Gretchen had thought she would feel such satisfaction at seeing Ronnie behind bars, but she found there wasn’t much she could feel when her heart was lying dead somewhere.
They hadn’t told her anything about Finn or where his body was. She could only gather bits and pieces of what had happened and how he had died, and she wished that were enough, but it wasn’t. She couldn’t wrap her mind around the fact that he was gone for good.
She looked through the one-way mirror, watching Ronnie as she sat at the battered old table in a cold metal chair. Her nose and arm were broken, and although she had spent the last forty-eight hours in the hospital as she and the doctors debated over how best to treat her, she wasn’t in any better condition than she had been when Neil had dragged her, handcuffed, from the room two nights before. Gretchen took a deep breath and pushed through the door into the interrogation room.
She would have to be lying if she said she wasn’t slightly satisfied by the way Ronnie’s eyes grew wide when she spotted her.
“Good evening.” Gretchen smiled sweetly. “I hope that you are doing well tonight.” Gretchen turned slightly when the door behind her opened and Neil stepped inside.
“Please, you have to get her out of here,” Ronnie cried. “She did this to me. She tried to kill me.”
“You had a gun to her head,” Neil reminded her. “I think she would have been within her rights if she had killed you, but Agent Christensen merely injured you.”
“Injured me?” Ronnie screeched. “She fucking disfigured me.”
“You’ll thank me,” Gretchen assured her. “You were much too pretty for prison before, and no one would have taken you seriously. I’ve given you a look and a story. I’ve worked wonders for you.”
Gretchen’s lips quirked and she watched Neil take a seat across the table from Ronnie. Gretchen continued to stand.
“She’s lying,” Ronnie started, but Neil shook his head.
“It was all videotaped,” he told her. “The room had cameras. We saw it all.”
“Cameras?” Ronnie muttered, confused.
“Yes,” Gretchen told her, “just like my apartment where your men attacked me.” She dropped the file containing the pictures and disk on the table in front of Ronnie.
“Why were you in that room anyway?” Gretchen asked. Neil had already told her that he had sent her in to that particular room because their informant had promised to send Ronnie there, but she wanted to hear from Ronnie who had sent her to her downfall.
“Jay sent me.” She smiled at Gretchen.
“Jay sent you?” Gretchen hadn’t been expecting that, and she shook her head. “Why?”
It was Ronnie’s turn to smirk now.
“We were going to meet the stripper back there,” she shrugged, “so we could fuck her.”
Gretchen tried to hide the hurt and disgust she felt at Ronnie’s words, but she wasn’t as talented a con woman at the moment as she had been.
“Poor little good girl,” Ronnie pouted. “You thought it was going to be different, didn’t you? You thought you had changed him and you’d have a life together when this was all over. How’s that working out for you now?”
Gretchen steeled herself against the other woman’s taunting and smiled, despite what she was feeling inside.
“Not very well, since he’s dead,” she stated flatly.
Gretchen met Ronnie’s usually cool blue eyes and watched as they filled slightly with tears, before she was able to quickly gather herself.
“Dead?” she asked. “How?”
Gretchen shrugged.
“I wasn’t there,” she told her. “I was too busy defending myself against you instead of saving him.”
“You can finish this,” she told Neil as she turned and stalked from the room.
She rushed out of the viewing room and through the halls to the locker room. She tried to make herself breathe the way the shrink had told her to the night before, but her chest was too filled with the pain of missing Finn to expand enough for air.
She could feel the anger at Finn and herself and the world rising in her. She kicked the locker in front of her until it began to bend under the force of the blows, then spun, shoving a chair to the floor and sending the table sliding. She pounded on the tabletop with the sides of her fists and screamed as loud as she could.
She heard the door to the locker room as it was flung open and left to bang shut. She heard her name as it was yelled, felt the hands that pulled her away from the table and turned her into a hard male chest, but she struggled and tried to pull away. She didn’t want to be consoled, she wanted Finn alive, even if he wasn’t with her, she just wanted him alive.
“Gretchen, it’s okay, honey, shh.”
The soothing voice managed to drill through the rage inside her and she looked up.
“Grant,” she gasped, pushing against his solid chest, but he only held her tighter.
“I’ve got you,” he assured her.
“What…what are you doing here?” She looked around the room for a guard or someone who would explain what this man, whom she had seen in handcuffs just days before, was doing standing in the agents’ locker room.
“I heard you,” he told her. “I wanted to make sure you were okay. I told you I had your back. That hasn’t changed.”
Gretchen pulled away and turned from him. “I don’t understand,” she whispered. “Why would they let you in here?”
“’Cause I’m one of you,” he told her. “I’m Agent Joseph Grant. I’ve been working alongside Jay for the past three years, but I’ve been a cop for the last ten.”
Gretchen wasn’t sure she had heard him right. She turned slowly and raised her eyes to meet his, and he nodded.
“I was your backup, Gretchen.”
She shook her head. Grant had helped Finn take care of Carlisle’s problems. He had vouched for Finn and told her he was a good man. It didn’t make sense that he was a cop. Then she thought about herself, about how fiercely she loved Finn in spite of, and maybe even because of, the things that he had seen and done, and she knew that there were times when even those who had sworn to obey the rules could turn away for someone as good and yet flawed as Finn James. She felt her heart break again at what she had lost and her eyes filled with tears.
“I know you’ll have your reasons for hating me,” he told her, “but know that I am here for you. I know Finn, I knew what he was to you before the job, Gretchen, and I know what you were to him after.”
Gretchen shook her head and walked away.
“Don’t,” she told him. “I loved him and I’ll own that, but let’s not make his feelings for me into something more than they were.”
She thought about Ronnie’s reaction to hearing that Finn was gone, thought about the stoic way she had questioned Gretchen, but not fallen apart. Gretchen had fallen so far apart now that she wondered if she would ever be able to pull herself back together.
“Because they told you he was with Ronnie?” he asked behind her.
“He was with her,” Gretchen told him. “I saw them, I—”
“All a con, Gretchen, he was playing her. It was the only way to set her up to be taken down. For you to take her down. You had to believe that he was done with you so you’d stay away, and she had to believe you were out of the picture so she would trust him.”
Gretchen shook her head again, still not sure if she believed him.
“I guess we’ll never really know.” She bit back the tears and shrugged hopelessly.
“Maybe, maybe not,” he told her. “I just wanted you to know, I still have your back, Gretchen.”
She nodded and watched as he walked toward the door.
“Grant,” she called when he was almost there. “Did you see him that night before we got there? Was he with Ronnie?”
Grant shook his head, but not in denial, before he sighed heavily. “For a minute,” he told her reluctantly and she was sure he was trying to find a way to hurt her less. “He sent her back to a room.”
“Was he on his way back there when we came in?”
Grant shook his head again. “No, he stayed in the private dance room, I don’t think he planned to follow her.”
“But he sent her?” Gretchen pressed.
“Yes, but—” Grant continued, but Gretchen was pushing past him and running from the locker room.
Gretchen pushed through the door of her captain’s office and stood breathing heavily as he lifted his head to meet her eyes.
“Who was your informant?” She knew the answer from the way he avoided her eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?” She moved closer to his desk, wondering why Finn hadn’t told her either.
“He asked that I not,” Carpenter replied. “He came to me and wanted to do it.”
“That doesn’t make sense.” Gretchen leaned her hands against his desk and bent to meet his eyes. “He knew who I was all along, why didn’t he just tell me what he wanted you to know? It would be safer for him.”
“For him…perhaps,” he told her.
“But not for me?” She stood and paced to the window, looking out at the forest beyond but seeing nothing.
“He came to me after Ronnie’s men attacked you. The deal was your safety for his information. I didn’t see how I could lose.”
“Of course not,” she muttered. He still hadn’t lost, but she was fucking dying as they spoke.
“This was the plan all along,” he confessed. “Our deep undercover told us—”
“You mean Grant,” she interrupted, glancing over her shoulder and catching a glimpse of anger in Carpenter’s eyes before he pushed it down.
“He told you?”
She nodded.
“Grant told us two or so years ago that he thought Finn was our best bet at getting inside and blowing this organization apart. Finn was a good man in a bad world, we just needed to find something he felt more loyalty to than that world and the people in it.” Carpenter shrugged as if Gretchen should be able to figure out the rest.
“And?” She turned to face him fully.
“And we found you,” he told her. “Finnegan James has loved you in one way or another since you were a child, Gretchen. We knew that if we put you in that world, he would have to make a decision, and we were certain that he would choose you.”
Gretchen shook her head, new tears springing to her eyes as she realized that she and Finn had both been mere pawns in an elaborate game of chess.
“You bastard,” she whispered.
“Gretchen, I…” he started, but she shook her head and backed away.
She couldn’t listen to any more of this now. She had to get away from this office and these people and everyone who had lied to her for months, or years. Hell, she didn’t know if anything she had thought to be real was real anymore. She turned away, with the captain still calling after her, and made her way out of his office and to her car.
* * * * *
Carpenter was still fuming when Grant pushed his way through the door without knocking.
“What the fuck do you want?” he asked, glancing up.
“Did you tell her?” Grant demanded, crossing his arms over his thick chest.
Carpenter shook his head. “It’s too soon,” he told the other man…again. “She has to believe it or no one else will believe it.”
“You don’t give her enough credit,” Grant told him. “You think she can’t pull this off? You think she can’t fucking fool people? Then why did you send her into the depths of that hellhole? Do you know what they would have done to her if they had ever found out she wasn’t who she said she was, that she was a cop?”
“Finn would never have let that happen,” he replied arrogantly.
“He couldn’t watch her every damn minute, Carp. You saw what they did to her because Ronnie was jealous, they would have had her begging for death if she hadn’t been able to fool them.”
Carpenter thought for a moment, tapping his fingers against his pursed lips. “This is too important,” he responded. “Besides, it’s for her. She’ll thank me for it one day.”
“Like hell she will,” Grant snapped. “She’s losing her grip. She’s spiraling, Carp, and I don’t know where she’ll end up.”
“She’ll be fine…”
“And if she’s not? It’s only been two days, but she hasn’t slept, she hasn’t eaten, she’s already losing it, Carpenter, be her captain and do something.”
“I am,” Carpenter told him. “This was the plan, Grant. I’m beginning to wonder if I should have told Neil instead of you. I thought you could hold your shit together better than this.”
“This isn’t about me. It’s about that woman and what you’re doing to her. She’ll never forgive us if this goes wrong.”
Carpenter laughed sadly.
“Goes wrong?” he asked. “How can this go any worse?”
“You need to at least tell Neil.”
“Hell no, he can’t keep a secret, besides they’re partners.”
“He’s in love with her,” Grant informed him. “You have a woman like Gretchen who’s out of control and her partner who is in love with her, you are asking for more trouble than you can handle, and she may never come back from it.”
“Don’t do anything stupid,” Carpenter warned him. “We have a plan.”
Grant nodded though he had already made up his mind to fuck the plan.
“I see you. I know you,” Carpenter cautioned.
Grant only shook his head; Carpenter thought he knew him, but he couldn’t possibly understand the ways in which Grant had changed over the last three years. It was why he knew not to underestimate Gretchen now. It had taken him time to acclimate himself to Carlisle’s world and to warm up to the men and women around him, but Gretchen had slid into the life as if she were sliding into her favorite pair of jeans. She was entirely too comfortable there, and Grant knew the right amount of pressure could be enough to force her into a decision to stay there.
“You won’t be doing anyone any favors,” Carpenter was threatening now. “Least of all you. Do you hear me?”
“Every word.” Grant smiled defiantly. “Every fucking word.”