“Them, yes. If it was just them, I’d be angry, I’d miss them terribly, but I wouldn’t-I don’t know if I’d have gone after Salvatore. But Zia… no way could I let that go.” She cleared her throat, and the words seem to pour out of her. She hadn’t been able to talk about Zia to anyone since the murders, and now it was like water going over a spill gate. “I found Zia when she was just a few weeks old. She was starving, abandoned, almost dead. She was mine, she was my daughter even though I let Averill and Tina adopt her because there was no way I could take care of her or provide her with a stable home while I was off on a job. Salvatore killed my little girl.” Despite her best effort to hold them back, tears welled in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.
“Hey,” he said in alarm. With the tears blurring her vision, she didn’t see him move, but suddenly he was beside her on the sofa, putting his arm around her and pulling her close so her head nestled in the curve of his shoulder. “I don’t blame you. I’d have killed the son of a bitch, too. He should have known you don’t touch the innocents.” He was rubbing her back, the motion comforting.
Lily let herself be held for a moment, closing her eyes as she savored his closeness, the heat of his body, the man-smell of his skin. She was starved for human contact, for the touch of someone who cared. He might not care, but he sympathized, and that was close enough.
Because she wanted to stay where she was just a little too much, she sat up out of his embrace and briskly rubbed her cheeks dry. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to cry on your shoulder-literally.”
“You can use my shoulder anytime. So, you killed Salvatore Nervi. I assume the guys trying to kill you yesterday are after you because of that Why are you still here? You’ve done what you set out to do.“
“Only part of it I want to know why Averill and Tina did what they did, what was so important to them that they took the job when they’d been retired for so long. It had to be bad, and if it was bad enough for them to act, I want the whole world to know what that something is. I want the Nervi organization broken up, destroyed, made a pariah in the business world.”
“So you’re planning on breaking into that lab and seeing what you can find?”
She nodded. “I don’t have a firm plan on how to do it; I’ve just started gathering information.”
“You know the security had to be upgraded after your friends broke in.”
“I know, but I also know there’s no foolproof system. There’s always a weakness, if I can just find what it is.”
“You’re right about that. I’d say the first step is finding out who did the security work, then getting your hands on the specs.”
“Assuming they haven’t been destroyed.”
“Only an idiot would do that, when the system might need repair sometime. If Nervi was really smart, though, he would have the specs instead of letting the security company keep them.”
“He was smart, and suspicious enough that he probably thought of that.”
“Not quite suspicious enough, or he wouldn’t be dead,” Swain pointed out. “I’ve heard of Nervi, even though I’ve been in a different hemisphere for ten years. How did you get close enough to him to use that peashooter of yours?”
“I didn’t use it,” she replied. “I poisoned his wine, and almost killed myself in the bargain, because he insisted I taste it, too.”
“Holy shit. You knew it was poison and you still drank it? Your balls must be bigger than mine, because I wouldn’t have done it.”
“It was either that or let him storm out without drinking enough for me to be sure it would kill him. I’m okay, except for some damage to a heart valve, but I don’t think it’s serious.” Except, yesterday she’d been gasping for breath in his car, which wasn’t good. She hadn’t even been running, though she guessed being shot at would get the adrenaline flowing and speed up her heartbeat just as running would.
He was looking at her in astonishment, but before he said anything else, there was a knock on the door. “Good, the food’s here,” he said, getting up and going to the door. Lily slipped her hand into her boot, ready to act if the room service waiter made a wrong move, but he wheeled in the cart and set out the food with swift precision; Swain signed the ticket and the waiter let himself out.
“You can take your hand off the peashooter,” Swain said as he pulled two chairs up to the cart. “Why don’t you carry something with some stopping power?”
“My peashooter gets the job done.”
“Assuming you put the shot right where it counts. If you miss, someone’s gonna be pissed and still able to come after you.”
“I don’t miss,” she said mildly.
He glanced at her, then grinned. “Ever?”
“Never when it counts.”
* * *
News that the director of operations had been critically injured in a car accident didn’t send ripples through the intelligence community, it sent tsunamis. The first possibility to investigate was that the accident wasn’t an accident at all. There were more efficient ways to kill someone than an automobile accident, but still, the idea had to be considered. That suspicion was laid to rest after swift but thorough interviews with the cop who had been chasing the florist van for speeding through a red traffic light. The driver of the van, who was killed in the accident, had an outstanding warrant for unpaid speeding tickets.