Now he regarded Raiden with eyes as still and fathomless as an abyss. But his absolute calmness didn’t fool him. That abyss was filled with flesh-melting acid.
Raiden had compromised everything Numair had strived for—their freedoms, their achievements, their very lives. Numair was coldly angry. And when he was like this, he was deadly. Anyone with any sense of self-preservation would be afraid. Very afraid.
“So what took you so long to let us know?” That was Wildcard. Of Russian origins, he’d come to The Organization old enough to remember his past life. But he’d chosen not to make contact with his family after his escape, adopting the name Ivan Kostantinov instead. Still a Russian name, but he hadn’t told any of them the significance of his choice. Many of his rivals in the cyber development world thought Ivan the Terrible suited him far more.
Ivan’s mockery grew more caustic when Raiden made no response. “Did you change your name from Lightning to Turtle without telling us?”
“Maybe since he’s a ninja, he’s always been one.”
Ivan glared at Bones, the most blasé of the brothers. If only in comparison to the rest of them. To the rest of the world Antonio Balducci was a whirlwind of energy and achievements, an enigmatic, awe-inspiring figure who was a wizard in medicine and with the women who catapulted themselves at his feet. As their former medical expert and field surgeon, Antonio was now in charge of Black Castle’s medical R&D business and a reconstructive-trauma surgical god whose work bordered on magic.
On the personal level, ever since their days in Black Castle, Antonio and Ivan couldn’t stop harassing each other, but neither one could live without the other, either.
“You knew that she knew,” Ivan said, resuming the corrosive scolding Antonio had interrupted. “And you not only let her go then, you’re back with her again now. Don’t you—”
“I had no idea what she was up to until it was too late,” Raiden interrupted Ivan. “I let her go because she gave me her word she’d never use her knowledge. She kept it and I—”
“You had no way of knowing she would,” Numair interrupted him in turn. “That was a blind, insane gamble. You jeopardized yourself and, by association, all of us. You compounded your mistakes when you made the decision to keep us in the dark. It could have meant our very lives.”
From the bare facts, it did look like that, Raiden conceded. But it had been his gut feeling that he’d gone with then. Still, he couldn’t admit that. It would make him look even more unreliable, and Scarlett more dangerous.
He finally exhaled. “I made the call to believe her. And I was right to.”
Antonio snorted. “How do you know that? There’s no proof yet that this woman hasn’t leaked strategic info about you, or us, in the past five years. For all we know, every single problem or loss we suffered could have been her doing.”
Raiden’s answering snort was more spectacular. “Don’t you think if she’d leaked info about our identities, the least we would have suffered would have been bullets between the eyes, not the tame business setbacks we did? She leaked, and will leak, nothing.”
Antonio shrugged. “Then you lucked out. So far.”
“It wasn’t luck. It was a judgment. I stand by it.”
“I can understand you making a mistake once,” Ivan said. “Though I can’t get my head around it, not from you. But to be doing it again... That’s totally incomprehensible to me.”