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26
Aria saton the sofa in the Marchand apartment, staring into the cup of tea Charlotte had insisted on bringing her. It had been hours since the explosion and shooting at the cyber lab, and Aria had stopped being surprised byCharlotte’scalm.
It had been Charlotte who had risen first from the floor when the paramedics arrived to help the man named Mac, suffering a gash in the head from the explosion that had thrown him against a desk. It had been Charlotte who had given the first accounting of the events to the police department, explaining that the cyber lab was headquarters for the digital operation of one of Christophe’s companies. Aria had learned later that the company was legitimate, although used more for the purposes of cover than as an actual revenuegenerator.
Charlotte had been the one to wrap a blanket around Aria’s shoulders, to walk among the lab’s shell-shocked employees, making sure they were all okay. She’d insisted on bringing Aria back to the Marchand apartment in Paris while Damian and Christophe finished giving their official account to thepolice.
But none of Charlotte’s care could change the realization that had Aria had come to shortly after the incident atthelab.
This was herfault.
She was still reasonably sure no one had followed her after the meeting with Primo in Paris, but meeting him at all had given him an important piece of information that he hadn’t hadbefore.
She was in Paris. That meant Damian was inParistoo.
And anyone with a working knowledge of the Syndicate and its leaders could have guessed Damian was collaborating with Christophe Marchand, head of the Syndicate’s Paristerritory.
It would have been far too difficult to launch an attack on the apartment in the ritzy area of Saint Germain du Pres. The apartment was heavily guarded by Christophe’s men and surrounded by privatehomes.
But the cyber lab was the perfect target for the kind of cowardly attack that had been perpetrated on them earlier in the day — a molotov cocktail thrown into the second story window followed by a round of semiautomatic gunfire from across thestreet.
The lab itself had enviable security — a locked front door with palm scans and an intercom, a bulletproof lobby that acted as a buffer to the interior of the building, the powerful servers for the lab locked behind fortified walls, the staff ensconced on the secondfloor.
It would have been difficult to actually breach the facility, but sending a message — a gangland hit and run — was just a matter of launching the explosive device through the windows and peppering the exterior walls withgunfire.
And it was all herfault.
She looked up as Charlotte came into the room bearing a tray of toast and a fresh potoftea.
“I know you don’t feel like eating,” Charlotte said, “but I thought I’d bring you something in case you changeyourmind.”
Aria’s stomach turned over at the thought of food. “Thankyou.”
Charlotte sat down next to her. “Can I get youanythingelse?”
“Please, you’ve done enough,” Aria said. She set down the cup of tea and shook her head. “I’m sosorry.”
Charlotte reached for her hand. “You’ve apologized too many timesalready.”
“I don’t think that’s possible,”Ariasaid.
Charlotte seemed to choose her words carefully. “Ours is a mad world,” she said. “We do the best we can, but we all make mistakes from time to time, especially when it comes tofamily.”
Aria had vague memories of spilling her guts to Charlotte after the attack, the words emerging unchecked from her mouth as she explained Primo and her meeting with him in Paris. Charlotte had listened with sympathetic eyes, consoling Aria with assurances that no one blamed her for what hadhappened.
She’d only seen Damian briefly before he and Christophe had piled Aria and Charlotte into a car bound for the apartment. He’d said little, looking carefully at her face as if checking her for injury, wrapping her inhisarms.
“It’s okay,” he said. “It’sokay.”
She knew he was trying to tell her he understood — that Primo might have targeted the lab because of her but that he didn’tblameher.
It was a minor consolation in the face of the bloodied employee named Mac as he was loaded into the ambulance, the expression of shock on the faces of Christophe’s employees as they’d started cleaning up the debris in the lab and checking the systems to see how much datathey’dlost.
“Is everyone really okay?” Aria asked Charlotte for what felt like thehundredthtime.
“Everyone is fine,” Charlotte said firmly. “Every one of Christophe’s employees in the lab is trained — and not in cyber operations — before they’re brought on. They look like your average data engineer, but trust me when I say they’re every bit as capable and prepared as any of the Syndicate’s streetsoldiers.”
It was the first time she’d directly referenced the nature of the Syndicate’s business. There was something subversive in the reference to street soldiers emerging from the elegant woman nexttoher.
