Then again, didn’t the Kingmaker do the same?
“It looks to me like you already have a hacker of your own,” Winter said as she finished the last of her algorithm and sent it through, barely resisting the urge to tap her fingers along the top of her desk as it worked. “What would you need me for?”
“Your task won’t aid me in my endeavors, if that’s what you’re thinking. Well ...” She paused and shrugged. “Not entirely.”
“Then what do you want from me?” Winter asked, trying not to appear as impatient as she felt.
By now, the code should have already run its course and produced results—or, at the very least, a command box should have opened on one of the monitors that would allow her to take back control of her own system.
Instead, she was still locked out.
“It’s not what I need. It’s what the mercenaries will.”
She might have been distracted before, but Belladonna now had her full attention. “What does that mean?”
“As Uilleam’s hacker, you’re privy to more of the inner workings of the Den than the others. You have access where the others don’t.”
“Is that what this is about? You want me to give you information, and you give me something in return?”
That seemed to be the gist of what Belladonna was doing. Calavera had hinted at it from her interactions with the woman, and Ada had come into the Den in part because she had information on Belladonna, and in part because Belladonna had, in a way, effectively saved her life.
But, if that was what Belladonna intended, she didn’t say as much. “The contracts the mercenaries were ordered to sign have a very specific language in them. I’m sure you already know that, considering you’ve read over them a time or two.”
“How would you know that?”
“Because you grew up in this life,” she said matter-of-factly. “And for a girl as gifted as you are, I quite imagine the Den was everything you had ever dreamed of. It would make sense that you looked into things so you would know everything you were in for should you have joined.”
She wasn’t wrong.
Winter had pored over everything for weeks when she’d considered going behind Synek’s back and trying to wrestle a contract out of the Kingmaker, but while the man had been willing to utilize her services when it came to the Den, he hadn’t let her become one of his mercenaries.
Because of Synek, he’d said.
Now, she couldn’t help but wonder if that had been the right choice.
“Why do you want me to look at the contracts?” Winter asked, trying to hide her smile of triumph when she saw that her hack had finally gone through and she was inside Belladonna’s system.
Now, she couldn’t afford to sort through it all to find whatever was useful, so she just pulled as much as she absolutely could while she had her on the phone.
“It would be in the mercenaries’ best interest to find a way to break their contracts. Soon, I’d imagine.”
“Bullshit,” Winter said, returning her gaze to the woman, momentarily distracted. “There’s no way the Kingmaker would have left anything like that in there.”
They were ironclad. Foolproof.
The contract was the contract, and the only way to walk away from the Den was for it to expire.
“Then perhaps you should read it again, and again, and once more until you find it because if you don’t, I’m afraid everything I have done will be moot.”
Why did she make it sound as if everything she was doing was for them and not to serve her own selfish agenda? What was that agenda?
“Do take care, Winter,” Belladonna said, a soft smile now on her face. “I trust we’ll meet again.”
Before she could get a word out, Belladonna ended the call and severed the connection, not that it mattered. Winter had enough data pulled that she would have to spend the next few days sorting through it all, but as much as she wanted to dig through it and answer questions the Kingmaker wouldn’t, she hesitated.
It wasn’t because Belladonna asked her to that she logged into her personal server and brought up the contract, finding the one Red had signed years ago. It was because she needed to know for herself.
For him, even.
Because he wouldn’t stop until he had fulfilled his promise to Iris, and he wasn’t someone who would mind the lines.
For that reason only, she told herself as she started on the first page and read on.
Not because there was a sudden fear in her heart for what the future would bring.
Chapter 22
If this was the last time, she wanted to make it count.
For once, it was her taking his face in her hands, going up on the tips of her toes to reach his lips. She wanted to remember the shape of his lips, the taste of his skin. The way it never took any effort at all to love kissing him.
But when she finally pulled away, albeit reluctantly, he still held her.
He stroked his thumb over her jaw. “Don’t ask me to let you go.”
Iris couldn’t even as she knew she should. She couldn’t ask him to do it any more than she would be able to do it for him. Instead, she said, “Wait for me to come back.”
It was a big ask—a gamble if nothing more.
In the end, she didn’t know how this night and morning would go. She had no guarantee that what she anticipated would be what would ultimately unfold.
It all came down to one of her father’s lessons that she had no choice but to hope for.
The good guys would win, and the bad guys would lose, but what lingered in the middle ... that was what she worried about the most.
Synek kissed her again, one last brutal press of his lips before he released her. She could see the way his hands tightened and released. He was physically restraining himself from keeping hold of her.
That made it all the harder for her to walk away and leave the room.
And she knew when she returned, he would be gone again.
Almost over, she reminded herself for the hundredth time. It was almost over.
Iris walked away from the building with her heart in her throat, hoping she was making the right decision. Foolishly, she had let hope infect her, flickering through her entire being to the point that she knew, she knew, if anything went wrong, she wouldn’t recover from it.
She knew that if Synek got his hands on her again, he wasn’t going to let her go, and worse, there would be someone gunning for her, and that someone was unlike the Wraiths. He wouldn’t just stop at a little torture. He wouldn’t just forgive and forget.
No, there was no time for second-guessing.
She had chosen her path, and now she just needed to stick to it.
Iris hadn’t been walking for more than a few minutes before twin headlights lit up the night around her, momentarily blinding until she lifted her hand to shield the light.
All she saw was white before she knew who it was.
“Protecting your investment?” Iris asked dryly, folding her hands across her chest as she approached Belladonna and the Bentley she was sitting in.
Driving, actually.
Iris had only ever seen her being driven, making her wonder where the man in the black hat was.
“I have no worries about whether you’ll go through with it, Iris.”
“Then why are you here?”
Her smile was complacent. “My reasons are my own. Get in.”
Not really seeing what choice she had—even though no one was there to force her—Iris stepped off the curb and opened the passenger door, pausing to glance up at Synek’s building. She wondered if he was looking at her now—whether he could see her slipping into the car that smelled faintly of spring flowers.
She considered riding in silence and letting the minutes tick by until she was back at her hotel, but just as it did whenever she was in the woman’s presence, her curiosity took over. “Canina didn’t seem surprised when Syn and I paid her a visit.”
“I imagine she wouldn’t, consi
dering she worked for me.”
“So it wasn’t his wife who leaked the affair to the news. That was you?” Iris asked.
“More of a mutual effort and decision, I would say.”
Of course. Of course, the wife was in on it.
She thought about the interviews Mrs. Spader had done since the news broke. How, though her tears had been all too real, something had been rather empty about the way she spoke. At first, Iris had believed it was because the woman was going through a lot.
Now, she knew better.
“You must have been truly desperate to get revenge against the Kingmaker to do all this,” Iris commented, turning farther in the seat to better see her. “Why do you hate him so much?”
Belladonna laughed, but the sound was hollow. “I quite imagine this would all be a lot easier if I did hate him.”
“If you don’t, then …”
But before she could finish, she had a sudden thought.
Belladonna didn’t have to hate the Kingmaker to ruin him. She was, in many ways, not the one to do it.
Sure, she pulled the strings and dangled the bait, but in the end, she hadn’t done anything at all.
It would be Iris. The other mercenaries.
They were the ones who harbored resentment toward the man, and Iris couldn’t help but wonder if that too was by design?
“Why?” Iris asked, unable to manage anything more.
But as soon as the question was out of her mouth, they pulled in front of her hotel. She expected Belladonna to send her on her way, but instead, she sat for a long time staring out the window.
“I believed once that love conquered all. He made me believe that. So much so that I gave up everything that was me for him. I didn’t care about any of that anyway. Not the family business, not my name, none of it. I love ... loved him,” she hastily corrected, a quiver in her voice. “Uilleam … he forgot, I think, that power is finite. That it is something gained and lost, but love … love is more than that. Once upon a time, he taught me what love was, how beautiful it could be. And after I found out I was …” She cut herself off there, her breath catching.
Iris blinked, looking at her, and found tears in the woman’s eyes.
Genuine sorrow that couldn’t be faked.
“Uilleam forgot what love was in his quest to be who he is now. I only tend to remind him because I want him to feel what I felt all these years ago.” Belladonna blew out a breath, seeming to rein in her emotions. “But that’s ancient history. Let’s focus on tomorrow. I’ll be sending a man to retrieve you at the designated time. Be ready.”
The conversation was over.
Iris nodded before opening the door and stepping out. “One last question.”
“Yes?” Belladonna called, looking in her direction.
“Will it hurt?”
Another small smile. “I have it on very good authority that Siris is an excellent shot, but it won’t hurt for long.”
Iris nodded once and stepped away to close the door.
There was no turning back now.
There was just the end.
24 hours later …
Snow might have fallen in thick flakes, but nothing could make this day seem any colder than where he sat now.
Synek sat in silence, staring down at his hands. No matter how he tried to calm himself, how he needed to trust what little Iris had told him before she disappeared again, this time, he hadn’t been able to find her as easily. As far as Winter could find, Iris might as well have dropped off the face of the earth.
Today wasn’t like others inside the four walls of the Den safe house. They weren’t smiling and laughing—joking about what was to come.
There was a clear divide in the room—the side where Synek and the other mercenaries were sitting, silent, all lost in their own thoughts. Then there was the Wild Bunch across the room, arms folded across their chests.
They spoke in hushed tones, never loud enough for anyone to hear other than the lot of them, not that Synek gave a shit.
He was waiting.
But for what, he didn’t know. It wasn’t as if Iris had given him anything to go on last night, only assurances and promises that this divide between them would be over within twenty-four hours.
By his calculation, he only had another twenty minutes, but each second was ticking by with excruciating slowness, and he could feel his nerves worsening as time went on.
Tensions were already thick in the air, and it was a miracle Red hadn’t exploded yet, considering the way his leg had been bouncing up and down since the moment they were on Den property.
“Good of you to join us,” the Kingmaker called as he entered the room, his gaze going from Red to Celt, before lingering on the latter. “Both of you.”
It would be hard to miss the bruises on the man’s face that were still in various stages of healing.
“It’s the job,” Red said, his voice flat.
Synek didn’t say anything at all as he glanced at his watch again, then the window, and finally the television playing in the background. A news report that he didn’t care very much to see.
“We’re here to address the Belladonna problem.”
“About that,” Synek said, leaning forward. “Sounds more like a you problem, doesn’t it? The way I see it, she only wants you, yeah?”
“I’ll elect to ignore that.”
Celt mumbled something under his breath, but Synek was unable to hear him.
But as quickly as he wasn’t interested in what the news was reporting, he suddenly was as he saw an all-too-familiar brownstone in the background, then a small crowd of reporters. Except it was the people in the background he cared about.
People who shouldn’t have been there.
Silence fell over the room as each of them turned to face the television together, all eyes glued to the woman standing in the center of the frame, her black pantsuit both stylish and appropriate, considering the woman was in mourning.
Dorothy Spader might have played the grieving wife well, but Synek saw beneath the glamour of it all. He saw what she was trying to do.
The role she was about to step into.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen,” she said calmly, but only just so, her voice wavering slightly at the end as if this was hard for her.
And she did her very best to look the part, to look as if what she was doing pained her, but Synek saw the brief flash in her eyes, the pleasure of it—the way she couldn’t quite keep her expression straight.
“For twenty years, I believed my husband was a good man. That he loved this country as much as he loved me, but I have realized over the last couple of weeks that my husband was not the man I thought he was.” Dorothy drew in a rattling breath before continuing. “My husband was involved in various illegal activities, and I have turned all evidence of this over to the local police as of this morning. And with me, I have a witness to my husband’s crimes.”
Questions were shouted, hungry reporters trying to get her to tell them more, but Dorothy turned, gesturing for the woman standing to the right of her to step forward.
Iris.
Her face scrubbed clean of makeup, she was wearing a dress that made her look years younger. She looked like a victim.
She wasn’t tucked away in the background, just out of range of the camera. She was there, in the very center. It wasn’t about the widow standing next to her, or the other woman whose face was only shown in profile though the white dress she wore made it abundantly clear who she was.
Watching her, he saw it unfold in his mind’s eye. Everything that led up to this moment—how it was and how they all were connected. He didn’t know the why, though he suspected there were only two people in the entire world who knew the reason behind all that had transpired.
But whatever the Kingmaker’s reason for the Den’s beginning, Belladonna was the reason for its end.
Iris cleared her throat, the microphone still in front of her face, but instead of continuing,
her gaze lifted to the cameras, or beyond them, Synek wasn’t sure. There was something in her expression that he didn’t like.
As if she was resigned to what was happening around her.
But as curious as Synek found her expression, he wasn’t the only one.
The Kingmaker was standing now, his narrowed gaze on the television, disbelief warring with outrage.
“For eight years, this young woman and her family has suffered!” Dorothy said passionately, and if Synek had been anyone else, he would have eaten it right up.
He might have believed that she didn’t know a thing about what her husband was doing—that she wasn’t in league with the woman in white behind her.
“But not just because of my husband,” she went on, suddenly holding up a thumb drive.
A drive that Synek distinctly remembered the Jackal having taken from the war room.
He dropped his feet to the floor.
He knew then what they were about to do. He knew.
“My husband’s partner is a man whose name he wouldn’t ever share with me. A man who I’m sure is responsible for his death! A man they call the Kingmaker. And should anything happen to me, then know that it is he—”
A sharp crack sounded before screams started and the camera shook.
But not before Synek saw Iris lurch, a pained expression on her beautiful face before she flew backward. That was all he could see.
All he could feel as the distant memory of a bullet lodging into his chest flared inside him. He understood now, what she had been hinting at before—the promise she had made.
But he also saw what others might not have.
The way she had tensed. Where her gaze had gone.
As if she had been expecting the bullet.
The news cut out, a new camera panning toward one of the frazzled looking anchors. It was no longer about the explosive confession tape, or even the governor’s suspected widow.
It was about a man known only as the Kingmaker.
The man in question threw the remote he held against the screen so hard that it cracked, leaving a black spot spidering along the image, but it didn’t matter. One could still hear.
Iris. (Den of Mercenaries Book 7) Page 25
