I run through the catalog of possibilities in my mind. Who is this? What are they referring to?
How dare they threaten me?
Rats.
Politicians.
Choice…
It dawns on me with a clarity that chills me to my bones.
“Who are you?” I demand. “And what choice? I brought you what you wanted. I’m taking my brother and I’m?—”
Nicolette screams. I look sharply to where she stands, my weapon drawn. Two masked men have hold of her.
“Your brother or the girl. One of them leaves here alive.”
I. Will. Kill. Them.
Without missing a beat, I shake my head with a forced laugh. “Is that supposed to be a hard choice? Take her.”
I expect Nicolette to look furious, but she doesn’t. Instead, her teeth chatter and her body jerks as if I’ve slapped her. And maybe I have. Words can cut more than weapons.
I tap my earpiece that communicates directly to Thayer.
“Now.”
I toss Lyam my gun and grab the second I have in a holster. The man holding Nicolette draws his weapon, but he’s too late. My bullet pierces skin and bone when I hit him straight between the eyes. Nicolette screams and falls to her knees as three armed men swarm us. But my men are faster. My men are prepared.
Lyam never misses, and Thayer has no conscience. Our adversaries drop like flies. A stray bullet hits the talisman. It falls like a star struck from heaven, and splashes into the pool.
I stare at it for a split second. I could get it. I could get it and run but I’d have to leave Nicolette.
I lift her off the ground, sling her over my shoulder, and run.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Nicolette
“You saw nothing?”
Fabien’s brother Lyam, the spitting image of his mother harshened with masculine features, sits nursing some kind of drink with ice I can smell from halfway across the room. It’s ten o’clock in the morning, but something tells me the Gerard brothers don’t care for things like societal norms.
Lovely.
Fabien paces the room. He’s barely looked my way since we got back, though he held me as if I’d fall to pieces if he let me go.
I can’t let that mean anything to me.
It doesn’t.
Thayer sits next to Lyam, scowling at his brothers as he pieces things together. None of them have looked at me since we got back.
I stare into my own mug of black tea gone cold. It feels oddly symbolic, as if my own heated expectations have chilled, left to be discarded.
I put the cup down.
“I didn’t say that,” Lyam replies tersely. “I said I didn’t see faces. I don’t know names. I saw uniforms of the gendarmerie without question.”
