Chapter 17
Chapter Seventeen
Marley paused beside the empty desk just outside of Declan’s office. She’d expected to see Pierre sitting there with his back perfectly straight. With his eyes glinting at her from behind the frames of his glasses. A slightly angry glint. Maybe a judgy one.
She’d prepared for battle.
Only…
Pierre wasn’t there.
Declan strode past the empty desk and toward his office.
“Probably giving someone hell someplace.” He unlocked his door. “Pierre is good at that sort of thing. Come on inside.”
But Pierre’s computer was turned off. And the desk chair was in the exact position it had been in the previous night. She remembered because she’d glanced over to make sure Pierre was long gone when she and Declan had left. “I don’t think he’s been here yet today.”
Declan waved her inside. “Why are you obsessed with Pierre?”
She did not go inside his office. “Because your assistant strikes me as the type who is never late. I mean, the man was still here with you at 8 p.m. last night. Everything about Pierre screamed devoted-to-the-job.” And something just nagged at her. “Has he ever been late?” Because it was nearing ten a.m. Declan had just wanted to swing by the office to collect files to use in their investigation. Or at least, that had been his story.
They’d been trailed by Cade and Hunter all the way to the elevator on the lobby floor. The men had just stayed below because they’d been certain the building was secure.
But the nagging continued as she eyed the desk.
“Pierre is always on time.” Declan ambled away from his now open office. Frowned. “Maybe he’s sick?”
Maybe. And maybe… “He really did not like me yesterday.”
“Pierre doesn’t like many people. That’s why he’s good at his job. He’s great at telling people to fuck off when I’m not interested in talking with them.”
Yes, she could see where Pierre would excel in that department. But she could also see… “He’s your personal assistant.”
“Uh, yeah. The term he prefers is executive assistant.”
“He knows everything about you.”
“He knows my business. Not my personal life.”
She shook her head and crept toward the desk. Her hand slid along the back of the chair. “You are so wrong. There would have been a million conversations that he’d heard over the years. Conversations you thought were private. Assistants hear everything. They always know the best gossip. When I did the real estate bit, the agency’s owner had this insanely organized assistant who knew everything. And I mean everything. Where the owner took his mistress for dinner. How many times the guy had cheated on his wife. Where every single body was buried.” She reached for the top desk drawer. Pulled it open. Tried to, anyway. It was locked.
“You think Pierre knows where I bury bodies?” An amused rumble of laughter. Dark laughter. “Obviously, darling, you don’t get that when I bury bodies, no one finds them again.”
Her head whipped toward him. “Are you making a joke?” A bad one.
“Maybe I’m sharing all of my deep, dark secrets with you. You wanted to hear them, didn’t you?”
She wanted the truth.
He closed in on her. “Pierre nearly fainted when one of the interns tripped as she was—literally—running with scissors, and she cut a gouge in her hand. The man can’t stand the sight of blood. I hardly think he’s the type to set me up for a torture party.”
She tried another drawer. Locked, too. “Is he the type that would know you were looking at buying Abyss?”
He didn’t have a ready comeback.
Her head turned toward him. “Is he?” She’d bet that Pierre was. “Because a good assistant always knows where his boss is. In a company like yours, I bet he’s always aware of any potential acquisitions that you might make.” Her hand had pulled away from the locked drawers. “I bet he was aware of, say, when you flew down to Savannah to meet your brother.”
“He didn’t know why I went to Savannah. Only James knew about Royal. But…” His eyes flickered.
She edged closer to him. “That seems like a really big but… ”
“All this…” His hand gestured toward the empty desk. “Because my assistant happens to be late?”
She caught his hand. “All of this…” Her hold tightened on him. “Because you may have tried to sideline me, but I have actually still been working your case. I don’t have full access to your life, but I can still come up with suspicions. When I think of people who would know your travel schedule, who would know about your acquisitions, who would know where you would be and when…a couple of folks pop to mind for me. People at the top of my suspect list.” A slow exhale because he was not going to like what she had to say, but the words needed to be spoken. “People like James, of course.”
His expression tightened. “Of course. Let’s not overlook James.”
She wouldn’t dream of overlooking him. “He was with you in Augusta, after all. I doubt there are many moves you make that James isn’t aware of.”
“He didn’t know I was considering buying Abyss. I don’t normally discuss every acquisition with him. Besides, the place is a bit out of my normal wheelhouse.”
And that was interesting. “So why even consider it?”
“Maybe I was looking for something new.”
No emotion. So that meant he was probably seething inside. She got it. Hearing that the person closest to you was on her suspect list—the list of the people she thought might want Declan tortured and killed—would hurt. It would even hurt the man who liked to say he didn’t feel. I’m starting to think you feel too much, Declan. Not too little. “Cade and Hunter.”
He didn’t even blink.
“They are both extremely dangerous men. They are at the top of your security team. They each have full clearance to all aspects of your world. Again, they were with you in Augusta. They were supposed to protect you and yet, they weren’t there when you needed them.” Another fact that bothered her… “I was the one to spot the shooter in the alley. I would have thought one of them would do the job.” She liked the men. She did. But liking them didn’t mean that she couldn’t suspect them at the same time.
“So you don’t think the enemy is from the outside, huh?” They could have been talking about the weather because he seemed so very casual. “You think it’s an enemy within my inner circle. You think people close to me hate me enough to arrange my abduction and torture.”
“I think the mastermind knew your favorite drink. So that means it’s either someone close to you or the perp we’re after has been using someone close to you in order to gather intel about you. Intel like…where you’d be. What you drink. When you might be unprotected because you ditch guards and take off on your own because you need the occasional escape. To discover these details, you’d have to get access to someone who knew your habits incredibly well. Someone who knows you better than you know yourself.”
“No one knows me well.”
Not true. “I think Pierre knows your habits far better than you realize.” She wet her lips. Didn’t let go of him. “Last night, when I tried to get in to see you here, he told me that you never allowed visitors that weren’t on your schedule.”
“I don’t. I don’t like surprises.”
Yes, well, considering his last surprise had involved him waking up drugged in a basement, she could understand that. Truly. “I told him you shouldn’t be working so late. He told me that you never left before nine p.m. on a workday. And then he rattled off your schedule to me. Telling me when you normally arrive at work. When you leave for lunch. Telling me that I couldn’t interrupt you at all because you were a busy man with commitments that had to be met. Then, you know, he tried to actually block me with his body so I couldn’t get to you. At the time, I thought he was freakishly dedicated to his boss and his job.”
No response.
“And then I opened your door later and told him to leave. He was…he was on the phone with someone.” She played the scene in her mind again. “Cell phone. Not business. I could have sworn that he stared at me with some hot anger before the emotion vanished. I was planning to have a one-on-one chat with him today?—”
“You mean you were going to interrogate him.”
“I mean we were going to interrogate him.” One of the reasons she’d so readily agreed to visit Declan’s office. “But your faithful assistant isn’t here. His desk hasn’t been disturbed, and I suspect every single drawer that he has is locked.”
“Pierre doesn’t have the stomach to torture me.”
“No, but he may have the stomach to take a ton of cash and sell you out to someone who does want to torture you. Someone who needed an inside man in order to learn everything possible about you. Pierre has access to every part of your life. Don’t you think we need to investigate that? Investigate him?”
His square jaw hardened the tiniest bit.
And…
Ding.
Her head swiveled toward the elevator. She sucked in a breath because if this was Pierre, now would be the perfect time for her to grill him. Declan probably thought she was crazy to go off on this tangent, but she’d woken early this morning, and the more she’d considered the people closest to Declan, the more afraid she’d become.
Declan won’t give me a list of his enemies. Is that because…is it because he thinks the enemies are close? She felt like he was holding back on her. Keeping his secrets when he should have revealed everything, and that crap needed to stop. Correction, it was stopping.
If he was afraid she’d turn from him if she learned all the dark parts he kept hidden from the world, then the man was mistaken. She never intended to turn from Declan. Wasn’t even sure that she could.
The doors parted.
And Hunter McQueen strode out. “He’s not answering his door or his phone, boss.”
She let go of Declan’s hand. “What?”
“I took the liberty of breaking in his house, of course,” Hunter added with a shrug. “His place looks undisturbed. I don’t think he went home last night. My gut is telling me that the guy could be in the wind.”
She looked at Hunter and his stern, I-never-laugh-but-I-often-kill expression, then Marley peered at Declan and his unreadable face. “What is happening right now?”
Declan raised his brows. “I may have reached the same conclusion you did.”
“What?” Marley hated that she seemed to keep repeating the same, sharp exclamation.
“I haven’t been just sitting on my ass this past week either, sweetheart. I’ve been digging. Pulling financials. Ripping into the lives of those I should be able to trust. People like Pierre.”
Her heartbeat began to drum faster. “You suspect him, too? You suspect him and yet you still let me do that whole spiel about why he could be in involved in this mess?”
“Yes…and yes.”
“Declan,” she snapped.
“I wanted to see why you thought he might be guilty. Him, James, Cade…” He motioned toward a watchful Hunter. “Hunter.”
“Me, too?” Hunter grunted, but didn’t seem offended. “Yeah, I could torture the hell out of a person. I know all the tricks.” He sauntered forward, as if admitting he could torture someone for hours and wreck a person’s life was just a common confession. “Glad to know I made your suspect list, PI.”
She shook her head. Anger and confusion hummed through her. “You both think Pierre is guilty?”
“I found an offshore account the guy had yesterday,” Declan admitted. “Took some time, even for someone with my tech skills and connections.”
“Connections in all the wrong places,” Hunter murmured.
This was the chattiest she’d ever seen the former Ranger.
“He’d buried that account,” Declan added. “But I got access. And I saw the payments. Some that have been coming for a while now. One that hit the day after my abduction.”
Her breath shuddered out. “It’s him. Pierre’s involved.” She glanced back at the desk. “He knows you’re on to him. He’s run?” He must have. That was why he wasn’t at work. Why he hadn’t been at home when Hunter had checked that location.
And why does Declan trust Hunter so much? I thought he didn’t trust anyone. But he’d told Hunter about his suspicions regarding Pierre, and Hunter had gone out to track down the assistant.
The missing assistant. Who’d run and was hiding?—
“Or he’s just, you know, dead,” Declan concluded.
She jolted. “He was alive last night! Right here!” Her gaze flew back to him.
Declan stared straight at her.
Did you kill him, Declan? Her lips pressed together. She would not voice the question because, no, absolutely not, he hadn’t. Declan had been with her all evening.
“Doesn’t mean he’s still alive,” Declan said. “We’ve got a killer eliminating loose ends. If Pierre was another part of his hired help, he’d need to be eliminated, too.”
“Security doesn’t have a record of him leaving last night,” Hunter revealed. “Probably need to start a floor-by-floor search. Considering just how many floors there are in this beast of a building, that could take some time.”
They thought Pierre was dead. Dead somewhere in the building. Her breath huffed out. “This is the kind of crap I’m talking about,” she fumed. “I need to be in the damn loop, Declan. You can’t fuck me like your life depends on it one moment, and then keep from me the fact that you think your assistant is trying to kill you—and, oh, that he may be dead. That isn’t how relationships work.”
Declan glanced toward Hunter.
She did, too.
He grimaced. “This sounds like a you-two problem. I think I’m gonna go search the building for a dead assistant.”
Who said things like that? Searching for a dead assistant as if that was a run-of-the-mill activity?
Hunter swung away. “Oh, and by the way, you might want to check the news when you get a chance. Big story out of Georgia.”
“Hunter. ” A snarl from Declan.
Hunter tossed a wave over his shoulder before he reached for the elevator button. “Thought she had a right to know.” The doors opened. He glanced back. Stared at Marley. “No more monsters.”
Then he slipped into the elevator. The doors closed a moment later.
Of course, he would have access to get in and out of the private elevator and to go wherever he wanted in the building. “You trust him more than anyone else.” Something she had not picked up on before. In fact, if anything, she’d thought he was closer to Cade. But…
Hunter. Hunter is the one who shares Declan’s secrets.
A million thoughts seemed to crash and churn in her head. They think Pierre is dead. So…what? They believe the killer was here last night? That he got in the building with all of its security and took out the assistant? And what in the hell is happening in Georgia that I need to know about?
Then, beyond all that…
And why does Declan trust Hunter so much?
“We should talk in my office.” Declan turned away. “Hunter will let me know what he discovers. Be certain of that.”
“You mean if he turns up Pierre’s body, probably with a bullet in his head and his heart…” Like the two men who’d taken Declan. “He’ll notify you.”
“Yes, that’s exactly what I meant.”
She didn’t move. “You let me tell you all about my suspicions. For James. For Cade. For Hunter. For Pierre. And you said nothing. You acted like it was typical for him not to be here—like you weren’t alarmed at all when you already believed the man had betrayed you!”
“I was going to bring you in on the interrogation.”
“You were going to bring me in on—” Incensed, huffing, she broke off. Then she blasted past him, might have even elbowed him out of the way, as she stormed into his office. “What in the hell, Declan? What in the actual hell? This isn’t how a partnership works! This isn’t how a relationship works!”
The door closed quietly behind her. She spun around. He leaned back, letting his shoulders hit the door as he studied her.
“That’s the second time you’ve used the word ‘relationship,’” Declan noted, as if that was the most important part of their conversation. Spoiler, it was not. They were talking about a potential murder. More important, surely, than their relationship.
His arms crossed over his chest. “Does that mean you’ve accepted my proposal?”
Her eyes widened. She felt them widen. Or bulge. Whatever. “Declan!” Marley glanced around the massive office, frantic. Her gaze landed on the desk. The desk they’d been on when he took her for the first time. When she’d taken him.
Memories flooded through her.
“Is that a yes?”
“There was no proposal! There was you telling me, not asking. We’ve covered this, and you are not going to distract me.” Her hands were on her hips. She needed to get him focused. “Why isn’t Hunter a suspect?”
His eyes narrowed. Narrowed eyes did not equal an answer.
“Hunter is on my suspect list.” Marley was sure she’d covered this, too, with him. “Why isn’t he on yours? Why are you trusting him so much when I thought you weren’t a trusting person?”
Declan rolled one shoulder. “Because I hauled his ass out of an inferno once upon a time. The man has this ridiculous idea that he owes his life to me. And now, shit, I’m pretty sure he’d take a bullet for me in a heartbeat.”
Surprise had her hands falling from her hips.
“The guy is pretty jealous that you beat him to the whole taking-a-bullet-for-me punch, by the way. The last seven years, he’s been jonesing to even the score for me. I carried him out. Bastard was mad at first, when I pushed his ass to do therapy to get back on his feet, but after he stopped raging at me, Hunter realized he was still alive. And he could go after the SOBs who’d set the trap for him.” A pause. “He did go after them, by the way. I helped.”
A chill skated down her spine. “Declan.” Marley wet her lips. “What happened in Georgia?”
His brows lowered. “Someone else is on my suspect list.”
“Who?” Who had she missed? “If you would share your list of enemies then we could get on the same page and?—”
“Your police detective.”
“Okay, first, he is not my police detective.” Obviously, he was talking about Parker. And Parker was not hers in any way, shape or form.
“He’s in Chicago right now.”
That news had her edging back a step. “Since when?”
“Yesterday morning. I might have put eyes on him before we flew to Chicago.”
She thought there was no might about it. “You had someone tailing him for that long because…” Because the only thing that made sense was… “You already suspected him before we left Augusta? Declan, you have got to stop being a secretive bastard and tell me things! Don’t you get that? You have to tell me things because we are?—”
“In a relationship,” he finished.
She sniffed. “I don’t fuck men that I’m not in relationships with. So, yes, we are in a relationship. And that means you tell me everything. Good, bad, and all the messy stuff in between.”
“You don’t want to know the parts in between. Or the bad things.”
She did, even as her stomach twisted. “Why do you think I can’t handle bad things?”
He closed the distance between them. His hand reached up, and his knuckles skimmed over her cheek. “I don’t want any bad part of me to ever touch you.”
Her head turned. Her lips brushed over his hand.
Declan pulled his hand back. Fisted his fingers. “But there is so much bad in me.”
“Stop seeing yourself that way. You are not bad.”
A faint smile twisted his lips.
The twisting in her gut got worse. “Is your brother a suspect? In your mind, could Royal be guilty? I mean, he arrives in town and then your assistant—who we both believe was sharing intel with the perp after you—suddenly vanishes. That’s a coincidence.” But, apparently, Parker is in town, too.
At this point, who isn’t in Chicago?
“Why would Royal want me dead?”
She could think of several million—possibly billion—reasons. “A long-lost brother might want your fortune.”
“He doesn’t give a shit about that. Besides, I’ve already set up the legal paperwork so that he gets half of everything no matter what. Whether he wants it or not, it’s going to him. Once the paperwork is signed and the deal is sealed, he can give all the cash to charity if he wants. But it’s going to him.” A vow.
That news sent a little hum through her. “Did your assistant know that you were giving your brother half of everything?”
“Yes.”
“And Royal…you met him over a dead body, so I’m taking that to mean the man clearly has no qualms about killing.”
“Royal killed to protect himself and the woman he loved. I completely understand that action.” A roll of one shoulder. “Someone hurts you, and you can damn well bet they’ll be getting a swift trip to hell.”
That was dark. And intense. And very Declan. Maybe he thought the words would give her pause. They did not. “Someone hurts you,” she returned, not missing a beat at all, “and I’ll make sure they take that same trip.”
He blinked. Then… “Marley…”
She waited for him to say something profound. Maybe emotional. A woman could hope.
His phone rang. He yanked it from the pocket of his fancy suit coat. A dark blue one today. Declan stared at the phone’s screen. “It’s Hunter.” His fingers swiped over the surface. Turned the call on speaker.
Great. She wanted to hear this.
“Do you have news?” Declan demanded by way of greeting.
“Oh, I have news—I’ve got a fucking body.”
She sucked in a breath.
“Bullet to the brain and bullet to the heart. Looks like our perp is definitely in town and eliminating loose ends.”
“Where are you?” Declan wanted to know.
Marley would like to know that important fact, too.
“Conference room. Floor right below you. Pierre is spread out on the table. Guess he had one final, big meeting, huh?”
Was that supposed to be funny? It wasn’t.
“Security cameras are offline for this floor,” Hunter added. His voice had roughened. “That’s how I knew to look on this level first. Apparently, security glitched a lot last night. Back on in most places pretty quickly, but not where I found Pierre.” A rough exhale. “The bastard was right here. For all we know, he could have left some surprises around the building. Be damn careful. More than that…how about you get your ass out? As in… now .” A sharp order.
Declan grabbed Marley’s hand. He hauled her toward the door. Yanked it open.
“Surprises?” Fear flashed through her. “Where would he put surprises?” What kind of surprises? But a terrible, numbing thought rushed through her. A bomb. He could have left a bomb in the building. Then waited for Declan to appear so that he could set it off. Her gaze jerked to Pierre’s desk. To the locked drawers. Why had the drawers been locked? “Declan?”
He slammed his hand into the elevator button. Hauled her in front of him. Shielded her with his body. “Hurry, fucking hurry,” he bit out.
“Declan…” Marley stared into his eyes. “You think it’s a bomb?”
The elevator dinged.
She jerked.
Declan shoved her into the elevator. He rushed in after her. His hand slammed into the control panel. He used his access code and then he grabbed her and curled his body against hers. He held her tightly in his arms. Tight as can be.
“Declan, I love you,” she whispered.
And then she heard the terrible boom that seemed to echo all around her.