I sighed, the sound making a quiet noise in my office as it bounced off the walls. “Thank you, Bjorn.” I took it with as much grace as I could, the assistance of a murderer and rapist. It wasn’t like I had armies of wholesome people in my head offering me their assistance, so I had to take what I could get, right?
Right.
Don’t forget, Bastian’s soft voice said quietly, I’m at your disposal as well.
“Thank you too, Roberto,” I said, nodding as I turned to look out my window across the neatly manicured lawn. The world might be going to hell around us, but our gardeners still worked every day, apparently. I couldn’t decide whether that was soothing or galling and eventually decided on the latter. “I can use all the help I can get.”
I heard a quiet rustle in the back of my head where Gavrikov and Eve still waited, watching me. I could feel them back there, discontented, their anger with me still fresh on the surface. “What about you, Aleksandr?” I asked.
I think not, his faintly accented words floated up to me. I do not wish to give you more power which you may hang over my sister’s head like a looming danger, an axe or sword ready to fall.
“That’s not me,” I whispered, as I felt him retreat to the back of my head. I could nearly taste his bitterness, his suspicion. It fed into all my worst fears about myself, giving me a sense of unease.
What if he was right about me?
I felt another presence, and it caused me to relax just a bit. Bjorn’s psyche, as near as I could tell, still held the hard-planted seeds of reluctance and rawness from how I’d treated him. I didn’t want to ask, but I suspected he was just being a bigger man. Not literally, but figuratively.
“Thank you,” I muttered again.
It is not for your sake, Bjorn said, and I sensed his anger below the surface. Sovereign deserves to die, horribly, for what he has done to me, and … I could hear the hints of grudging admiration spiking through his words as he spoke in my head, … your plan, your ideas … I find them pleasing.
I frowned then quickly wiped the look off my face, burying my first reaction—distaste—at his approval. I knew he sensed it, but he wisely decided not to comment on it. Our choices were terrible, to either ignore each other, fight each other, or work together. It didn’t take anyone with half a brain to realize that those choices were absolute shit to both of us.
But what the hell else was there to do?
“Sienna?” There was a knock at my half-closed door, one that pushed the door open more than the crack it had been at. J.J.’s face appeared in the gap, and I caught a hint of eager eyes behind those huge black-rimmed glasses. “I think I’ve got something.”
“Come in,” I said, trying to clear my mind of the distractions imposed by having six people living in the mental space meant for one. I waved him toward the desk and he slipped in, pushing the door nearly shut behind him as he came forward. He dragged one of my chairs a couple inches closer to the front of my desk, scuffing the carpet as he did so and getting an irritated reaction from me, as though I’d heard a single nail briefly scrape a chalkboard.
Ever meet someone and just find yourself repelled by them, as though you’d met your polar opposite? That was J.J. for me. I couldn’t exactly explain it (not that I’d put a lot of thought into it), but the guy just annoyed the holy hell out of me. I tried to bury it, since I was his boss and I needed his expertise, but it did not take much effort on his part to set my teeth on edge.
That was probably more on my end than his, honestly. I’m flawed, and one of those flaws is lack of patience. I’d say I was working on it, but that’d be a lie. I was just working on keeping it from ballooning out into murder every time I lost it.
Baby steps.
“I traced the plane,” J.J. said, “and you were right.” Who doesn’t love those words? Music to my ears. And ego. “Looks like it was chartered, and I found a new money trail leading to a shell corporation headquartered in Massachusetts. The Wise Men’s Consortium.” He glanced up at me. “Heh. Like a play on Weissman—”
“Yes, I got it.”
“Right,” he said, turning serious and clearing his throat. “And sexist, obviously. Anyway, it’s something. Also, the NTSB has traced the plane back to its takeoff point, and they’re now on the scene at the hangar, along with the FBI—”
“Oh?” I had a hard time caring.
“They found some stuff,” J.J. said, causing me to strike that ‘not caring’ thing. “Looks like Weissman had been using it as his temporary base, so there was a computer and—”