Chapter 33
Nicole
“Hear me out, before you have me killed,” Nicole said calmly.
Her body buzzed with adrenaline, her favorite high. Nothing like having a gun barrel digging into her cheek to focus the mind, see the world with brilliant clarity.
Vincent glared at her from his wingback chair.
“Why bother?” he said. “It’ll just be bullshit, anyway.
Why were you even stupid enough to come back, after failing so badly, and getting yet another of our crew killed?
Or was it you who killed Maynard? I know you have your little kinks, but you will have to indulge yourself on your own time, and your own dime if you work with me, you blood-drinking slut. ”
Nicole widened her eyes in outrage. “No! I did not! That would be counterproductive, stupid, and messy, and I am none of those things. Ethan Masters killed Maynard! He is a brutal killer. You saw what he did to Wex Boer’s crew. And to me.”
Vincent tilted his head to the side, studying her shrewdly. “And the crushed jaw, the broken teeth? That sounds more like your style, Nicole. One of your tantrums.”
“Absolutely not,” she said briskly. “I’m a skilled professional.
Killing Maynard would be a waste of a valuable resource, and would make a huge mess, too.
I would never. I admit, I miscalculated when I took only Maynard with me to collect Kat Banner.
But I thought she would be alone. I had no clue Ethan Masters would come down on us with a six-man crew of Unredeemables. I barely survived that experience!”
“And you’ve got nothing to show for it,” Vincent snarled.
“Oh, no,” she said. “That’s not true. I have a brand-new plan, based on brand-new information. This plan will get us everything we need, and solve every single logistical problem we have, all in the same stroke. You are going to love it, Vin.”
Vincent crossed his legs, his mouth twisting suspiciously. He gestured for her to go on. “You’re full of shit, Nicole, but I’m listening.”
“Could you have your guy take away the gun barrel?” she asked. “It’s pressing into my jawbone, and making it kind of hard for me to talk.”
Vincent made a languid gesture toward the goon with the pistol. “Keep it pointed at her,” he said, and the cold circle of metal painfully stabbed into the hollow of her cheek suddenly released its pressure.
“Well, then?” Vincent asked. “Talk. Make it quick and entertaining, or Maynard’s corpse will have company in the morgue really fucking soon.”
She covered up her rage with a serene smile.
“I am proposing an amendment to our original plan, which was to compel Mick Drummond be our suicide bomber. But it’s not a perfect plan.
I don’t think Drummond’s motivations will look compelling or believable after the fact.
Besides, I’m afraid he might implode on us at the last minute, in a crisis of conscience. We need someone tougher.”
“Such as?”
“Well, I know we’d tossed around the idea of using Ethan Masters himself,” she said.
“But his motivations are even less believable, and that works only if he gives us the functional codes to the algorithm in time, and if we’re sure we can make SmokeScreen do what we need it to do without him.
But time is very tight for this scenario. Too tight, in my opinion.”
“We’ve discussed all this before, Nicole,” Vincent said. “You’re boring me.”
“Today, while collecting Kat Banner, I discovered she has a secret double life, full of violence,” she said. “And it is pure motherfucking gold for our purposes.”
Vincent’s foot jiggled with nervous energy. “Tell me more.”
Nicole swiftly laid out the details of the grisly story, the dead mom, the older sister becoming a mafia thug’s whore.
The mafia thug murdering the whore and the seven-year-old sister.
The lonely, wounded fourteen-year-old girl, forced to testify, subsequently tossed into the Witness Protection Program, orphaned, bereft, and traumatized.
“She’s our bomber, Vin,” Nicole concluded.
“She’s perfect. A gift from the gods. She’s marked for death already, and has been since she was fourteen.
She’s so damaged, see? The whole world is her enemy.
Who would be even the least bit surprised if she fell prey to the hateful ideology of a domestic terror group? I mean, duh!”
Vincent crossed his arms as he considered it. “And yet, you let her get away.”
“There was no way to bring her in, not with Masters’ whole team coming at me,” she said impatiently. “And we need the little girl to control Ethan Masters anyhow, so we can just take Banner when we pick up the little girl.”
“That place is heavily fortified,” Vincent snapped. “We can’t just waltz in. You know that.”
“Of course not. But we have the perfect tool to make them jump, thanks to you,” she said. “Don’t you still have some of those videos you took of Shane Masters?”
He looked miffed. “I seem to recall you scrapping them because they offered too much intel,” he said sourly.
God. What an idiot. He was still piqued about her criticizing his game with extortion videos.
She pasted on an encouraging smile. “Well, things have changed. And now we need for Masters to follow those exact same breadcrumbs you left in your videos,” she said.
“You were absolutely prescient, Vincent. You sensed what we would need before we even needed it. It’s your special gift. ”
Vincent looked suspicious, as well he should, when she gave him compliments. But his ego was so grotesquely swollen, he always fell for it like rotten fruit. “Use them if you need them,” he said. “Who’s your asset, again? Are you sure you can trust him?”
“Of course I’m sure,” she said. God, she simply could not wait to tear the flesh from this dickface’s bones. “I have the ultimate leverage.”
“Ah, yes.” Vincent wrinkled his nose in disgust. “The groaning old man in the basement. I can’t tolerate that kind of thing in my central headquarters, Nicole. You need to move him to one of the satellite facilities. It’s distasteful. And the smell. God.”
“I’m almost done,” she assured him. “After the Event, we can dispose of him. I think old Jay Drummond is going to make one last video tonight. A real doozy, for his great-nephew’s viewing pleasure. Care to watch me make it?”
Vincent had that snotty, superior expression that had always made her want to gut him, ever since they were children. “No, thank you,” he said. “I prefer to outsource that kind of thing. Too messy. And you enjoy it a little too much, in my opinion.”
She shrugged. “You want something done right, do it yourself. I get results, don’t l?”
Vincent harrumphed. “It’s very late, to change the plan,” he complained.
“I know, Vin, but trust me. This is a better plan. The psychoanalysts will eat it up with a spoon. Kat Banner has every reason to feel that the world is a shitty, dangerous place that’s badly in need of punishment.”
Vincent made an impatient sound. “As long as things move on schedule.”
“Of course, of course,” she murmured. “Let me tell you exactly what I have in mind. If you could, ah…call off your dog? So we can get to work?”
Vincent waved the guy with the gun away. She exhaled, and put her hand in her pocket, fondling Maynard’s damp, sticky tooth as she laid out how the plan would work. The resources she would need, the steps to be taken. Her heart thudded with excitement.
The sweetest part of it all was going to be making Ethan Masters believe he’d been betrayed by a lying whore. Nicole had seen the way he dove into those thorn bushes for that girl. The way he’d kissed her. He had it bad. He was so whipped.
Let Ethan Masters take a turn at feeling like a fool. Taken in by a honeytrap temptress who led him by his dick…straight to his own destruction.
Perfect.