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“If he sees you… what?”
“He’s not gonna be happy.” She shifted more to her side. “He thinks I stole from him.”
“Did you?”
Valid question and one that shouldn’t be difficult to answer. After thinking about it for a second, her confused cringe became a grimace. “Maybe… sort of. Not really, but… yes.”
“What does that mean?” The lines of his brow and the set of his jaw betrayed his frustration. “Babe, you have to tell me what’s going on. I will protect you. I’ll do whatever it takes, but I have to know what the threat is.”
“Zeus is the threat.” She took a deep breath. “About four days ago, One and Three left London. They were going to meet with the new Two and Five, Six will be there too.” He just listened and kept on driving. “After that, it was just me and Ulysses in the apartment. A couple of days ago, we were out for dinner and had a good night. We talked and I think… Ithoughtwe came to an understanding.”
“But you didn’t?”
“No, because when he woke up, he obviously checked on something and discovered it wasn’t there.”
“Checked on what?”
She winced. “Bolt and Trident.”
A few seconds of silence passed, which was fine, he needed that time to process. “Are you telling me that while you were being kept in a foreign country against your will, you somehow managed to acquire every key required to steal Minotaur?”
“That’s not why I did it,” she said in her own defense. “And don’t say it like it’s some kind of huge incredible feat, two of them were in the same apartment.”
“And the third you’ve been hiding in secret since before we met.”
He didn’t sound mad, but he definitely wasn’t full of glee either. “Not before we met, I found it like a day after, but… yeah… It’s complicated.” Because Styx specifically asked her not to tell anyone about him. Given his abilities, she couldn’t take for granted that he wouldn’t know if she revealed all to Daire. Breaking her promise could mean Styx wouldn’t be in Miami and she’d be screwed. “I told Zeus I mailed them here, to Hugo’s house. There was no one he could send to retrieve them. I said my mail was kept in a separate place because I was getting a bunch of business stuff.”
“But you didn’t mail them here? So why get him to bring you back to Vegas?”
“I needed to get the Scepter and I wanted to see you again… You can’t blame me for that, can you? I thought if I just vanished that you might worry. I needed to get out of London, I wanted to be closer to you and here I have options. Options I didn’t have in London.”
“You went from reaching an understanding to the guy baying for your blood. That’s risky, babe. Too risky. He could’ve killed you and I wouldn’t have been there… Damnit, I knew I should’ve just walked out and got on a plane.”
Shaking her head, she twisted further toward him. “No because he needs me, Zeus needs me alive.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know exactly,” she said and licked her lips. “He got pissed off at Byron for something he said to me. I overheard them.”
“What did he say?”
“When he was leaving—” She stopped and raised her head.
Her sudden stop drew his attention. “What?”
“There’s no chance there’s any bugs in here, are there?”
He nodded at the stereo. “There’s a jammer in the back of the stereo that interferes with anything that tries to record or transmit, so no bugs and no trackers.”
That relaxed her again. “Good.”
“Since when do you care about bugs?”
Since Styx told her she shouldn’t assume anywhere was clean. “Didn’t you say in your letter that Hugo rigged his place before he left? Maybe he did it in your truck too.”
“Three’s not that smart. And I check the truck and Beast every day. It’s habit.”
“You check them every day? You didn’t do that when we lived together.”
