Swallow (Kindred Book 2) (30 page)

“What the hell was that?” she demanded, ignoring Sutcliffe’s prone form to get near her boss. “I didn’t tell you anything about Raven. I didn’t tell you we could lure him here to murder Sutcliffe just so you could get yourself promoted! You lied to me! You made me believe that you wanted me to be a part of this. That you trusted me—“

Grant wore his own fury. “Welcome to the club, Zara! I trusted you, and you ran off to fuck my brother! You sold me out.” Grant kicked the crate and spun toward her, his anger made him forget everything else in the place.

It became so clear to her. “You didn’t think you could get me,” Zara muttered. “You used me… You… this was payback. All of it. You didn’t want my trust. You wanted to set me up.”

Grant’s self-satisfaction shone. “And that you so readily accepted Sutcliffe’s offer told us that you were still working for Raven, that you were going to betray me again,” Grant said. “Don’t stand there acting shocked and hurt. You came to the compound and pretended to entertain the idea of an allegiance because you planned to betray me—again! All I did was play you at your own game, Zara.”

She couldn’t be angry because he was right. She was on the side of the Kindred, inside CI, close to Grant, all because it was supposed to get them information about Grant’s plans. She’d completely missed that he planned to get Sutcliffe out of the way and take over. But as she glanced around at the dead body, she saw it so clearly.

Grant was a powerful man. CEO of a multinational. Billionaire. Men like him didn’t work for anyone, and they were even worse at taking orders. Somewhere along the way, Grant had gone from being complicit to craving authority. It could have happened when he saw what Sutcliffe had built, maybe he wanted to be exalted by the cult.

“What makes you think that they’ll let you take over?” she asked, still looking at Sutcliffe. “Are you just going to saunter back to the farm and tell them Sutcliffe is taking a nap and left you in charge? How long do you think they’ll accept that for? Sutcliffe was their leader and—“

“He was ridiculously inefficient and slow. It won’t take them long to see that things are better under my leadership.”

Grant wasn’t the man she thought he was. When she turned to look at him, his egotism disgusted her. “Under your leadership. What about the company, Grant? Are you just going to abandon CI while you take up your position as supreme leader?”

“The company gives us the tools we need. War is a business and just like running a multinational, if it’s led by the right team of people with the right acumen, it’s impossible to lose.”

“You told me this wasn’t about money,” she said, backing away from him when he encroached upon her. “You told me this was about ideology.”

“Everything’s about money,” he said and some of his enthusiasm turned to a sneer. “Or sex. You proved that.”

Brodie might doubt her but she couldn’t doubt him. “You know, it doesn’t matter whether he trusts me or not,” she said, taking farther small steps of retreat. “He’s still going to take you down.”

“I don’t think so,” Grant said, taking the padlock out of his pocket. “The loss of our parents crippled him. Losing Art sent him back to square one. And now he’s lost the woman you claim he loves, he’ll turn right back into a hermit again. He’s nothing on his own. He’s easily broken.”

She wouldn’t believe that, Grant had played a cruel game with her, and maybe it was one she deserved to lose. But she wouldn’t agree with him disparaging her love. “If he loved me, then he wouldn’t have believed your claims, would he? By your own admission, he’s incapable of love. So all you’ve done is strengthen him. Now he has more hate for you and hate for me. Pissing Raven off always has consequences,” she said, and nodded at Sutcliffe. “Look what he did to the last man who pissed him off.”

Grant stopped to look down. “He won’t be able to get to me.”

The upper hand was returning to her. “If Sutcliffe’s people accept you, maybe he won’t get to you quickly. Your little game might have fucked with Raven’s head and broken us up. Maybe you’re pleased that I got what I deserved. But there’s one thing you haven’t achieved, one thing you can’t steal.”

“What’s that?” Grant asked her, but was unconcerned.

Free and joyous despite the rift Grant may have caused, she still had hope. “My love for him,” she said and smiled. “You can fight a thousand wars and raise an army of a million. You can stamp your feet and demand to get your way, but Raven is not alone. Day or night, no matter what you do, I will always belong to him.”

And while Grant was building up another red-faced fury, she bolted to the truck Sutcliffe had left idling and sped away as fast as the vehicle would take her. As soon as she was too far away for Grant to catch her, she stopped to take her purse from the backseat so she could call Ben to tell him what had happened. Although she put the gun in Grant’s hand and omitted all reference to Raven.

Her goal was to cause as much mayhem and dissension as she could before Grant got back and spun his own yarn. That he was marooned in the middle of the field would help, because although he probably had a cell phone, he would have no one to call for help. With Ben on the case, spreading the news, she dumped the truck, wiped her prints, and caught a cab to the airport.

She hated every second of the journey. In her desperation to get home, she counted every second, especially the ones where there was some sort of delay. If someone so much as stopped in front of her to tie their shoe, she had to dampen her urge to scream at them to get out of her way.

If Grant wanted to cause more trouble then he could get back before her and be in her apartment. But he had a cult to usurp, so she doubted he’d be chasing her down. There was nothing more for him to win. He wanted to bust up her relationship with Brodie as payback for their association and it was possible he’d succeeded. But stepping into Albert Sutcliffe’s shoes would be enough of a job to keep him busy for a while. Zara didn’t think it would be as easy as Grant seemed to think.

Sutcliffe had spoken about being valuable to the group to ensure cohesion. After she’d killed Elvis, cohesion fell apart. Without Sutcliffe’s direction, she’d guess that most of the group would disband—the innocent ones at least. Bringing together so many type A personalities, as Sutcliffe had to build his army, would lead to clashes now that the position of leader had become vacant.

The flight was bumpy, but she was too distracted to care. Then the cab she’d jumped into outside arrivals got stuck in traffic. So by the time she ran up the stairs to her apartment, she was tired and annoyed. Thinking about what had happened in that bunker for too long drained her senses. Grant had set her up, which she was raging about. But it was the look on Brodie’s face as his brother wove his magic that broke her heart. Every time she pictured it, tears came to her eyes. Her man had hurt enough, he didn’t deserve to be played with for nothing more than sport. At least when she’d betrayed Grant it was for the greater good. Grant did what he did in that warehouse just because it was fun.

Sticking her key in the lock of her apartment, she closed her eyes for half a beat and prayed that she’d find hope inside. The apartment was dark. It was cold and nothing moved. She locked the front door, threw her purse onto the floor, and marched straight to the bedroom. There were no lights in here either, but she didn’t have to search the corners, he was lying right there in the middle of the bed.

She couldn’t pick out his expression, but from his pose with his hands linked behind his head, she could tell he wasn’t here for a fight.

“What took you so long?” Brodie asked her. Her smile came after her tongue pushed into her cheek. “Get your sweet ass over here.”

Zara was shaking her head when she ran over to throw herself on top of him, but she grabbed his face and kissed him ten times in a row before she spoke. “I hate you, you know that?” she said and kissed him again. “I guess you didn’t close the door on us after all.”

“I had you going,” he said and snatched her body to roll over and tuck her under him. Her dress was off the shoulder and loose enough that he could just pull it down out of his way. But after exposing her breasts, he gave them a brief look then kissed her mouth.

Brodie loved to kiss and when the urgency of his tongue heated hers, she mumbled and took his jaw into both hands to separate their mouths before things went any further. “What was the point of that? Why did you leave me there with him?”

She’d been terrified that her relationship with Brodie had been irreparably damaged by Grant’s antics. If Brodie was still looking for a way to push her out of his life, Grant had given it to him. Each extreme had warred within her, which was why her journey was so taxing. She’d convinced herself Brodie was going to cast her out of the Kindred, then swung back to the other extreme that the whole thing was an elaborate ruse, and he did trust her.

“I guess you gave him the riot act after I left,” he said, brushing his nose over hers and kissing her cheek then her chin before he pressed his lips to her mouth.

Pushing him up, she still didn’t understand. “What did you expect me to do? Was this all part of your evil plan? Can you explain to me what—“

His loud exhale was as frustrated as it was resigned. He had to have known she’d want answers. “You knew I’d be here, didn’t you?”

With his arm around her, he relaxed onto his back. He picked up the ends of her hair that hung down her back and let them snake between his fingers. She moved onto her side and laid her hand over his heart. “I hoped you would be. I told Grant that if you loved me, you wouldn’t have believed him… I was on the plane when I realized I meant it. We’ve been through so much and… I don’t want trust to be an issue for us anymore. I couldn’t get home fast enough. I had to know.”

He admired her. “If I was here, that meant I love you and if I wasn’t then we were over?”

Saying it so plainly brought back old worries. Looking at him, she couldn’t picture her life without him at the center of it. “It would never be over,” she said, sliding down the bed to rest her head on his shoulder, but he kept picking up and dropping her hair. “I told him I would always belong to you. A woman can’t love a man like you and then go back to Regular Joe’s, it’s just not… it wouldn’t be possible.”

“What’s a guy like me?”

Pushing her hand onto his sternum, she levered herself up to make eye contact with him again. “A guy who’s intense and assured and bold. You’re quick and you’re smart and you love me more than a hundred men love their wives.”

His brows rose as his head tipped in her direction. “And I’m the one who’s assured?”

“Deny it,” she said, wearing a grin. Pushing both hands onto his chest, she climbed over to straddle him and rub her lips gently, side to side on his. “Deny that you love me.”

His voice got lower, making it more intimate. “You think I can’t lie about how I feel?” he asked, splaying his fingers on her back to take as much hair between them as he could when he slid them upwards and locked both around the back of her neck.

She squinted. “Would the lie be that you loved me or that you didn’t?”

“I don’t know. If you need a check on my emotions, I guess you’d have to ask my old lady.”

“She says it’s true,” Zara said and he accepted another kiss. There was still business to talk about before they could get busy. “I called Ben.”

“Figured you would,” he said. “What did you tell him?”

She sat up on him to stroke his torso, watching the motion of her hand as she did. “That Grant killed Sutcliffe and wanted to take over. I took Sutcliffe’s truck from the bunker, stranding Grant. I figured that would buy some time because Grant would have to walk back to the road. There are no phone lines at the compound, right?” He nodded. “How did you get to the bunker before us?”

“Easy, we had everything we needed. Swift just needed time to clean up the map image we got from your camera.”

Touching the edge of the pendant that was still around her neck, she closed her fist around it. “Is he still recording?”

Brodie half shrugged. “Probably, but it’s on backup at the manor. We can get there before him.”

That raised another question. “Swift’s not at the manor?” she asked. Seeing Brodie open and relaxed was such a treat. He’d come so far, and she was proud of him, just as Art would be.

“He cleaned up the image of the map while we traveled there last night and when Game Time stopped moving, we knew we had our target. Zave was already in town with the chopper, so the journey didn’t take long. Security wasn’t up to much at the bunker. Sutcliffe was relying on it being a secret. If you beef up security too much then you draw attention to yourself. Sutcliffe wouldn’t want attention on his weapons stash. Picking the lock took seconds and then we unloaded everything.”

That was an impressive operation. “You unloaded everything? What does that mean?”

One of his hands slunk down her body to squeeze her ass. “It means all the boxes and crates you saw there are empty.”

She’d been terrified when Sutcliffe’s supplies came into focus. All those boxes and crates suggested that he’d planned for a massive mission. Knowing that the Kindred had cleared him out alleviated some of her fear. “Does that include Game Time?”

With a single nod, he erased her remaining worries. “That includes Game Time.”

They had to have been working all night, breaking into each crate, removing its contents and then staging the place to look like nothing had been touched. It was genius. “How did you and Swift do all of that—“

“We had help,” Brodie said. “Remember I said we needed an army? Rigor and his men helped us clear the place. We let them have some of the lower level stuff, the rest Zave

brought back with me in the chopper. In the end, it took three trips. The chopper was waiting for me with the final load after I left you with Saint.”

“Which brings me back to my first question? What was that all about? How could you have a plan in place when you didn’t know what Grant was planning?”

“I had an idea,” Brodie said. She brushed her cheek on his when he switched his focus to the window.

She didn’t want him to withdraw now, so she kept caressing to soothe him. “Tell me.”

“In the motel room, after your meeting with Ben. I said it didn’t make sense, right? Putting myself in Grant’s place, I wouldn’t trust you, not after you screwed him over in the Atlas warehouse.”

Opening her mouth, she breathed in to argue, but there was no other way to put it. She wouldn’t blame Brodie or the Kindred for what had happened, or for losing Grant’s faith. As it turned out, he wasn’t the type of person she wanted to be allied with.

Deflated, she changed the tone of her interruption. “Go on,” she said, letting the air out of her lungs.

His lips tilted like he’d read and was amused by her thought process. “Swift and I talked about it that night, after we left the motel room to meet with Rigor. The guy was pissed after that poker game, but he’s smart enough to know a good deal when it finds him. He got arms and cash, and he’ll get a whole lot else if everything goes our way. Grant was gonna screw you over. There was no way he’d trust you. I’d have told you that when you decided to go back to work at CI, if you’d asked me. The way he let you back in was just too easy.”

Back then she couldn’t ask him to so much as pass the salt because he was too distracted. Thinking again, she wondered if she’d been wrong to mollycoddle Brodie the way she had. If she’d forced him to listen, forced him to help, maybe he’d have found his way out of his funk sooner. “Swift and I spoke about it.”

“Swift doesn’t have a brother, and Saint has always been that way, he holds grudges. Since we were kids, he couldn’t keep friends because as soon as he didn’t get his way he sulked. That’s probably why he held onto the argument we had about our folks when we were teenagers.”

Grant wasn’t the only one to hold onto that, the brothers’ relationship was already in tatters and after that, neither of them had made any attempt to patch things up.

“You could’ve just told me to walk away,” she said. “You didn’t have to sneak out of the motel room and make secret plans with Tuck.”

“Saint would never have hurt you, look at what happened today, he thought he conned me into coming to that bunker to kill Sutcliffe because Saint wouldn’t get blood on his Italian loafers. He doesn’t have the stomach for it. That’s why he needs Sutcliffe’s army. If I thought he was gonna hurt you, I’d have yanked you. As it was, he needed to win, needed to defeat us and today he did.”

She was still confused. “So you were just playing fair? You hurt him. I hurt him. So we let him hurt us back.”

“He’s not looking at you anymore, is he? You got away clean, and he’s smug.”

Grant wasn’t focusing on her, he was trying to ingratiate himself with the cult. If Brodie had ignored Grant’s claim that she’d betrayed him, he’d be even angrier and even more likely to focus his wrath on them.

“You were protecting me?” she asked. “You let him think he won because as long as he thinks we’re not together, he’s satisfied.”

“As far as we’re concerned, yes.”

“You were protecting me?” she said and her love for him swelled.

He didn’t even register that what he’d done was a big deal, but it was to her. He’d foregone battling egos with Grant to make sure she was safe. “It’s my primary mission, baby.”

“Beau,” she murmured, but had no words for how humbled she was. It wasn’t every man who would let his opponent claim a win just to protect the sanctity of the heroine.

Still, he was nonchalant. “Don’t worry,” Brodie said, rolling her onto her back again. “He’ll know by the end of this that we conned him again. We just need this window.”

He began to descend to kiss her, but she stopped him. “For what?”

“For the grand finale,” Brodie said. “Swift is still out there, he and Rigor’s men are causing hell at the compound. Scaring the shit out of people and shaking some trees. It should be enough to scare off the women and children.”

Saving innocent people was a plus, but the non-innocent people would raise hell. “But the men will mobilize,” she said, not sure that she liked this plan because it put people she cared about in harm’s way.

“With what? We have the majority of their arms… and with Sutcliffe gone…”

“It will be mayhem,” she said and let him kiss her while she sorted through what these developments meant. The weapons were gone, but they probably didn’t know that until they showed up to retrieve them from the bunker. There was a chance that the men were so busy fighting amongst themselves that no one had taken charge yet. Grant didn’t have their confidence, he was just a random suit who had recently shown up, he hadn’t proven himself to anyone, didn’t have their faith.