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The mention of Bo had me licking my lips. Theo caught the hesitation.
“What happened to Bo?” he asked, but it was with very little inflection, like he already knew.
“Bo’s the one who told me a lot of efficient men were going to be paid if I died.” I massaged a residual ache at the back of my neck. “He decided to become one of them.”
“Jesus. No.” Theo attempted to lift of the wall, but fell back at the waste of energy. “Why did you go back there?”
“How could you think I wouldn’t? You were gone. And the only place I could think to make sense of what happened was to find Drea. The one who gave us up in the first place.”
“Yeah. I figured that one out, too.”
“Instead it was just Bo there. And he was angry.”
“Are you all right?”
“Aside from being trapped here in a dungeon with you?” I didn’t want to tell him I killed Bo. “Sure. Dandy.”
Theo’s gaze on me didn’t waver. I was conscious of him assessing my every tell. “It’s my fault.”
“No, it isn’t. I have a knack for sticky situations.”
This time when he lifted off his wall support, he was steady. “The contract was put on you because of me.”
“I’d deduced that.”
“What you didn’t figure out was that as soon as Trace was returned, it would be lifted.”
That caught my attention.
“It was what made me do my father’s bidding in the first place,” Theo continued. “If I didn’t find my brother, you would die. And you would continue to be at risk of death until Trace came back.”
“So I was used as a pawn. The entire reason you left me two years ago was to prevent that.”
“He knew,” Theo said. “Father knew what you meant to me well before you took a bullet. I thought I could redirect his attention and he’d forget about you if there was no more mention of you, not a whiff of your presence around our family. But…”
“I continued to play.”
Theo sighed. “Yes.”
I used the resulting silence to wonder if this was the time to tell Theo about the FBI and the deal they’d forced me to make while still lying prone in a hospital bed from said bullet. That I didn’t play for profit, or to piss off the Saxons, as Gordon assumed, or maybe even Theo himself. It would be just like me to revel in the possibility that I was getting to Theo, that talk of me and my hands would reach his ears and piss him off enough to come back.
But for once, I hadn’t been tossing my pride around.
“What are you thinking about?”
I lost my nerve. “How to get out of here.”
Theo rested his elbows on his knees. “We wait.”
“Seriously?”
“They cornered me. Now they have you. I know my family. We’re about to see their final play.”
“And when that happens?”
His eyes glimmered underneath his brows like a cat’s reflecting in the dark. “You and I will be ready.”
I avoided the instinct to scoff. “With what? Our bare hands?”
“Scarlet.” He held me steady in his stare. “You and I don’t get by with fists and weapons.”
“You’re right,” I said, beginning the calculations. “We plan ahead.”
