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“Put yourself the fuck away,” he muttered.
I dressed in slow, easy movements, staying away from my gun, and not giving him any reason to be cautious of me. Finally, I shrugged on my holster and waited.
He punched me square in the face, caught me off guard under my left eye, right across my cheekbone, then followed it up with a couple of rabbit punches to my stomach, and I pretended as if it shocked me to the point I didn’t defend myself.
I’d been expecting it.
“Now we’re even,” Danvers snarled, and then slumped back into the chair opposite me, and indicated I sit.
I made a show of checking where he’d hit me, wincing as I sat down. I could play the injured party better than most, and I couldn’t fail to catch the soft smile that Danvers tried to hide. He’d enjoyed that shit, and now he’d asserted whatever dominance he felt he had over me. He’d repaid me for hitting him and humiliated me by making me strip when he could have used the wand device. I slipped further into the headspace of the underdog, begging for scraps at the table, desperate for help, while not losing my credibility as someone who got the job done.
“Now, let’s start with why you took Josh Anderson from my custody.”
I shrugged, then examined my nails. “Not a lot to tell. I played the game and lost. I owe people. Fucked up a couple of times, needed the cash.”
“Who paid you to extract him?”
I shrugged again, then leaned forward in my chair. “I don’t ask questions. I go where I’m told, do what I’m paid for.”
Danvers turned his phone over in his hand, then pressed a button and held it to his ear, staring at me as he waited for the call to connect.
“I need everything you’ve got on Ethan Masters… No, all of it… No, he’s not… He’s in my fucking front room—what happened to surveillance?” Whoever was on the other end said enough that Danvers’ expression went from icy cold to blazing hot in a second. “Well, fuck you very much, asshole. Get me the information. Now.”
He ended the call, and through all of it, the phone conversation, and the silence now, he stared at me.
“Shitty security in this place, you know,” I said. “You can’t rely on anyone.” I smirked and rested my hands on the sides of the chair. I couldn’t come out and ask who he was talking to. That would be too direct, and I knew my job here—stay under the radar, fix things, get home to Josh and Ben.
Danvers’ flash of temper began to ease into an icy calm, and he regarded me with disdain.
“You don’t get to fuck with my head. My team is rock-solid, which is more than can be said for yours. Ryder and Luca have completely vanished, left you completely isolated. Is that why you’re really here?”
Cue regretful expression. “We were never a team after Luca and Ali split. Messy fucking marriage destroyed anything we might have had. They went one way; I went to the other.”
“Surveillance showed them assisting you in extracting Josh.”
“They disagreed about certain parts of the operation.”
“Like?”
“Like when I suggested we should sell this Josh guy to the highest bidder and ride off into the fucking sunset.” I shrugged as if it meant nothing, but allowed my expression to be one of anger, as if that last part went against everything I wanted to do.
He considered me for a moment. “Who do you owe money to?”
“Too many people to count. Seven hundred for the unfinished job would have gone a long way to settling what I owe.”
Danvers raised an eyebrow at the amount. According to Sanctuary, my back story was locked and everything about my connection to money owed would be documented, and I had to trust they’d had gotten that part of my back story in place.
“What was the unfinished job?”
“Delivering Josh and his son.”
“You had them, well Josh, at least.”
“And Sanctuary took him.”
“Who wanted Josh and his son, and why didn’t you deliver?”
I kept to the script and hoped would be enough to put an end to the questioning. “Paid mercenary shit on the dark web. I never asked. I’ll follow anyone’s orders until the moment I get paid. Only, Ididn’tget paid for the Josh thing.” I spat out the words. “Myteamfucked me over, and Sanctuary got there first.” I touched the bruise on my eye and channeled any anger I could find inside me about Kayden adding extra punches, the asshole. “I’ll work for the highest bidder, and I know that you’re connected to Rouxier, and Iknowhe’s paying people off for political gain with dark web money. I want in.”
