Chapter 3 The Woman Who Sells Secrets
Cains P.O.V
I decided to meet up with Sable at a restaurant where no one would recognise me, Marcus had loyalists everywhere so it was safer to lay low. Even though my wound was hurting like hell and I had developed a migraine from trying to process everything going on, I knew that this meeting had to happen no matter what.
I definitely could not take Marcus down on my own and definitely not in this condition.
She was already there when I arrived.
That was the first thing that told me something about Sable Voss,not that she was early, but that she'd chosen the table with her back to the wall and a clear sight to both exits, and she'd done it so naturally that anyone watching would have thought she just preferred the corner. The café was a 24-hour place called Maren's, the kind that served bad coffee and cheap pastries, populated at this hour by night-shift workers and people with nowhere better to be. She looked like she belonged and somehow like she was above it at the same time.
She was reading something on her phone. She didn't look up when I walked in.
"You look terrible," she said, when I sat down across from her.
"I was shot and thrown in a river."
"That explains it." She set her phone down and looked at me Her eyes were dark, steady, the sort that didn't give much away unless she wanted them to. "Cain Devereaux. New Crest's most recent corpse."
"Working on changing that."
The waitress came. I ordered coffee. Sable was already nursing something that looked like it had gone cold an hour ago, which meant she'd been here longer than the meeting required. She'd been thinking, which was good because I needed someone who thought ahead, not someone who reacted.
"Who else knows?" she asked, once the waitress was gone.
"One person. He's not a talker."
She nodded slowly. "Marcus has already put out word that you took off with money that wasn't yours and you're not to be trusted. He's not broadcasting your death. He's muddying the water instead."
I absorbed that. It was smart. A dead man draws attention, investigations, questions, the inconvenient curiosity of people who'd known him. A thief who ran was just a disappointment. Something to be dismissed.
"He always was thorough," I said.
"He's scared," Sable said. "Scared men are thorough. It's the confident ones who get sloppy." She tilted her head slightly. "The question is what you're planning to do about it."
"You already know what I'm planning."
"I know what you want. I'm asking about the plan."
I looked at her for a moment. In those two conversations we'd had before tonight, I'd clocked her as someone who dealt in information the way a chess player dealt in pieces, never spending one without knowing what she'd gain. She hadn't come here out of sentiment. She'd come because she wanted to know if I was a viable investment.
Fair enough.
"I'm going to take everything from him," I said. "The operation, the connections, the name. I'm going to dismantle it piece by piece until there's nothing left but Marcus himself, and then I'm going to make sure he understands exactly what he lost and why."
"That's an objective," she said. "Not a plan."
"The plan is what I need you for."
Something shifted in her expression ans she picked up her cold coffee and took a measured sip, and I got the impression it was something to do with her hands while she decided.
"I've been building a file on the Devereaux operation for two years," she said finally. "Shipping routes, political connections, the names of the officials they own and what they paid for them. I built it for my own purposes, which are none of your business. But there is overlap between what I want and what you're describing." She set the cup down. "I give you information. You act on it. What I need moved, you move."
"And what do you need moved?"
"There's a man named Aldric." She said. "He's connected to Marcus, above Marcus, really. He's the reason I was burned out of my last operation. I want him finished. Publicly and completely."
"We'll get there," I said.
"Yes," she said quietly. "We will."
We talked for another hour. She was methodical and precise and she had clearly been waiting a long time for the right instrument to pick up the file she'd been building. I didn't flatter myself that I was anything more than useful to her. But useful was enough.
I was standing to leave when her phone buzzed against the table.
She looked at it.
Something changed in her expression almost immediately.Ger jaw tightened. Her eyes went flat and inward, processing something private and terrible.
"What?" I said.
She turned the phone to face me.
It was a photograph. Grainy, shot from distance, clearly taken without the subject's knowledge. A room I recognised whicg was the private dining room at Marcus's preferred restaurant, where he held the meetings that weren't supposed to exist.
Marcus was at the head of the table.
Across from him, leaning forward in conversation with the easy body language of two men who had known each other a long time, was someone I had not expected to see.
My throat closed.
Felix Hale. Twenty-four years old, the kid I had trained, the one I had brought up through the Devereaux ranks and watched over like like a younger brother. Felix, who I had trusted. Felix, who had been standing three feet from Marcus the night the order was given and hadn't said a word.
I had told myself he'd been afraid. Too young, too low in the hierarchy, too frozen to act.
Looking at this photograph and seeing the two of them relaxed, talking, sharing a meal, I understood that I had been wrong.
The timestamp in the corner of the photograph read tonight. Two hours ago.
Apparently he was not afraid or frozen that night.
Felix Hale had been at the table that ordered my death and from the look of that photograph, he had been there before.
