“Can’t do a damn thing for himself, huh?” Nia asked, shaking her head. “Well, without a way in, I can’t find out anything about him. And there is a surprising lack of personal information about him online. Usually, people who get to the level of success he is at, there are all kinds of goodies out there about them.”
“We are figuring that he has hired people like us a few times over the years to get rid of the skeletons he had to have had in his closets. And with no exes or children to spill some dirt or use against him, we’ve just… hit a wall.”
“What does that mean? I should change my name, dye my hair, and move to a new country?”
“I think what we do is we get copies of the shit you sent to the Rylan guy. Then we go have a talk with Phillip.”
“You want to try to reason with him?” I asked, shaking my head. “I can’t see that ending well.”
“If nothing else, he is a businessman. He doesn’t want that shit going public. He’d likely rather just pull the product.”
“But it is going to go public,” Gemma insisted, brows furrowing. “Rylan is going to make it public. All you’d get by saying it wasn’t going to be public would be to delay my possible death by a few months.”
“You’re not going to die, babe,” Quin insisted, shaking his head.
“You didn’t see Rylan, Quin,” I piped in. “He’s losing his damn mind. I think you should be more worried about him not sticking to a plan than getting Phillip to agree to it.”
“Let’s face it,” Quin was quick to shut me down, “Rylan will be much easier to silence than the CEO of a giant chemical corporation. We have to pick our battles.”
“He’s not going to give in. What happened to his father is too important to him. It’s all that mattered,” Gemma insisted.
“I’m not saying it is going to be something he is going to like, but he won’t be given a choice but to accept it.”
And when Quin said things like that, he meant by whatever means necessary.
He wasn’t always an all-or-nothing kind of man. More so than anyone else, he understood that there were gray areas in the world, that there was a give-and-take in all situations. It was why Miller and I were on the team. Every situation required a middle man and a negotiator. That was how most situations were handled. Not by brute force, not by murder and clean up, not by disappearing someone. But by talking shit out, finding that precious middle ground that both sides didn’t love, but accepted.
That said, though, this was not just some client.
This was Gemma.
When it came to those that Quin knew and loved, there was nothing he wouldn’t do for them. It was a trait we all shared.
I didn’t hate this Rylan guy. I sympathized for his loss and what seemed to be some pretty serious mental illness he had going on.
But if it came to his safety or Gemma’s, I would choose Gemma.
Maybe that didn’t make me the most moral of men, but that had never been a badge I had tried to wear.
I think most people, when given the choice between their loved one and someone else, would choose their loved one. Maybe the other person–in the grand scheme of things–had a higher value, but to the chooser, their loved one had that value.
Hard choices had to be made sometimes.
Consequences needed to be lived with.
We understood that.
But Gemma? Maybe not so much.
“How would you go about taking his choice away?” she asked, eyes a little cooler than any of us were used to seeing them.
“There are several options. He would be presented with them all. Then he would have to make his own hard choice,” Quin informed her, trying to be as tight-lipped about one of those options as possible. I wondered if that was why Bellamy–after telling me Quin was on his way–had ducked out; he didn’t want to serve as a reminder of what lengths this team was willing to go to if a situation required it.
“You can’t propose rational options to an irrational person. I mean, Lincoln hasn’t told me yet how things went with Rylan, but judging by how he was the last I heard from him, he is not doing well.”
To that, Quin’s eyes squinted a bit. “He didn’t tell you how it went with Rylan? The fuck have you guys been doing since he got back?”
“My aunt was here,” I cut in, dragging Quin’s attention away from Gemma, knowing that her face would show him exactly what we had been doing, whether she meant to or not. Judging by the way Nia was watching her, though, it seemed like we had yet another person who had sussed things out on their own.