Page 68 of Fated for his Flame

Silas looked at the pictures. Then at his sovereign. I watched it all in the corner of my eye, never taking my gaze off her.

“Are you sure?” he asked in low tones. “If Caine told you this, you know he’s got it out for me …”

“The building and person were verified externally,” she said, still staring into me with those piercing eyes of hers. “It’s CIA.”

Silas exhaled slowly, turning to face me. “Chloe,” he said slowly. “What are they talking about? Why are you in these pictures?”

“Because she’s a fucking spy!” Caine snarled, clapping his hands together explosively. “That’s the only explanation.”

The sovereign lifted a hand, and silence immediately ruled the room.

“What do you have to say for yourself?” she asked.

I ran through a dozen different excuses. The ones I’d cobbled together in my mind in case such a situation arose. I truly hadn’t expected it to, however, and I wasn’t ready. Nor was there a good reason.

For a brief moment, I tried to play it off as being someone scared for my life and wanting to find a way out because of constantly living in fear among dragons and people like Caine.

But they wouldn’t buy it. Maybe the sovereign would believe me, woman to woman, but that was it. Silas wouldn’t, and Caine surely wouldn’t. He already had his mind made up.

So, I didn’t say anything. I just stared at her.

“I see,” the sovereign said, disappointed.

I glanced at Silas. He was staring at the photographs, his face twisted in a mix of pain and anger. When he finally looked over at me, it wasn’t the man I cared for looking back.

“How could you?” he asked, shaking his head. “All this time, and you’ve been a spy? Take her away.”

Hearing the disgust in his voice, knowing his suspicions about me at the resort were now founded in reality, was more than I was prepared to hear. Tears filled my eyes as two of the guards snatched my wrists and escorted me out of the room.

A dozen paces down the hallway Silas caught up with me. For a moment, hope blossomed.

“Give me a moment,” he said to the guards.

They glanced at one another.

“Now,” Silas growled.

They walked ten paces forward and paused, watching.

I faced Silas.

He watched me. “I knew something was off when you came back to the villa,” he said. “I just never expected it was this bad. That you were that bad.”

I stared back at him, unblinking as the hope I should never have allowed to flare died instantly. He wasn’t there to try to get me to explain what I’d done. He was just hurt.

So, I didn’t say anything, didn’t give him that satisfaction.

“I trusted you,” he said suddenly, the pain in his voice wrenching at my heart. “I chose you, Chloe. You. Over my family, over everyone else. They told me to not trust you. But I did. I fought for you. I thought you were different, that you were special. And then I was wrong, and they were right. You’re a fucking traitor. You were never who you said you were, were you? Never the person I thought I knew.”

The raw anguish in his voice, racked with a pain that tore at my soul, had the tears streaming down my face. I didn’t bother to hold them back. He was hurting, bad, and all I wanted to do was reach out for him.

“This whole time, you were just learning more about us. So you could hurt us. Hurt me. Well, good job. You fucking succeeded,” he said, shaking his head and blinking furiously. “How could you do this? Say something!”

I tilted my head slightly. “You have no idea what I did,” I said stiffly. “But you’ve already made up your mind about it. All of you. So, whatever I say, it won’t matter.”

Then, before I could second-guess myself, I turned and walked away. I was not the type to squeal, to whine and beg. That was the risk of my job, something I’d known the day I signed up for the Clandestine Service.

Death was something I knew far better than I’d like. Now it was stalking me, and if I was going to die, I would face it head-on. Not crumple into a pile of tears and snot and piss as I begged them to spare me.

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