The car jolts to a stop as a group of walkers step in front of us. “It was you who took those journal pages, wasn’t it?”
“You know the answer.”
“You were watching us in our tower.”
“He was watching you.” The announcement turns my blood to ice. “I couldn’t save you from that.”
“Did you even try? How did you get in there?”
He scrubs a hand through his dark hair. “I was over my head, Ella. I’m still fucking over my head. Maybe I should have gone to Kayden, but I didn’t.”
“You can now.”
“It’s too late for that,” he says, turning us around a corner that puts us in a pedestrian- and retail-free area, which means I’m running out of time. “I just need my payday and I’ll disappear.”
“From the necklace,” I say.
“For delivering you.”
I don’t have time to let the spike of anger this creates in me take hold, because he cuts right and we’re suddenly in an alleyway and then halting. “The party stops here, Ella.”
He’s right. It does, because my gun is already in my hand.
Matteo’s cell phone rings and he listens before handing it to me. “Neuville wants to talk to you.”
I inhale and take the phone. “So close,” he says, his voice meant to be pure seduction, but it cuts like a rusty nail. “If we open the doors and you resist, even slightly, someone dies. Kayden dies. And just in case you doubt I’m going to do it, watch Matteo fall.”
I suck in air and look up at the same moment a bullet pierces the front window and Matteo slumps forward. Dead, and he never saw it coming. “Party is over, Matteo,” I whisper.
Neuville laughs, a nail-biting sound. “That sounds like enjoyment. I’d better pick someone else.”
My heart races but my voice is calm, steady. “You made your point.”
“I like insurance,” he says. “You should know that, but you seem to need a
reminder. Nathan’s at the hospital right now, and his current patient has a syringe in her pocket that would kill him in thirty seconds. I suggest you leave whatever gun you have on your person that Matteo missed in the car. Understood?”
“Yes,” I lie.
The doors to both sides of the backseat open almost instantly, and I react. I shoot the man to my left and then the one to my right, and step over him. But there are three more men, all pointing guns at me. And then there’s him, in the center of them all, tall, dark, and striking in a fitted black suit, so close I can almost see the evil in his charcoal eyes.
And my gun is aimed at him. “I am many things you didn’t realize I was,” I say. “Including a perfect marksman. Tell them to put their guns down. Because if they shoot or move you’ll be dead, even if I am, too.”
“I knew everything you were,” he says. “More than you did, and I could tell you things you burn to know—but not if I’m dead.”
My father. Those words rip through me and I know in that moment that Neuville is connected to my father’s death—and that’s all I need to know. “You have nothing to say that I want to hear.”
“Well, believe this,” he says. “If I’m dead, Gaston, my second, who I’m sure you remember, has been instructed to visit our friend Sara, which won’t upset him. He’s quite fond of her. He’s been watching her, you know.”
My blood freezes with those game-changing words. Kayden will protect himself. Nathan is far more than just a doctor and can do the same. I trust Sasha to have protected Giada and Marabella. But Sara is an entirely different story.
“I can almost hear you thinking,” he says. “Let me vocalize your thoughts. Is Sara safe? Are all those people protecting her as good as you are? The answer is no to both. She is not. They are not. Now, Kayden’s men are good, but there’s that layer of Americans between them and her, who all mean well, and are exceptional in their own country, but not in France. Paris. I own those places. Put the gun down or I’ll have a bullet put in her body now, and let her suffer while she waits for you to get there.”
“She is nothing to me,” I say. “A girl I met while undercover.”
He removes his phone from his pocket. “Then I’ll tell Gaston to fuck her, shoot her, and get rid of her.” His eyes meet mine, a brow arching, and evil radiates from him.
He isn’t bluffing. He never bluffs. I lower my weapon and Bastile, a brawny man with a goatee, who’s also Neuville’s personal bodyguard, snaps his fingers at me, silently demanding my gun. I look at him, remembering the many times he smiled at Neuville’s nastiness toward me, and his tall, muscular body looks like a mighty fine target for a bullet.