Page 72 of Vicious Betrayal

She doesn't move for several seconds. Then, slowly, she straightens, her face streaked with tears. She looks at me, her eyes wide and hollow with shock. "They almost caught us," she whispers, her voice trembling. "Cormac, they were going to⁠—"

"I don't want to hear it."

She shrinks back against the passenger door, wrapping her arms around her ribs as if trying to hold herself in one piece.

We drive in absolute silence for another hour, the rhythmic sweep of the windshield wipers the only sound in the cab, until the dark fields give way to the lights of a small, old town.

I stop at the first old motel I see. It's tucked behind a shuttered diner and a row of run-down trailers. There are no security cameras I can see, and the bored older woman at the front desk doesn't ask for a name when I pay cash. She just hands me a key.

I park the car out back and take Oksana by the elbow to lead her to the door.

The room is old, musty, and badly in need of updating. The furniture is warped, and the comforter looks dusty. But it has a deadbolt, and I lock the door before turning to look at my captive wife.

Oksana is shivering, looking at me with wide, frightened eyes. She looks around the dim, ugly room with a dazed, uncomprehending expression.

"Sit down," I tell her, nodding toward the bed.

She moves mechanically, sinking onto the edge of the mattress, her hands resting flat on her thighs. The springs groan under her weight.

I pull my gun from the holster and see her flinch. I set it on the nightstand where I can reach it easily, and then I reach into my jeans pocket and pull out the two earrings.

I stand over her, looking down at the top of her head, the fragile line of her neck bowed in defeat. "Here," I say, keeping my voice flat, holding my palm out between us.

She looks up, her brow furrowing slightly.

"You dropped one on the floor outside the bathroom," I lie smoothly, my face giving away nothing. "The other was on the nightstand."

She's been through so much in the past day that she doesn't even question it. She just looks relieved as she takes them, like I've given her back some piece of normalcy in all this by returning her earrings. "Thank you," she whispers, her fingers brushing against my palm as she takes them. Her skin is ice-cold.

I watch as she puts them back on. Her fingers are trembling so badly she fumbles the first one twice before managing to slide the thin gold post through her earlobe. She fits the second one into her right ear, smoothing a strand of damp blonde hair behind her ear with a weary, defeated motion.

Now, as long as she doesn't take them off, I can track her with my phone. Even if she does run, she won't make it far.

She looks up at me, her blue eyes wide and glassy with unshed tears, filled with a mix of terror and exhaustion that makes my own chest ache behind my ribs. "Cormac," she begins again, her voice barely a breath. "What are you going to do with me?"

I look at her for a long time—at my wife, at the woman who tore my life to pieces, the mother of my child.

I don't know the answer.

I don't know if I brought her to this rat-trap motel to protect her from the feds, to protect Declan from her, or her from Declan. I don't know what the fuck I'm going to do.

"Go to bed," I tell her, turning my back to her as I pull the heavy curtains shut over the window. "Try to sleep. We're not going anywhere tonight."

19

CORMAC

Oksana falls asleep almost immediately, despite the circumstances. I watch her for a little while, taking in the sight of her blonde hair spread across the cheap pillow, her shoulders rising and falling with her breathing. My skin feels raw and buzzing with the leftover hum of adrenaline. Every instinct I have, every brutal reflex beat into me over the last twenty years, tells me to treat her like what she is—a liability, a threat sitting six feet away from where I sleep. Declan would already have her being questioned with a bullet right behind the answers. Rian would have told me to walk away and let Declan handle her.

Instead, I haven't told my boss or my men a goddamn thing, and I'm sitting in a dive motel, watching her breathe while I try to figure out what the hell I'm doing here. How it got this bad.

And despite everything, my chest feels hollowed out, aching with a persistent hunger that disgusts me. Looking at the curve of her hip beneath the thin blanket, the delicate line of her jaw, my body reacts before my brain can shut it down. My cock stirs against the rough denim of my jeans, remembering the softness of her thighs, the taste of her mouth on the balcony in Greece, the way she shuddered when I fucked her on a bathroom counter on our wedding night, how good every part of her feels around my cock.

She sold you to the feds. The thought is enough to knock the breath out of me. She went into Declan's files. She walked into a sunlit square in Greece with a target painted on my back, ready to hand my life over to a federal agent.

I turn away from the bed, my jaw clenched so hard the joint pops, and look at the clothes she changed out of in the bathroom. She had sleep shorts and an oversized T-shirt in her bag, and that's what she's sleeping in now, her jeans and T-shirt and sweater discarded on top of it.

She needs clean clothes. She needs food. She has to be taken care of, or the baby will suffer too. That's the only reason, I tell myself, that I haven't hauled her back to Declan yet. The child didn't ask for a lying mother or an enforcer for a father. The kid is innocent.