Outrage twisted his features. “They sterilized you?” His disgust was enough to make me feel sick to my stomach, and I jerked back a step.
Leon was right there, catching me in his warm, secure hold, but Kai’s venomous gaze just shifted over my head to center on Leon.
“Why?” Kai shouted. “Why would you do that to her? You sick fuck.”
“What?” I exclaimed, twisting my head to look between them. “Leon had nothing to do with it. He’s—”
“He’s one of them!” Kai barked, his teeth grinding together as his chest swelled with indignation. “He might not have been then, but he sure as fuck is now. And I bet my own balls that nothing has changed. Has it, Leon?”
Now I was really confused. “Kai, take a fucking breath and explain what in the shit you’re accusing him of.”
Kai’s gaze darted back to me, regret flashing across his face briefly, then he was sneering at Leon again. “Siren, baby. You’ve been sleeping with the devil. Leon Marx is on the Circle.”
35
Those words just fell out of my mouth faster than I could catch them, the slippery bastards. The second they were in the air, though, it felt like a huge weight lifted off my chest. Now she knew. Now she could kick him to the curb or shoot him or whatever the fuck a vicious little creature like my woman did when people betrayed her.
The last thing I expected, though, was for her to start laughing.
Bewildered, I flicked a glance at the dickhead still holding her hips possessively, but his face gave away nothing.
“Siren, I dunno what you think I just said… but Leon is on the Circle. He’s one of the seven psychopaths that runs the Guild. Everything they’ve made you do, all the years of exploitation, they’re his fault.” I simmered down my rage a few notches in an attempt to get my point across. Because she clearly hadn’t heard me the first time.
“Oh my god,” she groaned, scrubbing her hands over her face and stepping away from him.
Good. That fucking cunt needed to keep his hands off my woman, anyway. But she also stepped away from me, and that was unacceptable.
“Danny,” I tried again, because goddamn it, this was important.
“No!” she shouted, pinning me with fire in her eyes. “Enough! I have heard e-fucking-nough. I expected this meeting to go badly. I knew neither one of you wanted to tolerate each other. I knew eventually someone was going to get heartbroken or killed. But was it so fucking much of me to hope that could wait until after Blanchet was dealt with? Until after the world’s best mercenaries weren’t coming for my blood?” She was shouting at us both now, her cheeks pink with fury, and my jaw hung open in shock.
Leon must have seen the need to try and calm the situation, too, because he stepped forward with a calming gesture. “Beautiful, I think we should—”
“Shut your fucking mouth, Marx,” she snarled, shifting her blazing glare his way. Ouch, I didn’t envy him being on the receiving end of that. “You are far from an innocent bystander here.”
That snapped me free of my shock, and I scoffed. “Quite the opposite; he’s the enemy.”
Danny’s glare snapped back to me, and I straightened my spine. “You’re delusional. Let me guess, your mystery Guild mole told you that? Did you ever stop and think that they could be feeding you false intel to further their own agenda? Fucking hell, Kai, grow a brain. Just because your interests align on Project Remus, doesn’t mean they’re not using you.”
Leon cast me a curious glance but didn’t seem even slightly offended by my accusations. Was I wrong? Fucking hell, I hadn’t even considered the validity of that tip. Everything else our mole had provided was serving to be true… and this information had rocked me so hard I’d just accepted it.
“You have a mole that knows about Remus?” Leon asked, pondering. “And they claim they know who is on the Circle? How interesting.”
Danny shot him a hard look. “You have ideas on who it is.”
He gave a smooth shrug, then grabbed one of Danny’s braids to tip her head back, leaning down to kiss her hard. “Maybe,” he murmured against her lips. “I need to make some calls. Come get me if you decide to kill this idiot. I wanna watch.”
He kissed her again, making me want to snap his lying fucking neck, then shot me a smug wink before casually sauntering out of the room. Totally unconcerned with my revelation of his duplicity.
Danny propped her hands on her hips, giving me the most pointed look. It was genuinely embarrassing. Had my Guild mole played me? But why? What did they have to gain in providing that information?
“Siren,” I said again, my voice rough with the unspoken plea that she believe me. “How can you possibly trust him? He’s a psychopath!”
She huffed a sigh, shaking her head. “No, Kai. That’s where you’re wrong. He’s a sociopath, and he’s my sociopath. You’re going to have to trust my judgment on this, or we have problems. Leon won’t hurt me.”
I swallowed hard, every instinct in my body screaming that she needed to be protected. But she wasn’t some delicate flower with easily crushed petals, she wasn’t Charlotte. This was Danny… my siren. The kind of woman who would lure a man into the water with her beauty and light, then laugh as she drowned him and sank the body.
So I wet my lips and gave a jerking nod. “Fine,” I uttered, aware I was already losing this fight. I needed to withdraw and regroup, because my ace in the hole had just backfired in spectacular fashion.
It was stupid. I should have verified my mole’s intel about Leon being on the Circle. But how the fuck did someone verify one of the best kept secrets in the criminal underworld? Shit. That in itself should have been my first clue. It was one of the best kept secrets; for hundreds of years the Circle had remained anonymous… and my mole just handed his identity over without question?
Fuck. I’d been played, and now Danny was frowning at me like I was a needy, manipulative son of a bitch trying to trap her. I could feel her slipping through my fingers, and it filled me with sheer terror. I couldn’t lose her.
“How do you explain him being able to name Blanchet, though?” I pushed, following her as she exited the kitchen.
She shot a scathing look over her shoulder but didn’t stop as she took the stairs back up to the master suite. “He’s a hacker, Kai. One of the best. Which means that for one thing, he—of anyone—has the skill to be able to uncover the Circle’s identities because somewhere those records are being held, or else any Tom, Dick, or Harry could claim to be Circle. Right?”
Her pause seemed like she actually wanted my response, so I grunted my agreement.
“Which then begs the question, Kai, if he really were Circle, don’t you think he’d have covered his own tracks so well that no one below his expertise could uncover his identity? Fuck me, it’s like you legitimately didn’t even question the information presented to you for a split second. It fit your already formed negative opinion, and so you ran with it. But for what, Kai?” She shoved through the doors to the master bedroom and jerked open a drawer.
I just hovered in the doorway, confused as fuck and feeling like a massive moron.