rising, she crossed her arms. The last person she wanted to discuss with Dr. Oliviero was Andrew Moore. But she refused to continue running from her problems.
And deep down, she suspected the psychiatrist was right. Unless she truly confronted her past, she’d never reclaim control of her life—and the people around her would pay the price.
“All right.” Dreading it, she forced her mind back to Chicago, to those final days with Andrew Moore. “I liked him. He wasn’t what I’d expected. Maybe I wasn’t what he expected either. Maybe that’s why he trusted me, why we got so close. Too close.” Her face warmed, her stupidity shaming her even now. How could she have made such a huge mistake?
“That didn’t stop me from doing my job, though. I continued gathering information even during our affair. We were getting ready to make the bust.”
“Did that bother you, that you’d be arresting Andrew Moore?”
“Of course.” The guilt had nearly driven her mad. “I wanted to warn him, to get him out of harm’s way, but I was torn. I couldn’t blow the mission. We had too many people undercover—people who’d be in danger if the truth got out—and I couldn’t predict what he would do. So in the end, I didn’t tell him. I waited.” Despising herself all the time.
“We still hadn’t found Moretti. Until we did, we couldn’t make the bust. We knew he’d just relocate his organization and set up shop again somewhere else unless we put him behind bars.”
But the noose had been tightening around her. The closer she got to Andrew Moore, the greater the chance that she’d blow her cover, a mistake that could have gotten them all killed.
“Andrew didn’t suspect you were FBI?” the doctor asked.
“I don’t think so.” Maybe he’d sensed her desperation. Their lovemaking had taken on a note of urgency toward the end. Or maybe she’d imagined that—just as she’d imagined what he’d felt for her.
“I decided to help him find his buddy’s sister. I figured that even if I was going to bust him, even if I was going to put him in prison, at least I could help him save that girl.”
“You wanted to make amends.”
“Yes—which was idiotic, considering how badly he’d lied to me.”
“But you didn’t know that then. You were making decisions based on the information you had.”
True enough. But it still galled her that she’d let her emotions blind her to the truth.
“So, what happened next?” Dr. Oliviero asked.
She knotted her hands, forcing herself to return to that awful night. “I’d learned that some girls were being moved, transported out of Chicago for a special event, a play-off game that would attract a lot of johns. I had information that his friend’s sister might be involved, so I went to the warehouse to find out.”
“Was she there?”
“Not that I could tell. But Andrew showed up. I figured he was doing the same thing I was, looking for that missing girl. But I couldn’t get close enough to him to ask.
“After the trucks left, I tried to find him. I had to stay quiet in case Moretti’s people were still around. I was on the point of giving up when I heard a voice—a man’s voice. It sounded like Andrew’s, but the voice was deeper, and it had a different cadence, like the rhythm was slightly off.”
She inhaled. This was the hard part. The moment when her world had fallen apart, when she’d learned that everything she’d once believed was wrong.
“I got as close as I could and hid. I didn’t want to barge in on whatever Andrew had going on. I thought he’d arranged a meeting. Then I worried that someone had surprised him, that he might be in trouble and need my help. But when I peeked around the corner, I saw that he was alone. He was talking on the phone. But I still didn’t understand.”
She closed her eyes, the lengths to which she’d gone to deny the obvious sickening her even now. “I thought he’d put the phone on speaker, that the voice belonged to whoever else was on the line. But then I heard him giving orders to move some cargo from a south side warehouse to headquarters later that afternoon. And I realized the voice was his.”
She met Dr. Oliviero’s eyes. “I still didn’t get it. I knew Andrew was sharp, probably the smartest man I’d ever met. I figured he had a reason to change his voice.”
“Did he?”
She let out a bitter laugh. “Oh, yeah. He had a reason, all right.”
“And what was that?”
Andrew Moore—the wounded ex-soldier, the arms commander she’d come to admire and respect, the tortured man she’d confided in, made wild and passionate love to—was a total myth. Instead, the man she loved was a monster.
“Andrew Moore was Moretti.”
As mistakes went, it was colossal one. Falling in love with a man like Moretti had to be the most revolting thing she’d ever done.
“You hadn’t suspected the truth? That they were actually the same person?” Dr. Oliviero asked her.
“No. I was shocked. I just stood there, reeling at the discovery. All this time, I’d been searching for Moretti, and he was the man I was sleeping with.” The head of a brutal empire. The man who’d single-handedly ruined thousands of lives. The monster who’d condemned innocent children to a hellish existence, who’d tortured and killed without conscience.
How could she have been so blind?
Lara covered her face, filled with loathing and self-disgust. “I didn’t want to believe it. Even then I was trying to make excuses, to justify what he’d done.”
“Your reaction was perfectly normal. You loved him. You’d formed a set of beliefs about him. When a view like that gets altered that drastically, it takes time for it to sink in. And denial is a typical first response.”
She’d denied it, all right. The truth was simply too horrific to accept. “I couldn’t believe how thoroughly he’d conned me, how effortlessly he’d lied.” That all this time, he’d been putting on an act, hiding his identity and true nature from everyone—especially her. Then again, she had been doing the same thing to him.
“So what did you do?” Dr. Oliviero asked, his voice gentle now.
“I knew I had to act fast, to get out of the warehouse before he spotted me. And I had to get word to my boss that I’d found Moretti. So I left right away.” She’d been terrified that he would see her, that he’d discover that she’d learned the truth. But she’d managed to escape undetected and get the information to her handler.
“I’d heard him arrange a meeting with his top commanders for later that night. We knew it would be our best chance to take him down, so we scrambled to make the bust. We had surprise on our side, but we didn’t have much time. And we knew if we didn’t catch him, we might never have another chance.”
