4. September 9, 2022
Demon
Tense did not even describe the silent ride in the elevator after the team meeting with Haskell Dawson and all of Cherry’s revelations.
Everyone was more than a little stunned right now, to say the least. He had a feeling all of them were spinning with the implications of what Cherry had just told them about her father, the Salieri, and how possibly everything they’d done these past five years was interconnected to those two things.
Did she have any clue what she’d potentially and inadvertently unleashed?
When the elevator doors opened on the fifth floor, his hand still clutching her bicep, Demon propelled Cherry off the carriage and toward his apartment door. She tried to be quiet about it, but he was sure people in the elevator heard their first few sentences.
Cherry hissed at him. “I can walk, you know.”
“I don’t want you trying to escape this long-overdue conversation.”
“I have nothing to say to you.”
He stopped them in front of his door and swung her around to face him. “That’s fine because I have a lot to say to you, and I hate being interrupted.”
He keyed in his door code.
“I want to go to my apartment,” she fumed.
“It’s good to want things.”
“You’re an asshole!”
“And you’re being a bitch right now, so we’re even.”
He saw and felt her flinch at his verbal slap, and he immediately felt bad about what he’d said, but he squashed it down.
Being soft on her right now would not fix things.
With one hand, he opened the door, and with the other, he gave her a gentle shove over the threshold.
He followed behind her, and once the door was closed, he keyed in his code so that it wouldn’t open again without it.
“You know I know everyone’s code, right?” she asked. Obviously, she’d gathered her wits about her and got back into combat mode.
“Yes, I am aware. However, the three seconds it would take you to enter the code and wait for it to clear would be enough time for me to catch you and keep you from leaving. Now park your arse. On the sofa, in a chair, in my bed, if you fecking like, but sit.”
Her arms folded over her chest, Cherry pivoted on her heel and moved to the terrace window instead.
Internally, he sighed. She always did the opposite of what he asked.
Well, what he told her to do, if he was going to be truthful.
Both of them seemed to jump straight to pissed off whenever they spoke to each other lately.
He had no doubts it was about to get worse.
Despite his anger at her, which was really fear, Demon admired her silhouette from where he stood in the center of his apartment entryway.
She was fecking fire, and he loved everything about her.
Every inch of her five-foot-ten frame in those stiletto heels.
Every twitch of her tight ass in those pencil skirts.
Every strand of her long, fire-engine-red hair.
Every stare, warm or cold, from her sea-gray eyes.
Every word, whether it was sarcastic, teasing, or straightforward.
Every thought in her machinelike brain. She was the whole fecking package and, right now, gloriously pissed, although he wasn’t sure if it was at him or herself.
Either way, he wanted her more than he’d ever wanted her before.
With a loud sigh, he removed his sunglasses from the top of his head and tossed them on the breakfast bar. “Damn it, Cherry. What the hell am I going to do with you?”
“Excuse me?” The glare warned him he was in dangerous territory, but it wasn’t as if he hadn’t already known that.
“What were you thinking? Keeping these kinds of secrets gets people killed. It nearly did today.”
“It’s my life, Demon!”
“No, it wasn’t! Jaysus, for someone who’s so organized, you sure don’t think straight sometimes.
You didn’t just put yourself at risk. You put Haskell at risk, all the guys, and Scheherazade when we came to bail you out, not to mention dozens of innocent people in that café.
And that’s just today’s antics! What’s the matter with you? ”
Instinctively, she managed enough control to defend herself. “I can’t be responsible for every decision every sick mother?—”
“I didn’t say you were or that you should even think you could be.
What I’m saying, whether you want to hear it, whether it hurts your feelings, is that you knowingly kept us in the dark to manipulate us to a particular result.
That’s not cool. I can almost guarantee that had you told us up front, we all would have jumped to help you.
” Closing his eyes, he hung his head, put a hand to his hip, and with the other, he pinched the bridge of his nose.
After taking a steadying breath, he looked back up at her.
“Whether it was today, tomorrow, next week, next year, whatever. It doesn’t matter.
Circumstances forced your hand today. When were you going to let us in on this shite? ”
“When I was damn good and ready! You don’t tell me what to do, Demon.
I tell you! God may be the boss, but I’m the chess master.
I set up the board! I make the strategy!
And I move the pieces! Me! Tribe is my company.
Its purpose is my own!” Her hands slapped down against her sides.
“You say you can almost guarantee you all would have agreed to help me without knowing all the details? Then what’s the goddamn difference, Demon?
If you would have agreed to help me with full knowledge, why does it matter if you knew or not?
The result would be the same as it is now. ”
“The difference is that people’s lives are at stake!
I get playing things close, Cherry, but you can’t work in the shadows like this and hope that we’ll come to the solution you want!
You’re good, but what you’re hoping for would take a feckin’ miracle.
We’re human beings. We work as a team, and over the years, we’ve developed a sort of hive mentality, but we also function independently.
Those skills are important too. By not sharing information you had, you stripped us of the ability to inject our personal knowledge and strengths.
Don’t bury them because they don’t fit some plan you made in your head. ”
Her fists were clenching and unclenching, and he was glad that he wasn’t a home decor person because otherwise, anything not nailed down would sail at his head.
“I need your ‘hive’ to find my father, dead or alive. If he’s dead, then I need you to find his killers. If I allow you to work on an independent trajectory, you develop personal agendas, and then what happens if your needs don’t match mine anymore?”
“Do you even hear yourself? ‘Your needs don’t match mine’? TB was right. This isn’t about justice. We’ve become your tools for revenge. Only it’s the revenge of a teenage girl who’s lost her daddy.”
“Asshole!”
“Yes, we established that earlier. But who’s the bigger asshole right now? Me or you?”
“What the hell are you talking about?” she screeched.
“You’ve been putting us at unnecessary risk for six years.
” He took a step in her direction, then froze again when her eyes narrowed.
He cooled things down with logic so she would understand.
“Look. While that came out wrong, the fact remains. Every project has to have a purpose, right? And every project we’ve been out on, we’ve been going in with only a partial understanding of what the hell it is we’ve been doing. ”
“How dare you accuse me of blindsiding you! Is that really what you think?”
How could he get through to her? How could he make her understand that she’d been playing with people’s lives?
“We may have had the short-term understanding. Steal the diamonds. Kill the drug lord. Rescue the kid. But we never knew the big picture, Cherry, or that there even was one! You can’t play a chess game this large and not sacrifice some pieces along the way. ”
“I know that!”
“Well, did the pieces themselves know they were part of the game?”
She threw her hands in the air in frustration. “What are you talking about? You’re not making any sense.”
He moved two steps closer to her. “Did you inform the pieces in your chess match with the Salieri what the dangers were? Did you let them choose to be a part of your game? Did they understand what they might sacrifice? Or did you decide what you were willing to sacrifice, and woe be those who were lost in the cross fire?”
She sputtered in rage, but he knew that when she calmed down, she would see that it was raging at herself. Not him. Not the team. Not even the men who’d kidnapped her father and likely murdered him. A rage of impotence at the whole situation.
The next question he asked was going to be a killing blow, but he couldn’t hold it back.
It was going to hurt her, but it needed to be said, and he’d rather she directed her rage at him than the team at large.
Based on how Waters had reacted in the conference room, it was clear he had made the connection between Cherry’s tale and the chain of events she’d set in motion.
Events that may not have needed to end as they had .
His voice was sad and soft because the damage he was about to inflict was irreparable. “Did Sarah make the choice to be a pawn in your game?” He watched her body rear back as if from a physical blow and her face blanch.
“How dare you?” Her voice was shaking with anger and sorrow and fear. “Sarah was my best friend. What happened to her was not my fault! The kidnapping of Sarah to retaliate against Waters for stopping the shipment of trafficking victims was unacceptable.”