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“Well stop worrying. I’m fine,” I lied.
“No, you’re not,” she shot, calling my bluff immediately and bluntly, as was her way. “For a journalist, you suck at lying.”
“Journalists aren’t meant to lie, it’s kind of the point.”
She scoffed again. “And I’m not meant to eat carbs, but I had a bagel for breakfast.”
I picked at the comforter of the bed I was sitting on. “Not the same thing,” I told Emily.
“Whatever, I’m on a crunch, so fill me in on what the fuck’s going on,” she demanded.
I didn’t have the time, the energy or the creativity to come up with a lie that would satisfy Emily. So I went for the journalistic truth.
Leaving out the part about Liam/Jagger, of course. I wasn’t going to bury that lead. I’d obliterate it. She knew all about him. After a night of lemon drops, confessions, and broken hearts. It was the only time I’d ever seen her cry. No, the other being when one of her biggest clients had a meltdown on live TV days before his book launch.
“Shut the fuck up,” she said when I finished telling her I was a prisoner here until I was found to be trustworthy enough to be able to leave. Most normal people would express outrage, panic and be calling the police.
Emily was not most normal people.
So I waited.
“You got the president of one of the most notorious organized crime collectives in the fucking country to agree to give you the inside scoop?”
There it was.
I couldn’t help but smile. “Yeah, with the small detail that I’m a prisoner until I do so.”
“Details,” she dismissed. “This is big. Like really big. I already had publishers on the line when I pitched the idea of a novel when you were undercover, but now…shit we’ll have our pick out of all the fuckers.”
I froze. “A novel?”
Traffic honked in the distance. “To begin, but depending on the way this goes, we could get a movie deal. A mini-series. Netflix would love the screenplay for this shit—”
“Emily,” I snapped, knowing that she would just keep going. And I needed her to stop. “I didn’t ask you to pitch a fucking novel. I asked you to put out feelers to the Times and the Tribune about an expose.”
I could hear her roll her eyes. “With this story plus your talent as a writer, I couldn’t physically do something like that. With this exclusive, they’re going to triple their advances.”
I clenched my fist. “I don’t care how much they offer, Emily, I’m not going to do it,” I gritted out through my teeth.
“Are you kidding?” she demanded. “This is the chance of a lifetime. Let’s forget about the money, though that’ll be hard to do since there’s a lot of it on the table right now. But we’ll try. This is every writer’s dream. A fucking book deal. And not to mention in this climate. No one is getting book deals anymore. Especially on nonfiction. Especially with an advance like this.” She spoke quickly, apart from the times she drew out words, long to put focus on them. It was her signature trick, and it worked surprisingly well with everyone but me.
I ran my hand through my hair. “Yeah, I’m sure this book deal is every writer’s dream, Emily, but I’m a journalist, not a writer. I don’t want buckets of money so I can sit in my cozy apartment and tell my story. I want to be somewhere that’s not cozy, so I can tell the stories of people who aren’t offered book deals for their lives. I’m not profiting off the horror I’ve seen. That’s not what I’m here for.”
She laughed. “A noble journalist, you may be the last of your kind.”
“I’m not noble,” I said, the word scraping at my throat. “I’ve done a lot of morally questionable things to get stories. I’ve hurt people. Betrayed them.” I thought about the man who I’d been in love with once. The one whose eyes had gone dark and who was currently keeping me prisoner here. “I’m not putting all that into a book. I’m going to keep doing my job until I can’t, unless I die first.”
I hated that it sounded like a premonition.
Chapter Nine
They came for me late that same night.
I had expected as much.
My door wasn’t locked anymore, but I didn’t venture out into the clubhouse because of the tone in the room earlier today. I knew that a lot of the men weren’t happy with their president’s decision.
I understood that.
Which was why I wasn’t surprised when the man I knew as ‘Swiss’ came into the room. The nicknames were a mystery to me since this man didn’t look Scandinavian, with beautiful midnight chocolate skin, sharp bone structure, and a bald head. But for all I knew, he’d killed a lot of Swiss men.
