Page 9 of The Saint

“Do you know why you’re here?” D’Angelo asked, and I was forced into a memory I’d tried hard to forget. One that’d been coming back to me more and more the past few months.

With a focus I’d worked my whole life to harness, I concentrated on the man in front of me and not the past. Not the first time he’d asked me that same question right here in this very room. Not on the events that led to his questioning, or everything that had transpired since.

Even though my answer was the same.

This time, it wasn’t a lie.

Lifting my chin, I met his sharp gaze. “No, sir.”

One of his eyebrows quirked up slightly. From anyone else, that look would have had me itching to reach for my gun. But when it came from D’Angelo, it had me wanting to run.

He circled me like a shark, and my attention didn’t waver from him until he passed behind me, his presence felt but his body no longer visible from the corner of my eye. For a split second, my gaze darted toward the desk and the plastic case Jet was hovering over. But before I could figure out what was inside, D’Angelo was at my other side.

A big hand gripped my bicep, and my first instinct was to yank my arm away while slamming a fist through somebody’s face. Only I couldn’t. Someone else had snuck up on me and grabbed my other arm.

“Tsk, tsk.”

My gaze snapped to Arik, the reprimanding look he was giving me melting away my aggression as fast as ice thrown in a fire. My eyes widened and I turned my head to my other side, meeting the dark eyes of D’Angelo himself.

“You are lacking something, my dear,” he told me, holding my arm out in front of him. And the way he said it made me want to shrivel up and die.

I’d do anything for my brothers, and my brothers would do anything for this man. By extension, so would I. Even when I ran, my loyalty lay right here at his feet. It killed me that he felt that I wasn’t enough.

But I didn’t let him see how much his words hurt me. Because I knew—there were worse things than words in this world.

Before D’Angelo could continue, the door to his office swung open, and Queenie—D’Angelo’s daughter, my boss and former charge—came sweeping in the door. There was a moment, before her eyes narrowed and her face hardened, that I saw pure happiness there. The kind of happiness I’d seen in her for the past few months with her boyfriend, Mateo, at her side, but had been missing before.

But it was gone so quickly, it was as if it were never there.

“Papà,” Queenie said, a snap in her voice, “cosa stai facendo?” What are you doing?

She snatched my arm from her father’s grip, the look on her face one I’d have hated to have directed at me.

“Admiring her fire,” D’Angelo said, a soft chuckle in his voice as he withdrew from my side. “I was telling Jael she seems to be lacking something.”

Queenie turned her hazel eyes on me, making a sweep of my face before a half-smile tugged at her lips. She squeezed my arm and let go of me, and my breath stopped in my chest.

“Yes,” she said, her voice so pleasant and relaxed I almost didn’t feel the pain of that word slicing through me. She gripped my chin, giving that a squeeze as well. “But we’re here to fix that.”

With that, Queenie spun away from me, perching herself on the corner of her father’s desk. And any part of me that hadn’t already shriveled up at her and D’Angelo’s denouncement withered and molted until it was nothing more than rotted flesh.

Because there was a woman who was everything I could never be: beautiful and confident and feminine, completely unfazed by the fact that she was sitting in a room full of powerful men and had likely just been ravaged by her boyfriend moments before coming in.

It took everything in me not to shift under her steady gaze. To stand strong and still, even though I felt as hollow as I had every time I was teased by the pretty, popular girls as a kid.

At my side, my brother squeezed my arm. I’d completely forgotten he was there, but I couldn’t bring myself to look into his eyes. To see any possible recognition of the turmoil rolling around inside my head.

Jet moved beside the desk, drawing the attention away from me and allowing me to glance his way. Though, he stepped forward, stopping in front of me and forcing me to raise my chin in order to look him in the eye.

“Two years ago, you came back to the States,” he started, and once again, that desire to shift my weight raged through me. “You answered my call without question. You put your life on hold and gave away your newfound freedom to stand at our side.”

“You protected my daughter,” D’Angelo added.

“You were my loyal guard,” Queenie said with a smile, “and you fought at my side.”

“And for that,” D’Angelo said, taking a step to the side, “you should be rewarded.”

Behind him, in the gap between his shoulder and Jet’s, stood a man I didn’t know, though recognized immediately. With a bald head and a thick, short beard on his face, hard muscles and all-black clothes, he could have been anyone. Any man from anywhere in the world.