Gabriel Evans walked like a man used to being followed. He never looked to see if we were behind him, he simply assumed that we were. The arrogance of him, the sheer ego, was almost palatable. I felt as if I were a lesser mortal tramping in the wake of a king, and the only thing that made that particular pill easy to swallow was that Marcus clearly noticed it too.
The only difference was that Marcus, for all his bluster earlier, seemed more used to following than leading. Not as interesting as everything else that I’d gathered today, but still worth noting for future reference. Speaking of which, I loved how I’d been here less than an hour and I was already drowning in dirt. The only problem was that none of what I would see today would be caught on camera.
I was supposed to be setting up the hidden cameras and microphones today and scoping out other employees to see who would be the most likely to blabber about Evans. All of this was prime material, but I wouldn’t be able to use any of it without some proof to back it up. Otherwise it would all be my word against theirs.
One of the downsides to using me in this investigation was the fact that no one would believe a word that came out of my mouth. I wasn’t exactly prime witness material, so everything I saw had to be backed by something concrete.
I was still chewing on that little nugget of unfairness when Evans led the two of us into his main office. Marcus closed the door behind us and I followed Evans’s lead and sat on one of the couches in the far corner. Marcus made a move to sit as well, but Evans looked at him with a raised brow that made him pull up short. With an irritated sigh, the other man backtracked to pour three drinks at the wet bar on the other side of the room.
Evans turned to me and smiled.
“I hope you like brandy, Miss Conners.”
“Even if I didn’t, I’d still drink it. Given the circumstances.”
He nodded sympathetically. “Of course. The excitement downstairs must have been an unwelcome surprise. It’s certainly no way to spend your first day.”
Marcus sat our drinks on the coffee table and as Evans reached forward to grab, his eyes landed on the dried blood on his palms. He stilled, no longer the courteous host but a statue made of flesh and bone. If I hadn’t known any better I would have said that he’d forgotten that he was still covered in the stuff.
Evans looked at me, eyes growing wide and face flushing bright red. He almost looked…embarrassed? Guilty? Whatever the emotion, it had him jerking his hands back to himself and sitting a bit more stiffly in his seat. It made me revise my earlier opinion. Maybe he hadn’t forgotten the blood was there. Maybe he’d simply never noticed it before now.
“Forgive me.”
Pretending ignorance, I lifted my own glass and took a sip. Liquor before noon?
What would my mother think?
“For?”
He opened his mouth, closed it, and then looked angrily over at Marcus as if his dilemma was all the fault of the other man. Before he could speak, I sat my cup back down and crossed my legs.
“I was hired to help you. Not judge you, Mr. Evans.” Lie. “I don’t need an apology. Just an explanation.”
Marcus’s face flushed red, but his rising color was due to temper rather than shame.
“He doesn’t need to explain anything—”
“I’m afraid that’s where you’re wrong.” I overrode him easily. Now that I knew he wasn’t the head honcho I could enjoy the sense of vicious satisfaction that arose from annoying him. “If I’m going to talk down Jensen and his representatives,” I continued, taking a wild stab in the dark, “—then I need to know what I’ll be dealing with.”
Evans blinked. “Talk them down?”
I nodded, slowly as if with a toddler. “Of course. Am I right to assume that you were the one who attacked the man downstairs?”
Marcus whipped around to stare hard at his employer, and I had to fight down a smile as the tips of Gabriel Evans’s ears turned beet red and he looked away. Fidgeting in his seat, he admitted almost grudgingly, “Yes.”
“Jesus, Gabriel.”
“I had my reasons,” he snapped, and the look he sent towards Marcus lacked any trace of apology or disgrace.
“I’m sure you did,” I soothed. “I just need to know what they were, so that we can take appropriate action.”
He regarded me solemnly for a long moment, and then with a sigh, nodded.
“Penelope Jensen works for Alder International. For years she’s been trying to convince me that a merger would be beneficial, but it’s only been recently that I thought to give her claims any credence.”
“Why?”
Sparing a brief glance for his hands, he regarded me levelly.
“They have something I want. My technicians haven’t figured out how to recreate their discovery, so the only way I’m going to get my hands on it is if they decide to play nice and share.”
I frowned, spidey senses tingling.
“What is this item exactly?” I asked, knowing before the question had even fully formed that I wouldn’t be getting a straight answer. His eyes darted to one side and his lips tightened. It was a split second tell, but a tell nonetheless, and I filed it away even as he lied to my face.
“I have many hobbies, Miss Conners. Alder International is simply another method of indulging those whims.”
Nodding as if I believed him, I took another sip of my brandy. “I see. And what happened downstairs?”
Straightening in his seat, those amber orbs seemed to intensify. As if a flame had been lit in their depths, and without thinking, I shifted further away.
“A simple misunderstanding,” he said finally, carefully choosing his words.
Hoping my disbelief was obvious, I just looked at him, waiting him out.
“I lost my temper,” he finally admitted with a smile.
“Why?”
“It turns out that they had a Trojan Horse among them. A liar.” The smile became more of a baring of teeth, “I don’t like liars.”
Confused enough to look to Marcus for an explanation, I repeated, “A Trojan Horse?”
Marcus smirked. “There’s a certain…faction that doesn’t approve of the work we do here. They’ve been attacking us one way or another for years now. They probably had a mole in Alder who saw an opportunity to finally meet the infamous Gabriel Evans and take him down.”
“Only I got him first.”
“Why didn’t you just ask security to escort him out of the building or something? And how do you know that this man was even working with these people?”
“They call themselves Huntsmen. We learned how to sniff out their members as time passed.” Though his words were mild enough, there was an undercurrent of amusement in his words that brought the first real smile I’d ever seen to Marcus’s face.
I was right. He was almost handsome when he smiled.
“The reason why I didn’t bother calling security is because they wouldn’t have dealt with the situation with the amount of violence that it deserved.”
Whoa.
That kind of casual brutality stunned me. But it also drove home the situation in which I’d placed myself. If I hadn’t been terrified of what would happen if I got caught before, I certainly was now.
“I wouldn’t feel too sorry for them if I were you Conners.” Marcus chastised, misinterpreting my expression for one of pity. “The Huntsmen were responsible for your run-in with the police a few months back, if I recall.”
I was a little ashamed to admit that it took a while to sift through all of my run-ins with the police and hone in on the incident he was referring to. I could take full responsibility for all but one and I felt my jaw drop as it came to me.
“The Huntsmen planted that car bomb?”
Outrage. That’s what I was feeling. Those people had been instrumental in ruining my life. If they hadn’t gone and planted explosives where they had no right being, I would have gotten off on much lighter charges. Hell, I’d still be allowed to cross state lines and board major airlines. You n
ever knew how much crossing a border really meant to you until the right was snatched away and bashed against the rocks of broken hopes and dreams.
“The bombs were probably just a part of a much larger arsenal. They were tracking me that day, and thanks to you, they were unable to use some of their more deadly toys,” Evans grew strangely solemn. “We haven’t always been so lucky.”
Trying to swallow past the sudden lump of nervousness in my throat was hard, but I managed.
“Have you ever…lost anyone?”
Again came that terrible stillness, as if he’d been turned to stone. It was Marcus who answered.
“Several,” his voice was gruff. “It was one of the reasons why we decided to fund the formation of the new task force. It hasn’t eradicated the problem, but the attacks have become less frequent now that the police have the extra help.”
This was not at all what I had been expecting. If it was true, then Gabriel Evans was a lot less sketchy than I’d always assumed. There were still a lot of unanswered questions, but it seemed, from what they were telling me, they were victims rather than shady criminal overlords.
If I were the kind of woman without trust issues I may have believed them.
There are two sides to every story, however. If I could get my hands on one of these Huntsmen, I’d bet they’d have something equally juicy to tell. When I looked up from these musings only to see Marcus eyeing me, I shifted guiltily in my seat. Suddenly understanding how Evans must have felt under my earlier regard, I decided to cut him some slack.
“How sure are you that the rest of the men sent over from Alder aren’t also Huntsmen?”
“Very,” he growled.
Holding up a placating hand I nodded. “Ok. I get it. Were you still hoping for a merger?”
He and Marcus exchanged a brief look, before Evans met my eyes and nodded.
I grinned.
“Then I think I can help.”