Page 3 of Her Keeper
Now…
I slammed through the door of the conference room and shoved Penny toward one of the chairs. “Sit down,” I told her, spinning around to shut the door behind me. “We’ve got some talking to do.”
I turned back to her expecting to see her terrified, possibly crying in fear. Instead, she looked blank, like whoever had once lived behind her face was just gone.
A moment later, I realized it was a mask. And I should have known that, except that I hadn’t seen it in so long. Not since we’d actually started getting to know each other.
Orthinkingwe were getting to know each other.
Because it turned out I didn’t know her at all.
I walked toward her, slammed my hands down on the table on either side of her, and leaned in until I could smell her. Smell the fear and the slight tang of her perfume. “Tell me everything you told them,” I growled. “And I’ll know if you leave anything out.”
Mentally, I was going through everything that had happened. A boat—and its shipment—missing 50 miles offshore. Reno’s messages blaming us for its disappearance. Another boat held by the authorities in port. Another of Reno’s shipments. A spy in the warehouse in LA, threatening the jewelry importing business. And that didn’t even start to cover all the random attacks on the streets of Brooklyn. Rossi soldiers who were shot without warning. Families of Joseph’s men threatened. Someone had known things they shouldn’t have known, and they’d used it against us. They’d found us in places they shouldn’t have known to look, hit us exactly where it hurt.
All the way back to the killing of a top family guy on a Sunday morning, when he was at breakfast with his wife. No, the guy hadn’t been from our family, but he’d been one of my father’s allies, and the leads as to who had killed him were awfully thin on the ground.
That had started all of this, I realized. That shooting had led to my father making a stupid decision to have Sloane Brennan kidnapped, and while Joseph and Sloane were in Italy, everything had gone haywire.
Penny hadn’t started working for me until two weeks later.
The timelines didn’t quite match up, I realized, but it still made sense for it to be her. All the information she had access to and our enemy somehow knowing things they shouldn’t have known. There were too many unanswered questions, and she was the only answer.
Enough had happened since she started working for me that there had to be a connection.
Also, she’d just copped to it in my office. Saying ‘It’s not what you think it is’ doesn’t mean anything other than ‘I’m doing something I shouldn’t be doing and I want you to pretend otherwise.’
Guilty. She was a rat, and I had to treat her as one. No matter how pretty or young or fresh or lovely she was.
“Talk!” I shouted.
Penny jerked back, her eyes growing impossibly large, and her mask started to slip. Within moments her eyes were filling with moisture and a single tear was tracking down her cheek.
And God dammit all to hell, I wanted to reach out and wipe it off her face. Tell her it was going to be okay. Touch her and remember how it felt when she touched me.
Or I wanted to make her cry even harder.
I was two men in one body and it was fucking exhausting.
I pushed the sentimental sap down into the corner and lifted my eyebrows. “Crying’s not going to save you, Ms. Lane. I want a list of the things you’ve had access to and what you turned over to the Caruso family, and I want it now.”
“I haven’t turned anything over to the Carusos,” she breathed, her voice barely audible.
I got as close to her as I could get without actually touching her. “No? Then who the fuck are you turning it over to? Because whoever you’ve allied yourself with is using it to kill us, Penny. I need to know who that is, and I need to know now.”
Her face flushed and crumpled, her body shaking with sobs, but a second later she straightened up and lifted her chin, the crying suddenly finished. She narrowed her eyes at me and pressed her lips together, looking likeshewas the one who’d been wronged.
“I didn’t give anything to the Carusos. I’d never give anything to the Carusos. Are you insane?”
I brought a fist down on the table. “Then who’ve you been talking to? I know you’ve been talking to someone, so there’s no use in denying it.”
Penny jerked again and her lower lip started to wobble. “No one. Just some reporter. But it was only because—”
I felt like all the wind had suddenly been taken out of my sails. “A reporter? What the fuck does a reporter want with information about our operation? And why would she…” I cocked my head and looked down at her, trying to put the pieces together. “Why the fuck would she send you?”
That, of course, was followed by another, far more important, question.
I glared at the girl in front of me. “And why the fuck would you say yes?”
