I knew it was all over.
CHAPTER15
Present Day
Ifinished my story and watched Bray for a reaction. He hadn’t expressed much as he listened. I’d been looking for cues he might have been forming an unfavorable opinion about me, but he hadn’t given anything away.
“The man who chased me today, it was the man from that night,” I said. “The man who held a gun to my head and who my father shot so I could get away. The man my father went to prison formurdering.That’s who that was.”
Saying it out loud even though I’d just relived the story sent shivers all over my body.
The ghost.
“How is that possible?” Bray asked.
“Excellent question. My guess is he wasn’t dead, and he escaped, but they wanted to pin my father with something on top of the counterfeit money, so they overlooked that minor detail and framed him for murder.”
“Wouldn’t they need a body for that?”
I arched a brow at him. “You work for the DSA. You think the FBI can’t get their hands on a spare corpse?”
He held up a hand like he couldn’t argue. “And how did he find out where you are?”
I lifted my shoulders in a shrug. “Hell if I know. I’ve been on the run for ten years with no contact from anyone from that night.”
“Not even your father?”
“Not even him.” I swallowed the complicated emotion that always rose at the rare mention of him.
Bray frowned. “And what about Olena? What happened to her?”
“Prison. Almost the same sentence as my father. The FBI was there for her that night; diamonds weren’t the only thing she trafficked in. We just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and they got a two-for-one deal when we all got caught. As soon as my father handed over the counterfeit money for the diamond, they knew they had busted something bigger than just a trafficker. I’ve only learned about this from Wallace over the years. He’d feed me updates because I obviously couldn’t go around asking since I had disappeared.”
“Disappeared?”
I pursed my lips and nodded. “This is the part that’s above your security clearance. I’m not only undercover to stay out of prison, Bray.”
I watched him to see if he would put the pieces together on his own. If he could reason out why I had willingly changed my identity over and over since that night in the hotel room.
“No one knows I’m alive.” I filled in the blank. “Not as the real me, anyway. Wallace made sure of that by redacting parts of my file and keeping me mobile every few months. He did that in exchange for helping him on cases, because he knew Olena would have killed me if she found me.”
Bray intently studied me. “Why?”
“Because of that night. Olena ended up in prison and, I thought, the other guy had died. My father obviously didn’tget away with anything, so that only left me.” I paused and held his eyes. “And the diamond. It was in my hand when everything happened.”
Realization dawned on his face, lighting his eyes. The pieces came together, and it all made sense. The reason I had no name and no home. The reason I had remained a puppet for my own safety.
When he finally spoke, it was the last thing I expected him to say. “Do you have it?”
I gaped at him. “Seriously?No!You think I’ve been running around for a decade with a five-million-dollar diamond in my pocket? You think I wouldn’t have cashed in on that the second I could have andreallydisappeared forever?”
Just the thought made my head spin with joy. And relief. To be gone for real. To be free. What a dream. I still had Javi’s contact info in Peru. He’d been waiting for a call for ten years, and I’d been waiting to give him one. The good thing about diamonds was they never went out of style. All I’d have to do was get the diamond, get it to him, and vanish with my newly found wealth—which I had been trying to do for the past decade.
Too bad that rock was still missing, and freedom was an impossible pipe dream.
I sighed. “I have no idea what happened to it; that night was pure chaos. But you’re not the only one to think I have it.”
Bray looked up at me.
