“Partly, yes.” I swallow a small swill of my drink, allowing the burn to be a respite to gather my thoughts. “But if that were all, I could work around it. I could inform Wells that I no longer viewed it as a conflict of interest to know the identity of the person sneaking around the resort on KORT’s behalf—even though I do. It’s unlikely he’d buy it, which would only make him question what I wasn’t sharing. And asking directly about Zara would demean her abilities, though our business is to know what our clientele are involved in. She couldn’t be faulted for that—not entirely. But if she isn’t KORT’s asset …”
Ryker motions to Cash to throw him the bag of buffalo pretzels as he finishes my thought, one too bitter for me to taste on my tongue. “Then she’d be tagged a threat, and you’d have to turn her over. Or be considered a traitor to the society.”
I nod, affirming that.
Maddox flicks his knife closed, sitting straighter in his chair. “What difference does it make either way? Even if she was hired to collect information against us, that’s her job. That’s not betrayal. What does it change for you?”
“A fucking lot,” Cash bites out. “She’s impressive and taken with Axe, but you can’t shut your eyes beside someone who will be more than happy to suffocate you the second you do.”
“No matter who she’s working for, she won’t hurt me or any of you,” I protest.
Cash’s features soften with a rare urge to be my cushion. “I believe that, too, but she’s as good of a con as I am, and it’s a bitch to surrender mid-trick.”
“Then we make her feel like she’s winning by playing our game,” Jax muses, lighting a joint.
That is the precise strategy used to cajole an asset into being a double agent, but I don’t want her to question me in that regard. I don’t need her to get me information or turn on her client. I just want her to be safe.
Maddox shakes his head, like all hope is lost. “I couldn’t have given Tessa up for anything.”
Ryker grasps that perspective better than anyone, so he revisits Maddox’s original inquiry. “What does her source of employment change for you?”
“The risk,” I share simply, spinning my luck on my watch and tracking the ball bouncing in the hopes it will choose any of the numbers that mean something.
In an instant, the remembrance of hope before my greatest failure rushes back to me.
“I know what you’re doing for me and your siblings tomorrow is …” My mother trails off, unable to speak the horrors of what the next twenty-four hours will hold for me.
Maybe I’m no different from the man I’m prepared to burn because I feel no hesitation about it, only elation that they’ll be free and hunger for the ashes to settle. For Hayden Noire and his atrocities to be nothing more than dissipating smoke.
“I’m fine. Everything’s set, and you’ll meet us at the lake house.” I hedge there for a beat. “I’d prefer that you come with us.”
She’s going to see her former lover, not that she’s admitted to that. She claims she has something she needs to take care of.
“I can’t, but”—she folds six thousand dollars into my hand—“play my numbers on the roulette wheel tomorrow. For good luck.”
“What numbers are yours now?” I ask, knowing they change like the wind.
“Your ages.” A smile blossoms on her tear-soaked face, one she can’t seem to fight, no matter how bleak things are. The one she has for us. “I always play your ages. So, now it’s twenty-one, nineteen, fourteen, twelve, eight, and six.”
The memory fades to a ball in my throat. I played our ages the next day. Again and again. Against all odds, not one of them landed. And I never saw my mother again.
With that haunting reality snaking around me, I excuse myself to the plane’s office and make a call.
“To what do I owe the honor?” Ivy answers. It isn’t haughty or pretentious. She’s got more honor in her pinkie than a saint has in their entire being, the cunning edge of a demon, and the devotion of a queen willing to take up arms for her people.
“I have a delicate matter to discuss,” I begin.
“Too delicate for Wells?” That is both a challenge and a reminder of her allegiance to her husband.
“Too dicey for Wells,” I explain. “He can’t see straight when things get complicated if it could cause any hardship for any of you, and I love him for it because I know Rena is well cared for, not just by Ty, but also with him at the helm. But this … it requires you to respond apart from your KORT authority.”
She can separate it, put the conceivable grim outcome in a box and ignore it. He cannot.
“We’re family first, Axel. Nothing’s too dicey. I’m sure my husband would echo that, but, yes”—she sighs, almost reluctantly but with an unambiguous trace of adoration—“it would eat at him. Jared and Payne do not take kindly to being in the dark, and Wells worries that too much personal intervention could backfire. This—whatever this is, private conversations among us, discounting KORT—is against the bylaws, but I’ll admit that it is not my first.”
I don’t acknowledge that she and Wells both being KORT chairs indisputably opens a myriad of off-the-books conversations. I only want part of that clandestine discussion. Jared and Payne—the other two chairs—wisely prohibit talk regarding the organization to be held without them, but they can’t truly believe it never happens among the married couple.
There’s no sense in tiptoeing around my purpose for the call, so I dive in. “I’m curious about the loyalty test for a spouse of a chair.”
