Page 80 of The Verdict

“I’ll be okay,” I swore. “Trust me, Merritt. Nothing is going to happen to me. Nothing?—”

“It’s not that, Rhys.” She dug her forehead into my chest and then pushed out of my hold, stumbling back with glittering eyes. “I should’ve told you sooner. It’s not that.”

“Then what is it?” I demanded low, my patience threadbare. “Are you worried they’ll implicate you? Because I won’t let that happen. I’m not the police, Merritt. I don’t have to play by the rules to get a confession from these men, and I will get one. For the heist. For Wheaton. They’ll finally be brought to justice?—”

“No, they won’t,” she cried out, but it was the depth of her conviction that pierced like an arrow straight through my chest.

“Why not?” For a second, I wished I could believe it was simply because she didn’t think I could pull it off, but that wasn’t it.Fuck, that wasn’t it.

I went to her again, cupped her face, and held it up to mine. “Tell me.” I exhaled hard. “Trust me.”

“They’ll get away. No matter what you do.”

“How do you know that?” I asked low, and when her lip quivered, I begged once more, “Trust me.”

Anger and unshed tears glittered in her eyes. “Because I was the police, Rhys. I was the police, and I had them wrapped in a bow to be arrested in Barcelona, and they never were.”

Chapter Seventeen

Merritt

“You want us to believe you were a cop?” Dare’s distrust oozed from every deep line of his scowl.

All four of them stared at me intently; the emergency meeting called as soon as I’d told Rhys the truth I’d carried for so long.

“I don’t want you to believe anything except that if you think you’re going to turn them into the police and have them pay for their crimes, you’re wrong.” I tried to keep my frustration at bay, but it felt like acid leaching into each syllable. This was why I hadn’t told them.Part of the reason, at least.

“There was no record of you?—”

“Because we wiped it all.” I exhaled slowly. The idea that they’d go free again was suffocating. It made every breath into my lungs feel smaller and smaller. The space closed up tighter and tighter until there was nothing left.“After my mother died, I enrolled in the academy. One year of training there before Icould apply for the GEI—the, um, Special Intervention Group.” I translated roughly.

“It’s like SWAT in the US,” Ty added for everyone’s benefit.

“It’s very difficult to do. The year before I started, there were over three hundred and fifty candidates, and by the end of the year-long selection process and testing, only eleven were chosen.” I felt the burn pricking at my throat. “I made it through the entire year of intensive training, but in the end, I wasn’t selected as qualified.” The sting of that moment was still with me like a barb buried under my flesh, but there was no reason to share that part of my past now; it was what it was.A spiteful decision by a man who didn’t believe women should be allowed in the unit.“The day I was told, I was approached byan inspector from one of the central departments in the city. Inspector Eduardo Saba?—”

“Your mentor.”

I looked at Rhys and nodded. “He was honorable. Honest. And I thought he was recruiting me for the department; they did that for many of the candidates who weren’t chosen for the GEI. But, as it turned out, he wanted me for something else. An undercover operation.”

“With the Cosmos Gang.”

I lowered my head slowly. “He had intel that the crew was in Barcelona planning their next job and they needed a sixth. The police… Europol… they’d been trying to take down this gang for years, but they could never find any information on the crew, and they were always one step ahead of the police. Saba had a chance to put someone on the inside, and he was desperate to take it.”

“And he wanted you? A new graduate with no field experience?”

“I was highly trained with no family, no ties. Itwas easy to put me undercover.” I swallowed over the lump in my throat. “Plus, he didn’t want his investigation on the books.”

“Why?” Rhys growled, but it was Ty who answered before I did.

“He thought someone in the police department was tipping them off. He didn’t know who to trust, so he needed someone with no ties to the Mossos.”

“Why’d he think they had someone on the inside?”

“Aside from the fact that they’d never been caught?” I lifted my brow and then shook my head. “Saba never told me his reasons. He didn’t even want to tell me his suspicions at first. When he recruited me, it was all about getting the gang, but eventually, the whole truth came out.” My chest tightened, recalling that day with perfect clarity—the day Jupiter had killed Saturn. “Maybe things would’ve ended differently if he’d told me.”

“How’d he get you in?”

“There was a local fence he’d busted for selling stolen goods. The guy claimed to do business with the Cosmos Gang—claimed he knew they had a big job coming up and were looking for a sixth member. So, Saba started feeding information to the news—building a massive backstory around theQueen of Thieves.” I mocked the name he’d given the headlines. “Then he had me fake a heist at a store owned by a friend of his and made sure the cameras caught enough of my face before I took the jewels he’d planted. I went to sell the goods to the fence; he passed along that information to the gang. Next thing I knew, I was approached by a man with slicked black hair who offered me a job for the biggest score of my life…”

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