Page 72 of Merciless Protector

That name rang a bell, and I remembered the door guy saying Shawn Rook had placed the order. Now I needed to know what to say. Shawn and I hadn’t coordinated stories, given that Shawn assumed I’d stay put in New York.

“Is that why you sent a shooter to my apartment?”

“You’re alive, aren’t you?” He hadn’t answered the question, but would he really implicate himself? My guess was I wasn’t the intended target. “Now, why aren’t you with your owner?”

I didn’t like that word, but now wasn’t the time to debate it. “He let me go.” Ruin’s brows shot up, and I rushed on. “I told him I was FBI and he let me go.”

“Just like that?”

“I promised not to put him in jail,” I spat to make the lie sound better.

When he reached behind him, I felt the emptiness of my shoulder holster. “I promise to do the same for you.” I took the calculated risk and loosened my grip before letting go. If he had a gun, I would lose anyway. I needed to be able to move.

His eyes narrowed. “Why should I believe you?”

“Because you know who my family is,” I admitted. “And if you kill me here, the full force of the bureau will come looking for my killer.” I wasn’t sure what did it, but he seemed to consider it. “Alive, I will do everything to protect my family. Dead, not so much,” I added.

A door opened in the distance. He pointed a finger at my face. “If I get even a hint that you’re coming after me, I’ll kill your parents and take your sister as my next pet.”

I balled my hands into fists and tried to keep my face from showing the hate I felt.

He didn’t leave. “Tell me where my chattel is.”

It took me a second to put that sentence into context. He was talking about the women we’d freed. “I don’t know. I swear.”

“You took them.”

I slowly shook my head. “I didn’t.” I remembered the tracker. “That was when Rook let me go.”

There was no lying my way out of that. We had trackers on us. He would have known we were there.

Footsteps got closer, but Ruin made no move to leave. “Why was he there?”

I shrugged. “To look for you? I don’t know. He took me there after I told him I was FBI.”

Ruin was not easily read. “You talk and your sister lives.”

That threat was worse than him saying she’d die. I let him walk away. Though I wanted to run back into the FBI office and tell my boss what happened, I had to leave. If Ruin had a mole in the bureau, I couldn’t give the appearance I was going back on my word.

Back at my apartment, secure that my new security system was operating and no one had entered my apartment, I called my boss, not wanting to put my report in a file someone else could access. Though I would put it all in writing.

He said he’d look at security feeds of the garage based on an anonymous report that someone saw something funny happening. He agreed for me not to send in my report but to write it down and save it, leaving a time stamp of when I did it. With Ruin’s wealth and influence, it was likely he had someone in the bureau working against us. The question was how high up the person was.

I called Kelsey to relay the events. She put Griffin on the phone.

“What the hell, lassie.” It was the first time I’d ever heard Griffin speak with a Scottish accent. “Yer going to get my balls blown off. Shawn is in a shite mood.”

“If Shawn has something to say, he can come say it to me himself.”

Griffin grumbled something I didn’t understand. “Ye should have stayed in New York.”

“I couldn’t stay there forever, now could I?”

“Women,” Griffin mumbled.

“You love us,” I teased.

“Women, sure. They keep me bed warm. Ye, not so much. Shawn would kill me if I thought of ye as anything more than a little sister. Now, what did ye tell the feds?” There wasn’t a hint of flirtiness coming from him. Things were serious. So I told him what I said and what I should say. He had ideas too.

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