Page 51 of Arrogant Bastard

“She called me a month ago, on my cell. Then, three weeks ago, she just turned up at the club.” I don’t mention Cairo and what Fionnella did for me that day. It has nothing to do with what’s happening now. I hope.

“Fuck.”

“Yeah. Who the hell is she, really? What’s her role at Fallhurst?” When I first met the woman calling herself Fionnella Smith, I thought she was a handler. But she wasn’t. None of the team knew what her true role was. Or those who did weren’t prepared to divulge it.

“I asked a couple of times. I was stonewalled. I stopped asking.”

“And she didn’t tell you who she was?”

Killian shakes his head, a wry smile curving his lips. “I was too busy playing the nerd to be concerned too much about her name. Plus her evasion tactics are legendary.”

I shudder. “She scares me with all that smiling and all that…joy.”

Killian chuckles. “Yeah, her boundless joy scares me too.”

We share a grin. His gaze drops down my body. His eyes heat up, and the laughter evaporates.

“This was important. And you didn’t tell me,” he accuses with a low, deep voice after a moment.

A tide of guilt rises inside me, and I shift my gaze to a point over his shoulder.

“Look at me.”

I clench my gut hard before I can comply with his command.

“You said Axel knows who she is?” he asks.

I shrug. “Well, she was there to meet with him. If they knew each other beforehand, they were pretending otherwise that day.”

“You know why she came to see him?”

I hesitate. I don’t want to breach Axel’s trust.

“Faith…”

Every time he says that name…my name like that, it’s like a lightning rod to my system. A jolt designed to drag me back to who I was. Who I can never be. “Dammit, don’t keep calling me that—”

“I’m not going to call you ‘B,’” he says with a finality edged in steel. “Your name is Faith. You’ll always be Faith to me. End of story. Now tell me why she was there to see Axel.”

“He has his own punishment room. He has his own ghosts. I think she was there to help him slay a few of them.”

He stares at me for several seconds and then nods. “Did you ask him how he knew her?”

I frown. “I told you. We don’t have that sort of relationship.”

He sighs. “Okay, we’ll assume that was what she was there for, but why did she call you before?”

“She didn’t tell me,” I reply.

Cobalt-blue eyes hook into me. “She didn’t tell you, or you didn’t give her a chance to?”

I’ve entertained that possibility since the nightmare started unfolding yesterday. But Fionnella, as sprightly and maternal as her demeanor conveys, was always a nebulous character. And the impression she left with me, that I owed her one after Cairo, has always lingered in the back of my mind, although it was never vocally expressed. I’m not ashamed to admit that her phone call out of the blue triggered wild panic. And that head-in-the-sand position I adopted is biting me in the ass now.

“I didn’t give her the chance to,” I admit to Killian.

He nods, accepting my explanation without censure. And something soft and vulnerable gives way inside me. God, it’s not fair, what he does to me.

I leave the doorway and walk closer to him, even though the more sensible thing would be to go back to my room and put more clothes on. “How did you find out?”

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