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“Guess who we have in the interrogation room next door?” Chenko said. His teeth, just as stubby as the rest of them, were a sickly yellow. I remembered studying this exact grin while prone on a hospital gurney.
“Theo,” I said, sounding throaty. “Theo Saxon. I know.”
The grin widened. “Try again, sweetheart.”
Concern peppered my brow, but I smoothed it immediately under Chenko’s joyous study. Could it be Kai? Was he in as deep trouble as I was? Did he get himself—
My gaze screwed into Chenko’s.
“That’s right, sweetheart, think it through.”
Remember the hospital room, he was saying, and his threat then. What it caused me to do. How it forced me to act in the interim. How it brought me to this very interrogation room, Theo cuffed and behind bars in another.
“Verily,” I choked out. “You have Verily.”
Chenko pumped the air with over-enthusiasm. “Brilliant deduction!”
“She hasnothingto do with this. Any of this,” I said, but pebbles clogged my voice. “Just as she didn’t back then.”
“Back then?” Sawyer asked but was ignored by Chenko.
“I beg to differ, Miss Rhodes. Verily was seen at Kai’s apartment a mere hour before the whole hoopla that was this afternoon.”
“To convince me to stay safe!” I cried. “Not to help with the Saxons. She has no idea—she’s an innocent victim in all of this!”
“Not since she met you,” Chenko purred. “Seems you have a knack for getting innocent people in trouble.”
“Leave her out of this.” I turned to Sawyer. “We’re not even friends anymore. She heard I was back in town and was worried about me, wanted to try one more time to get me out of this … what did you call it? Situation? I was in. Please, let her go.Please.”
Sawyer remained unexpressive. Instead, he reopened my file, reading through with his pen running down the page. “I believe there’s enough probable cause to keep her.”
I tried standing but was hampered by the cuffs. In doing so, I appeared weaker than I was,wantedto be, and plopped down hard, staring at nothing but this man in front of me, Sawyer, who followed the law more than his gut.
“Look at the facts,” I said. “Verily hasn’t been involved inyears. I’ve made no contact with her, not for months. Not since I started working for the FBI. You don’t have probable cause, you barely have reasonable doubt”—I was throwing out all the law terms I could think of—“you can’t keep using her against me like this.”
Sawyer raised eyes his from the paper. “We’ve used her against you before?”
“No matter what you think,” Chenko cut in. “We are following the law here, and that is leading us to what Verily knows. Like I said, if I have to arrest her, I will.”
…If I have to plant evidence against her, I will. You understand, Scarlet? If you don’t do what I want, what I ask of you, I won’t make your life hell, I’ll make everyone you love’s lives an utter fire pit. I’ll start with Verily and end with your dad. I’ll make them all complicit with the Saxon crime family. I’ll fill their bank accounts with extorted funds, I’ll leave a drug trail a mile long. Get it? I. Will. Win.
Chenko learned from Gordon Saxon, and the same way the patriarch exacted his demands, Chenko outsourced his. I’d been his pawn these years, giving him cuts of the money I won, providing information I knew wasn’t going to the FBI in order to reign in Trace, undercutting police work and making Chenko richer. Kai didn’t know, Theo had no idea, and nor, it would seem, did Chenko’s superiors have any clue just how dirty their agent was.
But two years was exhausting. Living two lives was soul-depleting. I studied the table underneath my hands, scratches and scrapes in the metal from all the suspects, the innocents, the arrested before me, and I couldn’t handle it anymore.
I looked first to Sawyer, silently begging him to see Chenko for what he was, then held Chenko’s stare when I said, “I want my lawyer. Now.”
