Page 87 of Broken Promise
“Oh yes.” She clicked the button on the laptop again. I glanced at the image of Larissa Vandergraff again, and ice settled into my veins. She’d had everything money could buy, but had she had a good life? Was she okay? Had I scarred her forever?
Her dark eyes stared back at me. The same dark eyes that had haunted me since.
Emilie practically danced with barely contained glee. “So obviously this picture is of Larissa Vandergraff at thirteen. You know that.” She clicked the key again. “We ran an aging program on this image. Look familiar?”
Oh shit. Hell yeah she looked familiar.Too familiar.
Somewhere in the distance I could hear Alan talking even as parts of my cerebral cortex figuratively exploded.
“The Vandergraffs have done a hell of a job keeping this girl off our radar, but it’s likely they might bring her along for a trip to the States. Maybe even as a reward. It’s possible that she has no idea what kinds of things her brothers are into. If we can find her, we can use her,” Alan finished.
I stared at the large screen. She’d lied to me.You already knew that.Is this what she’d been trying to tell me? When I’d told her we’d work it out together? My stomach flipped. She obviously knew who I was. The things I’d done… the things I’d done to her father. How the hell could she stand to be anywhere near me?
Or did she know the truth? If she didn’t know the truth about her family before she’d infiltrated my house, she certainly knew now after she’d robbed me and taken the information from that flash drive.
For weeks, I’d been kissing her. For weeks, I’d been making love to her. The woman on the screen was the woman I loved.
When I didn’t answer, Alan answered for me. “Since we know the brothers are here, we need to be on hyperalert. But we also need to work every avenue we can to find that woman. She could be the key to cracking the case against her brothers.”
I couldn’t breathe. Every gasp for air was constricted through the narrowest of passageways. “Can you change the hair color on this thing?” There was a part of me that was still fighting. The part of me that didn’t want this to be true. The part of me that knew that it wasalltrue.
Emilie nodded. “Yeah. To what?”
“Change the hair color to blond.”
Emilie crinkled her brow in confusion but leaned over her computer to execute the command. A few key taps later, the image on the screen was the spitting image of Diana.
I put a hand over my chest, wondering if it was possible to die from shock. All this time and I’d had the key to the case living right under my nose. In my bed. In my heart.
She’d lied to me, betrayed me, and then tried to leave me behind only to come back and ensnare me even deeper. The haunted look in her eyes, it was no wonder it captivated me. It was the same haunted stare that had been with me for ten long years. The eyes that had made me question everything I thought I knew.
The eyes that now made me want to be a better man so I could deserve her love.
“I think I know how to bring the Vandergraffs in.”
The room went completely quiet. Emilie sat forward, anticipation on her face.
“You do? How?”
That snapped me out of my delusion. If they were going to end this, for my sake and especially for Diana’s sake, it had to be done right. She was a victim in this whole thing and had been from the very start.
She’d been thrown into hellish circumstances the day she’d been born to a megalomaniac, sadistic monster like her father and then raised with two twisted brothers. But there were others who wouldn’t see it that way.
There would be people here in the FBI who saw her as just one more criminal and try to find a way to hold her accountable for the actions of her family.
I wasn’t going to let that happen. Diana had been brave enough to come back to me even though she’d been afraid. All she’d cared about was making sure the information she’d taken didn’t fall into the wrong hands. She’d tried to leave me because she was worried about my safety. Hell, as little as she was, she’d jumped on a guy’s back to fight because she was worried about me.
I had to find a way to keep her protected in all this.
“I think I know a way to bring them in,” I repeated. “But first I need an immunity deal.”
CHAPTERTWENTY-FOUR
Rafe
“Why is it you need immunity, DeMarco?”
My gut twisted as I stared up at the photo. Diana. She was the girl from all those years ago. Some of that pain she carried around was because of me.
