Kira turned to face her self-appointed bodyguard and spoke just above a whisper. “How long have you known Andre was a fraud?”
Rand was silent for a long moment, then he said, “Since this morning, when you were in his hotel room.”
Kira could have accepted just about any answer but that one. He’d had so many opportunities to tell her what he knew since then.
She’d been falling for this man and had believed his feelings were along the same lines. But he’d spent the better part of five hours with her, without telling her the one thing she absolutely needed to know.
Anger surged in a way she’d never experienced. It was a raw, violent rage she didn’t know what to do with. Hit something? Cry? Yell? Seethe?
Collapse into a broken heap?
It was as if she’d been attacked with sandpaper and the outer layer that protected her was gone, and now her raw skin ached at the merest touch of air or sun.
It wasn’t fair that he was wound-free while she suffered along every inch of exposed flesh.
She held up the necklace. “Thank you for getting this back, but we’re done. Go home. I don’t need your kind of help.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
“Kira! Wait!” His shout was a desperate plea, but she continued down the path, heading for the exit.
Dammit, he’d known it was a shit idea to keep her in the dark. Still, he’d done it. He couldn’t blame Freya for this epic fuckup. His desire for Kira messed with his logic, so he’d overcompensated by making the harsh choice—as that’s what he’d do if it were anyone else.
But Kira wasn’t anyone else. He needed to stop pretending his feelings for her were irrelevant when it came to the decisions he made on this op.
No doubt now it was an op. And he’d fucked it up beyond all recognition and been kicked off the team.
“Please, Kira. I’m sorry.”
She didn’t look back. Didn’t offer any sign that she’d even heard him.
The one thing he’d believed from the moment he’d first asked her out and she’d turned him down was that eventually, he would win her over. Even with her father’s interference, he’d held on to the idea that if he didn’t push and was patient, she’d give him a chance.
Now he realized he might have broken her trust beyond repair. And he couldn’t blame her. This trip meant everything to her. She’d shared her fears about what she’d learn, not just about her parents, but herself. And he’d withheld a vital piece from her.
Worse, because he’d messed with her emotions, she was even more vulnerable. Her gait was angry and lacked signs of situational awareness. Because she wasn’t protecting herself, he had no choice but to follow and protect her as best he could from a distance.
Before she turned onto the main street where she was supposed to meet Kulik, she pivoted and faced him. “Stop following me.”
“No.”
“I meant it when I said go home. You sure as hell aren’t staying in my room.”
“You’re in danger, Kira.”
“And whose fault is that? Maybe the person who had intel he didn’t bother to share?”
“I wanted to extract you from Stoltz’s hotel room the minute I found out, but I knew you wouldn’t appreciate that, and, more important, we’d get more information from him if he didn’t know we were on to him.”
“But we weren’t on to him. You were.”
“You had your suspicions. You said as much to him, but you never said a word to me.”
“Don’t make me the villain here, Rand. I’m not the one who knew for a fact he wasn’t Andre.”
“I fucked up. I should have told you. But you did have your suspicions, and if you’d shared them, I’d have told you everything. As it was, I wasn’t about to let you see him without me by your side again, and I’d hoped to get more information from him if I played along with his charade.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
The truth would sound like an excuse: He absolutely would have told her if not for Freya’s instructions. His rationale for following her command was solid. Freya was a former operative who had run this kind of op for years when she was in the Special Activities Division. He had no one else of higher rank to consult with. Plus, he trusted Freya.
But Freya underestimated Kira, which meant so had Rand.
Excuse or not, he owed her the unvarnished truth. Still, he made sure to keep the blame on himself. “Freya wanted you to be unwitting, thinking we could catch him off guard if you didn’t know. But I never should have agreed to that. It was the wrong call, and I’m sorry I didn’t trust that you could hold your own with him. In the end, he was the one who broke cover.”
“Don’t you get it? Given our history, Freya will always think I’m less-than. I’m sure she thinks I wasn’t good enough for her brother and that I was a fool. That you went with her assessment even after I told you about Apollo, well, that hurts even more.” She turned and resumed walking toward the main road, where there were crowds of tourists.
He chased after her. “First, you were too good for Apollo. Second, I don’t for a moment think Freya thinks less of you.”
“Bullshit. There’s no other reason to hold back that information.”
He clamped his mouth shut. He wasn’t throwing Freya under that bus, even if she did make the bad call. When this was over, the two women had some painful history to sort through. Rand wouldn’t make that harder.
“Freya is a former covert operator who ran ops like this and called the shots when she did. She slipped into that role here and was making the same kind of decisions she would for anyone.”
“This isn’t Freya’s op, Rand. It’s my life. I’ve let you join me, but I never asked for Freya’s help. You did that. And then you made her the boss. Not me.”
