Page 8 of Reckless Woman
He swipes a hand across his jaw. “Looking for you.”
“Is something wrong?” I shut the door behind us, wincing at the slightest creak.
“No.”
He’s in one of those moods again where getting whole adult sentences with adjectives and adverbs is like squeezing blood from a stone.
“You’re busy,” he says abruptly, turning to leave.
“Wait, Joseph—”
“I’ll catch you later.”
“I really think—”
But he’s already heading back down the white stone steps, leaving me trapped behind the cold, steel bars of his emotional diffidence.
Chapter Four
Joseph
When I walk back into Dante’s office, he’s already on the phone. With three quarts of bourbon in his hand and an expression that’s just as sour, I’m guessing my afternoon won’t be improving anytime soon.
He looks up as I enter and jerks his head at the bar.
“Keep the bullshit pleasantries for your superiors, Peters.” He switches the call to loudspeaker. “Just tell me what you have on Morozov.”
“He’s a real piece of crap,” comes the cool, uptown brogue of Special Agent Roman Peters. “Remind you of anyone?”
I fight a smirk as I reach for the Macallan. I pour out a double, knock it back in one, and then refill it—all in the span of a couple of breaths.
Roman is our FBI connection in New York. We help him bring down the kind of international human trafficking organizations that the US justice can’t touch. In return, he keeps our cartel business from the more law-abiding detectivesin his department. There’s enough history between us to fill an eighteen-episode Netflix special, and Dante’s clearly going for the bonus scenes today.
“When I want your fucking opinion, Peters, I’ll ask for it. What else do you have?”
“His links to Sevastien Petrov are as ugly as he is.”
The glass pauses halfway to my mouth, and then I’m slamming it back down on the drink’s tray, making all the glass and silver rattle. Petrov was the same bastard who kidnapped Anna and turned her into his own personal fuck toy. We’ve spent the last year hunting down and eliminating the roots of his former organization. We’d believed that every man was dead.
I turn to find Dante watching me. There’s murder on his face, too. If what Petrov did to Anna was bad, it’s nothing compared to the abuse he inflicted on Eve when she was a child.
“Is Morozov a threat?”
“Yes.”
“To me or to Sanders?”
“To our whole operation.”
Fan-fucking-tastic.
That the trip to Texas planted a devil’s seed of unrest in my soul. There was too much past, and now it’s spilling into my present. I’m edgy-as-fuck, drinking too much…I never should have snapped the locks to that dirty box.What the hell was I hoping to find there? Rose-tinted redemption? Blunted memories?
It’s infecting me.
It’s infecting my work.
My only respite is Anna and this gossamer-thin veil of contentment we’ve wrapped around ourselves, but even that’s in danger.