“Even so,” Karina said with a frown. “I didn’t buy him for him to work for you.”
“Darling, without me, you wouldn’t even know he existed. Or have you already forgotten that if I hadn’t stepped in, you wouldn’t have made it another day?”
It was always this way with her.
Guidance and favors with strings attached.
And worse, Karina knew there was no use in arguing it any further—not when Katherine always got what she wanted in the end.
“I suppose I have no choice in the matter.”
Katherine smiled, patting her cheek. “I think you’re starting to get the picture.”
Forcing herself to breathe steadily, Karina said, “Fine.”
“I’m glad we could come to an agreement. Now, if your plan is to steal a painting, I would suggest you get started. Time waits for no one.”
No, it certainly didn’t.
23
Torture
Despite his predilections, Uilleam clearly wasn’t as fearsome as he liked to believe.
Because somehow, despite it being in the museum’s possession for less than seventy-two hours, a thief had managed to break into one of the most secure buildings in the world.
This was state-of-the-art equipment meant to thwart any kind of attempt to steal anything.
Yet in a matter of days, not only had the L’Amant Flétrie been stolen but it had also taken him even longer to find the men responsible.
But he hadn’t quaked beneath the pressure, and the grueling need to find some answers. He kept moving forward.
Until now.
The moment of truth when he would finally get an answer to his question.
He sat across the room in a high back chair, his ankle hooked over his leg as he casually observed the men strapped to lengthy stainless tables.
The drains at the head and end of the table didn’t even inspire any emotion in him.
Nor did the two men who were currently bound naked to the metal.
“This is the part where you tell us what you know. Otherwise, you’ll have to deal with my specialist, and I wouldn’t want that.”
Because then, torture would commence and awful grisly business, and there would only be one outcome once Synek finished with him: Pain.
Even now, the man in question sat with his back against the wall, his knees bent to his chest, his arms resting at his sides.
There was no trace of malice in his expression. No driving desire to commit violence in any way.
But what was also telling was the absence of the cigarette from behind his ear—one that meant he would be in a fairly decent mood.
The fact that it wasn’t there only reaffirmed what Uilleam already knew.
Synek was a powder keg just waiting to explode.
“We don’t know anything,” the one on the right said.
Uilleam laughed a little as he patted the man’s shoulder. “Why don’t I believe that? I doubt we’d be here at all if you were innocent.”
And there was also the telling fact that they hadn’t denied their involvement.
Both were quiet now, trembling and eyes wide. Whatever the reason, they weren’t willing to divulge what they knew.
Pity.
He’d been hoping this would be over relatively quickly.
“Sure you don’t want to change your answer?” Uilleam asked hopefully, giving the man an opportunity to free himself at the very least.
But when he merely licked his lips, he knew they needed a bit of persuading.
Synek unfurled from the floor, rising up to the tips of his toes before stretching his arms above his head.
Seemed fair enough, considering the position he’d been in from the moment the men were brought in, but Uilleam realized a second too late that this was all merely a part of his routine.
It became obvious when he slipped out of his jacket and tossed it across the room before rolling the sleeves of his shirt up. He tilted his head this way and that, the cracks in his neck just audible in the silence of the room.
“I’ve never had the stomach for torture,” Uilleam explained to the man, whose frantic gaze was darting back to where Synek stood. “Unfortunately for you, my mercenary doesn’t share the predilection.”
No, Uilleam thought as he watched Synek pull a knife from his belt. His favorite, he called it, with its gleaming black handle and carbon steel.
He didn’t mind a little torture at all.
By the third hour of hoarse screams and heaving breaths, Uilleam wished the men would break already if only so he could leave this room.
They’d gone back and forth ad nauseam—asking the same questions, repeating the same answers. And at this point, there was a slim chance that perhaps they’d been telling the truth.
That there hadn’t been some sort of ulterior plot, and it had been merely a robbery that happened to involve his painting.
One of the men mumbled out a strangled plea, his hand lifting briefly, managing to catch Synek during a moment of silent contemplation.
“What’s that, mate?” he asked, leaning an ear toward him but not seeming to care at all that he had the man’s blood spattered on his face. “Mercy? Right, yeah, see I’m right out of that. But all this will stop when you answer the question, mate. Simple.”
Uilleam was almost certain he would fold now, if only so he could avoid Synek’s blade, but he still maintained his silence.
After another ten minutes, three of which had been spent in silence, Synek took a step back.
“This one doesn’t know anything,” Synek said as he snapped off his gloves, managing to sound disappointed despite the amount of blood on his hands.
“And you’re sure of that?” Uilleam asked, eyeing the man in question whose eyes had finally slid shut and his body had gone lax.
Synek poked the man in the side of his neck, seeming surprised when he didn’t respond to it at all. “Pretty sure, mate, yeah.”
Well, that was ... inconvenient.
Uilleam turned to look at his partner and was surprised by what he found.
Oh, but this one was nothing like his friend. Had it not been for the gradual rise and fall of his chest, Uilleam might have thought he’d passed out from the pain as well, but he was still conscious.
It wouldn’t be the first time the cleaner got a little overzealous when it came to his work.
And as he drew close, the man opened his one good eye.
“I can stop this,” Uilleam said, adopting a sympathetic tone. “I can make all this go away if you give me what I want.”
The man swallowed thickly, his expression awash with pain and panic. He wanted it to end—anyone could see that in his face—but something else was there. Something that made agitation spark inside Uilleam.
Reluctance.
He wasn’t sure who the man was protecting anymore—the person who he claimed wasn’t involved, or himself.
“I c-can’t,” he whispered on a stuttering breath before his body was wracked with coughs, the sound making Uilleam think there might very well be some internal bleeding.
“My apologies, I couldn’t hear you.”
Uilleam didn’t have to give the command before Synek moved forward, eyeing the damage he’d inflicted over the past few hours. One would have thought that with the effort he’d been expending, he’d be tired—his arms weak, at the very least—but Synek didn’t seem even the slightest bit winded.
And once he found the worst of the injuries, Synek moved his hand over it before digging his finger into the wound.
Uilleam blinked as the man wailed, so loud he almost thought he’d gone deaf when the room finally fell silent once more. “It seems you’ve found your voice again.”
“You d-don’t understand.”
“I’m certainly listening.”
He shook his head as much as he could with Synek pinning him down on one side, as if he hadn’t meant to even say that much. “I-I c-can’t.”
“D’you think this i
s the worst of it?” Uilleam asked, genuinely curious.
Did he think his mercenaries were all trained under the same art?
If he thought Synek was bad, he truly didn’t understand what it meant to feel pain. He could take him back to the Den compound and have him strung up by his ankles—have his mercenaries take turns until nothing but flayed skin and broken bones remained.
“Is this how you really want it to end for you?” he asked.
“I’m not afraid to d-die,” the man said as if some honor existed in dying here on this table.
At that moment, he also knew there was no point in questioning him further because the longer the torture went on, the less likely he would spill anything other than a name meant to just stop his suffering.
“I can respect an honorable man,” Uilleam said, clapping him on his bloodied shoulder.
The man seemed to sag beneath him as if those words would ultimately become his salvation, but he didn’t realize that in Uilleam acknowledging that fact, he was also acknowledging that the man no longer served a purpose.
And once someone became useless to him, they were discarded.
“You might not be scared to die,” Uilleam told him even as he took a step back, “but I’m certainly not afraid to kill you.”
He might have turned in time not to see Synek remove his finger from the man’s wound and pull out his knife, but he couldn’t not hear the sound the blade made as it sliced through skin and muscle, or the way the man on the table choked and suffocated on his own blood.
All the same, there was work to be done.
He was finished here.
24
Blackout
Two years later …
As they crept into April with spring right on its heels, Uilleam had expected the weather to warm up, but a cold front had blown in, and New York was back to freezing temperatures with the promise of snow.
Despite his assumption to the contrary, time did heal the worst of his wounds. They were still there, and he could even feel the phantom pain of them if he lingered on them too long, but they didn’t hurt the way they were used to.
And no matter how much the thought ate at him, he was also thankful the pain had numbed.
Though he still wasn’t sure if it was the time or that he was getting closer to finding the answers he wanted that eased the ache in his chest.
“And what kind of visitors should I be expecting?” Ren asked through the closed door where he stripped out of his clothes and set them aside.
“Nothing to worry yourself about,” he told her with a smile as he passed over an envelope filled with bills and a set of documents that named her as the new owner of a chain of parlors around the city.
A relatively easy job that had cost him very little but ensured he would be given recordings of any high-profile guests who came into her establishments.
The potential profit on such information would prove priceless.
The wrinkles around her eyes deepened when he came back out, holding the towel around his waist.
“All respectable company.”
Of the two people coming to meet him, he felt a fondness for one, in particular. The last thing he wanted was her to get hurt.
“And my girls?” she asked, gesturing to the women who would be working on the muscles in his back.
“It won’t be anything like that,” he said, voice softer now, almost embarrassed, even as the emotion was foreign to him.
He knew what she was really asking, though, but it wasn’t a slight against the operation she ran here. He just was in no mindset to even entertain the thought of another woman.
Ren nodded before she left him alone in the room, slipping out through the door before her footsteps sounded on the stairs leading to the upper floor.
His phone in one hand, he settled himself on the cushioned table, arranging himself as best he could. Draping the towel across his back, he made sure everything of importance was covered.
As he busied himself answering messages and inquiries, he heard the women enter the room, their voices soft as they greeted him.
“Sir,” Ren called through the door after a brief knock. “You have a visitor.”
Right on time.
“Send her in.”
Though she had probably seen more in her young life than was probably healthy, Luna still managed to look embarrassed as she entered the room, her gaze drifting over the women first. But for whatever reason, when her eyes rested on him, she jerked them away just as quickly.
Amusement at her expression had him chuckling. “I’ve been waiting ages, Luna,” he said as he rolled over onto his back.
“In case you didn’t realize,” she muttered, red suffusing her cheeks, “it’s pouring down outside. You’re lucky I got here when I did.”
He was also fortunate that his brother wasn’t feeling particularly territorial this evening, or she wouldn’t have been here at all.
It had become clear mere months after he’d left her on his brother’s doorstep that Kit had grown fond of her in a way he hadn’t entirely expected.
Did he expect him to care for her? Absolutely. Despite how exasperating his brother could be, he was empathetic toward those in unfortunate situations.
But did he expect Kit to fall in love with her?
Not even a little.
Yet some part of him knew that she didn’t know the truth. About how she had ultimately ended up with Lawrence Kendall … why she had been taken from Mexico in the first place …
If she knew, what would she do?
Would she leave Kit the way Karina had left him?
Would he then find himself here, where Uilleam was, mourning the loss of something amazing?
The better question was why did he care about his brother’s happiness at all? He’d made it abundantly clear that whatever business they had together was severed.
At this point, he owed Kit nothing.
“Fair enough,” Uilleam said, focusing back on Luna. “Where … is there a reason you refuse to look at me?” She was still facing the wall instead of facing him.
“Are you kidding?” she asked, that flush creeping down her neck. “You’re naked.”
Uilleam glanced down at himself with a scoff. “I once held a meeting between two warring families on a private beach on the coast of France. Neither was willing to work with the other because they were both notorious for killing their enemies during sit-downs.”
A smile almost formed on her lips. “So you decided to have it at a nude beach?”
He shifted to his feet, going over to the table in the other room to quickly dress. He came back out buttoning the front of his shirt and looping his tie around his neck.
“It was the only way I could guarantee each party would respect the arrangement I had set up.” He ran his fingers through his hair, remembering his good work. “Unless, of course, they decided to get a little creative.”
Wouldn’t be the first time he saw something of the sort.
“Clever,” she admitted grudgingly.
She moved to tuck the long, glossy strands of her hair behind her ear, his gaze seizing on the sizable ring resting on her finger.
He grabbed her hand without thinking, bringing it in closer so he could get a better look at the ring.
“A shame I wasn’t invited to the wedding,” he said, looking from the ring to her.
Not that he would have gone had he been invited. In his current state, he doubted he would make very good company at a wedding, especially when he and his brother had some unresolved business between them.
“I’m sure you looked beautiful.”
“It was a surprise to me too,” she went on. “There wasn’t really any time to invite anyone.”
On that, she was wrong. “Trust me. This may have been a surprise for you, but my brother is a planner. This would have been in the works for months.”
Rarely was there anything spur of the moment when it came to his brother. So even if it hadn’t b
een personal for Luna, his brother had made it a point to exclude him on that big day.
And he wondered why they didn’t get along.
Here was yet another reminder that he owed Kit what his brother gave to him.
“It really is a shame,” he thought to himself, only realizing he had spoken out loud when Luna spoke.
“That we got married?”
If only she knew the truth ... how would she respond? His curiosity was now running rampant. “No, a shame that you have a job to do.”
Which was why he had called on her in the first place.
“What is the job, exactly?”
There was plenty of time for that. “I’ll fill you in on all the details later, or Skorpion can.” He glanced at the Rolex on his wrist. “He should have been here by now.”
“He’s in town?” she asked, sounding surprised.
It seemed he wasn’t the only one who had been left out of the loop where she was concerned.
“I can’t imagine we would both fit on that bike of yours,” he said, thinking of her latest purchase that she insisted on driving everywhere. “Tell me, how on earth did you convince my brother to allow you to drive that thing? I can’t imagine he didn’t try to talk you out of it.”
Her smirk told him her answer was something he probably didn’t want to hear. “What are you doing back so early anyway? I thought you were in Shanghai this week?”
He could feel his annoyance reflected on his face. “I see my uncle has yet to curb his habit of telling you my business.”
“He doesn’t tell me everything,” she reassured him, “only what may concern your brother, so I know what to expect.”
Because the two of them, as Zachariah liked to say, were like oil and water most days.
It was a delicate balance ensuring that neither stepped on the others’ toes, though Uilleam lived to do it all the same.
“Ladies.”
They both turned as Skorpion entered the room, having to duck beneath the threshold to actually walk inside.
The past year had treated him well, not that Uilleam had expected otherwise, considering the man split his time between Los Angeles and Hawaii. As of late, he’d spent more time surfing and lounging on beaches than he did guerrilla work.
Black Swan Page 20
