The Spy (King’s Security #3)

Chapter 16

16

FIONA

Kade looked at Zeke with surprise in his eyes. It made me suspicious.

Zeke cleared his throat. “I, uh, messed with his phone yesterday and was able to remotely activate a location tracker, so provided he hasn’t destroyed it, we should be able to find out exactly where he is.”

I stiffened and removed my arms from around Zeke’s neck. “You’re tracking him?”

“Yes.” He sounded hesitant, perhaps sensing my mood.

I looked him in the eyes. “Is there a particular reason why we didn’t follow him last night?”

He looked steadily back. “My team had instructions to monitor his whereabouts. They know exactly where he’s been since we left the yacht. If he went anywhere that raised alarm bells, they would have alerted us. We needed to rest last night. There was no point in following him then. The whole point of a tracker is that we don’t have to tail him in person. ”

I gritted my teeth. I could see where he was coming from, but I was sick and tired of being kept in the dark. Especially when Kade’s surprise led me to think he assumed Zeke had told me this already.

“Is there a reason you didn’t let me know about this yesterday?”

He shifted his weight, seeming uncomfortable for the first time. “You have a lot riding on us proving that your ex stole the Monet. I thought you’d insist on following him even though, as I said, it wouldn’t have achieved anything.”

My jaw was beginning to ache. “So, what you’re saying is that you knew I’d have a different opinion from yours, and you didn’t want the hassle of having to discuss it with me.”

“Fi.” Zeke cupped my face, and I was surprised to realize that his signature rings were missing from his hands. Perhaps he’d lost them in the lake last night. “I’m sorry you’re upset, but it was the best tactical decision to make.”

“You kept me in the dark.” My voice was thick, and I felt like crying. Once again, someone had proved they didn’t trust me. I thought we’d turned a corner after yesterday, but actions spoke louder than words, and Zeke’s were telling me not to rely on him to treat me like an equal.

“I’m sorry.”

I could hear his remorse, but I also got the impression that if he had a do-over, he wouldn’t change anything.

“Don’t be upset.” Kade sounded pleading. “You know I can’t handle sad women.”

I rolled my eyes, but on some level, I knew that however upset I was, it wouldn’t move us forward. If I wanted to nail Bergen, other things were more important than my hurt feelings.

Zeke’s phone rang. I got off his lap and sat on the sofa while he answered.

“What’s up, Ellie?” he asked, then tapped at the screen. A moment later, Ellie’s voice filled the room. She was one of Zeke’s best people, and I’d always liked her.

“The auction was canceled last night,” Ellie said. “After the scare with the ‘police,’ they headed back to shore and went their separate ways. Rene and Claudette Laurent have already booked flights back to France. They leave in a few hours.”

“What about the Monet?” Zeke asked. He caught my eye, and I got the impression that his putting this call on speaker phone was an apology for the things he hadn’t told me. It wasn’t enough, but it was a start.

“There’s a rumor about someone holding private viewings of the stolen Monet for anyone who was at the auction and missed out on the chance to see it,” Ellie replied.

“Do those rumors tie back to Bergen Cole?” he asked.

“Unfortunately not. It’s all very vague. There are no names directly linked to it at this point, and there’s no viewing address or means of contact either, but we’ll keep looking.”

“Thanks, Ellie. Let us know as soon as you find anything,” Zeke instructed.

“On it, boss. Talk later.” She hung up.

Zeke faced Kade and me. “We should check Cole’s current location and see if he’s been anywhere that would make a good storage location.”

“Yes.” I was relieved to know we’d actually be doing something to make progress. What point was having the ability to track Bergen if we did nothing with it?

“Kade, did you bring my laptop?” Zeke asked.

Kade went to the kitchen counter and opened a black case, extracting a slim laptop from it. He handed the laptop to Zeke. “Let’s find this bastard.”

ZEKE

I’d never realized Fiona was so impatient, but if I’d learned one thing today, it was that. We’d spent hours monitoring her ex’s location on the laptop. At first, she’d been engrossed, but she’d gradually grown frustrated with how slowly everything moved. Bergen had spent an hour at a cafe for breakfast, then returned to a residential complex—my team were looking into whether it was his apartment building—for another couple of hours.

When he’d gone into motion again, Fiona had been excited, practically vibrating as she sat next to me, only to slump when he entered a restaurant she said used to be one of his favorites.

Another hour passed. Kade had left not long after we started our cyberstalking, and Fiona didn’t seem to appreciate my amusement at the way she was pacing and muttering, desperate for something to happen.

“This is so boring,” she complained forty minutes into Bergen’s restaurant visit. “I thought spying on people was supposed to be thrilling.”

I laughed, smiling at how put out she sounded. With her lower lip set in a sulky pout, she was adorable.

“Most surveillance doesn’t keep you on the edge of your seat,” I said. “At least we can do this from the comfort of the apartment so you can pace all you like. Could you imagine if we were stuck in a car together watching him?”

She grimaced. “Okay, good point. But surely he has better things to do than eat. The man has a stolen painting worth millions. If that were me, I wouldn’t be going out for brunch with my friends.”

“All the better to throw suspicion off,” I said.

“What suspicion?” She threw her hands up. “The only ones who suspect him are us, and we don’t have the ability to arrest him, so why would he care?”

I leaned back against the sofa and eyed her thoughtfully. “So, your problem is that you’re bored?”

She sighed and pushed her hair off her forehead. “I’m sorry, I just wish he’d do something that would distract me from what he said yesterday about me being in an orange jumpsuit.”

I felt a pang of sympathy.

“Hey.” I waited for her to look at me. “It’s going to be all right. And if you need a distraction, I have just the thing.” I waggled my eyebrows suggestively and she laughed. That laugh made me feel like a king.

“I need to find something to keep my hands busy,” she said. “Do you have any paper?”

I gestured toward the case on the counter. “Look in there.”

She checked inside and pulled out a pad of blank notepaper and a pencil. Then she sat at the end of the sofa, her feet tucked beneath her, and started scribbling. I checked the screen to make sure Bergen hadn’t moved, although it wasn’t really necessary since I’d set an alert to ping if he was in motion for more than a few minutes.

I lit my phone screen to see if I had any messages, but there were none, so I opened my work inbox and began looking through the emails I’d received for our other, more routine jobs. Benson had been handling the bulk of those. I really needed to update his job title from assistant to something more fitting of what he actually did. Without him, my life would be infinitely more difficult.

I finished replying to an email about a potential new client who Benson thought sounded dodgy, then glanced at Fiona. She’d showered and gotten dressed a while ago, much to my disappointment, and now her hair spilled over her shoulders like fiery silk while the pencil whizzed across the page. Her forehead was crinkled with concentration and her lower lip was caught between her teeth.

Something inside me settled. If I could see her like this every day, I’d be happy. Unfortunately, I had some ground to make up because it had been obvious she was angry about the decisions Kade and I made without consulting her. I could see her perspective, and I hated the thought that she might believe I didn’t trust her judgment, but I also knew that we’d had reasons for making those choices, and our reasons were valid regardless of Fiona’s feelings.

“What are you doing?” I asked, curious.

She looked up, blushing slightly, and angled the notepad toward me. She’d sketched me standing in the narrow alley on the side of the yacht, where I’d told her to strip and jump. My face was shadowed, my mouth smirking, and tattoos peeped out from between the open buttons of my shirt. Behind me, a few stars spotted the sky. But what really caught my attention wasn’t the drawing itself, but the way she’d captured my mood on paper. She hadn’t just reproduced my face; she’d illustrated my soul. The dark parts of it, the dirty parts of it, and the parts I sometimes allowed to be hopeful.

Emotion clogged the back of my throat. From this one single sketch, I could tell that she saw me. More than anyone else had in a long time.

“It’s amazing,” I said. “You’re very talented.”

She cocked her head, eyeing me curiously. “It’s all right. It needs a lot of polishing.”

I rubbed my hand over my mouth, unable to take my eyes off it. “You’re too hard on yourself. Really, it’s… something else.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Are you trying to butter me up? ”

“No.” I checked the screen one last time and went over to her, dipping my head to kiss her cheek. “You’re incredible.”

“Yeah?” Her smile was shy.

I started to draw back but she grabbed me and pulled me closer, kissing me on the mouth. I groaned and tasted her lips. She came up onto her knees, her hands wandering down my chest. I wanted to scoop her into my arms and carry her to the bedroom, then drop her on the bed and make her beg for my cock, but before I could do anything, a ping sounded from behind us.

Fiona drew back. “He’s moving.”