“I’ve done plenty of jobs alone,” Ronan said. “In fact, you may remember that until recently that’s how I worked most of the time.”
“This isn’t like the other times,” Nick said. His arms were crossed over his chest, mimicking Ronan’s posture when he’d first laid eyes on the watch meant for Julia. “Security is heavy, and you’re not going in for a quiet kill and a quick exit. If Elise is there, you may need help creating a distraction to get to her. If you find her, you may need help convincing her to go with you.”
“I can handle myself,” Julia said quietly.
He turned toward her, still leaning against the wall. There was no triumph in her gaze, only the same resignation that had begun leaking through his veins while Nick and Declan made their case.
“She knows how to use a weapon.” Ronan cursed the day he’d told Nick that Julia had been packing when they went to Dubai, cursed the day Julia had told Nick and Declan over beers that her grandfather had taught her and Elise to shoot when they were teenagers. “She might not be an expert, but you could do worse for backup.”
“It’s not about that.” Ronan knew how Julia prided herself on being an asset instead of a burden.
He could hardly look at her when she came to stand next to him. Doing so made him want to lock her away, keep her from anything that might hurt her, even if it meant she hated him for it.
He knew it wasn’t an option even as the thought crossed his mind. She might forgive him for doing it, but she would never forgive him for leaving Elise behind again, and Nick and Declan were right: the rescue mission was a two-person job.
“I know I’m not as experienced as Nick or Dec,” she said. “I’ll take orders from you, I promise.”
It was a statement, not a plea, and he knew he’d lost.
14
Julia stood in front of the full-length mirror and studied her reflection. The dress was beautiful, a brilliant shade of purple silk structured into a column and suspended from one shoulder, but it wasn’t right.
She met the eyes of the dark-haired woman in the mirror and tried to find a way to say as much without offending her.
“Not quite right, is it?” Joanne Fuller asked.
Julia shook her head. “I’m sorry. I’m being difficult.”
Joanne made a sound of dismissal. “Don’t be ridiculous, darling. An evening gown should feel like a new lover. If you’re not enamored, it’s not right, and it must be right. Off you go then.”
Julia unzipped the gown, relieved Joanne understood, although Julia wouldn’t have thought to put it so eloquently.
Then again, everything about Joanne Fuller was eloquent. An American living in Florence so long her English had developed a slight accent, Joanne had in every way become a fashionable Italian signora, from her luscious dark hair to her always precise red lipstick to the tailored clothing that hugged her hourglass figure in all the right places.
According to Ronan, Joanne was kept on retainer for those occasions when Nick or Declan needed a woman’s touch in Italy. Julia had been jealous until Ronan confided he’d never before availed himself of Joanne’s services.
She handed the purple gown to Joanne and stood in her underwear, waiting as Joanne surveyed the rack of clothing that had been wheeled into the apartment by two uniformed men at the start of the afternoon.
She’d been shy at first — she wasn’t used to standing around half-undressed with anyone but her sister — but she’d had no choice but to set modesty aside as Joanne presented her with gown after gown, prodding Julia’s flesh as she arranged Julia’s body in each selection.
She was trying not to think too hard about the reason for the gown, the fact that in four days she and Ronan would have to lie their way into Manifest’s monthly party, Ronan as Milos Černík and Julia under the guise of the heiress named Anuska Král.
They had no idea what kind of verification process would be required to enter the party, whether the chips Clay had coded with their identifying data would be enough or whether they’d have to submit to a visual verification or questions about their past. To be safe, Julia had cultivated a Czech accent, dyed her hair a lighter shade of blond, and she planned to wear blue contacts the night of the party to better match Anuska’s appearance. She’d also studied Anuska’s background, memorizing her parents’ names and the names of the schools she’d attended as a child.
Ronan had done the same with the details of Milos Černík’s identity, although he had a leg up on Julia, both because he already knew something about Černík and because their basic stats — height, weight, hair color — were close enough to be considered the same.
“Ah, I think I have it.” Joanne held out a voluminous gown in crushed indigo velvet, embroidered flowers adorning the skirt and bodice in a riot of color. “It’s ready-to-wear, but quite fabulous.”
“I don’t know…” Julia usually preferred simple lines and monochromatic colors. This looked like an ad she’d once seen for Dolce and Gabbana featuring sensuous Italian women with heavily made-up faces sitting at an outdoor cafe.
Joanne met her eyes. “Will you trust me?”
Julia took the dress with a nod and turned toward the mirror.
It slipped over her head like a breeze, settling as softly as a cloud on her body. Joanne stepped behind her to work the zipper and Julia saw that while the skirt was soft and full, the bodice, held up by the thinnest of straps, was actually quite fitted, the intricate flowers on the bodice making her torso look almost like a butterfly.
It was exquisite.
Joanne pulled back Julia’s hair. “I think there’s just enough blue in the flowers to bring out the color in the contacts you’ll be wearing.” Julia registered surprise that Joanne knew about the contacts. She wondered how much the older woman knew about MIS’s business. “And this is very Italian, dear. You’ll stand out because you’re stunning, of course, but you’ll also look like you belong, and I think that will be important.”
The dress fit her like a dream, like the dream of a woman she might have been, a woman she might still be if that’s what she wanted.
Julia met Joanne’s eyes in the mirror. “I think you’re right.”
Joanne smiled. “Lovely. Now let’s see what we have in the way of shoes.”
Julia’s eyes remained on the mirror as Joanne turned to a series of boxes lining the floor. She wondered if Ronan would like the dress, then chided herself for being ridiculous.
They hadn’t discussed the fact that she was going to the party with him, not privately, but she knew he was livid about it. She’d heard him fighting with Nick and Declan after she’d gone to bed, arguing that they should have come to him first before mentioning it in front of her.
“You would have found a way to argue the point,” Nick had said.
“Damn right,” Ronan had growled.
Julia had had to resist the urge to break up the argument, to remind Ronan that she was a grown woman who didn’t want or need to be sheltered from the details of her sister’s rescue. The fight was between Ronan and his brothers. It wasn’t her business.
She was going, which was all she cared about. She wasn’t going to risk letting Elise slip through her fingers again, and she wanted to be the first person her sister saw when she knew someone had finally come for her.
“Let’s try these,” Joanne said, holding out a pair of strappy black heels somewhere between Fashion Week and Stevie Nicks circa 1977.
Julia bent to put them on her feet, then stood to look at her reflection. There was something of Elise staring back at her in the elegant dress, the lighter hair catching the late afternoon sun slanting through the apartment’s big windows.
She thought again of Ronan, of the weighty silences that had been between them in the days since he’d accepted she would attend the Manifest party at his side. She knew he wasn’t angry at her — at the situation maybe, at Nick and Declan, but not at her.
Still, the tension between them, diffused only when she was
naked in his arms, scared her. She couldn’t help wondering if this was the beginning of the end, one more thing in a line of things that would slowly undo them until Elise was finally brought home and they had no reason to be together at all.
15
Ronan sat in the back of the limo and watched the outskirts of Florence pass by on the other side of the window. He was hyperaware of Julia next to him, the scent of her perfume taunting him like a dream to which he was too eager to return.
She looked magnificent, although to his mind no more magnificent than she looked in jeans and bare feet, or in the oversized boxer shorts she sometimes wore around the house when she wore no makeup and left her hair loose and messy around her face or pulled up into a haphazard knot at the top of her head.
Still, the dress highlighted the perfection of her breasts, the toned length of her arms, and the slender line of her neck. Her hair was twisted not into a casual knot, but slicked back into an almost severe twist, and her features looked more pronounced thanks to the makeup artist Joanne Fuller had sent over to help Julia prepare for the party.
She looked like a slightly different version of herself, and when he’d searched her eyes for the amber fire that sometimes sparked there, he’d found only a clear and unsettling shade of blue.
She was still his Julia, he knew that, knew it from the way she came to life in his arms at night, the way she allowed him to occupy her body even if a dark corner of her soul was still off-limits, but he was eager to be done with this night. Eager to bring Elise home and prove to Julia that his love for her would be unchanged, to cook for her and take Chief for walks on the beach and sleep late on Sundays.
He would do it as long as it took to earn her trust. He would do it forever.
She reached for his hand and he looked over at her across the darkness in the backseat of the limo, driven by Nick, who would be forced to leave Ronan and Julia at the gate of the villa in the city’s Firenze district in keeping with Manifest protocol.
No one was allowed on the grounds without a chip, something Braden Kane had passed along from his contact on the FVEY task force.
“It will be okay,” she said.
“I know.” It was something he didn’t doubt. He knew it would be okay because someone would hurt Julia over his dead body, and he had a habit of not turning up dead even when the odds were against him.
The minute he’d accepted that Julia would be attending the party, getting her out alive had become his prime objective. It wasn’t something he could tell her. She had to think he would risk everything to save Elise, but there was no way in hell he would let anything happen to Julia. If that meant hauling her out of the place the way he had in Dubai, so be it.
If it meant she hated him, so be it.
He turned his thoughts to the villa that was host to the party. Even with Braden Kane’s sources, they’d been able to gain precious little information about the security they could expect inside.
It wasn’t unheard of. Ronan had been in more than one situation with too little information. But he hadn’t had Julia with him in those situations. Now the lack of information felt like the weakness it was, the potential consequences all too real.
He could assume there would be heavy security at the gate where their chips would be scanned for the first time and again at the front door to the villa. After that, it was anybody’s guess.
The one thing they did have was a decent grasp on the layout of the villa. A search through the digital building archives for the city had given Clay the basics, which included six exits, eight balconies, and a series of tunnels that had once been used in the operation of an onsite vineyard.
The tunnels were a last resort. They hadn’t been used in over a hundred years, but with all the doors and balconies, Ronan was fairly certain they wouldn’t have to make an exit underground.
They’d gone over the layout more times than Ronan could count, he and Julia agreeing on three meeting places in the event that they got separated. They would try first for the sunroom at the back of the house. If anything prevented them from meeting there, they would head for the kitchen, which also happened to have a set of doors leading to the back terrace.
If the first two options failed, they would meet at the entrance to the tunnels.
He’d quizzed Julia incessantly on the details of her identity as Anuska Král. She’d passed with flying colors, delivering each lie so convincingly he’d begun to wonder where she’d honed the ability.
The limo slowed down as they approached a line of brake lights, other limos stopped as they made their way to the gate of the villa.
The privacy window rolled down with an electric hum.
“You ready for this?” Nick asked from the driver’s seat.
“Ready,” Julia said.
Ronan wished there was more fear in her voice, that there was some evidence that she understood the danger of the situation in which they would soon find themselves. There was too much they didn’t know, too much that could go wrong, and they weren’t even sure Elise would be among the girls being brought to Manifest’s showcase.
He had the urge to tell Nick to turn around, to take Julia straight to the airport and force her onto the plane back to Boston, to throw up his hands and tell John Taylor it had been a mistake to take the job, that they couldn’t help him.
But it was too late for that. For one thing, he couldn’t turn his back on Elise Berenger, couldn’t turn his back on the other girls like her now that he had a chance of saving even some of them.
For another, he could no longer deny that he was deeply and hopelessly in love with Julia — and there would be no future with Julia without the safe return of her sister.
16
Julia squeezed Ronan’s hand as the limo’s back door was opened by one of the guards standing outside the gate to the villa. She forced a bored expression onto her face — she’d studied the few pictures of Anuska Král she could find online and found that this was her most often utilized expression — and stepped from the limo with as much dismissive entitlement as she could muster.
“Identification,” the guard said in accented English. He held a tablet in one hand, a tiny digital wand in the other.
She was aware of Ronan stepping from the limo behind her as she offered the guard her wrist, the diamond watch band glittering in the lights from the cars still in line.
She looked around, trying to look vaguely impatient while he brought the wand up against the watch. Her heart hammered in her chest, the gun she’d strapped under the skirt of her dress burning against her thigh.
A beep sounded from the tablet and the guard looked from its display to Julia’s face, then back again.
He stepped back and waved her through. She was momentarily relieved she hadn’t had to answer any questions, then remembered that she wasn’t done yet: there would be a check at the front door of the villa, assuming they made it that far.
She stepped through the iron gate and waited on a cobblestone path while Ronan proffered his own wrist. Not wanting to seem concerned, she glanced around, watching as another guest — a woman with striking dark hair and eyes so light gray they appeared almost silver — offered the back of her neck to one of the guard’s wands.
Did she have the chip embedded in her skin?
Julia tried to get a better look without being too obvious and thought she caught sight of a tattoo that might have been the Manifest symbol at the woman’s hairline. A moment later the guard cross-checked a picture on his tablet against the face of the woman in front of him.
She returned her gaze to Ronan as the first guard waved him through.
He held out his arm, and Julia tried to hide the trembling of her hand as she took it. It was only the first test, but they’d passed, which meant they were one step closer to Elise.
The air was soft and fragrant, the walkway leading to the villa lined with trees strung with white lights. It might have been a black-tie party for celebrities or wealthy philanthropists,
and Julia’s stomach turned as she thought about everything they’d learned about Manifest: trafficking, arms dealing to terrorist groups, even black market organ harvesting.
She had to get Elise away from these people, and it had to be tonight. If Braden Kane was right — and Ronan said his sources were as good as they got — the girls would soon be auctioned.
After that, finding them would be next to impossible.
She reconsidered their decision not to use a comms system to allow for communication between Nick, Declan, Clay, and her and Ronan. Deep down she knew it had been the right choice — they couldn’t risk being caught with it, especially since so much of the security inside the villa was unknown — but she still hated the fact that she and Ronan were on their own.
It felt way too much like walking into a lion’s den.
“Easy,” Ronan said next to her.
She hadn’t realized that she’d tightened her grip on his arm. “I’m okay.”
“Good. Stay close,” he said as they approached the front door to the villa.
They took their place in line behind a handful of other people waiting to enter the villa. She let her gaze skim over the faces around her, not wanting to give anyone reason to make eye contact.
She wasn’t under any illusions: she didn’t look enough like Anuska Král to fool anyone who knew the woman well. But the people around her didn’t know she was posing as the Czech heiress. Only the guards armed with tablets would know that, and presumably they weren’t well acquainted with any of the guests. They would do exactly what the guard at the gate did — look at her picture on the tablet and compare it to Julia standing in front of them.
She looked enough like Anuska Král to pass under those circumstances, something she’d proven at the gate. Her best bet with everyone else was to avoid in-depth conversation, keep a low profile.
There was only one person in front of them in the line for the door, a diminutive man in a tux that looked vaguely familiar to Julia, his bald head shining under the lights at the front of the house.
Murphy's Wrath (Murphy's Law Book 2) Page 7
