None of this was making sense, and judging from his state, he didn’t seem very likely to tell her anything more ... unless she was able to confront him with enough of the truth that he couldn’t help but reveal it all.
It was just a matter of finding what she needed.
Which meant she would need to interview Claire McDonall as well.
Apparently, Claire McDonall was a hard woman to get in contact with.
Karina called not only her cell phone, but after a little digging and some not so legal research, she also tried the two different home phones listed for her.
As the call continued to ring out until the voicemail picked up again, Karina swallowed her disappointment down as she left a message, giving her name, her cell phone number, and then the best time to call back.
Striking out again, she tossed the phone aside and scribbled down a note to herself before she ripped the Post-it free and stuck it on the board she was still trying to make sense of.
For now, there were only fragments—little bits that didn’t make sense at first glance but would eventually reveal a big picture. Until then, she had to continue to put the clues together.
Sitting on the floor with her legs crossed, she reviewed it all while chewing on the top of her pen, that familiar itch starting to grow.
She knew why it was there, but nothing about any of this made sense. No matter how she tried to piece the puzzle together, one scribble or picture didn’t fit.
It just didn’t make sense.
The doorbell sounded before a knock came next.
At least she would have food to help her think while she looked over all of this. Food always helped where that was concerned.
Pulling a twenty-dollar bill from her purse, she twisted the locks just as another knock came.
“I’m right—”
Uilleam.
Strawberry-blond hair that looked a little more golden today. Suit that was a deep shade of navy.
Of course it was him.
She’d know him anywhere.
The left side of his mouth curled up in a mischievous grin as the bag containing her food dangled from his fingers. “Miss me?”
Karina wasn’t sure who moved first, whether she had taken that first involuntary step, or if he had deigned to cross the threshold himself, but once he was there, her lips found his.
She had missed this. Quiet stolen moments when it was just the pair of them.
She outlined the shape of his mouth, recommitting it all too memory, reminding herself how good it could be when they were together.
His free arm looped around her waist and yanked her to him, his need for her making the action rougher than he probably meant it to be.
Not that she minded—she wanted everything he would give her.
The kisses he gave her.
The spark that never faded where he was concerned. And she loved every second of it.
It felt as if she were finally home.
He might have been gone for only a little over a day, but that didn’t change the longing she had felt, and at least it was clear he had missed her too.
Uilleam drew back after a moment, his lips still hovering over hers as if he was fighting some internal war with himself.
“I need an answer.”
The fuzziness in her head began to disappear. “An answer to what?”
“Moving in with me.”
She blinked, wondering where that had come from. “You need an answer now?”
His thumb came up to stroke over the curve of her swollen lips. It was such a delicate action, his touch barely there, but the sensation of it all ripped right through her.
“I want to come home to this,” he said in return, his too intense gaze holding her enraptured. “Every night. Every day. You’re what I need.”
He kissed her again hard and fast, her heart hammering with the way he held her.
“Is that clear enough for you?” he asked.
Yes.
More than he would ever know.
“Yes,” she said after a heartbeat of breathless silence. “I’ll move in with you.”
She forgot all the reasons she shouldn’t and instead gave herself over to her own wants and desires. Sometimes, it wasn’t all about reason and ideal scenarios—sometimes it was just a matter of the heart.
He acknowledged those words with a smile that melted her heart. When he felt genuine happiness that wasn’t muddled by contempt, it lit up his entire face. She loved that about him.
Finally, now that he had gotten what he wanted, he guided her back into her apartment before shutting the door and locking it behind them. His gaze strayed to her laptop that was still sitting open on the coffee table, but he didn’t ask what she had been doing.
No, his mind seemed to be elsewhere.
But she wasn’t one to complain.
7
The Freelancer
He liked to watch her sleep.
To see the way she took that one final deep breath as her body relaxed into the bed. Her hand rested gently on the pillow beneath her cheek. He had never, as far as he could remember, seen anyone look as peaceful as she did in those hours.
And on the nights like tonight when his mind was spinning and he was far too wired to find sleep anytime soon, he found himself tracing the curves of her face when she wasn’t awake.
From her temple to the soft curve of her cheek, Uilleam refamiliarized himself with her as he waited until he was sure she wouldn’t wake up before he slipped out from beside her.
Because no matter how easy she made it to fall into bed with her and forget himself for a while, his quick glimpse of what she had been working on after he had come over.
A part of him wished he hadn’t noticed—that he didn’t care about the name he saw there—but it was too late to back away from that reality now.
And in his experience, it was always better to confront the truth head-on than to willingly believe in a lie.
Rubbing his tired eyes, Uilleam sat back with a sigh, wondering how his life had become so complicated. And to think, he’d thought his life was simple—that it was all merely about stumbling upon the right people at the right time and making the most out of it.
If his attention wasn’t split in a dozen different ways, he might have found it all comical really.
The biggest obstacle he faced was currently fast asleep in the room not even a few feet away from him, and while he usually dealt with such distractions swiftly and ensured they wouldn’t be a problem for long … this particular one softened him.
Changed him.
She made him hesitate and go against everything he had been taught.
Yes, Alexander would certainly call him weak for the way he allowed his feelings for Karina to override his own self-interests. Because unlike him, Alexander had never let his mother stand in the way of business that needed to be done.
She’d known her place, as he would say. She didn’t interfere or ask questions.
She had never, in all the years under their roof, stood up to the man and told him what he did was wrong or challenge him in any way.
Merely smiling, she was complacent, turning the other cheek more often than Uilleam could count—even when it came to protecting her own children against a monster.
But while he admired Karina’s strength—it fucking made him proud—he couldn’t afford for her to interfere now. Even before he had started with her, Paxton was merely a means to an end. He hadn’t been instrumental in what Uilleam needed to achieve.
Except now, everything he did had meaning behind it.
There was a reason, and he couldn’t afford for his carefully orchestrated plan to fail simply because of matters of the heart. It was why he had always believed in asking for forgiveness rather than permission.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his mobile and turned it around in his hands, forcing himself to do what he knew needed to be done despite how uneasy it made him. As he brought the phone up to his ea
r, he counted the seconds until the man on the other end answered.
“What can I do for you?”
“You once told me it was possible to erase a hard drive without being in the same room with it.”
Loud music tapered off in the background before the man came back over the line. “Sure, but I’d need the serial number and someone to open the virus.”
Uilleam drew in a deep breath, and glanced down at Karina’s laptop, knowing the information it held—knowing the secrets he was about to erase. It needed to be done.
And she’d never know.
Much later, after he had gotten lost in his work for hours and the sun had risen high above the clouds and brightened the otherwise freezing weather, Uilleam ventured from one of the many places he used as an office space in the city back to the hotel where he’d been staying.
Since he would be using other facilities very soon, there was no better time than now to sanitize the place of his presence. It went beyond removing whatever he might have left behind—though there was probably very little to begin with—the entire suite would be scrubbed of his fingerprints, hair, or anything else that could physically tie him to it.
And once he was done, he would have an old friend make sure that whatever digital recordings might have existed were erased as well.
It was better, he’d found, not to leave anything behind for someone to trace. Alexander had always been sloppy in that way, not caring if someone followed him—he’d welcome it sometimes.
He hadn’t minded the physical tolls that those attempts on his life did to him.
Uilleam, on the other hand, unfortunately knew all too well what it felt like to get shot—as well as getting hit nearly head-on in a car accident—and he had no intention of suffering through that again.
So if it meant he had to be a little more careful to ensure someone didn’t know where he was at any moment of the day, he would.
As he made it upstairs, removing his key from the elevator wall to ensure no one else could come up after him, he hesitated in the doorway, his hand hovering over the knob. Something was … off.
He couldn’t put his finger on what it was—it wasn’t as if the foyer light was off or a picture frame hung crooked, but something made him pause where he stood.
But as quick as he wanted to pull the gun he now kept on his person, his mind identified what was off about his surroundings, but it didn’t bring any measure of relief.
If anything, the answer made him scowl even more as he shoved the door open, both surprised and annoyed to find the man sitting far too comfortably in an armchair, his ankle resting on the opposite knee, and a newspaper flipped open to the obituaries.
“For a moment,” Uilleam said as he farther entered the room, hearing the door shut behind him, mindful of his cleaners currently moving about. “I’d hoped one of my enemies was lying in wait rather than you. At least that would have been vastly more entertaining.”
The man behind the newspaper scoffed as he lowered it, familiar gray-blue eyes staring back at him. “Must you always be so incredibly immature?”
Uilleam narrowed his eyes, glaring at him as he poured himself a drink. “Yes.”
His unwanted guest rolled his eyes even as he tossed the paper down on the table. “It’s good to see you too, brother.”
Kit Runehart.
Seven years older, two inches taller, and the only man in the entire world who could make Uilleam forget himself in a matter of seconds. No one could test his patience the way his brother could—if only because he was the last person Uilleam had ever allowed to get close to him.
Fucking mistake that was.
Even if their relationship had been inevitable, considering they were brothers—but of all the sperm, Uilleam still couldn’t for the life of him figure out why Kit had won.
“Is there a reason you’re inflicting your presence on me?” he asked, looking from the drink in his hands back to his brother’s.
It appeared the years had been kind to him. He had no new scars that Uilleam could see, and considering his previous profession, that was saying a lot.
No, he very much looked the same, though Kit had allowed his facial hair to grow in—Uilleam would be shaving his forthwith—and his hair was a shade longer in the front. Though he would hate to hear it, he had their mother’s hair.
“I thought you’d be happy to see me,” Kit said with a smile that said he knew the exact opposite. “After all that happened in Paris, you’d think a friendly face would be exactly what you needed.”
“We clearly have two vastly different opinions on the matter.”
It didn’t matter how or even if he insulted Kit, his brother ignored it all the same and continued as if he hadn’t spoken.
He hadn’t always been that way, though. In the early days, back when the first two years of Kit’s absence had ended with his sudden appearance at the estate one day, he’d taken it quite personally—never responding in a way that spoke of years training his emotions and making sure he never made a single misstep.
No, in those days, he was quick to lash back out—to cut with his words as effectively as Uilleam had and still did—but he had changed, as he liked to say.
Because they were vastly different people.
Uilleam was the first to break the silence when Kit didn’t respond. “What do you know about Paris, anyway?”
“How many times do I have to remind you that there is nothing you do that I won’t hear about in some capacity?”
“Because of your spies, you mean?”
Uilleam might have been in the midst of forming his team of mercenaries, but his brother had beaten him on this score. Though he was more than capable of defending himself—and even Uilleam would pray for the man who thought to try to kill him—he had also formed his own little organization.
One that was an off branch of the Lotus Society he had once belonged to.
The Wild Bunch, he thought his brother called them.
Assassins in training, he knew.
He’d never felt any inclination to actually meet them—he’d met enough assassins in his lifetime, thank you very much—and he had no intentions of crossing paths with them either.
“I’ve told you once and I’ll tell you again, I have no need to spy on you. Not when you make as much noise as you do. It’s nearly impossible not to know what you’re doing at any given time.”
“Yet time and again, people never see me coming until I have the proverbial knife at their throats.”
Kit shook his head. “They’re just not paying attention. After all, it’s not every day a man is christened the Kingmaker.”
Thoughts of Karina simmered in the back of his mind, cooling much of his annoyance at the change his afternoon had taken. If nothing else, she cooled his temperament.
“A fitting title, don’t you think?”
He’d never particularly enjoyed the sound of his name coming from anyone he hadn’t deemed worthy of it.
It felt too intimate—too much like they knew him.
When he had started this journey, of slowly making his way to the very top of the food chain, he had always wanted his name to invoke fear.
To make sure that anyone who even thought of him would understand exactly what it meant to be in his presence.
This was only the next step.
Because he had their admiration, he even had their respect, and now? Now he just needed their fear.
“But I’m not here about what you’re electing to call yourself nowadays.”
“No?” Uilleam asked, not correcting his assumption that his new title hadn’t been self-appointed. “Why are you here?”
“What’s her name?” Kit asked with a little tilt of his head. “Your companion in Paris, I mean. I’ve heard conflicting things.”
He could have told him he didn’t remember or had no idea who he was talking about—or just refuse the request entirely. It wouldn’t be the first time he claimed a name had escaped his memory, but Ki
t wasn’t like so many others.
He was no idiot, and his attention wouldn’t be so easily diverted.
The truth was his only resort. But while a part of him was annoyed that he was sharing something so personal, a part of him was also glad to be sharing. He was proud she was his. “Karina.”
Kit looked as if he had been expecting him to deflect or not to answer at all, but he still had a question at the ready. “Who is she to you?”
“Someone you don’t need to concern yourself with.”
That only managed to make his eyes widen, and now he looked curious. Which was the last thing anyone wanted Kit to be.
And on the heels of it came surprise. “Oh, she means something to you.”
Uilleam didn’t like the way he worded that—as if the concept was as so foreign that the reality of him caring about another individual was surprising. “She’s worth caring about.”
“Brilliant. I’d love to meet her.”
Over his rotting corpse. “Let’s not run her off.”
And it wouldn’t be because Kit didn’t know how to behave himself. His manners were impeccable to an almost obnoxious degree, but he also didn’t know how she would respond to the knowledge that his brother was an assassin.
Sometimes, when he wasn’t careful with what he said around her, he saw the way her face changed, how expression lost its curious note and turned to something else.
She didn’t know the full extent of what he did for a living, even beyond the deals he accepted, and as it were, he wasn’t sure if he would ever tell her.
Not if it meant she wouldn’t look at him as if the sun were rising at his back.
Secrets had always gotten him far, so one more wouldn’t exactly harm him.
“Considering I’ll be staying in the city for a spell, it wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
Uilleam forgot all about Karina and Kit potentially meeting as he focused on the rest of what he’d said. “You’re staying?”
“I’ll pretend you didn’t sound so horrified by the thought.”
“I thought you had business in Dubai?”
Or Sydney or even Uzbekistan.
White Rabbit Page 10
