“Adam. You don’t need to convince me you did your job the best way you knew how. I already know. You did everything right. And you did it a helluva lot better than Chek did, I will say that.”
“So why is Indie like this? Do you know?”
“They make them this way. It wasn’t you. It was Gerald Couture and that Machette guy in the Caribbean. It was the Company who did this.”
“We’re the Company, Nick.”
“Not back then, we weren’t.”
“Why are you really here? Is it just to cure Wendy?”
“Mostly.” He looks at me. “At least that’s why I came. But now…” He lets out a long breath. “We have work to do.”
“Such as?”
“You know Carter has more girls.”
“Nathan told us. He found a nest.”
“Yeah, I’m the one who sent him there.”
“Oh.”
“We need to kill them, Adam. All of them. Or this will never stop.”
I let those words roll around in my brain for a few minutes and Nick doesn’t bother me as I try to picture what this might entail and who might be involved. Nick might be the answer to my Nathan problem. If Nick takes Nathan away when he leaves, wouldn’t that solve something? Wouldn’t it make things easier? And if Nathan happened to die on the job, would that be the most terrible thing in the world?
But would Nathan go on that job? If I told him it was in Indie’s best interest, he probably would. He would go with Nick and they would take care of that shit. Those nests. It makes me shudder just thinking about it. I could never see myself hunting these girls the way Nick and Nathan do.
“I’ve lost people, ya know?” Nick says. “Good people. And that’s not counting the ones I gave up to save like Harper, and James, and Sasha, and Lauren. This cannot—” He pauses and I look at him, straight into those magic brown eyes of his. “This cannot all be for nothing. Do you understand me, Adam?”
I don’t. Not really.
But he might be saying that Indie needs to go. And I might…
No.
I shake my head.
“What part of that don’t you get?” Nick asks.
I sigh. Because he misunderstands. I’m agreeing with him. About Indie, maybe.
I just don’t like to think about it. After all these years, letting Indie die feels a lot like… well, a waste of time. And now I really need to change the subject. “I have something to show you.”
“Yeah? What is it?”
“Come with me.”
I lead him to the back of the house and we exit through the French doors the same way Maggie and I did last night. I retrace our exact steps and when we get to the boat, I grab the tackle box and take it to the dining table on the other side of the small galley. I point to the booth. Nick sits and I take the seat across from him.
Then I open the tackle box and pull out the envelope. But I don’t hand it over. I hold it for a moment. Because there’s a lot to this story that he doesn’t know yet.
“I had a baby brother,” I say. “Twins.” We both smile. “Triplets.”
“Fourplets,” Nick adds.
We chuckle about this. And it’s kinda nice, I think. Maybe we can be friends. Maybe this is the day that puts us all on a new path and this envelope in my hand is what does it. I hold it up. It’s tattered, and aged, and yellow. The kind of envelope that comes from time gone by.
“What is it?” Nick asks.
“When my father died, he left me enough. And I got some paperwork, but not nearly enough for an entire lifetime of Company work. And my father, despite all appearances, was a working man, Nick. Just like me.” I expect Nick to sneer at me when I say this. The term ‘working man’ and Old Home don’t quite fit together. But he doesn’t sneer and that tells me something important. Something I look for in men I want to trust, but haven’t made up my mind about yet.
He thinks before he reacts.
Most people assume that if you have money you don’t work. Not hard, anyway.
But I dare anyone to call my job easy.
So his ability to think before he reacts is a tick mark in the “Trust Nick Tate” column.
“But I knew it was there,” I continue. “Had to be around somewhere. I looked. I looked everywhere. And just a couple weeks ago Maggie found the answer. That girl does love a mystery. That’s why we dug up my brother’s grave. Funny thing is, as I mentioned, he was not in that little coffin. But this envelope was.”
Nick’s brown eyes dart back down to the envelope in my hand, then rise to meet mine again. “So. What the fuck is it?” There’s a little bit of an edge to his voice.