“Did you follow protocol getting into the hotel?”
I nod as Taylor smooths a lock of red hair back into place, glancing out the big window of the hotel suite and down to the Meatpacking District below.
“Yup. Took a cab to the French restaurant down the street, slipped out the back door, stayed out of sight, and entered the hotel via the service entrance.”
“You’re sure you weren’t followed?”
“Positive.”
She turns to give me a wary half-smile. “Just checking all the boxes.”
No, we’re not having a clandestine affair. In fact, I doubt Taylor Crown dates at all, given how married she is to her job.
Taylor’s the “Crown” in the hugely prestigious Crown and Black law firm, which my family uses extensively for both our legitimate and not-so-legitimate business needs. She’s also my personal attorney. Normally, for pretty much anything else, we’d be meeting at their plush offices in Midtown. But not today.
Not for this.
Taylor glances at her watch as my pulse chugs along like thick oil.
“She’ll be here any minute.”
Something sharp and barbed twists in my gut. A cold sensation and the need to escape from something unseen overwhelms me.
“Have you talked to your family about any of this?”
I shake my head. Taylor nods.
“Okay. Just curious.” She clears her throat, folding her arms over her smart, elegant, all-business charcoal gray skirt suit. “Like we discussed, she’s going to try and throw you with all sorts of scary threats. But remember, the CIA cuts deals all the time. Now, again, she’s almost certain to try and use the history between you to rattle you. So let me do the talking.”
I just nod slowly, staring past her out the window.
Yes, Taylor knows Amaya and I have “a history”. But she doesn’t know what the true nature of that history is.
Nobody does. Nobody alive, that is, aside from Amaya and me.
Jesus. One of these days, all the secrets I keep inside might drag me down…or make me explode. But until that day comes, nothing about the situation is going to change. Not even to my lawyer, who’s sworn to attorney-client privilege.
Yeah, Amaya and I have “history” all right.
A dark one.
The sort of history that scars and shapes you, that ends childhoods far too early and molds you into something brutal and twisted.
She helped make me the monster I am today.
But that’s not the reason we’re meeting her today, in a hotel room of all places, so that no one knows about it.
Back then, when it all happened, Amaya Mircari was working for the FBI. My father wanted a friend in the Bureau. He also wanted to “make a man out of me”, since I refused to be his attack dog.
Amaya was gladly able to help with both those things.
That was seventeen years ago. Now, she’s moved on and gone up in the world, switching from the FBI to the CIA. That’s how our paths have managed to cross again.
Because I fucked up.
Our family has been slowly moving most of our business from the shady and illegal to the legitimate. But there’s still a lot of money in smuggling weapons and drugs into this country.
If you do it right, it’s actually pretty low risk. We only work with people we’ve known for years. We keep the exchanges under a certain monetary threshold to avoid close scrutiny, and we always meet on our terms.
But a few weeks ago, I got sloppy.
Ares had been muttering about a dip in profits from the previous quarter’s financial investments. At the same time, I got contacted by a “friend of a friend of a friend”—a merchant who knew someone I’d worked with once, who was friends with someone I deal with regularly. They wanted a huge shipment of weapons.
It was stupid, but they were waving big money around. I got greedy, and it bit me in the ass, hard. Because after the lights went down and the curtain went up, it turned out my new “buyer” was the CIA, conducting an anti-terror sting operation.
On the plus side, I did the drop myself, alone, so none of our guys got picked up. And my family doesn’t know about any of this shit yet, thank fucking God.
But yours truly is royally screwed.
Not just because I’m potentially looking at spending the next thirty years in Federal prison. Even worse, the lead agent on all this is her.
As if on cue, there’s a knock at the door. Taylor turns, her brow furrowing just a little as we lock eyes.
“Seriously. Let me do the talking. The very fact that we’re having this meeting is significant. They want something, and it’s not your ass in prison, or you’d be there already. Got it?”
I just nod.
Yeah, Amaya fucking wants something all right.
