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“He’s not here to give his input,” he said to himself, “So that’s how it is.” He leaned back, looking out at the water. The seagulls squawked, circling overhead. The waves were loud but soothing. “I guess I won’t really know if I made the wrong choice, unless you end up getting killed like your father.”
“Has anyone told you that you have the sensitivity of a rabid, face-fucking alien?” I leaned forward in my seat, examining him like I had just made some perplexing discovery.
“You don’t know Star Wars, but you can reference Alien?” Brett chuckled. “There’s really no accounting for taste.”
His eyes were jovial again. There was a glint in his eye that he could turn off and on like a light switch.
“You two know each other?” I asked, when a moment passed. “You and LeBlanc?”
“We’re friends of your father.”
“I don’t have a…”
“I swear to God, I’ve never beaten a woman out of spite, but you’re about to force me to make an exception.” He interrupted me.
I didn’t say anything more. Brett allowed the silence to engulf us, muted by the roaring waves now rising almost as high as the lifeguard towers before cresting and falling harmlessly into the shoreline.
“Your father was our mentor,” he idly said, raising his finger to ask for another coffee from a passing waiter. “When we worked in Pacific Command. When he knew his time was up, he made us promise to look out for you.” He smiled a little. “We didn’t know you were so high maintenance, or maybe we would have reconsidered the promise.”
“Aren’t you in the bratva?” I hadn’t felt like I could ask too many personal questions until now. Something about looking a gift getaway horse in the mouth, or whatever…
“I left that life a long time ago,” Brett said somberly. “I may dip my toes in those waters once in a while, but I refuse to swim in it.”
“Why me?” I asked. “Why all this effort for me? Is it really just because you promised my… my fa…” I couldn’t say the word.
“At first, yes,” he responded, slowly. Deliberately. Like he was choosing his words. “At least with LeBlanc. He found you, and took you under his wing, and that was all he wanted to do. Then he told me you were a champion.”
I breathed, taking this information in. I thought LeBlanc had coached me because he saw me fight. I loved that. Someone had picked me because of my abilities. I wasn’t sure how this new information would alter how I saw our dynamic. Not that it mattered if we couldn’t find him.
“He called me to watch you fight,” Brett continued, unaware of the turmoil in my mind as I reorganized my perception of cherished memories. “That’s why I was in New York. I didn’t know that the rest would happen. But I was glad to be there.”
He leaned back in his seat, smiling broadly at me.
“LeBlanc and I have trained a lot of people. I thought he was biased when he said you were his best pupil.” He crossed his arms, then regarded me from head to toe. It was an assessing glance, as if taking the measure of my character. “I am going to train you to be the deadliest person alive. We’ll make it so no one will ever think to fuck with you, Jubilee Bradley. I look forward to seeing what you have in store for me.”
Chapter 12
Alastair - Up-State New York
Ihadtogetmy head on straight. I had to get back to work, to Scotland, to Caledonia Security. We were up to our eyeballs in work, and I was barely keeping up with nothing but a laptop.
Half of my associates were in America, tracking down the elusive ferryman, an assassin that had caused us trouble in Argentina. It wasn’t a kill mission, but it had the potential to be one, last we spoke.
Hugo and I were planning a rescue mission for some doctor in an ungoverned space south of Turkey, which was a headache. Couldn’t she have gotten kidnapped in Greece?
I groaned in frustration and got up. I made myself a cup of earl gray and checked the time. It was almost midnight. It had been five days since the fight. There was no sign of her. No hits on her ID cards, her passport, or any credit card associated with her name.
Only five days… maybe it was too early to give up on Rose.
I looked at my monitors, half tempted to run a search for her name one more time. But I resisted.
I took my cup of tea and walked out of my room and into the large downstairs foyer. Eoghan and I, at the great insistence of Uncle Alastair, had a very thorough education. He had harped on and on about our family’s rising place in society, and that we would need to hobnob and blend with those snooty aristos that looked down their noses at us.
I excelled at music. The aural senses. Eoghan was more ocular. The visual arts.
But to accommodate us both, Uncle Alastair had bought a Baldwin grand piano which was now in the main entrance, surrounded by Eoghan’s paintings.
The foyer’s incredibly high, vaulted ceiling had the perfect acoustics. It would fill the upstairs hallway with music, and most of the house would get to hear the notes I played. There was nothing quite like it. The old wood and antique frame just had a certain visceral perfection to it. The wood was hundreds of years old, and I swear, I could hear it in the notes.
