“Is it…your middle name?”
“No.”
We stare at each other. Finally, I sigh. “You don’t want to tell me.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to. It’s that I can’t.”
“Uh-huh.” I narrow my eyes and peer suspiciously at him, but it feels as if he’s telling me the truth. Since the situation is ludicrous anyway, I decide to roll with it. “Okay, fine. If we’re going by other people’s names, I want you to call me…Sophia. No, wait. Seraphina. That sounds kind of badass.”
He says softly, “But you’re already going by someone else’s name, little thief.”
I was picking up the bourbon to drink, but freeze with the glass halfway to my mouth.
“Aardvark?” he inquires, sounding amused.
I set the glass down carefully on the marble countertop. My heartbeat picks up, my hands turn clammy, and a knot forms in my stomach.
What the hell am I doing? This is dangerous. This is insane.
Looking at the glass instead of him, I say quietly, “I’d like to go home now.”
After a tense moment, he says, “Look at me.”
When I do, eyeing him warily, he shakes his head. “I don’t care if you have secrets. I don’t care if you call yourself Cinderella or Mary Poppins or anything else. What I care about is that you understand there’s nothing more important to me than my honor.”
“Meaning?”
His eyes burn straight through me. “Meaning I gave you my word I’d never harm you. That stands no matter what.”
I don’t understand him at all, and that frustrates me. My father could give his word you’d be safe with him, then five seconds later turn around and shoot you in the back.
I’m not exaggerating. I’ve seen it happen.
Because that’s what gangsters do. That’s what they are: liars.
“I believed you when you said you wouldn’t hurt me, Li—Killian, but you can’t promise the no matter what part.”
“Aye, lass. I can.”
Thunderclouds are gathering over his head, but I’m feeling reckless. “Even if I tried to kill you?”
His answer is swift and unequivocal. “Even if anything.”
We stare at each other until he adds, “And the reason you’re here is because there’s nowhere safer for you.”
I can’t help but laugh at that. “A bunch of men in riot gear carrying military-grade weapons just tried to kill you. I don’t think being near you is safe for me at all.”
He pauses, his gaze dark and unreadable. Then he says softly, “I’m not so sure it was me they were after, Juliet.”
9
Killian
I watch her face pale. I watch her lips part. I watch her knuckles turn white around the glass.
I watch all that and know that this gutsy young thief with luminous brown eyes that convey emotion like a silent movie star’s has skeletons in her closet that rival mine.
She might even have more, if that’s possible.
Swallowing, she moistens her lips. She clears her throat. Then she says, “What makes you say that?”
Her voice is shaky. For the first time since we met, she looks vulnerable.
That causes such a strong surge of protectiveness to flood through me, I have to take a moment to steady myself before I speak. “One of them didn’t recognize me.”
“How could you tell?”
“He thought I was your bodyguard.”
He sputtered it before he bled out from the bullet hole I’d put in his neck, cursing me for protecting “the girl.”
The interesting part was that his curses were in Serbian. I don’t have any Serbian enemies. I keep very careful lists.
Even more interesting is how still and pale Juliet has become, staring at me with wide, unblinking eyes.
Keeping my voice soft and low, I say, “If you tell me who you are, I can help you.”
“I’m no one of importance,” is her instant answer.
I’ve said those exact words to someone in the past, and it was a lie, too. “If you’re so unimportant, why the need for a fake name?”
“Sorry—Killian—but Juliet is my real name.”
Her eyes flash. Her tone is defiant. Every time she looks at me like that, with all that fire and fuck-you attitude, I want to push her down and pin her underneath me and kiss that smart mouth until she’s begging me to kiss her everywhere else.
“And Jameson? Is that your real last name?”
She presses her lips together and incinerates me with her stare.
“That’s what I thought.”
She stands abruptly, abandoning the whiskey glass on the countertop and wiping her palms on the front of her jeans. She announces, “I’m leaving,” and turns and heads toward the elevator doors, walking quickly with a stiff back and tense shoulders.
I let her go and pour myself another drink.
In a few minutes, she’s back. Seething. “The elevator’s locked.”
“Aye.”
“Open it.”
“No.”
Her voice rises. “I want you to let me go. Now.”
I study her. There’s an edge to her voice and a glint of panic in her eyes. It’s almost as if she thinks I’m…
When it dawns on me, I feel like a complete idiot for not realizing it sooner.
She’s afraid of being kidnapped.
Not raped, like I thought when she was freaking out in the taxi cab. Though that’s likely part of it, too. But mainly her anxiety seems to revolve around being taken—and held—against her will.
Fear of becoming a hostage is a very specific kind of fear. One ingrained by a specific kind of upbringing. And possibly a specific kind of training.
Her words come back to me again.
“Our fathers are all bad people. Very bad people. The kind who don’t care who they have to hurt to get what they want.”
I thought she meant drug dealers, perhaps, or some other kind of commonplace felon. Maybe even a soulless billionaire CEO. But added together with the acid disdain in her voice every time she calls me a gangster, and the unnatural calm she displayed during the car chase and gunfight, and her paranoia about becoming a victim of kidnapping—and, frankly, everything else—I think my little thief is the offspring of someone a tad worse than I thought.
Watching my expression, she demands, “What?”
“Juliet,” I say thoughtfully. “That’s an Italian name if I’ve ever heard one.”
“No. It’s English.”
“Not if it’s given to a girl born into an Italian family.”
As if she’s been slapped, her face turns white.
Bingo.
Something on my face makes her take a step back, shaking her head, her eyes wide.
“I won’t hurt you. There’s no need to try to run away.”
Her voice is strangled when she speaks. “Please let me go.”
I say firmly, “Juliet, I don’t care who your father is.”
She freezes in place as if turned to stone. The pulse in the side of her neck is flying.
Keeping my tone low and unthreatening, I say, “I won’t hold you against your will. I swear to you. But I need to find out who exactly was behind that attack and deal with him—or them—before you can go. For your own safety, as well as mine. All right?”