Retribution: An Alpha Billionaire Romance (Secrets & Lies Book 3) (15 page)

K
atrina looks at me warily
, I know she's still got her concerns, but I nod, and she sighs, tapping the touchpad on her computer. Immediately the screen flashes to life and splits into four quadrants. Three of them have one person alone in them, while the other has three people. Five operators total, with Major Munchak sitting in command of all of them.

We make our introductions, and Major Munchak sits forward. “Now Sergeant, let's just make it clear what you’re asking us to do. You're asking for Peter DeLaCoeur and Isis Bardot to be killed, correct?”

“If I thought it could be handled any other way, I would sir,” I reply, looking behind the computer as the rest of my family watches, their faces grave. “But Peter's already sent two contract killers against us. We got lucky with Orloff, and he still put me in the hospital. You all know Isis is even better than Orloff, she doesn't play games like he did. We need to eliminate him, because I can't be sitting around waiting on the goddamn courts to put him away. He's already had Isis kill at least five people, seven if you're including Katrina's parents, former colleagues of mine, and even Peter's own wife. He is not going to stop without a bullet in the head.”

The Major nods, and looks around at everyone. “Any objections, morally?”

“None,” Lincoln Vincent, one of the major’s men, replies, “but there's more than the morality of it all. We don't do this for free. I stopped that shit five years ago.”

I look at Katrina, who nods and taps at her keyboard. “You should all see on your screens right now a new window pop up. It's a screenshot of a numbered escrow account in the Cayman Islands. As you can see, there's three million dollars in it currently. Here's the breakdown. You accept the contract, each of you gets fifty thousand forwarded for expenses. The rest of it is performance-based. You take out Peter, you get half a million.”

“And the rest of it?” Roberts, another one of the major’s men, asks. “By my math, that's only seven fifty grand. What's the other two million and change for?”

“250 grand is for the Major for coordinating this,” I tell him, and Roberts nods in understanding. “One million is for whoever takes down Isis. The other million will be divided up among you afterward, a team fee for a successful mission.”

“More money for the bint than the bastard,” Buffy says, chuckling. “You must be worried a lot about her.”

“I am,” I reply gravely. “Read her file, study her. Because she can put a round right between your eyes at five hundred meters without you even knowing what's happening until your nose is being pushed out the back of your skull, and that's just the beginning. Trust me, you slack off with Isis, you are going to end up sinking deep in the Gulf.”

“Let me handle that part, Sergeant,” the Major says. “As a favor to you, I'm bringing everyone to me to do a little bit of training and team building. I'll send you a message when we're deploying to New Orleans.”

I give Katrina a look, and she nods. “Agreed. In the meantime, I urge you all to go as quickly as you can. We're safe for now, but I can't believe that'll last forever.”

The Major nods, and leans forward. “Miss Grammercy, I give you my personal promise that we'll work as quickly and professionally as possible. Honestly, based off of what Harold says, I might be asking you to help out. Do you have other assets you can let us use?”

“I can put you in touch with the woman who trained me,” Katrina says, and the major smiles.

There's only a few more details to iron out, and within five minutes the call wraps up. After Katrina sends a quick message to Darcy, her mentor, giving her an update. “Questions, guys?”

Melissa shakes her head. “So now what?”

“Now,” I say, leaning back, “we find stuff to occupy our time. Carson, I have already decided that I'm teaching you how to shoot a rifle, but honestly we need to find stuff to do to occupy our time and our minds that doesn't have anything to do with this stuff. Any ideas?”

Andrea's the first to speak up, rubbing her belly. “Well, I was kind of hoping, Carson and I talked about having a wedding-type ceremony. Maybe we can plan that out? Also, I need to get some more prenatal appointments taken care of.”

Melissa perks up, grinning. “I love it. And I want to get to work on the rock I hacked out, do some carving with it. Maybe a wedding gift for Carson and Andrea.”

“And what about you and Nathan?” Jackson asks, his own smile breaking out on his face. “Last I heard, you two are engaged, too.”

There's a brief silence, until BA decides to say something. “Wabu!”

Everyone looks over, shocked. “Did she just talk?” Carson asks, his eyes wide with wonder. “What did she say?”

BA, who's sitting in Jackson's arms, looks around and spreads her arms wide, grinning. “WABU!”

Andrea gets it first, tears coming to her eyes. “She's saying... love.”

I can't think of a better first word for a child, and even Katrina's got a tear in her eye as she goes over to hug her daughter. “We love you too, baby girl.”

T
he angle grinder
whines in the quiet of the afternoon, but I don't want to make a mess inside the chapel, so I'm working outside. Thankfully, I'm wearing hearing protection, and I'm not deafened by the powerful DeWalt 4.5 inch grinder. We bought two of them, along with a lot of other tools for stone, metal, and woodworking, to the point that the first thing we did as a family after our shopping trip was to build a lean-to off of the chapel that could keep all of our new stuff out of the weather. It's not much, but it keeps our work areas dry.

I press lightly, letting the motor do the work, pleased with the results of my experiments so far. We were able to find more than enough equipment for everyone's individual projects, with Jackson's archery project needing a side trip to a sporting goods store. He's about halfway done with his second bow, his first one cracking when he made the limbs too thin and he pulled back too hard and far. He grumbled a bit about it, but Jackson's enjoying the process as much as the actual bow itself.

The piece of granite I'm working with is about an inch long and three quarters of an inch wide, held on my workbench in a padded vise that we all share. I'm using a diamond blade right now, just adjusting the angle of the face cut I've put into the stone.

When I turn off the grinder, I see Jackson's joined me, taking out his bow. I pop out my earplugs just as he speaks up, friendly and relaxed. “Hey, how's the work today?”

I hum, studying the angle of my cut and liking what I see. “Good. I might get this one finished today, and I'll only have one more to do to complete the stones for the set.”

“What are you making a set of?” Jackson asks. “I mean, you've kind of been busy out here three or four hours a day, but you've kept mum about what it is you're actually building.”

I nod. “I know. I just wanted to make sure I can actually work with granite before telling anyone, but it's coming along well.”

“What?” he asks, making another draw. “If you don't want to tell, that's fine.”

“No, it's okay,” I reply, going over to the box I'm keeping the pieces in before I made my next step. I empty them on top of the storage box we're using, showing one of them to Jackson. “That one is yours.”

“Mine?” he asks, turning over the stone and studying it. “What's it for?”

“Well,” I say, taking it back and putting it back in the box along with the other four finished stones and the one rough cut stone I have set aside for my piece, “we're having this... whatever you want to call it, Andrea's calling it a wedding, right?”

“Yeah, although I think it's going to probably be the weirdest wedding I can think of,” Jackson says with a chuckle. “Who'd have thought I would end up serving as a minister? But go ahead.”

“I was at first thinking rings, but I don't have the tools or the patience to cut the stone that small,” I tell him, going back to the stone I have clamped in right now. “Besides, I'm better at working with metal anyway. So I cut all of these into smaller pieces that I'm going to set into different metal chains we can all wear as pendants. The whole set is subdivided into three smaller pairs, one for each couple.”

“Amazing,” Jackson says, going over and looking over the four completed pieces. “I see it. The one you showed me, it's like a flat pyramid, and I can see Katrina's. The other pair, the triangular one, what's that?”

“That's for Carson and Andrea,” I tell him, setting the angle grinder aside to get out the stone polisher. The motor's nowhere near as loud, and I don't want to deafen him or force him to leave the work area. “I chose it because a triangle is the most stable shape in existence. Carson's been my stable foundation for over twenty years, and Andrea's another source. Until recently, the three of us were a triangle, too.”

“And for you and Nathan?” Jackson asks, and I unclamp the piece I'm working on, turning on the stone polisher. I've gotten the hang of it pretty well, and I'm making progress.

“Rectangles,” I say, holding up Nathan's stone. “This one I chose just for Nathan because it has more of the green flecks than the others. They remind me of his eyes.”

Jackson hums in appreciation as I turn to my work, working slowly. This first run is just to get the scratches caused by the diamond blade out. It's four o'clock before I finish up, Jackson having finished his work for the day a while back.

I go inside and wash up quickly, dumping my work clothes in the entryway to find Nathan relaxing with BA in the living room, both of them sitting back and watching a cartoon on the computer, BA giggling at the antics of the cartoon buses on the screen. “What's this?”

“Tayo,” Nathan says, shrugging. “It’s cute, and BA loves it. Katrina says it is her favorite cartoon. It's a lot different than when I was a kid. Just how in the world did we survive our childhoods?”

I chuckle and sit down next to Nathan, taking his free hand and giving it a kiss. “Hey, I had the Transformers, Carson loved those. Just wait until she here gets older, and she's going to be following her mother and aunt looking like some crazy funky anime anarchist or something.”

Nathan laughs and bounces BA on his knee, tickling her belly. “Are you going to be an anime girl, BA?”

“Wabu!” She says, something she's been saying more and more as she gains confidence in her voice. “Wabu!”

Nathan chuckles and gives her a kiss on the top of her head. “Hold on baby girl, you'll get your chance.”

We sit back, Nathan being gentle and making BA laugh a lot. We exchange looks over her head, smiling. “This feels nice,” I say after the cartoon finishes, looking from BA to Nathan and back. “I hope that someday soon, we'll have a chance to do this with our own child.”

“Me too,” Nathan says, kissing my knuckles again. “In fact, I was thinking we can do our best to make that a reality over the next few weeks.”

“Oh, I'm sure we can do something about that,” I reassure him, warmth flooding my body from the look in his eyes. “So long without, and I'm enjoying every chance to catch up. Did you enjoy yourself?”

Nathan smirks, and he nods. “It was amazing. I don't want to go into details with BA sitting here, but you’re amazing.”

“So tonight?”

“Tonight.”

* * *

“
M
iss Sands
, I'm glad you're doing some work now, but these pictures, they certainly aren't what I expected,” Robert says over the phone from his office at MCS. “They are exquisite though.”

“Thanks, Robert. I know it isn't what that client was asking for, but I'll be honest, I just wasn't able to feel that, so if they contact you again, please turn them down, tell them I'm not taking any commission pieces at this time.”

“Of course Miss Sands. So these six pendants, are you wanting them up for sale?”

“No, no those are personal. Instead though, I'm going to be working with making more pieces of the same stone. It's remarkable, and I think I can do some interesting work with it. I've got a larger piece I'm working on right now, a kind of abstract piece I'm calling
Paladin
. It's going to end up being about two feet tall, about eighteen inches wide, steel and some other metals with this same granite.”

I'm sitting on the stump of one of the trees we've cut down for firewood, looking forward to Friday when Andrea has her next prenatal appointment. I'm excited to see the progress, Carson told me they're going to do an ultrasound this time to see the baby's development, and the whole idea fills me with anticipation.

“Miss Sands?”

Oh, I've been daydreaming. “Sorry Robert, go ahead?”

“I said that I'd like to build some anticipation for
Paladin
by posting pictures of your pendants on the MCS website. Do you mind?”

I shrug, pleased. “That'd be fine. I'll work up some sketches of what I'm thinking of for it tonight, and I'll scan them in and send them to you if you'd like. I'll let you worry about price points and all that. Okay?”

Robert sounds happy as he hums in reply. “That would be great, Miss Sands. I do hope you're enjoying everything.”

“Very much so. Thank you. I'll send you an e-mail this evening.”

I hang up and get my sketch pad. I don't use it a lot when I'm doing experimental work or just having fun, but with
Paladin
I'm thinking of blending a few different techniques I haven't used in a long time.

I want some of the exotic look the rarer metals can create for me. In my mind, I see the granite playing a role as highlights on a medieval suit of armor. I want to create a sense of motion, of the dynamic and maybe a blend of classic with futuristic.

Sure, I know as I draw that Nathan is part of my inspiration, my muse for this piece. But looking at the paper as I see
Paladin
begin to take shape, I see Katrina in it, too. She keeps her hair pretty short still, and in the spiky upshot of the left side, I can see her hair, and the curves of the whole thing are just a little too feminine for it to be just Nathan.

That's fine. I'm going to do dozens, maybe even hundreds of pieces in the course of my art career, and not all of them will be for sale either. There'll be other pieces I can devote totally to Nathan, a testament to how important he is to me, and how much I love him. But I'm not able to quite tap that vein of emotion yet. It’s too raw and too close. I've had so few good emotional things to hold onto, his love is something I'm not quite ready to share with the world yet.

* * *

A
ndrea goes silent
, staring at the six pieces laid out on the wooden tray. Finally, she clears her throat and traces the links on Carson's pendant chain. “They're... they're the finest pieces you've ever done, and I'll be honored to put it on during the ceremony. Thank you.”

“I'm proud of them,” I admit, smiling slightly. “When I finish
Paladin
, I hope it's as good, and can join them on the MCS website.”

Andrea looks up, concerned. “What do you mean?”

“I was talking with Robert the other day, I want to get some pieces back up for sale. So, I sent him pictures of the pendants, and a sketch of
Paladin
for him to put up on the MCS website. Don't worry, the pendants were taken against a wooden background, no signs of where we are.”

Andrea shakes her head, blanching. “You... but 'Lissa, the stone itself is traceable. I read about it last time I was in town, it's like fucking famous or something.”

“What?” I ask, fear striking my heart. “You must have read wrong.”

Andrea points at the green chips. “These emerald crystals are supposed to be famous. I even remember the name, it's called pegmatite, from a place called the Emerald Hollow Mine.”

“Oh no,” I reply, panic starting to take hold. She's right, I'd thought about it myself when we first got here. But, is it so famous that it's traceable? In my excitement, I'd forgotten. “Is it close?”

“In North Carolina, but about ninety miles away. 'Lissa, how long have the pictures been up?”

I shake my head. “I sent them to Robert on Monday night, maybe since Tuesday or yesterday at most?”

Andrea grabs Katrina's computer and dials the number for MCS. We're both sweating, but Andrea seems calmer than I feel at the moment, and Robert picks up quickly. “MCS Galleries, this is Robert, how may we help you?”

“Robert, it's Andrea,” Andrea says immediately. “I was just talking with Melissa, she says she sent you some pictures of pendants, is that correct?”

“Yes Miss Andrea,” Robert says, using Andrea's first name since we've never given him her last name. “Beautiful pieces. Why?”

“I need you to take them down from the website if they're up. It's very important.”

Robert gets stuffy, and I can somewhat understand. Carson's fiancée or not, Andrea has no business authority at MCS. “Miss Andrea, I understand, but I would need instructions from...”

“Do it, Robert,” I interrupt him. “Please. It's very important. Also, how long have they been on the website?”

“I've only had them up a few hours, Miss Sands,” Robert says, his tone immediately going respectful again. “There was a problem with the coding.”

“Get them off. If you have to, crash the website,” I tell him, trying to keep my voice under control. “Get them down as soon as I hang up.”