Page 52 of Covert Vengeance

“Okay, now you’re just being modest. You also hid it all so well that no one’s been able to find it or trace it back to you,” Trinity said. “Yet.”

“And they won’t.” Amber sounded totally confident of that.

Megan laughed at her sister. “You’re an evil genius. I might want you to manage my portion when this is all over.”

Amber’s answering smile told Kiyomi that Megan’s trust was worth way more than any payout Amber would ever receive.

But Kiyomi couldn’t stay silent about this any longer. She would have told Amber sooner, but she’d been too out of it. Initially she’d wanted to wait to do this in private, but the others deserved to know everything too. “About the op you did with Hannah and the others,” she began, drawing Amber’s gaze.

“What about it?”

“What happened?” Kiyomi wanted to hear it from her point of view before adding anything else. “Did you ever tell anyone?”

A heavy silence blanketed the room as all eyes turned to Amber. “Only the barest details to Trinity and Rycroft while they were holding me in London. I told them only what they’d absolutely needed to know, and handed over some electronic files as evidence.”

The rest, she’d kept to herself for protection and possible leverage later on. Kiyomi fully understood that. “Who recruited you in the first place? For the op in Rome?”

Tucking her feet beneath her, Amber settled back into the corner of the sofa and seemed to force her body to relax. “Hannah and Zoya. They needed a hacker to help them take down a dirty arms dealer connected to the Russian mob. But it was more than that.”

Kiyomi watched her intently, her heart beating faster. How much did Amber actually know? Kiyomi was betting not all of it. “What do you mean?”

“Initially it was a sanctioned op to take out a dirty CIA asset and his network of arms dealer buddies. Then the Valkyrie Program blew up in the media and officials scrambled to shut it down, bury all traces. I’m still unclear on the timing whether or not the Rome op was officially sanctioned or not, but in the end it didn’t matter. We were still operational, and everything was going forward as planned with or without government monitoring. Only it turned out that was because Zoya’s boyfriend had a serious grudge against that same target.”

“Stanislav was her boyfriend,” Megan murmured, watching her.

Amber nodded. “The team got the target, then I took his money and buried it. But when I followed our exfil plan and went to our rendezvous point to meet the others, I walked right into a trap.”

A low-grade nausea churned in Kiyomi’s stomach as she waited for Amber to continue. She now knew how that felt. What it was like to have the blood drain from your face as a wave of terror slammed into you. What it was like to be taken prisoner and be forced to endure everything your captors did to you.

“Instead of finding my team waiting, there were five Bratva members there for me instead. I took out three of them and escaped initially. The other two hunted me for the next nine days until one finally caught up and ran me off the road. He caught me as I was crawling out of the wreck.”

Kiyomi’s skin chilled as memories of her own capture and captivity beat against the steel door she’d trapped them behind in her mind. “And then?” she forced out.

Amber took a slow, deep breath and continued. “He knocked me out. When I woke up, I was tied to a chair in a windowless room, and there was a table next to me with an assortment of torture instruments.”

Nausea swirled in her belly. She knew exactly how it felt to be that helpless. To know what was coming and be unable to stop it. “But you got away,” Kiyomi said quietly, willing her heart to slow down.You’re safe now. Still alive.Though she mostly felt half-dead.

Amber inclined her head. “Yes. I killed him, took his phone and traced it all back to Zoya and Stanislav.”

“The Valkyries who betrayed you. They’re all dead now?” Georgia asked, her voice taut with anger.

“Yes,” Amber confirmed. “Including Zoya—which is why Stanislav wants me dead—and Hannah.”

“She was dirty.” Kiyomi’s tone was icy, seething with the anger that threatened to break through her iron control. She’d thought she’d been tough before her capture, but that whole experience had changed her. Hardened her. She would never be taken again.Never. “Trinity told me you thought there was a chance she might have been innocent, but whatever intel made you think that was planted either by her or someone close to her.”

“How do you know that?” Amber asked in surprise. “I thought it had been someone from the Valkyrie Program trying to turn me on the others.”

Her insides tightened. “Because she asked me to kill you.”

A tense, brittle silence met her words, broken only by Georgia’s soft whistle.

“What?” Amber finally said, her voice flat.

Kiyomi nodded, glad to have the chance to say this out loud in front of everyone. She wanted them all to know exactly what had happened. The depths the others had sunk to. “You and Hannah were the only ones who knew where that money was. She wanted you dead so that no one else would be able to track or have access to it.”

The rest was harder to say. “She knew we’d been friends and roommates and thought I had the best chance of getting close to you again. When she contacted me, she framed it to seem like you were the one who’d betrayed the others. That you’d taken the money and tried to disappear.”

The lying bitch had tried to manipulate Kiyomi to do her dirty work. To have Kiyomi kill her oldest friend.

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