JACE-1(Lane Brothers, Book 3)(32)

“I think… that might be the gist of it, babe.” I gasp, kissing her again through my chuckling as she frowns darkly and narrows her eyes.

“Shoot. There goes my whole revenge plot. But…they’re still in deep with Ronny, though.”

“Yeah? How’s that?” I ask when she shimmies on and starts pacing again, her bottom lip held firmly between her teeth as she contemplates her revenge dilemma.

I hold my tongue when she doesn’t answer and share a look with my brothers, who seem to think Trace is a rare creature if the way they’re looking at her is any indication.

“Yeah, Ronny and Timothy had this weird affair a while back,” she mutters disdainfully, scratching at her chin. “Why they’d risk it is beyond me, because those two spawning would birth like the ultimate evil or something.”

What? Is the woman really telling me that she was engaged to this piece of shit and planning to marry him despite knowing all this?

“Trace—”

“Don’t start with me, Lane. I’m having a good-bad day right now and I need to think. Okay, so if Ronny, Timothy, and Daddy are involved in something…oh gross! Just gross.” She gasps, making retching sounds when the truth of it all hits her. “Why would she? Why! Have you seen my dad? He’s like a million years old, and Timothy isn’t that much better.”

I don’t even care about what she’s saying right now; my mind is still stuck on the fact that no less than a week ago she was making wedding plans and fitting dresses.

“You were going to marry him? You were honestly going to marry that guy to further an investigation that isn’t at all real?” I grit out, mashing my teeth when I see my three brothers easing out of the room from the corner of my eye.

Trace pauses and looks over at me with narrowed eyes before she starts biting her lip, a sure sign she’s nervous right now.

“Not marry, marry. Just, you know, go through the motions while I got close enough to bug them and stuff,” she mutters, jumping at my volley of curses. “And besides, Jace, I didn’t know the investigation would turn up nothing. Well not nothing, but—fine! Stop glaring and just listen.”

“Speak.”

“Three years ago, Agent Williams came to me and offered me immunity for Mom if I started looking into Daddy and Timothy’s finances and tried to glean anything I could from them. I got nothing, not one scrap of evidence against them to tie them to corruption or backdoor deals or anything, so they put that all on the back burner and started working this Patriots thing. Initially I was just a profiler who never got any field action.”

That’s a good answer, because if she’d just told me that she not only let some assholes blackmail her and fool her into taking this job, but also admitted to putting herself at risk for this, I would be losing my shit.

“Go on.”

She sighs and flops down onto Jared’s chair, rolling her neck to relive the stiffness brought on by the strain I see lining her face.

“I’ve been one the team working this investigation for almost two years now. We have nothing concrete despite having wiretaps on the PD and someone on Dobson twenty-four hours a day. So they sent me in. I guess I should have figured this was all a screwjob to get me here, to you, because it’s obvious now that there’s no way my father would be involved in this. Corruption and side deals maybe, but not this.”

Nah, I think, closing my eyes to relieve the headache tunnelling its way through my brain. They got her here because they figured with our history, Trace would be an easy mark and she could feed them information without having to meet again.

Agent Williams is one tough broad, and I just love knowing that she’s desperate enough to get in on this action by pulling the love card with me.

Not that I think Trace would ever feed the FBI anything I didn’t want her to, but still, they’re using her, not caring that she’s now in danger just for being with me.

Should anyone in this hellhole discover that she is an agent and working this case, she would die.

For that alone, I should track down Williams and throttle the life out of her.

“I think we need to get the brothers back in here. We need to talk this all through and then I want to know how to get in touch with Williams.”

Trace just nods and sits back tiredly.

“I never wanted this. I just wanted a peaceful life.”

“I know, babe, I know. We’ll get it eventually. I swear.”





Chapter Ten


Trace

The only good thing to come out of three years’ worth of mess and bullshit is that I have Jace back again. Does it make me feel any better to acknowledge just what a fool I’ve been as I let the Bureau and that rat bastard Agent Williams play me like a fiddle?