“He’s my boyfriend, Eli Kohn.”
It was slightly fun to watch him nod slowly, meet my gaze, which I held steadily since I was telling the absolute truth, and then turn his head toward Lincoln.
“Is there a problem?” Lincoln snapped at Mazzara.
“Vincente tells me that your patsy here is not so alone as you led us to believe.”
“I don’t understand.”
“We needed a name as big as yours for people to believe a great fall from grace transpired. But you neglected to mention that his lover is a federal marshal.”
“What are you talking about?”
Mazzara turned the tablet so Lincoln could see the picture of me and Eli attending the party for the opening ofRomeo and Juliet.
“No, no, don’t worry about that. Senan and I were with them a few nights ago at a dinner, and the marshal was a guest of the mayor’s wife, nothing more. It’s not serious.”
“You’re wrong,” I corrected him. “I was Eli’s guest for that dinner. And you’re lying to Mr. Mazzara right now because you even said the other night that you had never been introduced to Eli, but you saw him many times when he picked me up after practice.”
“Is that right?” Mazzara muttered, and I couldn’t see because the tablet was facing away from me, but I was guessing he was scrolling through photo after photo of Eli and me.
“He’s not just a date or a…” Mazzara glanced at Vincente. “How do you say…función única.”
“One-night stand,” I offered before Vincente could, because that one, I knew. You had to know the words if you wanted to pick people up in foreign countries.
Mazzara was surprised for a moment and then turned back to Lincoln. “He’s not a one-night stand. This Eli is his love, and he’s a deputy US marshal. Do you have any idea what you’ve done by being so blind?”
I was going to say,Hah! Who’s the one who doesn’t see anyone or notice anything now?But Vincente looked really nervous, and I didn’t want to get shot accidentally.
“There’s no way you’re in a relationship with anyone,” Lincoln snarled at me, stalking across the room, hands clenched into fists. “Senan would have known!”
“Senan didn’t know anything about me. And we only found out about you and Mr. Mazzara because everyone hated Senan so much that they took pictures of him and Mr. Mazzara to show you. We all wanted to get his ass booted so you could focus on the work instead of him. That’s how deluded we all were. We had no idea you were the bad guy until we showed the pictures to someone who knew who the hell Mr. Mazzara was!”
“Who iswe?” Mazzara yelled. “And who did you show my picture to?”
This was why I would have made a shitty detective. I got ahead of myself and blurted out things I shouldn’t have.
“Mr. Harrington,” Mazzara said, his voice ice cold. “Who did you show the pictures to?”
“He showed his boyfriend,” Vincente concluded.
Mazzara pulled a gun from the holster inside his jacket, and it was a beauty. It was all gold, not at all nondescript like Eli’s Glock that I’d seen a million times. “Is that who you showed, Mr. Harrington?”
“Yes, sir,” I replied quickly.
“We need to kill him now instead of—”
There was aboomon the front door, and as Mazzara and Vincente turned, I took that second to dive behind the couch.
“Federal agents!” someone thundered.
“Everyone on the ground!” another roared, and when I looked under the couch, all I saw were what looked like military boots.
No shots were fired, so that was good.
“Celso Harrington!”
I poked my head over the back of the couch, and a man I was certain I’d met somewhere before flipped the plastic shield up on his helmet and smiled at me. “Hi,” I greeted him.