15. Mac
15
Mac
She’s… non-negotiable.
We’re square.
She doesn’t know the half of it. Not only have I repeatedly put her in danger, listened to her private life, and spied on her without her knowledge, but now I’ve put a target on her back.
No, we’ll never be square. I’ll never make it up to her.
Truth be told, I like the idea of being in her debt, almost like it means she has to stick around so I can work on the deficit. And because I’m a real asshole, I also like that she assumed I meant she’s in my debt. It feels like a power balance I can use to my advantage. It feels like it proves she knows I can protect her.
She’s right. Can and will.
I take her bag from the trunk and place my free hand on her lower back to escort her to the front door. Something happened when we passed through the gate—her body language changed. She seems jumpier, and I don’t like it, so I want her in easy reach.
“This is your place?” she asks, wonder in her voice as her neck tilts back and she locks eyes on the crystal chandelier hanging between the dual staircases.
I almost wince, seeing the marble floor and gold accents for the first time again through her viewpoint. It’s so over-the-top, but I wasn’t the decorator. “It’s a rental.”
“Oh,” she says softly. “That’s… not better.”
“It was the only available short-term rental that wasn’t a one-bedroom apartment,” comes Wes’s dry, amused tone from around the corner. He walks into the entryway, laptop balanced on one forearm, and extends his hand to her without so much as a glance my way. “ I’m Wesley.”
She takes his hand and I realize suddenly that I’m on edge—tense about them meeting. Wesley is what girls might consider a bit of a heartthrob, with his British accent and aw-shucks demeanor coupled with a well-honed body. But her eyes only scan him briefly in curiosity and my hackles lower.
“Mac didn’t mention a roommate.”
“Then Dimitri will be an even bigger surprise,” Wes replies mildly and I want to throttle him because I’m pretty sure he meant it as a pun. I mean, there’s a reason we call him Big D. “May I take your coat?”
It’s on the tip of my tongue to stop her, but she’s already handing him her things, completely blithe, and leveling a look my way that is adorable, if accusatory. “Two roommates?”
It would take a practiced eye—or knowing him as well as I do—to see Wes pocket her phone as he makes a show of folding the corners of her jacket on a hanger, fluffing it, and placing the hanger delicately in the closet.
“Wonderful to meet you, Eleanor,” he says, striding towards one of the studies on this floor where I know he’s made his little cave.
“You, too… wait, did I tell him my name?” she asks, half to me and half to herself.
I curse inwardly. No, she didn’t. Which means that he already knows about her. Which means he probably has known about her since Thursday, when I not-so-successfully threw him off the trail. Fucking Wesley.
I leave her bag at the bottom of the stairs and usher her directly into the kitchen, partly because it’s where I normally head when I walk through the door and partly because it’s a good neutral spot to leave her while I eat crow and clean up my own mess. Her head bounces around, side to side, trying to take in the grandeur all at once. When we enter the kitchen, she stops dead, eyes locked on the high-end appliances.
“Can I get you anything? A glass of water?”
She hesitates and I see the inner struggle flitting across her expressive face. “Do you have anything stronger? I did help you hide a body today.”
“Um, I’ve got some beer and Wesley keeps bottles of champagne—”
“Stronger?”
“Dimitri’s got some sort of small batch, homemade potato vodka.”
She blows out a breath and turns watery blue eyes on me. “Think he’d share?” her voice is thin and she sniffles after she asks the question.
I balk. I didn’t realize how close she was to breaking down. Those damn hackles raise again and I’m an instant away from declaring how I’ll make sure she gets whatever she wants, whenever she wants. “Yeah. Sit over there, let me get you a glass.”
“Thanks,” she whispers, all but collapsing into the chair that sits at the head of the huge table.
I pull a lowball glass from the cabinet and Dimitri’s unmarked swing-top bottle out of the freezer. I bring her both, set them down on the table near her and crouch in front of her. If she were shorter, we’d be at eye level. But she’s not, so I have to tilt my head up a bit.
“James,” comes the deep, accented voice. “Come. Now.”
I glance up and Eleanor twists in her seat to see Dimitri’s massive form filling the doorway. She goes rigid and gasps.
Yeah, his size and mean, scarred face have that effect on people.
“I’ve got to go have a chat with my… roommates. Will you be okay here for a few minutes?”
Her eyes cut to me. “Will I?”
I tense. Her tone is part challenge, and as much as that fucking stirs my blood, it’s also part question. “Eleanor—”
“Just go. I’m… I’ll be fine.” With grim resolve and shaking hands, she reaches for the bottle of vodka. She pours a finger, pauses, and pours a second.
Okay, yeah, I’ll give her that one, but if she thinks she can get drunk and close me out, she’ll be learning her lesson when I get back. I’ve noticed she responds well to a firm hand, coupled with a reminder of our sexual chemistry, so I indulge. I stand, then lean in to invade her space. When she shifts away, I place a hand on each arm of her chair and corner her against the back of it.
“Be a good girl for me and stay here. I’ll be right back.”
Since she has nowhere to further back away, she can’t escape the quick kiss to her cheek.
As I stride out of the kitchen, I throw a look over my shoulder and see her gulp down at least a shot’s worth of vodka .
Wes repurposed the formal study into a symphony of electronic whirring and humming computer fans. The mahogany desk in the center of the room boasts several huge monitors and enough computing juice to keep him flush in bitcoin, if he cared to mine for it. He told me once it was boring.
He’s sitting at his desk and Dimitri walks over to stand behind him, arms folded. It’s like being sent to the principal’s office for fighting all over again. They both look up when I close the door behind me, but Wes is first to speak.
“What the hell are you doing here with Eleanor Wilson, 1226 Second Ave, Apartment 3B, 28 years old, blue eyes, 5 foot 9, line cook at Bistro Jacques, account balance of $407?”
And that’s why piquing his curiosity is so dangerous. He probably knew that within 15 minutes. “So, what, now we can’t even have girls over?” I aim for levity, but neither of them looks very impressed.
“Of course we cannot,” Dimitri snaps. “But even so, she is not a girl—she is the girl. From the night of the mission failure.”
I’m not sure if he put it together or Wes told him, but there’s no use denying it now. I sigh. “She is. I’ve been… keeping tabs on her.”
“What about her has you so ass over tit, Mac? Couldn’t be her credit score,” Wes says, pulling a face. “Oof, 525.”
“Now you’re showing off,” I grumble.
“No, I’m showing you how easy it was to find her. She can’t be here, you know that.”
My hands curl into fists because he’s saying all the things that I haven’t been letting myself think. “Her safety was compromised. Rossi sent a fixer after her.”
“Jesus Christ,” Wes mutters as Dimitri curses in Russian.
Dimitri looks up at me and I scowl at the look in his eye. “Don’t say it—”
“If Rossi has her information, her safety is a lost cause. She knows too much.”
“No.” I shake my head.
He taps the glass on the top of the desk emphatically with two fingers. “You brought her here. She has seen our faces, knows our names. So now she really knows too much, and that is your fault.”
“No!” I growl. “We can… I’ll keep her here until the job is done. ”
“And then what?” Dimitri scoffs. “You will let her go? What if she involves the police?”
“She won’t go to the cops. She could have already and she didn’t.”
“Even if that’s true,” Wes cuts in, and his reasonable tone is so fucking grating. “You know you can’t just cut her loose after the job is done. Not with what Rossi already knows about her.”
I shake my head and cross my arms. “Once we take them all out, the city will be empty—”
“Unless the supplier comes looking for anyone who knows information about their deaths. She is like a bright sign that says, ‘easy target.’ They will find her,” Dimitri points out harshly.
My stomach drops at the possibility that soft, compassionate, lovely Eleanor might end up in enemy hands. I can’t picture her being interrogated, being broken… I won’t go there. “She’d never betray me—us, I mean.”
“We’re not saying she’d want to, but… She has a family,” Wes said, spinning his laptop and showing me an old picture on her social media, holding a tiny baby, with the caption Aunt Eleanor, Reporting for Duty! “She’s got weaknesses for them to exploit.”
“So, what? You want me to just kill her?” Dimitri and Wes exchange a look and I uncross my arms and lean forward, preparing for battle. “If anyone so much as lays a hand on her, they lose that hand.”
“You cannot compromise this whole mission for—”
I cut Dimitri off with a swipe of my arm through the air. “I’m not discussing her termination. I’ll take her somewhere else if you want me to, but we all know it’ll be less secure. And the more time I have to spend keeping her safe, the less time I’ll have to cover your asses. You feel me?”
“Mac,” Wes tries, after exchanging a look with Dimitri that’s all betrayal and disappointment. He hides it, but he’s too expressive to do it well—he didn’t expect me to pick her over them. “Do you even know her? Who could she possibly be to you after, what, two weeks?”
“She’s… non-negotiable. I’ll take complete responsibility for her.”
Dimitri mutters something in Russian about security risks and Wes turns his laptop back around and starts clacking away. “Maybe there’s something I can do—wipe her from the internet, give her a new identity. We’ll have to relocate her after all this, obviously. And she will have to stop being Aunt Eleanor if she wants to keep her family safe.”
Relief floods my system, and I let my shoulders drop. It’s not ideal, maybe—most people would object to being picked up and moved somewhere far away against their will—but it’s better than the alternative. Alive is good. Alive means I can make sure she’s safe; it means I get to keep her…
But she’ll hate me. I’ll be the guy who ruined her life. The guy who made her leave her home, leave her job and friends, and made her cut ties with her family…
But she’ll be alive.
“Wipe her for now. Her family is far enough away that it’ll buy us some time.”
“Until the fixer Rossi had on her fails to report in,” Dimitri points out. “Tell me you at least took care of that.”
“I called in a cleaning crew on my way out. They’re probably there now,” I add, glancing at my watch. Then, I dig in my pocket and toss the contents onto the desk. “His phone and wallet.”
I’ve never been more glad to have my own fixer than I am now—nothing would have inspired less confidence in my ability to handle this than needing to ask one of them for help retrieving the body.
Wes sighs, reaching for the items I brought. “That’s something at least. It’ll buy us a few days if I can mimic his check ins.”
Dimitri is still grinding his jaw. “Wesley should be focusing on the drop so we are prepared, not protecting some girl. This is unacceptable, James, you have put us all at risk and broken our trust. If we fail—”
“When have we ever failed?”
“If we fail, this will be our last job,” Dimitri finishes. “I will not work with someone who puts a woman that he does not know before his team.”
Wesley’s head is down, looking through the wallet, but his eyebrows shoot up at the declaration. I second his shock, and an uncomfortable sort of helpless frustration curls my hands into fists. I fucking hate an ultimatum, but I suppose I just did the same thing .
I want to say he’s being unreasonable, but the truth is I know where he’s coming from. The work we do is too dangerous not to trust each other. “We won’t fail.”
“And you will be responsible for her. If she is staying here, she must be completely locked down. She may not go in or out, no phone, no internet, no nothing.”
I nod, swallowing the snark just like Dimitri is swallowing his pride. Of course I know how to lock someone down—I don’t need him telling me—but I also don’t want him thinking he needs to keep an eye on her or tell her himself.
“So, erm, speaking of focusing on the drop,” Wes interjects, cutting the tension, “I just got a ping off one of my spiders. The pickup is set—midnight next Sunday.”
“Good.” Dimitri clips out. He sighs, and scrubs a hand over his buzzed hair, scratching the scalp audibly. “We should review James’s surveillance information and decide what our plan will be.”
“Just let me get Eleanor sorted,” I say.
I expect him to bristle at the mention of her and any further delays because of her, and my anger rises in my throat, ready to defend. But he just nods again. “Yes. And I am too angry to be thinking clearly, so I will be using the punch-kick bag.”
“Punching bag,” Wes corrects.
“That is what I said. Meet back here in two hours.” Dimitri crosses the room and exits, leaving the door wide open to signal the meeting is officially over, according to him.
Wes eyes me, and I feel the urge to apologize to him in a way that Dimitri’s rage never prompts. “You know it’s not like that, right? I’m not choosing someone I barely know, I’m… I won’t let you guys down, but I can’t let her get hurt. It’s a really fucking hard place to be.”
“Oh, I get it now.”
“The fuck does that mean?”
He grins, then sits back in his chair and links his arms behind his head. “It means… she’s cute, Mac. ”
A pressure is lifted off my chest at his implied forgiveness. “Get fucked,” I say, but then register what I said. “But don’t even think about touching her, pipsqueak.”
His voice follows me to the door. “All I’m saying is, if you do end up getting us all killed, at least she was hot, yeah?”
I flip him the bird on my way out.