Dead Drop (The Guild #2)(61)
She was pissed now. “My parents preferred that to the alternative.”
Ah yes, because it was either be useful or get killed. It was kind of sweet that her parents cared enough about her to prefer her new career path. Mine sure as hell hadn’t.
“Still, it can’t be easy,” I pushed harder, picking the scab on her decade-old wound. “You’re stuck in the archives, sniffing thousand-year-old books while your two best friends become the darlings of the mercenary world. Must sting. Especially when you know what some of those contracts pay.”
Her brow creased, but she was spared an immediate response by the waitress delivering our orders. We both waited in tense silence until we were alone once more, then she balled her fist and bared her teeth at me.
“How fucking dare you?” she snarled. “I know exactly what you’re implying Leon Marx, and you couldn’t be further from the truth. You think someone close to Danny is putting her in danger? Maybe take a fucking look in the mirror.”
She wasn’t wrong. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t also a liability. I sipped my coffee, sitting back in my seat to consider her furious, defensive body language. Surprisingly, she was harder to read than Sabine, but I wondered how much of that was her hiding the little affair with her boss.
“You’re the reason why she’s not responding to my messages, aren’t you?” Jude was accusing and looked like she wanted to rip my head off with her bare hands. “Where is she?”
I tipped my head to the side. “I haven’t taken her phone away. If she wanted you to know where she was, I’m sure I couldn’t stop her.” And I loved that. She was so stubborn, so unpredictable. “Tell me about your accident, Judith.”
Her eyes flickered with threats that she was in no fit shape to deliver on, and I waited patiently.
“Why do you want to know?” she finally bit out. “It’s ancient history now.”
I sipped my coffee, then carefully placed it back on the table. “Humor me.”
She glared at me for a moment, then sighed so hard her shoulders slumped. “There’s not much to the story. We were on an assessment contract, with the examiners following via drone footage. One of the guys on our team messed up and tipped the targets off. He got shot and the rest of us scattered. We were in an old warehouse, full of rusty machinery and shit. Somehow in the firefight, a chain supporting a piece of equipment snapped and fell on me. It crushed my leg.”
That matched the files I’d pulled on the botched mission.
“How’d you escape?” I prompted, wanting to hear her version of events.
“I suspect you already know. Danny saved me. She was like something out of a video game, ripping through the targets without even a fraction of hesitation. Then she called in for medical assistance and waited with me until they could lift the machinery off my leg. She graduated to alpha level that night, and the rest of the team got put back into training. Except me, obviously. I went through a bunch of surgeries and rehab, then got shipped here to work the archive.” There was a heavy dose of bitterness in her voice, but none of it was directed at my woman.
That was why I wanted to hear the story from her lips, because I needed to see whether she held any animosity for that pivotal point of her life. What I heard instead was a lot of self-pity and regret, plenty of hatred toward the Guild itself, but for Danny, it was all appreciation and love.
“Thank you, Judith,” I commented, pushing back my seat. “That’s all I needed.”
“Wait, what?” She tried to scramble out of her seat to stop me, but I’d already dismissed her from my attention, striding down the street with a small sense of confidence in Danny’s friends. They still shouldn’t be trusted implicitly, but at least I was confident they both cared about my woman’s well-being. That needed to count for something.
Even so, I called in one of my personal team and put him on Judith’s tail. Just in case.
27
We didn’t have a lot to pack up from the safe house, so we left the bloody mess in the kitchen and drove away, leaving it for the Hestia housekeepers to deal with. It was the least they could do for nearly getting me killed. I’d taken my attacker’s little security system bypass device with me to show Leon. It might come in handy one day.
Kai was quiet as he drove us away from Echo Creek and back toward the more densely populated area of Shadow Grove. It was a few hours away, and I barely lasted twenty minutes before the curiosity got to be too much.
“What happened with your team?” I asked, breaking the quiet. “I hadn’t expected you back for days.”
He shot me a quick glance, looking taken aback. “You think I’d have left you for days that easily? Siren, wake up and smell the obsession. I was so desperate to see you that I had to check my camera after barely being gone for an hour.”
Well, he had a point there. I couldn’t even seem to muster up the appropriate outrage about his hidden camera, because I quietly found it hot as hell that he’d been spying on my show.
“My team wasn’t far from here, doing a deal with some local gangs. Mo dealt with the issue before I even got to them, not long after I switched the car.” He drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “We should probably swap cars again before we get to Shadow Grove, come to think of it. This one might be reported stolen soon.”