Marco shifted. His eyes lowered to his knees. He seemed no closer to speaking, but Killian would fix that.
“Do you want to know something amusing?” Killian paced away from the desk and circled around the man in slow, even strides. Each clip, he noted, nudged a subtle flinch from his driver. “Had Juliette been here, she would have probably asked me to spare your life. She would insist on it. Not for your sake, but because she has this insane notion that she can save my soul.” He made a full round and stopped in the same spot. “She keeps insisting I have one, which I can’t honestly say I believe. But she does. Do you believe you have a soul, Marco?”
The sharp point of Marco’s Adam’s apple bobbed.
“I don’t think people like you and I are allowed to own a soul,” he continued. “We’re not good people. We live by laws that are not permitted through the gates of heaven so I can see why one might not care how they live the rest of their lives when their eternal fate is already sealed. There is blood on both our hands, but unlike yours, mine was never the blood of the innocent. I have not made the world a lesser place by taking a life worth living. But you … Juliette is innocent. She is good and pure and untainted by the things we have done to survive. Taking her, hurting her, will not bring you peace. It will, however, bring you me and, while I will not kill you, I will let you will live every day in hell where I will bring you to the doors of death in the most excruciating methods imaginable, but I will never let you pass through. So, I will ask you again, one final time, where is Juliette?”
There was a tremor in Marco’s hands as he slid them along the leather armrests. He had yet to raise his eyes, but his breathing had quickened. His entire body seemed to vibrate beneath the layers of his clothing. Sweat glistened along his brow, plastering dark strands to hollowed temples. Knuckles bulged white beneath the pulled skin of his knuckles. But no explanation passed his pale lips.
Killian straightened. “If that is your answer…”
He began towards the doors.
“I don’t know!” Marco’s frantic voice stopped Killian after only three measured steps. “I wasn’t told where they were taking her.”
Killian turned and went back to the desk. “By who? Who took her?”
Marco hesitated. “I don’t know.”
Anger welled beneath the calm he struggled to maintain. The edges of his limits must have shown in the clenched set of his jaw and the dark fury writhing behind his eyes, because Marco visibly recoiled. All the blood vanished from his face. It bleached his lips white and his eyes were enormous.
“I never met the person in charge.” His chin lowered. “He sent me a text with a location and instructions.”
Killian perched on the edge of the desk once more and studied the other man carefully. “Some person you’ve never met texted you with instructions to kidnap Juliette and you just hopped to it?”
If possible, Marco seemed to shrink even more in his seat. “It was the same message I got the first time.”
Killian’s fist left his side before he could pull it back. It flew into Marco’s jaw with a satisfying crack and nearly sent him flying backwards, chair and all. His knuckles blazed with pain that rocketed up the length of his entire arm, but it was worth it.
“I am getting very tired of your half assed answers, Marco,” Killian bit out. “I’m not going to play fifty questions with you. Tell me everything or so help me God, I will skin you alive across this desk.”
Looking dazed, Marco scrambled higher in his chair, one hand clutching the side of his face. His wide, stunned eyes shot up to Killian.
“I … I’m sorry…” He moistened his lips quickly. “I never wanted any of this to happen. I never wanted to hurt anyone.” His deep inhale shuddered through the room. “The first time they sent the message, it was pinned beneath the windshield wipers of your father’s town car. I thought it was one of the security details playing a joke so I ignored it—”
“What did the message say?” Killian cut in.
Marco frowned. “Something about being chosen. It made no sense so I threw it away. A few weeks later, another one appeared. This one more detailed. It went on to explain I was hand selected to fulfill a great task and that by accepting, I would get everything I ever wanted. But if I didn’t, I would be sorry. I had a day to decide by signing the bottom of the page and putting it beneath my wipers. Once again, I chalked it up as bullshit and tossed it.” He broke off to stare at his hands. “A few days later, I came home to find Lisa missing. All her things were still in their places, her car in the driveway, but she was gone. I looked everywhere, called everyone we knew and nothing. No one had seen her.”
Killian vaguely remembered hearing something about Marco’s wife leaving him years before. He hadn’t paid much attention to the gossip. At the time, his mother had gone missing and his mind had been preoccupied. Later on, it was just concluded that she’d left him and no one ever asked again.
“What are you saying?”
Brown eyes shone beneath the tears clinging to damp lashes. “They took her. The same people who have Juliette.” A tear squeezed free when he shut his eyes. “They left another note telling me that I had a week to do what they said or I would never see Lisa again. So, I agreed. I had no choice. They had my wife … and our son.” He rubbed a shaky hand over his face. “Lisa was pregnant when they took her. I had to get them back. I had to.”
Killian’s frown deepened. “That was years ago. What does it have to do with Juliette?”
Veins throbbed along Marco’s jaw. They pulsed at his temples. He licked his lips, but it made no difference.
Sniffling, he cleared his throat. “Because it was the same people who asked me to take your mother.”
The weak confession brought the world screeching to a halt. An electric silence descended, turning the air thick and sweltering. Currents crackled along his skin, burning and making the hairs rise.
“What?”
“Yegor Yolvoski had my family,” Marco explained hurriedly. “He said my wife for Callum’s, but he never gave her back and I was too afraid to tell your father so I said nothing. I had hoped that when your mother was found, my Lisa would be too.” He lowered his head. Dark strands tumbled over his downcast eyes. “Saoirse was given back. I never saw Lisa again.”
“You gave them my mother? You took her?”
It was the one thing Killian had never considered. When his mother had been taken, it had simply been assumed that one of Yolvoski’s men had ambushed her detail and taken her. No one ever considered the possibility that it was someone on the inside. But now that Marco was telling the story, Killian saw it. He remembered how his mother’s guards hadn’t even drawn their guns. There had been no struggle, because they had known their attacker, had trusted him. Killian’s mother had trusted him.
“You took her?” The vicious growl tore through Killian’s esophagus.
Marco blanched. “They had Lisa…” he croaked. “What would you have done?”
Even while a part of him already knew the answer to that, knew he would give whatever they wanted to get Juliette back, the rage remained. It continued to blanket him even as his mind fought with the two scenarios. He wondered if he would have been more forgiving if it had been a stranger and not his mother. Would it have made a difference to him? Would it have made the situation any less horrible? Marco had been in the exact position Killian was in now, only he’d lost two people simultaneously. Did that justify the pain and suffering he’d caused Killian’s entire family? Killian didn’t think he was in the proper state of mind to consider those questions, not when there were more important ones to ask.