Chapter 21
Everybody had a breaking point. Will had seen it hit people before—sometimes in a life-or-death situation, but sometimes it was as simple as seeing something awful on television, or even just having an unexpected conversation.
He’d gone through it himself when he was separated from his brother and sister as a kid, and come close more than once on the job.
But he’d never seen someone riven quite the same way as Cole.
He just sat and stared at Lilith’s desk, his head bobbing a bit like it was almost too heavy to hold up.
His bad leg was carefully straightened in front of him, hands gripping his crutches too tight.
He might’ve looked all right to anyone else, but Will knew him better than that now.
This was Cole driven past what he could take.
This was a man who was experiencing a betrayal so intense, he didn’t know where to put everything he was feeling.
Shit, he probably didn’t know what he was feeling right now, other than in a lot of pain thanks to his fucking knee.
That bitch. Lilith had orchestrated all of this chaos.
She might not have pulled any triggers herself but she’d fomented it all—fed the beast so she could make her escape.
Will had the feeling that giving in to the urge to badmouth her right now wasn’t the best play, though.
He needed to take care of Cole, and that couldn’t happen here.
He laid a hand on Cole’s shoulder. “We should go. She’s not here, an’ she’s not coming back anytime soon from the look of things. C’mon.” He put on a smile. “I bet your Courbet’s missing you.”
“Lilith pointed me toward that Courbet, you know.” Cole’s voice was almost normal, but Will wasn’t fooled. His eyes weren’t quite focusing, vaguely trailing across the desk like if he just stared a little longer, the view might change.
“I didn’t know that.”
“She’s an excellent art historian. She can make any subject interesting, even French Realism. Even cubism.” Cole almost smiled for a second there, Will could tell. “I stole a lot of things on her recommendation. She liked how that particular Courbet accentuated the colors in the living room.”
The colors in… “She knows about that safehouse?” Will asked, his heart sinking.
“She knows about most of the ones I have here in the city,” Cole said, finally turning to Will. His eyes were lively with emotion again, but not the kind Will wanted to see. “I trusted her.”
And she’d broken that trust. It had to hurt, to burn; Cole wasn’t the sort of person who worked well with others in the first place.
He didn’t let people in easily and always preferred to work alone.
It was one of the only things Will had known about him before the Puffin disaster, other than his regrettable accuracy at throwing things and his ability to curse like a sailor where their ex was involved.
And now, he’d lost one of the few people he’d let know him in the worst way possible.
If Will wasn’t really fucking careful right now, Cole would start to pull away, and Will might never be able to reel him back again. “We need to leave the city.”
Cole sighed and shut his eyes. “We need to leave the state, but I guarantee you the watch on the airports has doubled.”
“We can take a train.”
“Same for all the train stations.”
Well, this was getting depressing. “We’ll drive, then. We can—”
“Lilith has been inside my apartment.”
Will sat back, recognizing that this was a moment where he needed to listen, not speak.
“I brought her there once to consult on a job,” Cole went on, “and it turned into a standing dinner every third Friday of the month. I always kept surveillance on her while she was there, but I could have missed something.” I already did, the bitter twist of his mouth said.
“I don’t know how much I can trust my own home, much less the information I stored there.
My vehicles, every safehouse I’ve equipped, the boat… ”
“You own a boat, too?”
Cole broke eye contact. “It’s the family’s yacht, actually.”
Of course your family has a yacht. And now Cole was spiraling, so it was time for Will to get ahead of things before they tore his lover apart.
He did it the only way he knew how. “I reckon we need to meet with Alders, then.”
Ah, there, that was the sharp look he’d been waiting for. The one that said Are you fucking crazy?
“Are you insane?”
Close enough.
“We need a face-to-face if we’re going to get him to call off his dogs,” Will explained.
“What can we possibly say that will convince him to do that?”
“The truth,” Will replied. “We tell him that Marcus and Lilith were working together, that she’s taken off with the real deal, and that we have no clue where she is now. That should reorient him on Marcus, who he’s definitely got by the balls at this point, and get him off our case.”
Cole shook his head. “It won’t be enough.
People like Alders only care about results.
His entire art collection was amassed for the sole purpose of making him the center of attention whenever he wants to throw a party.
He’s a venture capitalist, for fuck’s sake.
He’s made billions of dollars acquiring things in order to slice them up and profit until all that’s left behind is a corpse. ”
“Jeez, that got dark fast,” Will muttered.
“It’s a dark world. You know that. There’s nothing to stop Alders from hurting us or worse once we’re in his hands just because he can, because he wants to feel big after being made to feel small.
He’s immune to blackmail because he has nothing and no one he cares about other than himself and his reputation, and he’s too good at keeping a low personal profile to take advantage of other than by stealing from him. ”
Cole grabbed one of Will’s hands, holding on so hard it actually hurt. “You can run. You’re good at blending in, you don’t need to rely on crutches to get around. You could get out of the city right now.”
Ah ha, no. Leaving Cole alone wasn’t in the cards. “’Fraid not, honeybee,” he said with a shrug. “I’m like a burr—I cling something fierce.”
Cole looked somewhere between surprised and resigned. “You’re not making a smart choice.”
“Haven’t you heard?” Will grinned. “I get by on looks and charm, not brains. Everybody says so.”
“And what would your brother say if he knew you were risking your life when you didn’t have to?”
Oof. Cole was pulling out the big guns. Luckily, Will was prepared for this particular shot across the bow.
“He’d say to never leave a friend behind,” Will said.
“Sure, he’d yell his head off at me for doing something dangerous, but he’d never actually expect me to abandon someone I care about.
” Especially not someone Davey knew Will was interested in, which he did.
“Now stop frettin’ about my family and start thinkin’ about yours instead. ”
Cole narrowed his eyes. “Why?”
“Because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that nobody says no to your mother.” Even when they want to. “If you can get her to set up a meeting between us and Alders, he’ll be on his best behavior.”
“I think you’re overestimating just how frightening Mother is.”
Will scoffed. “Are you kidding? I’m underestimating it, if anything. You’re just used to her. Like dosing yourself with iocane powder until you build up a resistance.”
Cole sighed. “Of course you like that movie.”
“Hey, you’re the one who recognized the line,” Will said. “And it’s iconic, thank you very much. Now, can you do this without your mother losing her shit?”
“Mother doesn’t ‘lose her shit.’” Will could practically see the quote marks. “She verbally flays you until you wish you could just die and get it over with.”
“Aw, don’t worry, baby.” Will slung an arm around Cole’s shoulders and pressed an obnoxiously loud kiss to the side of his head. “You ain’t doing it by yourself. I’ll be right there in the trenches with you.”
Cole turned and looked at him for a long, silent moment.
Will felt like he was getting pretty good at reading the man’s expressions at this point, but not this one.
Whatever was happening in Cole’s head, whatever the odds he was weighing and how he felt about them, he didn’t let it show.
When he finally nodded, Will felt like he was on the verge of gasping with relief.
“All right,” Cole said. “I’ll see what she can do.”
What Lucille Dalton could do, apparently, was get them a meeting with Alders in a private tea room in one of the largest and most expensive hotels in Manhattan.
Will had to borrow a jacket just to get through the front door—it was that fancy.
He also got to listen, secondhand, to Cole sit through a verbal beatdown the likes of which left him grateful that he didn’t have a mother of his own.
Jesus Christ, that woman was intolerable beyond the first dozen words, and even that felt generous.
That said, they were surrounded by people of all sorts, plenty of cameras, and enough wealth that not even Harry James Alders could throw his weight around too heavily.
Which was good, because the moment they stepped into the room, a pair of large men who smelled faintly of smoke came over and frisked both of them.
They even went so far as to inspect the crutches themselves before propelling Cole and Will over to the table where Alders was sitting.
There was no tea on the table, no tiny food or delicate china. There was just a single bottle of whiskey with a rather striking black and white label, and three glasses. One of them was full. The other two were turned upside down.
“Gentlemen.” Alders gestured to the chairs on their side of the table. “Sit.”