18. hunter #2
I loosened my tie and walked farther into the room. “Start talking.”
Echo glanced at the elevator doors before looking back at me. “He contacted me. He wanted to talk, so I told him where I was and that you were all at dinner. He came up here willingly, we talked for a while, then he decided he was done talking and tried to leave.”
I looked at the blood smeared several feet away from the chair and then at the reddish streak across the elevator door.
“And somewhere between him trying to leave and us coming home, you decided the appropriate response was to turn my lounge into a fucking interrogation room. I told you before I left not to touch him, Echo.”
“You told me not to go after him. I didn’t.
” She hopped down from the table and tossed the ruined towel into the pile she had started near the sink.
“He came to me because apparently spending every day wondering when I’m going to kill him has finally fucked with his head enough that he wanted to explain himself. ”
“That distinction is not going to save this conversation.” I loosened my tie the rest of the way and pulled it free, too tired to keep feeling the knot against my throat. “You knew exactly what I meant when I told you to leave him alone.”
“I knew what you said, and I was listening until he started telling me he betrayed me to save me.” Echo’s mouth tightened as she looked toward the chair. “Then he tried to run. I put his head into your elevator, and after that the night developed organically.”
I stared at her until she had the decency to look mildly aware that the wording was insane.
The anger was there, but exhaustion kept flattening it before I could do much with it.
I had spent hours listening to my father dissect Aldrich, learned that he had once tried to absorb a favor operation at Westbridge that sounded increasingly familiar, and come home to find Echo covered in the blood of the man at the center of it.
Somewhere in the middle of deciding which part of that deserved my attention first, I lost the energy to lecture her about obedience like either of us still believed she was going to become good at it.
“You know what? Fuck it.” I walked past her to the bar, poured two fingers of whiskey, and drank half before setting the glass down.
“I’m tired of having the same argument where I tell you not to do something, you find a technically different way to do exactly that thing, and then I spend twenty minutes explaining intent to someone who understands intent perfectly well. ”
Echo watched me from beside the table, blood drying in a smear down the front of her shirt. “That sounds like progress.”
“It isn’t permission to torture people in here whenever I leave for dinner.” I rubbed a hand over my face and looked at the stains spreading across the floor. “It means I’m accepting that whatever arrangement I thought I made with you stopped resembling reality several bad decisions ago.”
The elevator opened before she could decide whether to keep pushing.
Ronan came through alone, jacket gone and his sleeves shoved up his forearms, with Nichlas’s blood streaked across one cuff.
His usual stillness had sharpened into something colder, and he went directly to the sink to wash his hands before giving us the update.
“He’ll live. Doctor thinks the nose is broken, two fingers are a mess, the thigh wound needs stitches, and somebody put enough shallow cuts across him that he’s going to look like shit for a while.
” Ronan dried his hands and gave Echo a long look over the towel.
“Malakai stayed because Nichlas wakes up every few minutes and loses his mind when he realizes where he is.”
Echo folded her arms while Ronan’s gaze moved from the blood on her shirt to her face. “You put metal under his fingernails.”
She shrugged. “He survived.”
I held up a hand before they could turn the room into another exchange I did not have the patience to referee.
“The dinner gave us something. Desmond mentioned an operation at Westbridge that the Quorum tried to absorb years ago. Two students, favor network, coded records. They got the records and never managed to take control of the operation.”
Echo went still enough that I knew the connection had landed before I finished.
Ronan crossed to my desk and pulled out his phone.
“I started digging while Desmond was talking. The old acquisition inventory still exists, but most of it was transferred out of active files years ago. I found the storage reference before we got back and had someone pull the box while Malakai and I were getting Nichlas to the doctor.”
Echo’s attention stayed on him. “What box?”
“The one your ex apparently bought his life with.”