“What’s wrong with what I did? And you don’t have the right to hold me here.” Jerome looked her in the eye and seemed to be trying to keep his voice calm. “You would’ve done the same—have done the same, if I’ve heard right.”

“True, but then my father taught me well. I’ve gotten to where I am because of my hard work and by using my head, and not because of the FBI’s playbook. How many days of your life did you waste in the back of that shitty van, wondering what happened in meetings like this?” She pressed the tip of her blade on the inside of his thigh a few inches from his crotch. “Knowing all the time that I was as dirty as you imagined but could never prove…Is that what turned you? Did you turn your back on your old life for this one because it’s so easy to get away with doing what you want?”

“What?” Jerome asked, his voice going up a few octaves. “I don’t even know who you are.”

She glanced up at Dino briefly and he cocked his gun. It was incentive to keep Jerome in his seat as she pushed the blade through the fleshy part of his inner thigh slowly until it hit the chair. Jerome gritted his teeth as she twisted it, pulling it out. “I usually shoot my way to the truth, but today I have time to kill.”

Remi laughed at that. “I’d take her literally on that one.”

“You watched and watched until you couldn’t take it anymore, and then you found Juan. Little Juan, so eager to prove his manhood that he kidnapped my wife and tied her to a table. It was the only way he could get a girl to talk to him.” She repeated the painful exercise on his other leg and was amazed he stayed quiet. “You helped him with that. Was he planning to let you have a turn?”

“I don’t know.”

Jerome swallowed and shook his head to clear the sweat from his eyes. The room was cold, but she could see the fat droplets caused by his pain and his fear. The sight quelled that part of her that had raged at what had happened to Emma. She’d gotten back the power she’d lost that day.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

She twisted the blade and pulled out again, dragging it until it was against his side. It made her think of Cecil and his declaration that you could survive if someone shot you through the kidney. “I don’t think that was hard to follow. You made all these genius moves but followed them with the biggest fuckups you could think of.”

“Leave him alone,” his father yelled.