“You have a meeting in fifteen,” she told him.
We stepped inside, and he held his keycard up again to another reader. The doors closed, but he didn’t press a floor number, and the elevator began moving anyway. I was confused a minute later, when the doors opened, and instead of being in reception as I’d expected, we were somewhere else.
“Welcome to the basement.”
I looked around, and it dawned on me. “Do you have some secret underground lair down here? What the fuck? How long’s this been here?” Disbelief hung in my tone as I took it all in.
“Since the building opened. You would have known that if you’d ever called in to our meetings with your camera instead of just doing audio.” Despite how fucked off I was with him, I couldn’t contain my laugh. “This place is state of the art. We have training rooms, an armoury, a shooting range, but we also have somewhere that’s much more you.” He steered me towards a closed door, indicating for me to open it and look inside.
As I did, my mouth fell open.
“This place manages the comms and tech requirements for our jobs all over the world. We have tech that doesn’t even exist yet,” he winked, “and some of the most high-spec spyware.”
I tried not to show how excited I was at what I could see, but it was like asking a kid not to leap around inside Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory.
“And we also have some of the best people.” He walked away from me to where two men sat, one with headphones on, typing frantically, and the other staring intently at a bank of screens.
“Wren.” The man without the headphones looked up, his curly hair bouncing.
“Boss? We don’t usually see you in here. Something wrong?”
“This is Roman Black.”
Wren nudged the man next to him, who pulled off his headphones. “Babe, I’m in the middle of something…” He followed Wren’s gaze. “Boss.”
“Lev. I won’t keep you. You’ve spoken to him on the phone, but let me introduce you to Roman Black. Roman, this is Wren and Lev West. Just in case you don’t remember their very specialist skills, Wren is our resident forensic analyst. You could have typed something on a computer before the internet even existed, and he’d be able to find evidence of it. Lev is our hacker. He can write code in seconds and has got us out of more than a few tight corners with his fast thinking. We have a team of about twenty tech people. Each job I assign has a lead techie on it, and they bring in whatever support the guys in the field need.”
