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Crow still hadn’t spoken.
I set down the spoon. “What’s up?”
She sipped her espresso. She took her coffee black. No milk or sugar.
“Isn’t that what I should be asking you? Where have you been? You took the target and dropped off the radar.”
“Some place safe. Like I told you, he’s in no condition to travel.”
“Mm.” She eyed me through her sunglasses.
Sweat pricked my palms. I took a sip of coffee, pretending a calm I didn’t feel. What if she demanded to know where I’d taken Zaq?
I’d have to lie, and I was already lying too much to her—lies of omission, yes, but still lies—about my relationship with Leo de Froulay, about how I felt about Zaq and how I’d engineered his release.
But I needed that bolt-hole, needed a safe place that no one else knew about. Mom had taught me that. After I turned ten, she wouldn’t even allow me to tell her where my hideout was. The night they came for her, it had saved me. I’d managed to escape through a window.
I had a dhampir’s keen hearing. Even fifty yards away, crouched in a child-sized bunker with only a narrow pipe for air, I heard them smacking her around, demanding to know where I was. She’d been able to answer truthfully that she didn’t know.
“All right.” To my relief, Crow didn’t push to know where I’d been hiding Zaq. “So now what?”
“We go to New York tomorrow night. Or Sunday at the latest. They worked him over pretty good, and the silver poisoning slowed his healing.”
“He’s better?”
“Yeah.” I toyed with the tiny spoon. “They drank from him while he was shackled to the cell wall. Moreau and Étan. Did you know?”
Her response was immediate, and firm. “No, I didn’t know. But does it matter? He’s a Kral, isn’t he?”
My stomach knotted. SI was a paramilitary organization. A soldier-slayer like me followed orders and didn’t question my superiors. But I came close to it right then.
Yes. Yes, it does matter. They fucking tortured the man.
And I would’ve said it straight to her face, except it was too revealing. I couldn’t risk her yanking me off Operation Angel.
So I said, “No. It doesn’t matter.” The words tasted bitter, like I betrayed Zaq by speaking them.
“Mm-hum.” Crow stowed the information away in her computer-like brain. Of course she wanted to know; she might be able to use the information to blackmail Philippe Moreau in the future. “You’ll take a flight from Paris?”
I shook my head. “Another airport. The Paris Syndicate watches Charles de Gaulle. His father might be watching it too.”
“Makes sense. You say the target has agreed to help you?”
“Yes. We told him it was the only way to save his brothers.”
“And that worked?”
“Yeah.” The bitter Judas-like taste in my mouth was back. My research had told me the best way to get Zaq to cooperate was to use his brothers as leverage.
Zaq’s life depended on me being right. If he didn’t cooperate, my orders were to stake him—and his brothers would be staked, too.
My compromise had gotten Zaq out of Moreau’s clutches and given him the opportunity to save both his brothers and himself. So why did I feel like a manipulating piece of shit?
Crow’s phone buzzed. She glanced at it, typed a reply.
“I have to go,” she said to me, “but there’s something you should know. Torch is—” She drew a finger across her throat in the universal signal for dead.
I swallowed sickly. Torch was the slayer assigned to Gabriel Kral. For the past year she’d been undercover as Jessa, a red-headed gym rat who worked as the cook-slash-housekeeper of Gabriel’s Manhattan penthouse. She’d been the source of most of our recent intel on the Kral brothers.
