AllFreeNovel
Share Us
"Who was the one who held her through the nightmares and who comforted her when she wept? Who got her through her surgeries and who—”
“Her surgeries?” Conor questioned tensely. “She’s ill?”
“No. After her… after,” she said, tone blunt, “she ran into traffic to escape. She got knocked over.”
“They tried to find her in the hospitals.”
“I have contacts,” she muttered, telling us without words that a black site hospital had been used to help Lyra through her injuries.
Black site hospitals were only accessible while serving in the CIA actively, which she hadn’t been doing because she was working with Jorgmundgander.
I frowned at the news though, asking, “Since when did you have those kinds of contacts?”
She scowled at me. “Since when were you so nosy?”
D tilted her head to the side. “I thought that was bullshit about you being involved with the Çelas.”
Troy stiffened. “Don’t even think about saying that name under this roof.”
“Çela,” D taunted, hands plunked on her hips as if she baited a pissed-off lion.
The other woman growled, but I snapped, “Less of the infighting. Who are the Çelas?”
When Conor chuckled, I scowled at being the only one left in the dark. “You are Helen, aren’t you? Elena Çela?”
I demanded, “Who’s that?”
“Albanian Mob. Big in Kentucky and have been for the last twenty or so years.”
Kentucky?
He heard my unasked question. “Massive presence in racehorses but small fry in the scheme of things.”
“Race fixing?”
“That, but deeper too. They own massive stables and have a stud and everything.” I sensed his curiosity at this revelation. “Elena was the daughter of Altin Çela. It was like that whole Shergar situation in Ireland.”
“The what with the what now?” I queried.
“Shergar was a horse who got stolen by a gang of armed thieves in County Kildare. Well, the same thing happened here. Only Kelmendi, a prize-winning stallion, got snatched but the daughter did too. The horse was found dead; the daughter was not found.”
Troy, who’d grown steadily more stony throughout this conversation, ground out, “I don’t want to talk about this.”
“The things you freakin’ learn about people,” D muttered, shaking her head in surprise. “Anyway, we need to get going just in case a host of Sparrows come flocking once they realize we’re not dead and their dudes are.”
“I don’t want to go,” Lyra wailed, clutching desperately at Troy.
Troy’s gaze collided with mine and I appeased, “We wish neither of you any harm, Troy. If anything, we came here to help.”
“Sounds like you helped Ovianar,” Troy rumbled.
“You don’t know what happened there,” I spat.
O's passing was going to be an open wound for a very long time and now, barely an hour after I got the news, wasn’t the moment to be shoving it in my face.
“I know that you left her to fend for herself because if you hadn’t, she wouldn’t be dead.”
The guilt—fuck, the guilt had me leaning back into Conor for support.
