Chapter 41 Roman
ROMAN
The lights came on, and I turned to find a familiar face staring at me, but that was the only thing about the woman across from me I recognised.
My pulse hammered as adrenaline flooded my body, my relief from seeing her alive replaced by anger and confusion about why she was standing there like nothing was wrong.
She was dressed differently. Head to toe in black: a long-sleeved, high-necked, tight top, black leggings, heavy boots, her hair over her shoulders in braids, a thin brown harness resting over her shoulders and under her breasts.
In fact, every inch of her body was covered, even down to the leather gloves on her hands.
Gloved hands that were currently aiming a gun in my direction.
I’d been around enough trained killers recently to know when someone was familiar and comfortable with a gun, and Hana didn’t show an ounce of fear. “What the fuck, Hana? I thought you’d been kidnapped.”
She shrugged. “Kind of the point.” Her hands held steady, her voice calm when she spoke.
“So what… you sent me that picture? You faked being kidnapped?”
She didn’t reply, tilting her head like she was assessing me, but for what, I wasn’t sure.
“Hana.” I said her name with a little more intensity, and her facade cracked for a second, her eyes fluttering closed, her submissive side rising to the surface before she obviously pushed it back down and glared in my direction.
“I needed to make sure you’d come, and I couldn’t explain why.”
I held my hands up, aware that she held all the power here… and the deadly weapon. “Put the gun down, Hana.” I softened my voice, but my instruction was clear. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t really shoot me, and that confidence carried in my tone. “I’m here now. What do you need?”
She didn’t even pause. “You,” she replied matter-of-factly.
Despite the gun trained on me, anger replaced my other emotions. “You had me, remember. I told you I loved you, and you basically told me to fuck off, so pretending to have been kidnapped just to get me here feels a little excessive.”
Silence fell over the room as we orbited each other in this weird standoff—me not knowing what the hell was going on, her obviously not ready to explain why she was doing this.
“You said I could trust you,” she said eventually.
“And I meant it, but can I trust you? I mean, I thought I knew you, and then you started vanishing, and now this… what the hell’s going on, Hana? And put the gun down before you shoot me by accident.”
She huffed, lowering the gun and pushing it behind her back into the waistband of her trousers.
I was still a little thrown that it was within reachable distance, but at least I wasn’t staring down its barrel anymore, and my racing heart started to slow to a normal rate again.
I sharpened my focus, glancing around the room.
“You’re here alone?” I tried to start piecing together what was going on.
She nodded.
“I didn’t know how else to get you here,” she offered as if we were still talking about the photo and the text, while my brain had moved on to what she wanted me for and why we were alone in this murder cabin, because that was what this place felt like: sparse, remote… no one would hear me scream out here.
I pushed my fingers through my hair and tried not to think about that in too much detail. “Asked… like a normal person,” I bit back.
“Ro.” My name was soft on her lips, and it went straight to my cock, but I hated that I didn’t know if it was genuine or if she was playing me. Anger tasted like poison on my tongue as the enormity of all this settled and my bravado grew.
“Either tell me what’s going on, or I walk out of here and leave you to whatever fucked up situation this is.”
She didn’t speak for a while, so I made good on my promise and started to move to the door with purpose, but she had no intention of letting me leave, and the loud click of the gun’s safety being removed made that clear.
“Sit,” she commanded with a tone I’d never heard from her before.
I turned, jolting when I found her closer than expected, the gun pointed at my face. I recoiled, trying to put some space between us, but Hana wasn’t having any of it, sticking next to me as my feet continued carrying me backwards towards the door.
My earlier belief that she wouldn’t hurt me was long gone.
“You wouldn’t shoot me…” Even I could hear the fear in my voice, which worsened because she didn’t reply; she simply raised her eyebrow in a silent challenge, one I wasn’t willing to argue with.
Instead, I stepped to the side, placing my bag on the tired-looking oval table and pulling out a chair, all without breaking eye contact with Hana.
“There, that wasn’t hard, was it?” she said as I sat. The brat I was used to was back, but now the dynamic in our relationship had totally shifted, and I didn’t like it one bit.
I rolled my lips between my teeth, not sure how to respond, but I didn’t have to wait too long before she put the gun back in her waistband and took a phone off the side, placing it down in front of me.
“You’re into surveillance, right?”
I acted dumb, leaving her question hanging in the air, but Hana obviously had no patience for games today, as she quickly added, “Let me rephrase that. I know you’re into surveillance.
I broke into your office that night I ran while you were sleeping.
I saw the screens. No one needs a setup like that unless they’re into something hardcore. ”
I held my breath, not sure if I’d left the cameras for her place running that night since she was with me, but when she didn’t tell me she’d seen her home and business on those large screens, I guessed I hadn’t. Then it hit me. “You broke into my office.”
She didn’t look fazed by her admission, while I was shocked to the core.
“It’s a party trick,” she replied calmly.
“Like wielding a gun?”
Her pointed glare gave the impression that she was disappointed in how little faith I had in her, as if the lock picking and the gun were only the tip of the iceberg, and dread settled in my gut like water freezing.
“There’s a message on there. I need you to find where it came from.”
I pointed to the phone, and she nodded her permission.
It didn’t have a password on it, so a swipe of my thumb and it opened.
I clicked through to the messages, and seconds later, bile burnt the back of my throat, and tears threatened to spill over.
I swallowed a couple of deep breaths, trying to shake off the image of Tony I was currently staring at.
I’d not seen him since the day he was arrested, so the graphic image of him lying in a pool of his own blood, looking like he died in agony, was not what I was expecting when she handed me the phone. I read the message that followed it.
“You don’t know who sent you this?” I asked, hoping Hana couldn’t hear the pain in my voice.
“No, but I know the person in the picture. That’s my brother, Tony. I guess someone took that from inside the prison he was in. The person who killed him.”
I saw her shaking her head in my peripheral vision as I kept my eyes glued in front of me, pretending I was looking at the image when I was doing anything but.
To keep myself from losing my shit, I pulled my laptop from my bag and opened it, connecting to our secure server.
A message popped up instantly from Wren.
W: Working late?
Me: Something like that. You still working?
W: Aren’t we always?!?
Me: Can you find me the owner of a number?
W: Silly question. Send it over, and we’ll work our magic. Who’s it for?
Me: A friend.
I typed in the number the messages had come from and clicked send.
“There you go. Just a matter of waiting now. Won’t take long.”
Hana took out the gun, and my heart rate shot up again, making me wonder how many times she could shock me like this before I died of a heart attack. But instead of pointing it at me, she placed it on the table, facing it away from us as she sat next to me.
“Thank you.” It was the first time she sounded like the Hana I was used to.
“So, how long have you been picking locks?” I asked, trying to sound casual, but failing miserably.
“Since I was ten.”
I paused, deciding I was in a dream and about to wake up because, what the hell? “I’m sorry, what? I thought you said ten.”
“I did.” She nodded, taking off one glove and placing it down in front of her before repeating the process with the other, while I sat there in shock.
“You’ve been picking locks since you were ten years old?”
She sighed as if this was a tedious conversation. “Picking locks, breaking and entering, stealing cars, pickpocketing… then it escalated to stealing more high-value items when I was about twelve.”
“Hana…” I said with a gasp. “Why?”
“No one suspects the kid. That’s what my stepfather used to say. He liked money, and it turned out I was small and really good at stealing things, so he used to hire me out to gangs, groups of people who wanted to steal things…”
My mouth hung open, unable to find a way to respond.
She shuffled in her seat, and the urge to pull her into my lap and comfort her was real.
If this was true… if she’d been a thief from a young age…
I had to bite the inside of my cheek while I tried to regulate my emotions, unsure if I was angry on her behalf or angry that I’d not known any of this. How could I have not known?
“The gun… well, that’s new. I can shoot, don’t get me wrong. In fact, I have perfect aim most of the time, but they aren’t my preferred choice of weapon.”
I pushed my hand to my chest, where my heart beat against my ribs like it was trying to break free. Hana sounded like we were discussing her favourite type of pasta, not what weapons we preferred, but the sick fucker in me decided it had to ask, “So what is your choice… if you had to pick?”
Her lips curled into a half smile. “Not to get caught, so I don’t need one.”