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“He wasn’t your husband, Bell. Not the way you think he was.”
“If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that four days ago I married Kevin Drexel, whom I loved with all of my heart. And now you’re trying to tell me what—it was all a figment of my imagination?”
“What I’m trying to tell you is that the only reason you married Kevin Drexel, or even met him in the first place, is becauseIsent him to you.”
“That’s truly amazing, Quentin. I always knew you were a narcissist, but I had no idea it was this bad. How do you pass the Agency’s psych evals every year?”
“Let me explain, because it’s important you understand what’s happened over the last six months. I think once the fog of so-called true love has faded away, you’ll see that I was acting in your best interest.”
As Quentin talked, I tried to figure out a way to escape my handcuffs. One cuff was around my left wrist; the other was snapped around the thickest pipe of the radiator unit. If I couldn’t pick the lock, it would take superhuman strength to rip the radiator out of the floor with my bare hands and beat him to death with it.
“Both Kevin Drexel and Bill Devander—this suicidal idiot on the floor here—worked for me. Cutout company based in Berlin. I’d cultivated Devander years ago as an asset. He was a useful idiot. In other words, my favorite kind of asset. Only later did I bring Drexel into it.”
Cutout company: in other words, a front for Quentin’s various operations.
“Right,” I said. “So one day you decided to say, ‘Hey, random business guy who runs my cutout, why don’t you go off and marry one of my field agents?’”
“I knew you were eyeing the door, Bell. Look, it happens all the time. An adolescence cut short, followed by eight years in a high-intensity job? Of course you’d be looking to leave. It’s practically textbook. You wanted to know what the road less traveled felt like. I knew it beforeyouknew it. And you’re so stubborn, I knew I wouldn’t be able to talk you out of it. You had to see for yourself.”
“So you hired Kevin to what? Break my heart?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way, but essentially… yeah. He was supposed to show you a good time, then do whatallmen do eventually—dump you for a younger model. See, this is a lesson you never learned, because you came to work for me so young. But I didn’t want your heart broken by some random civilian. You deserved much better than that.”
What Ideservedwas something I could use to pick open this handcuff. But Quentin was too careful to leave anything within reach. I was cuffed to this particular spot because he had determined that escape would be impossible. He was right.
“But Kevin fell in love with me for real,” I said, “so of course you had to kill him. To what, teach me a lesson? Punish me?”
“No. I was happy for you. If Drexel turned out to be the exception to the rule, and the man of your dreams, who was I to stand in the way?”
“So what happened?”
“While you and Drexel were globe-trotting, the idiot on the floor here started embezzling.”
CHAPTER 38
“THIS IS ABOUT money? You have to be kidding, Quentin. You have unlimited access to funds. Each year, the government hands you the biggest blank check in the free world!”
“You’re right. It wasn’t about the money.”
“You were afraid Kevin would tell the police?”
“No. I was afraid Kevin would convince the corpse here to dissolve the company. And I couldn’t let that happen, because that would… well, let’s just say a very delicate operation would start to unravel.”
“If this story goes on much longer,” I said, “you’re going to be talking to another corpse. Tell me what all of this misery was worth.”
“You’ll be fine, Bell. I have an antidote.”
That revelation almost stopped my heart right then. Not because it was a new lease on life. But because of what it implied. Namely, that everything I knew was wrong. For the moment, though, I let Quentin play things out his way.
“There’s been an antidote this whole time? So I’m not going to die. Not tonight, anyway.”
“Yeah, and I would have given it to you in the hospital if you hadn’t decided to escape. You really don’t know what I’ve been through these past couple of days.”
“Poor baby. Why did your cutout help me escape the hospital?”
“Because it was the best way to get you away from Interpol. I knew you wouldn’t just lie there and wait for the end.”
“Andwhydid you murder my husband?”
