Sam walked stiffly over to the bench, sitting when the woman gestured to do so. How was it possible she was now sitting here with a knife to her ribcage when Alonzo was dead?
Maybe whoever he’d paid to come after her was still trying to complete the job for the sake of their own reputation? But then, why was she sitting here having a chat in the park at knifepoint instead of lying dead on the sidewalk outside of Sutton Capital where the woman had first approached her?
“What do you want?” Sam hoped if she could get the woman talking she could figure things out.
“What I want isn’t going to happen,” the woman said and there was a profound sadness to her voice. It was thick with … grief. The realization startled Sam.
“Did your Logan tell you about his last mission?”
Sam’s breath caught and she nodded jerkily. “Some.”
“Did he tell you of the family he slaughtered? The children? My brothers? My mother and father? I want you to know my name. My name is Diya Bogolomov. My brothers were Nikolai and Vadic and they were babies. They were innocent.”
Sam wanted to argue. Instead she swallowed her throat dry and threatening to seize up.
“And,” Sam said, not at all feeling the calm she was attempting to display, “to what do I owe this visit?” Visit, attack, whatever.
“Oh, I’ve just got some news to deliver to you. You see, Samantha, it seems that several of your friends have found themselves in a bit of trouble.”
Sam felt her blood churn to a frozen halt in her veins. The acid in her stomach leapt up her throat and she tried to take a deep breath.
“Excuse me?” Sam’s friends were everything to her. Her friends and family.
A sly shrug from Diya answered her and Sam had the urge to smack the woman. She controlled it, but only just. She needed to find out what the woman wanted.
Diya stuck her hand in a large tote on her shoulder and Sam stiffened. But the woman drew out only papers.
“I have to admit. Your plan is ingenious. It has a certain sick, twisted perversion to it,” Diya said.
Sam felt a wave of dismay as she realized what Diya was doing.
“You were listening. The listening devices were yours. It was you, not Alonzo.”
Diya laughed. “You wrote the plan for me. It was really quite brilliant.” She handed Sam a stack of papers. “It’s all there. You’ll see.”
Sam flipped through the stack. Kelly and Jack and the kids. Diya had planted evidence pointing to child abuse. Dear God, they could lose their children. Their children could end up in foster care.
Jennie and Chad. Drug use. Sam wanted to close her eyes but she kept reading.
Sam’s sisters and brothers all had pages, too. Everything had been set up to frame them for some criminal act or to drain money from their savings accounts.
All the money from her parents’ retirement savings.
Logan. Oh, Logan. Diya had set him up to look like he was leaking classified information. Information that might put his former teammates at risk. Information he would die to protect, she was sure of it.
Sam felt tears sting her eyes and she pressed her lips together for a minute, fending them off.
Diya’s laughter was cruel, unrelenting.
“What do you want?” Sam asked, rubbing the tears with the back of her hand, but she knew what Diya would say.
It had been Sam’s own plan, although she’d come up with it as a joke. It wasn’t meant to be someone’s sick game to get back at Logan and his team for some imagined crime. Logan and his team were not responsible for what happened to this woman’s family. That was on her father and no one else. He’d been killing people. Hundreds of people. Someone had to stop him.
“You’ll leave Logan immediately. You may have two days to say your goodbyes to your family. This was more than I was given, but I’ll give that to you. But no more than that. At the end of forty-eight hours, either you’re dead or all of this goes public. Accounts drained, evidence released. Your friends and family might eventually get out of some of the trouble this puts them in, but not before the damage is done.”
No, Sam knew. Not before they suffered irreparable harm.
Sam wanted to argue with the woman. She wanted to rail against her and tell her this was sick. She wanted to shake the woman and tell her Logan and his team were not to blame. Only her father was to blame for his family’s deaths. He was the one who put his children in danger. He was the one who had been a criminal, a terrorist. A murdering coward.