It was his turn to cough in disbelief. “Sure, by systematically deceiving me for five months, then leaving a fifty-million-dollar gaping hole in my liquid assets. I bet that’s every man’s idea of ‘help.’”
“It isn’t a crime to con a con man. I was sent to expose an assassin who was posing as a squeaky-clean businessman. The only crimes were in your past, not mine.”
He gaped at her, astounded all over again. Even after he’d found out she’d conned him, after she’d blackmailed him, he’d thought she’d held her own with him only because he’d been in a precarious position, and more important, because they’d had their confrontation over the phone. If they’d been face-to-face, he’d always thought she wouldn’t have been able to maintain her poise.
But this woman with the steely self-possession could stare down the scariest monsters he’d ever dealt with and not turn a hair. If she could hold him at a disadvantage with such effortlessness when he’d thought she would be vulnerable and off balance, no one else would stand a chance against her.
He shook his head. “I didn’t choose my old persona. It wasn’t the real me. This new one I created is. I bet you can’t say the same about yourself. So whatever you call what you do for a living, I call you a professional fraud, out of choice. And whatever elaborate deception you’re perpetrating now, I will stop you. I let you get away with deceiving me once. I’m not letting you get away with anything again.”
He’d let his lethal side surface as he talked. Expecting exposure to it to shake her at last, he was again amazed when she met his menace head-on.
“You can only ‘stop’ me if you expose me. And you can’t, because it would mean exposing yourself.”
He coughed in incredulity. “Are you threatening me?”
“You’re the one who’s threatening to strike me down like your old code name. I’m just pointing out that your righteousness is blinding you to the fact that it’s in your best interests to keep my secrets. Why do you think I was so free with them?”
“Because you think I can’t do anything with what I know?”
“Not if you want what I know to remain buried.”
“You are threatening me, then.”
Something like exasperation tinged her gaze. “I once promised I’d never hold my knowledge over you, and I remain at my word.” When he glowered at her, failing to find any words to express what collided inside his head and chest, she exhaled. “Listen, Raiden, you’re the one who can create this impasse, and you mustn’t. Not when you’re mere steps from attaining the family and the status you’ve craved all your life.”
His heart convulsed. She knew this?
Though it shocked him, it stood to reason. Through his obliviousness, his misplaced trust, this woman had somehow once found out his every secret. It must have been easy for someone of her shrewdness to extrapolate his life goals and future plans. Now that she knew the arrangement he had with Megumi and her father, as it had been announced in society already, the details must have been as obvious to her.
It made sense, but it still galled him that she knew so much about him when he knew nothing about her, except what she made him feel, how she still had such power over him.
As if reading his mind, something like gentle persuasion entered her gaze. “Whatever you feel about me, no matter your burning desire to punish me for my transgressions against you, I’m not worth tarnishing the perfect image you’ve worked so hard and long to create. And that would certainly happen if you expose me. For what would you say I blackmailed you for? You can’t say that you succumbed to my blackmail, since it would make you look weak, or that you needed to hide something that badly. If you expose me anonymously, once the mess is out in the open, details have a way of surfacing, of becoming land mines you never know which step will set off.”