A laugh rises up but smothers on my lips. Damon looks utterly serious, more afraid than I’ve ever seen him.
“W-what do you mean?” I manage. “What do you mean we’re going to die? Is this some kind of joke?”
“This is an operation.” He’s speaking low, his lips hardly moving. “I’m undercover, and I can’t explain better now. I’ll tell you everything later, but right now you have to play along.”
“You’re doing an operation?” I hiss back. “I thought this was a vacation. You invited me along!”
“I needed to come out here for the operation, but it was only meant to take a day or two. When you said you couldn’t come, I didn’t think you needed to know.”
“You didn’t think I needed to know?” Acutely aware that the stranger is watching us, I try to keep my voice level and my face impassive, but my blood’s starting to boil. “You’re clearly in the middle of something dangerous, and you just weren’t going to tell me?”
“You can be angry with me later.” His voice is fierce. “Right now you’ve got to do what I say. Our lives depend on it—and the lives of many others.”
Our lives? I want to look back at the stranger, this man who is clearly the source of the danger he’s talking about, but I don’t dare. “What do you—What—what do I have to do?”
“Well, for starters, I need you to hit me. I know you won’t want to—”
I slap him across the face.
Unprepared, Damon’s face jerks to the side, registering genuine shock. His jaw tightens, and he turns back to me, ignoring the other diners who are now looking our way. “Well,” he says tautly, “that certainly wasn’t hard for you, was it?”
“How could you lie to me?” I demand quietly. “Have you been lying this whole time?”
“Later,” he says. “That man over there thinks your name is Carmella Monroe.”
“Why would he—”
“No time. He thinks you’re a very scary, very powerful woman and that I work for you. You showing up now would mean that I screwed up your schedule. That’s what the slap was for. Carmella’s not a woman who takes mistakes lightly. What I need you to do is put on some serious attitude, walk over there, shake hands with him, and tell him the meeting will be conducted later as planned.”
“I don’t understand—”
“And I don’t have time to help you. Right now, you have to help me. Walk over with an attitude, shake the man’s hand, introduce yourself, blame me for the mix-up, and tell him you’ll be meeting with them later.”
“Them?”
“Yes, them. Make sure you say that. Now, go.”
I’m trembling suddenly. “If we’re in serious danger like you said—”
“Baby, the absolute worst thing you could do right now is to keep standing here talking to me. Every second we do he’s getting more suspicious. Now, I promise it’ll all be okay. I just need you to do this for me.”
I clench my hands together, fighting the sudden nausea in my throat.
His eyes soften slightly, pleading. “Just do this one thing for me, Jack. It’ll all be over in two minutes.”
The meeting or our lives? I think. But saying a silent prayer, I turn on my heel and force myself to stride back to the table with all the confidence I can muster.
“Please excuse the interruption,” I say briskly to the stranger. For a moment I start to sink into a seat then realize a powerful woman probably wouldn’t sit for such a short conversation, and I straighten up again awkwardly. “And excuse my associate.” I shoot a glare at Damon standing behind me. “He’s very pretty but not long on brains.”
For a moment the stranger regards me blankly, his face still awash with suspicion. Then he laughs—bright and loud like a jackal. “Well, we have to keep the pretty things around for diversion, don’t we?”
“Mmm,” I agree vaguely. He has a slight accent—hard to place. “As this was an obvious blunder on his part”—another glare—“the meeting will take place as scheduled.”
“Of course.” The stranger gets hastily to his feet then straightens and buttons his jacket as if he’s not someone comfortable with catering to others. “We’re looking forward to it.”
“As am I.” I extend my hand and then worry this is not something I am supposed to do. But he seems to find it entirely natural and meets my hand with his own.
Something about his grip and the calluses covered with an excess of lotion—harsh and at the same time too soft—gives me a shudder. But I wait for him to break contact then give a curt nod and turn on my heel to stride away. My ankle turns slightly as I exit the lounge, but I stagger on, trying to appear nonplussed.
I assume Damon is behind me somewhere but don’t dare turn to look, continuing through the lobby. The desk clerk still holding my luggage tries to get my attention, but I ignore her and march on. Just as I’m passing an enormous frondy plant flanking the front entrance, a pair of hands snatches me and drags me behind the plant through a side door.
I’m so shocked I don’t think to struggle until the assailant, holding me from behind, hauls me down a set of cement stairs. Even then, when I finally rouse enough to open my mouth, one arm disengages from my waist to clamp over my mouth, smothering the scream half formed on my lips. Still I shriek against the clammy fingers and flail, fighting for purchase on the cement.
Damon! I’m screaming though no one can hear me. Panic invigorates me, leaving a single thought—Where’s Damon?
At the bottom of the stairs, I’m dragged to the right, through a peeling door—
And into a melee of twenty people talking at once.
“What happened?”
“Who are you? Why did you approach Agent Wade?”
One man—built like a bull with hulking shoulders, rotund middle, and bald head above a furiously red face—charges at me, nearly nose-to-nose to demand, “Who are you working for?”
They’re all wearing suits and crowding me in a flurry of stained ties and stale sweat. Defensively, I’ve shrunk against the concrete wall of whatever room we’re in—I see only a flash of computer monitors behind all the people coming at me—lifting my hands in front of my face, palms out.
“Back off! Back off! She’s my girlfriend!”
It’s Damon finally propelling his way through the throng to get to me. “Baby, baby—it’s okay!” He’s pulling my hands down from my face, turning me to look at him. “It’s me. You’re okay now.”
“Okay?” I gasp. “What is this? Who are these people?”
“These are members of the FBI and the local police.” Damon’s speaking slowly. “This is a temporary command center here in the basement of Luxuria. You walked in on an operation.”
“Blew an operation, more like!” the bull shouts, followed by a stream of profanity. “How did she wander right into the middle of the setup?”
“Setup?” I repeat. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m undercover, doing an introduction,” Damon explains, but the bull advances to interrupt.
“We’re blown. You realize that? We are blown!”
“Not necessarily,” says another man. “I think he bought it. She covered it pretty well.”
“Pretty well?” the bull snorts. “She was clearly an amateur, and he saw that.”
“I don’t think so.” The other man is pointing to one of the screens in a bank of monitors all showing live black-and-white images of different locations in the hotel. He’s watching a high-above shot of the stranger still sitting in the lounge. “Look—he’s making a phone call.” They all fall silent a moment as one of the men hunched over the machines listens on a pair of headphones.
“He’s calling his brother,” the guy says after a moment. “He says the meeting is confirmed for tonight.”
There’s a collective breath of relief, but then the bull is right back to pacing. “Great. So we’re not blown right this second, but the whole op is a bust.”
“What are they talking about?” I ask Damon. My hands are still shaking.
He sees and takes them in his, trying to steady me. “It’s a long story, babe—”
“You can start with the part where you lied to me about coming down here for an operation,” I say acidly.
Another explosion of swearing from the bull. “This really isn’t the time to be playing couples therapy.”
“She needs to understand what’s happening,” Damon counters, his tone sharply protective. “She’s in this now too.”
“In what?” I demand. “Someone tell me what’s happening!”
Damon turns to face me. “That guy you met upstairs? His name is—”
“Don’t tell her!” the bull snaps. “That’s classified information.”
“Barry,” the calmer man breaks in, “like it or not, any op we have going forward has to involve her.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Damon says quickly.
“We all have to come to terms with how the situation has changed,” the calm one persists. “We can save this thing but only if we adapt.”
“And that involves handing it to some civilian?” Barry utters the word like it, not the other colorful language he’s been spouting, is foul in his mouth. “We’ll be dead in the water, McNair.”
“Not necessarily,” McNair says, holding up his hands to placate the bull. “Let’s just try to take a breath and get our heads around this.”
“We don’t have time to take a breath,” Barry snarls and storms off toward the monitors, bending his huge frame over them. The other agents who were all so intent on me a minute ago are now bustling around, checking tape, taking phone calls, conversing with furious glances in my direction.
“Go ahead, Damon,” McNair says, clearly the superior officer in the room. “She’s got to know.”
Damon nods and looks at me again. He gives a half smile that’s meant to be reassuring, but I see the pulse throbbing in his throat. “That man upstairs is named Slade Solokov. He’s one of two Solokov brothers—sons of a very bad guy who ran a crime ring in Europe.”
My head is already swimming. “Their—their dad was a criminal?”
Barry snorts, his back still turned. “That’s a polite word for what he was.”
“He died when his sons were very young,” Damon continues. “After that, they were raised by some folks in Kiev—all criminals. The boys were on track to take over the nasty family business in Russia when they came of age. Instead, once they turned eighteen, they moved to America.”
“Interpol had eyes on them before they even cleared customs,” McNair puts in. “They were certain the Solokovs were simply expanding the business to America, exploring new markets. They were expected to set up shop and keep on the criminal track.”
“And they didn’t?” I ask. “What did they do?”
“They both enrolled in college.”
“Majoring in gangster relations?” I offer. Humor to off-put the terror.
McNair shakes his head. “Business and hotel management.”
I blink, surprised. “Why?”
“Why, indeed?” McNair shrugs. “Interpol thought maybe they were doing it as a front for the regular business—a way of trying to look respectable. But they watched the brothers constantly for nearly a year, and nothing. The boys partied like regular college kids—they went out dancing, dated a lot, and did a little underage drinking—but they also attended classes and managed to get passing grades. They didn’t touch drugs or engage in anything illegal, other than the occasional beer. They seemed like average students.”
“Interpol and the FBI finally got tired of waiting,” Damon says. “They raided a party and picked up the Solokovs for underage drinking. Once they had them at the local station, they ‘casually’ questioned the boys about their move to America. They didn’t deny their dad’s reputation or the background they’d been raised with, but both swore they had no interest in the family business. They claimed to have sold their stakes in the business and come to America in pursuit of the pure American dream.”
“Which is what?” I ask.
“Money and power—but the glitzy kind, not the kind they’d had back in Russia. They wanted to be rich, but they also wanted to be revered, remembered. They wanted to be rock stars.”
“How would they do that?”
“Their plan was to get training then use the money from their buyout to open a hotel/casino right here in Las Vegas.”
“And you guys . . . believed them?”
McNair smiles. “Not remotely. They were released, but Interpol continued to watch them. We had a whole team of agents on them for months. Then, as nothing happened, the team was cut back to two then to one. That one agent followed the Solokov brothers through two full years of college—completely uneventful years—before he was finally reassigned. We still didn’t trust their intentions but didn’t have the resources to keep watching them take tests and do keg stands.”
“The FBI never lost interest in them,” Damon says. “When they graduated college and came to Vegas to build, the FBI was part of the task force that opened a new investigation into their activities.”
“Why these guys?” I break in. “There must be countless kids of criminals. Why was everyone so interested in these two?”
“Because of the ruthless nature of their family business,” Damon hedges. “Their father’s industry had a huge presence in Europe, and we didn’t want that moving over to America with them.”
“What’s the business?” I ask.
Damon only hesitates a moment before replying, “Human trafficking.”
My stomach clenches. “Oh,” I manage.
His voice is softer. “You can understand why everyone was so eager to be sure they weren’t setting up shop here. There are several trafficking operations here, but nothing like what this family was doing in Russia.”
“So did they?” I press, despite my nausea. “Set up shop?”
“No,” McNair says. “Not that we ever saw. And once their hotel went up, we watched. We expected it to be a front for trafficking, and we kept on them for any evidence, but months of investigation proved more of what we’d seen while they were at college—they liked to party, but they never engaged in anything illegal. Once they were both of legal drinking age, they were upstanding citizens. The worst thing was a few speeding tickets. Dax—that’s the other brother—likes cars and has had some driving citations, but other than that, they did absolutely nothing to break the law.”
“Nothing?”
“Nothing.” It’s Barry, stalking over from where he’s been hunched over the screens. “Casino builders are known to cut corners, bribe inspectors, and fudge here and there to lessen building costs. These guys did every single thing by the book—obsessively so. We couldn’t have arrested them to save our lives.”
McNair nods. “There was zero evidence they were doing anything corrupt. They thrive on social media. They have a constant stream of pictures and updates on Twitter and Instagram, publicizing their extravagant lifestyle. Their money and social presence has turned them into local celebrities. It’s the opposite of what criminals of their kind—their father’s kind—do. Men like that want to blend in. These boys seemed determined to broadcast their entire lives.
“Once the hotel was up and running, we continued to watch. With all the money changing hands, we thought maybe they were switching tracks—using the casino as a means of laundering money.
“We focused our investigation on watching the way money came in and went out of the casino. We thought we finally caught a break when our facial-recognition software identified several low- to high-level criminals visiting the casino. They would come in at different times and play the floor—the perfect opportunity to gamble dirty money and walk away with clean bills.”
“So that’s what they were doing? Laundering money?”
“We thought they had to be. But we watched carefully—even had an agent on the casino floor watching up close. Agent Farris was a dealer all through college and got hired at Tropicali. By dealing, he was able to watch the exchange of chips every time the criminals came to play. But after months of watching, he still couldn’t detect a pattern. The criminals weren’t winning or losing consistently. Every game they played seemed entirely random. Sometimes they won a modest amount and walked away with cash, but just as often they lost to the house and left empty-handed. No exchange of cash, no money laundering.”
“So what?” I ask. “Those guys were just coming to play? Gambling is popular, isn’t it?”
“It is, but that many criminals coming to that specific casino, the Solokovs’ background—it was too coincidental. When we expanded our investigation, we learned that many of these criminals were coming to Vegas specifically to go to the casino. Some even flew in for only a few hours, played a couple hands at Tropicali, and flew out again. They had to be going there for a reason.”
“And your agent—uh, Farris?—didn’t ever figure it out?”
“Actually, he thought he was finally on to something. He said he’d noticed a pattern—something unexpected—but he needed to watch a few more days to confirm what he suspected.”
“And did he? Confirm it?”
“Actually, he disappeared. Two days after his last communication, he missed a scheduled meet. A call confirmed he hadn’t shown up for work that day, and he was absent the next day as well. His apartment in Vegas was empty, though his clothes and possessions were still there. He was just gone.”
This is sounding familiar. And just like when Damon told me about Natalie Paul’s disappearance from her Salt Lake apartment, I feel a prickle of anxiety for this agent I’ve never met.
“Did he ever show up?”
McNair shakes his head. “We never heard from him again. That was six weeks ago.”
“So clearly he was onto something. He’d figured it out.”
“It’s possible. It’s also possible the Solokovs got on to him somehow—figured out he was an agent and got him out of the way. But we hope he finally saw something, something to explain how they’re moving money in and out.”
“Did you send in another agent?”
“We didn’t want to risk spooking them when we were preparing for this next operation.”
“Which is what?”
He slaps a picture down in front of me. “Monroe.”
I slide the photo closer. It’s a surveillance shot of a woman who was clearly wary of having her picture taken. Two men big enough to make Thor wet himself flank her on either side. She’s shielding her face with a gloved hand, seemingly blocking the sunlight from her eyes but also obscuring what little would’ve been seen of her face beneath an enormously brimmed hat. Through her fingers, I see a slice of mouth and a pair of sunglasses. Over the shoulders of a tightly tailored black dress spills dark hair set in old, glamour-type waves. She could be a movie star avoiding the paparazzi.
“Who is she?” I ask, still eyeing the picture. Nice shoes—probably designer.
“Carmella Monroe. The top arms dealer in the United States. Seventy-two percent of guns on the street are supplied by her.”
“Carmella Monroe.” I snort. “Well, that’s a made-up name.”
“A fake name for a ghost of a woman. She came out of near obscurity in her teen years—started out as arm candy to a top gun runner, where she learned the business and worked her way up. By the time she’d gained notoriety, it seemed like anyone who’d ever really seen her wound up dead.”
“Sheesh,” I mutter.
“She was erasing herself from history—removing anyone who could identify her. Since then, only a handful of mob bosses and top criminals in the world have seen her face-to-face.”
“How does she manage that when she’s doing so much business?”
“She has a complex network of employees,” Damon says. “It’s like being president. If some average Joe on the street wants to meet with the president, he can’t. There are thousands of people up the chain of command between average Joe and the Oval Office. It’s the same concept. A thug on the street goes to one of Monroe’s many underlings. The more important the customer is, the more important the clerk who deals with him. You have to be spending a serious fortune on artillery before you deal with Carmella herself.”
“And then what?”
“Well, that kind of person isn’t going to be real chatty about their gun supplier. By being so obsessive about her privacy, she’s managed to keep her identity a virtual secret from law enforcement as well as low-level punks who might want to take a run at her. For a long time, she was well protected by her anonymity. The FBI knew her by numbers and data, not by face.”
“So you knew she was out there handing out guns and you didn’t do anything?”
McNair spreads his fingers. “It’s the same problem with every sophisticated criminal organization. We may know exactly who’s guilty. We may even know how they’re committing their crimes. But without solid evidence, knowing isn’t enough.”
“So how did you finally get her?”
“Through more than a decade of undercover work. We placed a number of agents in various parts of her organization, and they worked for her for years, gathering as much evidence as they could. It took almost twelve years to get enough to charge her.
“When we finally picked up Carmella, we had enough evidence to put her away permanently. She’s smart and knew there was no walking away from it. She was only too happy to cooperate with us.”
“Cooperate?”
“She got a deal: a new identity and a new life for information.”
My eyebrows rise. “She’s been supplying guns to the whole country for more than a decade—is probably responsible for countless deaths—and you guys just let her walk away?”
“At that point, her information was more useful to us. She’d been supplying crime bosses for years. She was able to give names, account numbers, enough to take down a lot of guys. It was a good trade: one criminal’s freedom to catch fifty others.”
The logic there is both rational and alarming, so I push past it. “I’m sorry.” I turn on Damon. “How do you fit into all this?”
“You know how I told you that no one on the street gets to Carmella? Well, a few years ago when I was fresh out of training, I was undercover as one of the low, low, low underlings for her organization.”
My jaw drops open. “You were deep undercover? For a gun runner?”
He nods. “Two years. Of course, I never met her or got anywhere near her inner circle. I was like the secretary of the outer, outer, outer office before you get to the executive assistant who’s outside the boss’s door.”
“So what was your job, then?” My voice drops, strangled. “Did you . . . shoot people?”
“No!” He laughs. “All I did was make friends with the wrong kinds of guys. I made myself available—like that outer door secretary sitting at a desk. But instead of sitting at a desk, I was always playing pool and hustling poker in the wrong parts of town. People knew who I worked for, and if they wanted guns, they came to me and asked to talk to the supplier.”
“Is he the executive assistant?”
“He’s one of the secretaries before the executive assistant.”
“So”—I shake my head—“you helped bad people get guns so they could be worse people?”
Damon looks evasive. “Technically, yes. By being the contact guy, I got the names of those who wanted guns, and I passed those names along to the FBI.”
“Damon helped us put a lot of bad people away,” McNair says. “He did great work in those two years as Trey.”
“Trey?” I repeat.
“Trey Fletcher, my cover ID,” Damon says.
Normally that would have such Michael Weston coolness to it, but I can’t digest all this. “So you worked way down the line for Carmella for two years putting away the guys that wanted to buy guns from her. How did you not get caught? If all the guys who came to you for guns went to jail, didn’t Carmella’s people or the other gun buyers get suspicious?”
“The FBI is good at finding ways to remove people subtly,” McNair puts in. “We wouldn’t instantly pounce on someone once Damon gave us a name. Sometimes we waited several months and then had them busted for drugs—coincidentally, of course. There were a lot of ways around it without making their arrests look connected to Damon.”
“If you were so good at it,” I ask Damon, “why did you stop after two years?”
“I suspected one of the other secretaries was on to me. He didn’t have any proof, but he started hanging around me more, watching.”
“Damon was too good in the field to risk blowing his cover completely,” McNair says. “We thought it made more sense to remove him and keep the option open for his ID to come back later if we needed. Which brings us to now.”
Damon nods. “When the FBI finally indicted Carmella, she named the Solokov brothers among her customers. They’d approached one of her lieutenants and placed a very large order. She’d only begun gathering the guns to fill their order when she was picked up. The Solokovs had a lower-level guy working for them that I knew back when I was Trey. After Carmella gave us details of their gun order, I contacted him and asked for a meeting.”
My eyes widen. “Is that when you came to Vegas like three or four months ago? You were doing an operation?” I drop my voice. “You said you were cleaning out your mom’s garage.”
“I—I did both,” Damon stammers. I’m glaring, but he continues, “I told the Solokovs’ guy that from now on, I would be handling the transaction.”
“They didn’t wonder why the lieutenant they originally placed the order with had been replaced?”
“He’d already gone into witness protection,” McNair says, “but we gave him a very splashy fake death. Damon’s promotion as the other guy’s replacement made total sense, considering he’s supposed to be dead.
“We realized that Carmella could be the key to us finally getting close to the brothers. When they placed their order, she quoted them three months to fill it. We picked her up only two weeks later, so we still had nearly three months to get an operation in place before she was supposed to contact them with the guns—”
The door to the stairwell slams open. “Where is she?” There’s a slap of heels on concrete, and a woman steps into view, her gaze zeroing in on me. “Oh, so this is her.” This woman looking me up and down is stunning. And I mean seriously stunning. Enormous almond eyes flash in a perfectly sculpted face, and full lips are pursed in distaste. Dark hair falls flawlessly around her shoulders in a glossy sheath, like a dang shampoo ad. Her petite frame, impossibly long and lithe for how skinny she is, is barely adorned in a tiny black dress. She’s the kind of woman that I slink away from in public because standing next to her makes me instantly need therapy.
Her hands, fingernails manicured in bloodred, are on her hips. From the crown of her head to the tip of her crazy high heels, she’s radiating hostility. Toward me. “I just want to thank you,” she says, her voice hard, “for coming in here and ruining three months of training.”
“Training?” I repeat. “What—” I glance at Damon, afraid to maintain eye contact with Angry Barbie. “What is she talking about?”
“I’m talking about the operation we’ve been setting up for months,” she hisses. “I’ve been doing nothing but this every minute, and then you just breeze in and blow the whole thing to—”
“Lela,” Damon warns. He looks at me, eyes weary. “This is Lela Pivarti. She has been training to impersonate Carmella.”
“Impersonate?”
“The operation is one we’ve done many times,” McNair explains. “Carmella was shipped off to an unknown location with a new name, but we managed to keep her arrest very quiet. Her own obsessive need for privacy is what saved us. The only people who were close enough to her to know she’d been arrested were killed in the raid when we picked her up. For the rest of her organization, it was business as usual. They continued to receive coded orders through text messages, same as they always had. So to all of her employees, their faceless boss was still calling the shots.
“Since so few have ever seen Carmella, we knew we could substitute her—put one of our own agents in her place for the meet with the Solokovs. Use our Carmella stand-in to get close to the brothers and try to find out what they’re doing.
“We trained Agent Pivarti.” He motions to Lela, who is still giving me the death stare. “We still had Carmella in custody, so we used her as the pattern. Pivarti learned about Carmella’s life and how to mimic her physicality—the way she talked and walked.”
“I thought no one had seen her.”
“Very few, but with a close replica, we’d be covered if anyone who did know Carmella or had seen a picture happened upon our operation.”
“Three months,” Lela repeats. “And not only that—the investigation of the Solokov brothers is going on nine years. And you blew it away in thirty seconds.”
“Yeah.” I manage to swallow. “S-sorry about that.”
She turns her fierce gaze on Damon. “Who is she? How did she even know the location of the op?”
Damon straightens. “This is Jacklyn Wyatt. My girlfriend.”
Slowly the almond eyes swivel back to me, and now the scrutiny is not just hostile, it’s incredulous. “You’re joking,” she says finally.
“Why would I be joking?” Damon snaps. There’s definitely a weird undercurrent here. “She knew where I was because I mentioned the name of the hotel to her. She didn’t know I was in the middle of an operation.”
“Then why did she show up?”
“I invited her to come to Vegas with me.”
Lela laughs sharply, still ignoring me. “You invited your civilian girlfriend here when you were in the middle of the biggest operation of your career?”
“I was only here for the introduction. I had no intention of staying for the rest of the op. That wasn’t the plan. You knew that.” He pauses. “And I’ll invite my girlfriend anywhere I want.”
The silence between them throbs with awkwardness, but she continues to glare at him and he doesn’t look away, as if breaking eye contact would be losing some kind of challenge.
Unable to bear the quiet, I finally murmur, “I guess I should’ve called first.”
“You didn’t do anything wrong, Jack.” Damon finally turns his gaze to me, and his expression softens. “It’s my fault. I should have told you I was here for something big.”
My anger at his lying lifts, and I manage a tiny smile. “I just wanted to surprise you,” I say quietly.
His hand covers mine. “It was a wonderful surprise,” he replies just as softly.
“Precious as that is,” Lela cuts in, “the operation is still off.”
“Not entirely,” McNair says. “Damon, we really need to talk about this.”
“Then let’s talk.”
McNair hesitates. “It would be better if we get Jack settled somewhere—maybe get her something to eat while we—”
“No.” Damon’s voice is like flint. “If you want to discuss what I think, then you do it with Jack here. She’s got a right to know what you want her to do.”
“Me?” I laugh. “What could I possibly do?”
“Go back in time and stay out of it,” Lela mutters, and Damon shoots her a look.
“I really think we should talk details on our own first,” McNair presses.
“I won’t allow you to use her for this,” Damon says. “But if you want to even discuss it with her, you do it now.”
McNair sighs, rubbing a hand wearily on the back of his neck. He eases back into his chair. “Jack.” His gaze is gentle for an FBI guy. He’s the kind of soft, middle-aged man with generic hair you’d expect to see working as an accountant and talking amiably about golf at barbecues. “The problem we have is that Damon was supposed to set up the meet between the Solokovs and Monroe. The meeting you walked in on was a confirmation of the time with Slade. The plan was that tonight at seven, Damon would bring Carmella to the restaurant here in Luxuria to meet the Solokovs.”
“And I messed that up?”
Lela snorts.
McNair ignores her. “Well, all anyone really knows about Monroe is that she’s an attractive brunette somewhere in her late twenties, early thirties. The Solokovs have been waiting to meet her for months. So when you walked in and came right over to Damon, the man who’s supposed to be Monroe’s direct contact, Slade assumed that you were Monroe.”
I blink rapidly as his words sink in. “Oh,” I breathe out. Then, as the full impact settles onto my chest and constricts my breath, “Oh.”
“Damon couldn’t very well explain who you really were. A powerful man like Slade wouldn’t have taken kindly to a high-level gunrunner like Trey inviting some random person to their meet. You being Monroe was the only possible explanation that wouldn’t get you both killed on the spot. So he went with it.”
“I’m sorry,” Damon says, gripping my hand. “I wasn’t thinking about the operation or the future; I was just thinking about how to get you out of that lounge alive. But by telling him that you’re Monroe, I’ve actually put you in more danger.”
“Why?” I ask, my voice hoarse. “Why does it put me in danger?”
McNair answers, his eyes level on me. “Because we need you to impersonate Carmella Monroe.”