“I had work to straighten out. You had your plan. I had mine.” I shrug. “Are we joined at the hip because if we are, I wasn’t aware of it?”
She glares, not likening my answer because I’m right. Breaking eye contact, she then looks around the room. I don’t continue to press. You have to be patient with V.
“I needed you,” she says eventually, looking back.
“You need no one. How many times do I have to keep reminding you of that.” Needing anyone in this life guarantees a quick death.
“Why are you such a fucking asshole?” she scowls.
My mouth twitches at the corners, but I suppress it. “I should have come sooner.” That’s as much as I’m willing to relent on this topic.
“A lot sooner,” she says, letting the air out of her lungs, lifting her eyes to the ceiling as she blinks. “But you’re right. I screwed up,” she says as she drops her gaze back to me.
Fucking finally.
Getting V to admit she’s wrong is not a walk in the park. Training her, mentoring her, I was constantly fighting her damn ego. But I wouldn’t change her for the world.
She’s damn perfect.
“What now,” she asks when I pull her file onto my desk and flip through it.
“We get you out of this dump,” I say, taking the physical file and chucking it in the shredder. There’s a digital copy which I’ll have to get to before we leave here. Quinn wasn’t able to hack the files, not even with the virus she installed on the USB drive. That’s why it took so damn long for me to get her. There’s a protocol even I have to follow to get the necessary security clearance for this job.
“I just need to freshen up,” she says, eyeing the connected private bathroom.
“Knock yourself out.”
Ten minutes go by, and there’s no noise from the bathroom anymore. I go over to the bathroom door and knock on it. “V?” There are no windows in the bathroom, I checked, so I can only assume that she’s passed out in there.
I wait a few seconds and then take a step back and kick the door hard, placing my foot right to the left of the lock where the wood is softer and more hollow. There’s a thud as the door swings through.
V doesn’t wait.
She jabs me in the gut with the shower pole. It knocks the wind out of me, but I recover quickly and grab hold of it, yanking it toward me, pulling her with it. She stumbles forward, weighing nothing and out of shape. I easily grab her wrist, her recently injured one, and bend it sharply. She hisses in pain.
“You fucking bastard,” she seethes.
I pull her close and lock her arm under mine, forcing her to the floor, immobilizing her pretty quickly. “This is the wrist you broke, right?” I say, putting pressure on it. “I can very easily break it again.”
“Fuck you,” she snarls as I hold her in place with one hand on the side of her head, holding her down, and the other twisting her arm behind her back. “I know you’re working for Adrien.”
That makes me pause. V can be an absolute bitch when she’s paranoid, which is most of the time. But after everything I’ve done….
I give a harsh laugh. “Is that what you think?”
“You turn up just after he does. Do you think I’m stupid?”
“I think you’re delusional and scared.”
“I’m not scared of you.”
“Then why is your pulse racing?”
She shifts to look back at me, panting hard, eyes gleaming with rage. There’s no fear there.
Only hate.
“It’s not,” she lies.