PLAYED - A BRITISH BAD BOY ROMANCE (56 page)

CHAPTER TWELVE

I
stood quietly
in front of the huge oaken doors at the front of Nathan’s mansion, but I knew
something was wrong even before he opened them. His private security team,
usually quiet and more or less invisible, was out in force. They seemed to be
scouring the exterior of the building, although after a quick glance in my
direction, they completely ignored my presence.

Relax. Innocent before proven guilty. Don’t just let
yourself fly off the handle,
I told myself, trying to calm my nerves.

It didn’t make sense. Wallace was in jail. O’Rourke
was dead. Any Paddie left would be too busy stuffing their pockets with the
leftovers to bother with retaliation. Nathan didn’t need this kind of security
presence, unless there was another, more sinister reason they were here.

One of the men walked past, sweeping a long antenna
through the air, the business-end attached to a strange little electronic box.
He barely even acknowledged my presence.

When Nathan finally opened the door, he looked
different. On the courthouse steps he had seemed a happy man, a braggart and a
lover. Now, he carried a look that was anything but calm. I’d watched him stand
up and allow himself to be shot. The last thing I’d expected to ever see on his
face was fear.

Was it possible to be sexy and scared? Nathan pulled
it off. Sort of.

“Get inside,” he whispered, pulling me through the
door and shutting it behind us. I could hear a mechanical whirring and a
high-pitched electronic whine, and I glanced back to see expensive looking
locks sliding into place behind me. They looked better suited for a bank vault
than a front door.

“What’s going on, Nathan? You’re scaring me,” I said,
my hand instinctively moving toward my purse and the piece of death-dealing
metal within. Before I could go any further, Nathan had grabbed my arm and
dragged me through the living room, past the kitchen, and around near a
staircase. Hitting a piece of the wall paneling, I watched in silence as it
slid away, revealing a heavy metal door. It swung open, and I could see the
three enormous metal bolts that had retracted from the wall.

“Get inside,” Nathan said fiercely. I complied,
despite every instinct in my body telling me to get the hell out of here. A
moment later, the man I had come to both love and fear in such a short amount
of time was standing before me, the huge metal bolts closing off any hope of
escape.

“What are you doing, Sandra?” Nathan asked, staring
down at the gun I’d pulled out into the open. “Put that thing away.”

“You just locked me in a dark room and you look like
something has you scared to death, Nathan. You tell me what the hell is going
on right now and I’ll think about putting this away,” I replied, my hand
shaking ever so slightly.

What the hell was he doing? I stepped backward as he
moved toward me, one step, then another, until I was flush against the cold
metal wall of our makeshift prison.

“Stop. I’m warning you, Nathan!” I shouted, holding
the gun up. He stepped closer, reaching out. Every part of me wanted to pull
the trigger. Here he was, the man I thought I could trust, ready to show me how
foolish I’d been… But I couldn’t do it. His hand wrapped the barrel of the gun
and pushed it aside as he swept me up into his arms.

“Oh, God. I thought I might not see you again,” he
whispered, tears streaming down his face. I didn’t even have a chance to
protest as he forced his lips down onto mine. What the hell was going on? He
ran his hands over my body, my gun clattering to the floor. I pushed him back
as hard as I could, separating us.

“What the hell is this?” I asked, looking around the
small space. Shelves lined the walls, and a phone was wired into one of them.
Next to me, a small cot was pushed up against the side of the space and a
laptop sat atop a little table, open to what looked like a stock market ticker.

“It’s a safe room, Sandra. Three-foot-thick walls,
enough food, water, and air for a month. I had it built a few months after I
moved into this place, as a precaution…”

“Why the hell am I in here?” I asked indignantly,
staring into his crystalline eyes. Despite its name, this room made me feel
anything but safe. I felt claustrophobic, like the walls and Nathan were all
closing in around me. I felt like a cornered animal, like a victim waiting to
happen.

I had never
felt this way with him before. I didn’t like it.

“Because I needed a safe place to talk about this,”
Nathan said, tossing a small recording device onto the table. I recognized it
immediately. It was a standard issue t22 short range video and audio transmitter.
We used them to listen in on people during investigations. “There’s dozens of
them all over the house,” he added.

“Of course there are. You were potentially connected
to one of the biggest human smuggling rings we’ve ever taken down. Do you really
think the police wouldn’t have ears on you?” I shouldn’t have been so open, but
I also didn’t like lying to the man who had stolen my heart. I needed to look
into his eyes and know one way or another if he was guilty.

“I’m pulling these things out of here. All of them.
I’ll live in this goddamned safe room if I have to. The police offered me
protection for my testimony, they gave me immunity,” Nathan replied.

I almost smirked. Immunity protected you from past
crimes, not the present. The captain had to be hell-bent on taking Nathan down
if he was investing this much of the budget into tracking and listening in on
him. Any little misstep and the asshole billionaire would be behind bars. Just
thinking about the women on that container ship made my blood boil. I wanted to
be the one to slap the handcuffs on this asshole…

This asshole
who made me love him.

“And there’s this,” he continued, tossing a small box
next to the transmitter. This box was far more chilling. Photographs spilled
out onto the table, dozens of shots from every single angle. My apartment, my
car, the inside of my bedroom…

And one of me
from just last night, asleep in my bed.

I stared at it
for a moment, fear washing over me.

“What the hell is this?” I asked, trembling in place.
I had to maintain my composure. Nathan was trying to put me off balance. He was
trying to make me need him. I could see right through this game—he’d put
someone in my bedroom and had them take pictures of me. He had to…

“Did someone hurt you?” he asked, his eyes suddenly
alight with an angry, terrified fire. “So help me God, if someone hurt you…”

“I’m okay. Nobody hurt me. I didn’t even know they
were there,” I whispered, sitting down on the cot next to him. He seemed
sincere, and that set warning bells off in my mind. Was he playing me for a
fool? Was this whole thing an act? Did Nathaniel Hale have me photographed in
my own bed? And if he didn’t, who the hell did?

I couldn’t put it past him. Knowing what I knew, what
the Captain had shown me, Nathan was capable of damn near anything. If he was
half as cunning as Captain Pierce had made him out to be, there was no telling
what plan he might concoct to keep me from seeing the truth.

Maybe he intended to keep me out of harm’s way. Or
maybe he wanted me in here where I couldn’t interfere with his plans, where I
couldn’t snoop around and ruin his schemes. Even if I’d quit the force, he
might have suspected that I’d still be able to put my detective training to
good use. Maybe this was intended to be my prison.

“We can stop this,” I said, trying to manufacture a
reason to get us out of this room. “The police, the FBI…”

“No, Sandra. Don’t you see? Someone with a badge has
been watching me this whole time. Things haven’t sat right with me since the
courthouse transfer.”

The transfer… My mind flashed back to the men I’d
shot. It played over the chase, and the way Officer Kimball had sped off ahead.

“There were two in uniform when they came to pick me
up. Everything seemed normal. The lanky guy, the one with the scar, he gets me
in the car and shoots his buddy in the head, point blank. A couple of the
undercover cops tried to stop him, but it was too late.”

Kimball… It had never sat right with me. I trusted
Officer Kimball, and he’d gotten in the car with scar-face like nothing was
wrong. If he was in on it, why did he end up taking a bullet?

My mind went back to the day I shot O’Rourke. I could
see Kimball and the way he greeted the man with the scar. It was as if they
knew each other… Or… Maybe he was expecting someone.

Still, that didn’t explain why Kimball had sped off
ahead. If he was killed during the pickup, that meant he thought everything was
normal right up until the last minute… He never would have broken from
protocol… Unless…

Captain’s orders… Kimball would have trusted the
Captain. If he was ordered to hurry to the pickup, he would have done it. If
the Captain had assigned someone to ride along with him, he wouldn’t have
questioned it.

Captain Pierce had called Kimball “compromised.” He’d
branded him a traitor.

“They’ve pulled my passport, Sandra. They say it’s
temporary, in case I’m needed for any further questioning. Why?
_The
case is
over.
Peter Wallace is in
jail. They’re railroading me,” Nathan whispered.

Now it was the captain’s voice ringing in my head as
the detective inside me went to work, putting all the pieces together.

“We still have a rat, Sandra. Officer Kimball was
compromised, and now he’s dead.”

That son of a bitch,
I thought to
myself. It all made sense. Nathan wasn’t the one who had been playing me all
this time. It was Captain Pierce.

And now he was trying to turn me on Nathan. If I gave
him access to one of Nathan’s computers, there was no telling what he might do.

But why? What the hell was his angle? Money? Power? Promotion?
Was he working some kind of vigilante angle? If Captain Pierce had any part in
this, then the blood of thirty-six women, and maybe even more, was on his
hands.

There was still one small problem, though. A container
was on an inbound ship, and it had Nathan’s fingerprints all over it.

“Are you okay?
Talk to me,” Nathan said.

“Nathan, I’m going to need you to be honest with me,”
I whispered, staring at him. My gun was sitting on the floor well out of reach,
but I was already making plans to lunge for it, if necessary. There were so
many possibilities surrounding this whole sordid affair that I still couldn’t
rule anything out, and that included Nathan’s possible involvement.

My heart told me a different story. It begged me to
rush into Nathan’s arms, to bury my face in his chest and promise to protect
him, no matter what. Listening to it would have been dangerous, but at that
moment, it was all that I wanted to do.

I forced myself to listen to my brain instead. That
way, I was far less likely to get myself shot.

“I’ll tell you anything, Sandra,” he replied, his eyes
sparkling in the way I’d come to enjoy. Could he really be the evil man the
Captain had made him out to be? I’d been a detective long enough to know when
someone wasn’t being sincere, and either Nathan was the best liar I’d ever met,
or he was genuinely concerned about me.

“You signed for
another container. Didn’t you?”

His eyes cast to the floor quickly, not wanting to
meet my own. He might as well have come right out and said it: yes, that was
his doing. My body was tense, muscles ready to throw myself to the floor,
toward the gun that might be my only salvation.

“I had to,
Sandra. Let me explain.”

“You want to explain? The last container ended up at
the bottom of the ocean. You just condemned another group of women—
children
—to death or sex slavery, and
you want to
explain
?!”

My mother would have been proud. Her angry woman voice
was channeling through me from beyond the grave. Maybe Nathan was right; maybe
the Captain was trying to hand his ass over to the Irish, but none of that
mattered if this asshole was still bringing women over. This time, he had no
excuse. He knew what was in that container, but he’d signed for it anyway. This
wasn’t a case of willful ignorance. He was a monster, and he needed to be
stopped.