You Are Mine(5)

“Zac,” Alex began.

“I need to talk to Eva alone.” His voice was quiet and very, very certain. As if it was already a done deal that everyone would do what he said.

She didn’t answer or flinch away from the look in his eyes. Of course, she knew there’d be payback for not telling him about the meeting. For doing this without him. He was pissed and no doubt she was going to get it in the neck.

It didn’t worry her. He scared the shit out of everyone else but he didn’t scare her. He never had.

There was quiet movement in the room as Honor slid off Gabriel’s knee and the pair of them went out, closely followed by Katya and Alex.

Zac didn’t watch them go nor did he turn his head to make sure he and Eva were alone when the door closed behind them.

He stood there, a massive, dark presence in his perfectly tailored Hart Brothers charcoal gray suit. His deep-set golden eyes betrayed nothing, the impressive line of his strong jaw set. His hands were still on the back of the couch, the ink of his tattoos swirling over them. Crosses and dots and swirling spirals. Cyrillic letters. The legacy of time spent in a Russian prison years ago, or so he’d told her once.

There were other tattoos too, hidden by the thin veneer of civilization he wore in the form of that suit. There was a dragon on his back, a Chinese sleeve down one arm, and some religious iconography on his chest. She’d seen them when they’d had a Circles meeting on his Caribbean island and he’d gone swimming in the ocean. She thought they were beautiful, but she’d never asked him where they’d all come from.

Just as he’d never asked her what had happened the night he’d rescued her from the side of the road in the middle of nowhere. There were some things even friendship couldn’t bear.

Eva took a soundless breath.

Zac remained silent. He did that a lot when he wanted something, using silence to get people to talk. Or he used quiet, polite words, backed up with an undertone of iron that had a way of making most people obey him whether they meant to or not.

But she was not most people. “Yeah, I get it,” she said at last. “You’re pissed I didn’t tell you about this meeting. But I had my reasons.”

“I’m slightly annoyed you didn’t tell me about the meeting.” Again, his voice was mild. Deceptively so. “But what I am fucking pissed about is that you didn’t tell me you recognized the man in that tape.”

Again, not shocking. She’d lied to him so of course he’d be angry with her. Well, it wasn’t the first time. She lifted her chin. “If you remember, we were warned off investigating this further. I was trying to protect you.”

Surprise crossed his face. “Protect me? Are you serious?”

Okay, perhaps not entirely, since the idea of anything being a threat to a man as dangerous as Zac was lunacy. Then again, there were other dangerous men out there as she had good reason to know.

“Yeah, I’m serious.”

He didn’t smile and the banked heat of anger in his gaze didn’t lessen. “I know why you recognized him, Eva.”

The quiet words stood in the space between them like a black hole, sucking away all the light and warmth of the universe.

They’d never spoken about it. Not once.

All Zac knew was that she was a hacker he’d caught breaking into his computer system and who he’d wanted to come and work for him. So via email she’d agreed, in exchange for one thing: that he would pick her up at a time and place she specified, no questions asked.

She didn’t tell him she’d been taken by force off the streets of New York when she’d been sixteen. And then sold into sexual slavery. Kept imprisoned alone in an innocuous suburban house in upstate New York for two years and used by a man she never saw because she’d always been brought to him blindfolded. That her only means of communication was the stolen hours in the middle of the night when she’d been able to escape her room and use the computer in the study. Her captors had no idea that she’d grown up with a natural ability for code and that she could hack her way into virtually any system.

They only saw her as a sex object. And that’s all she’d been until she’d managed to escape. Until Zac had picked her up.

She did not want to talk about that. She wanted to never think of it again.

“Sure you do,” she said easily. “But I’m not going to go into that. Not now. Not ever, understand?”

“The others have a point, don’t you think?”

She ignored that. “Can you find him? I mean, you have databases you can search. Shit, I could probably find him myself. In fact, why don’t you leave this with me? I’ll find him. The past has got nothing to do with this.”