The Freedom Broker (Thea Paris #1)(70)

“Too young to fight. Don’t need more mouths to feed. We’re not UNICEF.”

Oba walked over to the truck, grabbed the sack of food, and emptied it on the ground, opening packages, shoving food into his mouth. Apples, candy bars, sandwiches—everything I’d dreamed about for the last few months. But now I couldn’t eat them if I tried. I was dead inside.



Thea’s mind reeled as she placed the pages on the bed. The words were poignant, but they couldn’t properly convey what had transpired. She’d had no idea he’d been turned into a child soldier, twelve years old and forced to kill. The damage that had been done to her brother’s psyche was unfathomable.

An overwhelming mix of emotions filled her. Hatred for Oba, for forcing Nikos to commit such atrocious acts of violence. Another emotion surged from beneath the surface. Anger, red-hot anger, toward her father.

Papa had kept her in the dark. She understood how he might not have disclosed this sensitive information to her as a child, but why not tell her in later years? It wasn’t as if she hadn’t witnessed horrific situations in her job. But, no, Christos had chosen not to tell her what had happened to her own brother.

She agreed that it was smart to keep this information out of the public eye. Nikos already had enough celebrity as a former child hostage and scion of the head of Paris Industries. If the press discovered that he’d been a boy soldier, murdering people, he might never have had a chance at a normal life. She had to give Papa credit there. Still, why had he given up on his own child, excluding him from the family business, acting as if he was a leper?

It all started to make a sick sort of sense. Nikos might have been given everything he needed and more, financially, but he’d been forced to hide the brutality of what he’d experienced, forced to hide the truth of what had really happened, forced to live a lie.

Their father didn’t require such silence purely to protect Nikos from the public. He’d also done it for himself. Papa had muted his son because he didn’t know how to handle a damaged child. With no wife to help, he’d been overwhelmed, channeling his energy into his business, where he could flourish, instead of dealing with the difficult task of reforming someone who’d been so psychologically scarred. He’d sent Nikos away so he didn’t have a daily reminder of the horror that had befallen his son.

Papa must have used his wealth and power to whitewash any mention of Nikos’s activities during captivity. Most of the press coverage had been about the million-dollar reward he’d given General Ita Jemwa. Hush money. She wondered if there was even more she didn’t know about.

Emotion overwhelmed her. She was saddened and angered by Papa’s reaction to Nikos’s ordeal, yet she felt guilty about that anger. For God’s sake, he himself was being held captive now, locked in his own private hell.

And Nikos—how did she feel about him? “Complicated” didn’t begin to describe it. Her brother had been taken in her place. She owed him in the most profound way. That guilt haunted her, too.

Still, reading about what Nikos had done filled her with fear. What was her brother capable of? Was it possible that he was behind Papa’s kidnapping? Part of it made a sick sort of sense: swooping in to kidnap Christos right before the biggest deal of his career. The ultimate payback. But Nikos had seemed genuinely disturbed when he found out about the kidnapping. Could he really be that good a liar?

The story of her brother’s kidnapping had opened her eyes, demonstrating that even the people she loved, her family, were capable of anything if pushed hard enough. In the field, she had killed to avoid being killed. Sometimes choices were taken away from you.

She turned off the lamp and crawled under the covers. She needed to shut off her mind, sleep for a few hours. Tomorrow the negotiations would begin, and she had to be sharp. Nothing could be taken at face value. Peter Kennedy’s murderer was still at large, and presumably whoever it was had had a hand in Christos’s kidnapping and everything else that had happened since. The general seemed smug, as if he knew something they didn’t. And the Chinese were driven to win the contract at any cost. She would also have to face Nikos, her understanding of her brother forever changed, now knowing he’d been a child soldier, a killer.





Chapter Forty-Nine



The bright African sun pierced the crack between the room-darkening drapes in Gabrielle’s room. She’d been up since well before dawn, communicating with the HRFC team, already cruising through her supply of Gitanes.

Her buddy and former CIA operative Rick Dennison had given her an off-the-books care package, including a SIG Sauer, a first-aid kit, GPS trackers, a few bugs, an M24, and a parabolic microphone, among other items. She smiled, surprised there wasn’t a flame-thrower in the mix. Who knew what might come in handy?

Someone knocked on her door. She looked through the peephole. Max. She crushed her cigarette into the crystal ashtray and let him in.

“Any news?” he asked.

“Not really. Come in.”

He glanced briefly at the mahogany bed in her suite. It hadn’t been easy to say no to his attempts to break her one-night rule, but not for the usual reasons. She might actually like him, and that was a whole lot more dangerous than sex.

He looked disheveled, strained. “I’ve been working with Interpol, combing through leads coming in to their hotline. I will meet my contact from the Harare office later today.”