Surrender (Careless Whispers #3)(9)

“Relax, Hawk,” he says, his eyes flecked with amusement. “I’ve ensured he knows that should my brother get anything he wants, including her, he will pay a price worse than death.”

“Then why,” Kayden says, “is Alessandro handing out her location to the private investigator her friend hired to find her?”

“Perhaps he felt that the more questions this investigator was asking, the more attention it brought in unnecessary places,” Niccolo states.

“In other words, you thought the investigator was asking too many questions,” Kayden surmises, the timing of this visit suddenly far from coincidental.

“Or perhaps,” Niccolo continues, homing in on me, “Alessandro thinks your past is where he’ll find the necklace.”

“My past has nothing to do with that necklace,” I say firmly. But there is this odd, uncomfortable niggle of something in my mind that I can’t explain, and a flickering image that I can’t quite materialize. “And your Jackal made a misstep,” I add, now worried about Sara’s safety and desperate to get her out of the picture. “What if this man Chris Merit, who’s funding Sara’s hunt for me, is after the necklace?”

“I myself own several Chris Merit works,” he says. “He’s well known and highly respected. He’s also far more concerned about curing children’s cancer than finding that necklace.”

“Maybe he wants the necklace to fund research,” I counter.

“He’d have to explain all that money, and even he, a billionaire in his own right, wouldn’t be able to do that without joining the likes of me and my methods. And he will not. But we’re certainly watching him and your friend, Sara. But tell me. How does someone with amnesia selectively have such certainty?”

I blink at the odd question. “What certainty are you talking about?”

“You said that your past has nothing to do with the necklace. You seem quite sure about that, but not a great many other things.”

“I can’t snap my fingers and get every piece of my memory back, any more than you can snap your fingers and—” I stop myself before I say more, actually feeling bad for what I was about to say, despite the inkiness blotting his soul.

“And what?” he bites out, his dark eyes flashing with irritation.

“Nothing you don’t know.”

“Say it anyway,” he insists, his voice hard with command, and it hits me that I’ve cast a net, perhaps luring him to a confession he’s dodged and weaved, handing us knowledge we can use against him.

I nod. “Any more than you can snap your fingers and beat cancer.” The harshness in my voice has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with the past I’m slowly threading together.

His eyes darken, pupils fading into black. “What do you know of cancer?”

“Enough to know that even the mob, even you, Niccolo, cannot buy, threaten, or beg its mercy,” I say, and unbidden, an image of my mother in a hospital bed, brittle and aged beyond her years, knots my belly. “If it decides to take you, it takes you.”

There is a spike of some unnamed emotion in his stare, there and gone in an instant, right along with any hope he might make an admission. “You remember its viciousness, but not the location of the necklace,” he says, casting a net of his own.

“It seems that its brutal nature transcends all else, including amnesia,” I say, my answer giving him nothing, while cancer takes everything, before I add, “much like your desire for that necklace.”

“What I desire,” he says tightly, “is to protect my legacy. It will live on when I’m gone, but my enemies will not.”

“And that’s why you want the necklace,” Kayden says. “One last big bang.” He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Well, what legacy do you have if a Jackal outsmarts you?”

“I have him contained, Hawk,” Niccolo states irritably, and then shifts to Italian before returning to English. “Do you understand it in my native tongue better than your own?”

“If I were Alessandro,” Kayden states as if he hadn’t spoken, “I’d have taken that necklace from Ella, hid it, and then done my best to destroy whatever evidence you have on me before I sold it.”

“You continue to underestimate me,” Niccolo replies dryly. “When I own someone, Hawk, I own them. I layer the many ways I control them, in ways they know they cannot escape.”

“You underestimate me if you think I couldn’t find a way to shove whatever you had on me right up your pompous—”

“Alessandro is not you,” Niccolo says, cutting him off. “On that, I think we are all quite clear.”

“If he took that necklace he can simply wait for your death,” Kayden points out.

“Those layers I’ve explained extend beyond my death, a fact on which he’s quite clear,” Niccolo replies.

“A caged man has nothing to lose, and no choice but to try to escape,” Kayden retorts.

Niccolo’s jaw tics. “Then it’s a good thing that I now have The Hawk and the best Hunter in two countries, if not more, aligned with me.”

“Only if you hand me whatever ammunition you have on Alessandro. All of it. Every last detail.”

“That would be control I’m not willing to give you.”