She takes the small envelope with the flash drive that contains some real but irrelevant documents, along with some top-secret but doctored documents, and sits on the bench as if she belongs there at two in the morning. She slides forward, plants her hands on either side of her legs, and wraps her fingers around the edge of the bench. Then she stands and walks back toward the way we came in the park, not drawing attention to my location. Her hands are empty…and the package is securely attached to the underside of the bench.
I have to give her credit…that sleight-of-hand trick was expertly executed.
I’d say she’s done that once or twice before tonight.
Chapter 10
Silas
After I jog around to meet her at the park entrance, we leave the area in the same manner we entered, as a couple completely captivated by each other. With my arm around her shoulders and hers under my coat, wrapped around my waist, we stroll through the empty neighborhood until we reach the truck. I open her door first and help her in, keeping up appearances in case we’re under surveillance. She finally looks up at me again, and for just a second, she drops the act, and I get a glimpse of the real Kira Petrova.
The real Kira is beautiful, inside and out.
When our eyes meet for that one moment in time, I feel something more sincere with her than with any other woman I’ve ever known.
She’s shy and unsure and brave and bold. She’s trapped in a life she can’t simply walk away from, and she’s being used by two competing governments, yet she still puts her trust in me with nothing more than my word as a promise.
An overwhelming and undeniable urge to know her inside and out overcomes me. A call I actively fight against to prevent another impromptu kiss that would be wholly inappropriate this time.
But damn if it wouldn’t feel so right.
I stop myself from doing something stupid by closing her door and hurrying around to the driver side. When I’m settled behind the wheel, I start to put the truck in gear, but she stops me before I can drive away.
“Silas? Are you upset with me for kissing you? You haven’t really spoken to me since then. That was just part of our cover—because of what those young ladies were saying. If I hadn’t reacted that way, anyone watching would’ve questioned if we were really together.”
“No, I’m not mad about that hot as fuck kiss at all. And I’m not still thinking about it until this very second. At all. But if you want to convince anyone else that we’re together, all you have to do is say the word.” With a wink and a smile, I let her know I’m only teasing her.
She laughs off my harmless flirting. “You’ll be the first one to know if we need to convince anyone else that we’re hopelessly in love.”
Regardless of how passionate that kiss was or that fact that I’ve only actually known Kira for a few days now, this outing has made us more relaxed in each other’s company. Not that I’m ready to give her the Silas Steele badge of trust yet, but I am impressed with how she took my advice about becoming her alias, and how fast she reacted on the fly when we were being taunted. If the circumstances were different, maybe we would make a good team.
* * *
The next morning, Kira is already up and dressed when I stumble into the kitchen in my pajama pants. The aroma of freshly brewed coffee woke me from my deep slumber, but I didn’t expect to find her wide awake so early after our late-night activities.
“What’s on your mind, Kira?”
“I guess I am pretty obvious, huh?”
“Yep. Up early. On your third cup of coffee. Already showered and dressed. Gnawing your fingernails down to the quick. All very subtle giveaways.” I take a long sip of the burning-hot lava from a mug and immediately feel the fog clearing from between my ears.
“How do you know I’ve had three cups of coffee?” She looks genuinely confused, and I decide to use it to my advantage.
“Didn’t I tell you? One of my many abilities is reading minds. I know your every thought.” I arch one eyebrow suggestively, and her face lights up like a Christmas tree.
Interesting.
“If you can read minds, you wouldn’t have asked me what’s on my mind.” She crosses her arms over her body and waits for my real explanation.
I chuckle and nod toward the coffee pot. “Half the pot is missing already. You’re the only one who could’ve chugged it this morning. So, let’s have it. What’s bothering you?”
“We’ve looked through everything this guy has, but we haven’t found any evidence of his collusion. But I know he’s somehow tied to this passing of classified information. I’ve heard his name—I wasn’t supposed to hear it, but my handler didn’t know I was in the safe house at the time. Something isn’t adding up with his connection. I can’t put my finger on what’s off, and I’m running out of time.”
“Tell me why this assignment is so important to you. Help me understand why you need to do this.”
“When I was around twenty and just barely out of field training, the Academy sent over a lot of girls who would cycle in and out. I didn’t think anything about it at first, other than they had completed the training they needed and were sent out on their assignments. I believed the lies they fed us. Then a couple of years later, I was working in the Miami area, getting insider information from an executive assistant in the FBI office there. I didn’t realize how important the files she gave me over lunch were until later that night. By then, I was too late.
“The FBI agents had been watching a massage parlor down there. They suspected the owner of human trafficking. So, I opened the file and started looking through the pictures they’d taken. Some were regular customers, you know? Just going in for a regular massage. But there were several in a row of young girls going in, with notes that they didn’t come back out. I stared at one face in particular and I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was one of the girls who’d left field training early.
“When I confronted my handler at the time about it, I was severely reprimanded for even asking the question, but she finally relented and told me what they’d reassigned that young girl to do. She’d been abused all that time, moved from place to place to give new men a chance to do whatever they wanted to do to her. After that, I was moved out of Miami and sent here to work. They thought this was far enough away from their activities in Florida for me to forget what I’d seen and focus on my new assignment.
“So, imagine my surprise when all these years later, the same massage parlor name is brought up in a conversation between two handlers—mine and one other. Then they mentioned Senator Hunt’s connection to it, and I knew they were still up to their old tricks. So, I did some digging of my own without telling anyone I was looking into him. He has another home in the Miami area, and when he’s there, he frequents that very place.”
“What’s the name of it?” My blood turns to ice in my veins, so cold even my hot coffee can’t thaw it because I already know exactly what she’ll say. It’s like a nightmare that keeps returning to haunt me, even though it’s many years later.
“Pure Delight Spa.”
The desire to ram my fist through the wall is overpowering, but I find the strength to refrain from somewhere deep inside. Knowing this mission isn’t finished stays my hand, but knowing a prior mission remains incomplete stirs my blood.
“Tell me everything you know about it.” My reaction is more intense than I intended to show, revealing my hand before I’ve had a chance to process everything.
“You know I’m more than willing to share everything I know, especially if it’ll help put an end to the abuse of innocent people. But this feels a lot like a one-sided relationship, Silas. You need to share what you know, too. There may be details I can give you to fill in the full picture. But if I have no idea what you’re working on or what you’re looking for, we could be running in circles and chasing our tails.”
She has a valid point—I’ll give her that. But keeping secrets was drilled into me from the start of my career until now. The
re are very few people I trust implicitly, and I can count them all on one hand. The fact that she already knows about this particular establishment does make me somewhat more comfortable in sharing the rest of the information with her now.
“Several years ago, I was read in on a top-secret assignment regarding that very place. The intel wasn’t widely known because the report had been restricted to our eyes only. Russian chatter had been intercepted and decoded by our Signals Intelligence division. The message referred to an international human trafficking ring, and one of the main locations was that very place in Miami.” That is the abridged version of the story. The extremely redacted and abridged version.
“Why do I get the feeling you’re holding out on me?” Kira rolls her eyes before cutting them sideways toward me.
“Okay, you want the entire story? Here goes. Another officer had a Russian asset he was working for this case. He got a lot of information from her about the next time they were bringing the new batch of girls into the spa—how, when, where, everything. For the entire two weeks before the sting, we took turns driving to the location, parking the car, and walking into a nearby establishment. We’d stay there all day to make it seem like we were working. Technically, we were, but if anyone was casing the neighborhood, our cars had to be easily recognizable as belonging there.
“The day finally came around, and we were more than ready to take down every single person. In the time we were waiting for them to arrive, we were researching their other locations and other illegal activities. They’d set up an extensive network of human trafficking…including a segment of very disturbing offers to sell underage children.”
Just the memory of what I saw still haunts me to this day, forcing an involuntary shudder to tear through me.
“Silas, I’m so sorry. That must’ve been terrible.”
“It definitely was. That was one of the worst cases I’ve ever worked in my entire career. Which made me even more determined to catch the man behind the scheme and take him down by any means necessary. He was so fucking bold. He thought he had everything locked up tight and no one could touch him. When he finally showed up, it was very late at night.
“He, um…” I push the feelings welling up in my chest back down. Now is not the time to dwell on them. “He pulled up in a moving truck, plenty of room in the back to conduct any business he wanted. Before he got the girls out of the back, he chose one to make an example of for the others. I heard her screams from inside that truck, but I was ordered to stand down. We didn’t have intel on what else was inside that truck, and the danger to the public was too much to risk for one girl. Or so my deputy director said.”
Several moments of silence pass while I mentally relive that dark scene.
“What happened next, Silas?” Kira’s voice is soft and soothing. She knows what’s next, but she’s hoping she’s wrong.
“We finally got a visual inside the truck, and I went completely off the rails. I didn’t wait for the team to be ready to move. I didn’t wait for my backup to reach his vantage point. I just jerked the door open and couldn’t believe my eyes. She was already dead by the time we rushed the truck. Instinct and pure hate took over, and I ripped that man apart with my bare hands—just like he did to that poor girl.
“The discussion with the Russian ambassador was a little more civil than mine with the fucker in the back of that truck, but their government got the message, despite the lack of bluntness I preferred. She died because of me. I was there to stop the trafficking, but also to save those young girls. But I didn’t do my job—I didn’t stop that monster from hurting her, I didn’t get her out of that truck in time, and I didn’t save her life.”
“That wasn’t your fault, Silas. You followed orders, just like we’ve all had to do. That doesn’t make you a bad person or any other negative depiction you have stored in your mind. You did what you had to do for your job.” She puts her hand on my arm, offering solace and reassurance with the warmth of her touch.
“Yeah. For my job. And what would’ve happened if I hadn’t followed orders? Face being written up for insubordination? Get a week’s vacation without pay for disobeying my scene commander? It’s not like they would’ve fired me or arrested me. Even if they did, saving her would’ve been worth it.” I roughly drag my hand through my hair then over my face. The mental images flashing through my mind are enough to choke me out.
“You didn’t know that the truck wasn’t rigged to explode. You didn’t know if you were walking into a trap that would’ve killed not only you but your entire team. There’s no way to know if the outcome would’ve been any different.”
“Just the chance of saving her would’ve been better than living with her death on my conscience all these years. They prepared her body, and I escorted her back home to Russia. That’s when I met your father at the Kremlin. He was there to apprehend me and throw me into a Russian prison for killing their man—until he saw what all that fucker did to the poor girl. I remember the scene very clearly. He said she reminded him too much of his own daughters, and he was enormously shaken up by all of it. The state of her body, the thought of something like that happening to Mira or you, and knowing his government had a hand in it. But I never realized the Academy was helping by feeding girls to that maniac. I’m glad I killed him.”
“Wait. I remember when that happened. That was about ten years ago, right? Our handlers tried to keep us from watching the local news. They said most everything reported about Russia was intentional misinformation to confuse and disarm us. But that specific incident rattled them worse than anything I’d ever seen before. That was you?”
“That was me.”
Her brows furrow and she stares hard at nothing, focusing all her brain power on one spot on the table. I’ve seen that expression before—she’s trying to access old memories. Some morsel of information is there on the cusp, waiting to be realized and put into context. Maybe something that didn’t make sense at the time, but bringing it out in the open now will answer unresolved questions.
“What is it, Kira? You’ve remembered something, but you don’t want to tell me.”
“Silas, you killed Ivan Sokolov. He was one of Russia’s most respected foreign relations ministers. What you just told me doesn’t match the story released to the Russian media at all. My handler shared that release with me because there was so much buzz about it. She knew I’d hear about it one way or another, so she tried to get ahead of the American version. The Russian embassy claimed he was captured and tortured by the American government because he was falsely accused of spying when he was here on a goodwill mission.”
“Typical propaganda to keep the citizens of our countries at odds with each other.”
“But when Ivan died, his brother Viktor was alive and well, safely hidden inside Russia. They were partners in everything they did. You didn’t see one’s name in the Russian news without seeing the other—except when Ivan died. Viktor swore vengeance in a rare outburst to a journalist, but he quickly changed his tune soon after. My guess is the Kremlin silenced him and scrubbed the story.”
“His brother? Our research never revealed he had a brother. No names, no mention of any surviving family members, nothing. How is that? What did he look like?”
“Viktor was quite a bit younger than Ivan—maybe a decade or so. I never saw Viktor’s face in the news, only Ivan’s. My guess is Ivan kept his brother’s name hidden and out of reach of the foreign press for his protection. That way, no one could touch his little brother because no one knew who he was or what he looked like. Then when Ivan died, the Kremlin continued covering him for their own benefit. Someone who never existed is an invaluable resource to the GRU.”
“Absolutely. And he’d be a ghost to us, nearly impossible to find.”
“Nearly?”
“Nearly.”
We have a lot of work to do.
Chapter 11
Kira
“Senator Hunt’s daughter left last night for her Carib
bean honeymoon before heading to Uzbekistan for the next six months. Then Hunt announced he’s taking a short vacation at his home away from home in Miami to relax and recuperate from the stress of overseeing the wedding in his home. He’ll be there for the next three weeks, possibly longer.” Silas beat me to the kitchen this morning. From his bright and chipper mood, I’d say he’s already on his third cup of coffee. Seems to be a pattern in this house.
“Well, good morning to you too. I did sleep well. Thank you for asking. And yes, it does look like a beautiful day out there. We should go do something fun for a change. All we do is work, work, work. You know what Johnny says about all work and no play. It’s really not a good thing.” I grab a mug from the cupboard and fill it full of hot deliciousness to jump-start my brain and hopefully put me in as good a mood as Silas seems to be. “Who’s your source anyway? His impromptu trip seems a little too convenient, doesn’t it? Maybe he’s onto us.”
“My source is airtight, so don’t you worry your pretty little head about that. And there’s no way he’s onto us. For future reference, I don’t get made when I’m undercover unless I want to.”
“Airtight, huh? So who is this magical, never wrong source of yours, and how do I get one?” I join him at the table, sipping my coffee and racking my brain for ideas of how to speed up this waiting game.
He holds up the local newspaper, showing the picture of Senator Hunt watching his daughter drive away in the posh stretch limousine after the wedding. The entire story is about how much time he and his wife have dedicated to the wedding, how stressful yet fun it’s been for them both, and how they need a few days away to recharge their batteries before the next congressional session begins.
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