by Riley Pine
I walked my dog on country roads and listened to music in my bedroom.
The girl seems like a stranger to me now.
“Apologies for the noise. My hearing is going, you know, and I do so love Doctor Who.”
“Indeed,” I say in a deadpan tone, happy to carry on the charade. No doubt the television is blaring to cover up the sounds of an interrogation happening somewhere below us.
“If you wouldn’t mind popping downstairs, I’m sure you will find something to occupy you. Now come in, come in, before you catch your deaths of cold.”
She bustles us in and opens the plain-looking door beneath the simple staircase that leads upstairs. There is dark floral wallpaper peeling on the walls and a fine film of dust on the banister.
We step into the closet and press against the mothball-scented jackets.
“Where’s the damn button,” X mumbles to himself.
“It’s behind me,” I respond and press an inconspicuous button colored to match the paneling.
Without so much as a lurch, the floor begins to descend.
Because we’re in a hidden lift, not a closet at all.
We come to a stop three floors below, and when I push open the door we aren’t in sweet Granny’s house anymore.
The hallway is a sterile white and the cement floor is illuminated by fluorescent lighting. There are four doors on either side, all a dull metal.
The one on the right, three down, swings open and out limps a slight man, around thirty, with pasty skin and thinning hair.
“Ah, Z, it’s been a long time,” he says, beaming at me while adjusting his cardigan.
I can’t help but return the grin. “Beta, I didn’t know you were in England.”
He used to be my assistant in the East Asian office. Beta wasn’t officially an agent of the Order, but he provided tech support—hacking, code breaking and the like. Very useful in a pinch.
“It seems fate has brought us together,” he says, holding open the door for us to enter. “Please, please come in. Ah, and you must be the famous X.”
“Famous?” X queries, sliding into a leather seat before being invited.
The room is full of state-of-the-art computers and surveillance equipment. Dozens of screens run dozens of complicated strings of code.
I don’t know what any of it is for, but if Beta has been brought to London, things are happening. He is one of the best.
“The Order might be the most secretive organization in the world, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have its share of celebrities. I’m sitting with the A-list right now.”
I don’t waste any time. “We were attacked on an operation tonight. In the Lion’s Den.”
Beta swings to the closest keyboards and his fingers fly as he types in some commands.
A moment later, the flat screen above our heads blinks on and a grainy surveillance video begins to play. It may be black-and-white, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t incredibly obvious that the two people on the screen are X and myself. And...
And...
Oh my God. My pussy floods with arousal, drenching my folds. We are consuming each other. I’ve never been one for pornography, but I can’t deny the power of our connection up there on the screen for all to see.
No wonder the woman at the club tapped us for notice.
We are riveting.
Beta clears his throat. “Quite a good performance,” he stammers.
“A-list,” X reminds him coolly.
I give him a subtle sidelong glance. He might as well be carved from marble. No sign that seeing our passion in the sex club ignited so much as a glimmer of deeper feeling. He is master of self-control. And my fingers twitch as I resist the impulse to leap to my feet and scream, “Was it real, what you felt in there? Is any of this real?”
But I don’t move a muscle. In the video, the door flies open and the henchmen pour in.
“I hacked this all off the security feed from the club an hour ago,” Beta explains. “But I can’t get a visual on any of the assailants. Their faces are all hidden, so it evades my facial recognition software.”
“So where does this leave us?” X asks.
“It appears that Dante Price didn’t order the hit. Chatter shows he was as surprised as anyone. In fact, after you were hauled out, he fled to an unknown location.”
“If Dante didn’t order the hit, who did?” I ask.
The door to the room opens as I speak and a tall blonde woman enters. “As far as we can tell, it was one of you,” she says.
X
I don’t react. I remain as impassive as ever, one of the many things I was trained to do. Acting shocked would be expected from someone who is innocent but also someone who is lying. And right now, I’m not letting on that I’m either until I know for sure who Z is. She is my Lora from decades ago, true. But she is also someone entirely new. And we are either allies or enemies. There is no in-between.
“So that would suggest a mole in the Order,” I say calmly. “That would be a first, would it not, Your Highness?” I offer the woman a slight bow.
The blonde woman herself might be a stranger to Lora, but I know she recognizes Cordelia, queen of Edenvale—the kingdom I lived to protect for most of my career.
As expected, Lora’s eyes widen, and then she bows, as well.
“Your Highness,” she says. “I was under the impression that after you resurfaced you had retired for good.”
I jerk my head, detecting a faint trace of jealousy in Lora’s statement.
The queen nods, then strides toward me and wraps me in a warm embrace. I hug her tight. “You saved my life once,” she says. “And my husband’s and sons’. It’s my turn to help you.”
When we let go, Lora looks at us both with a tight smile, and the queen motions for us to sit at a small round table while Beta continues to study the various screens.
“You’re correct, Agent Z. I have all but retired now that it’s finally safe for me to be with my family. But I owe your partner a debt I’ll never be able to repay. Stepping in to help was the least I could do.”
On instinct, I rest my hand on Lora’s chair. My thumb brushes the soft cashmere of her sweater, and she flinches ever so slightly. I have to bite back a grin.
Is she jealous of my connection to Queen Cordelia?
“Tell us what you know,” I say.
“Price is bad,” Cordelia says. “And we want him put behind bars eventually. But he wasn’t the real mission. At least, not entirely.”
I cross my arms and lean back in my chair. It seems this is going to get very interesting.
“Are you saying that we were decoys?” Lora asks, forgetting all her lessons and letting her anger shine through. “That we did what we did—on camera—and that wasn’t the real job?”
Cordelia presses her palms to the table, ever in control.
“Oh, Price is the job, Z. But what’s worse than an outside enemy?” she asks.
Beta mumbles from his computer terminal, “The one who’s right under your nose. Everybody knows that.” He laughs at his pun then spins toward the three of us, eyes bright. “Did you hear that? Nose and knows? Brilliant, right? Absolutely brilliant.”
He concentrates on his screens rather than us.
“So one of us is working with or for Price, then,” Cordelia says. “And set up tonight’s hit without letting him in on it so he would react accordingly—with complete and utter shock. Doesn’t seem to make sense, though, does it? If we have a mole, you’d think he—or she—would have seen to it that the targeted agent or agents were taken out. It was a sloppy job to say the least. So what I’m going to do is interview you each separately, compare your stories, and we’ll go from there. I’m going to need you two to stay the night. It’s late already, and we can’t be sure your hotel room is safe now that you’ve been ma
de. We keep you under surveillance—”
“And Price gets away,” Lora and I say in unison.
The queen hums. “Interesting” is all she says in reaction. Then she turns her gaze to me.
“Go and get that gash tended to,” she says. “There’s an infirmary—”
“I’ll suture it myself,” I inform her.
She smiles and shakes her head. “Of course you will, Max. I see not much has changed.” She stands. “Come, Agent Z. I can’t concentrate with all these screens. To the debriefing room, shall we?”
Z rises, as do I. “Of course, Your Highness.” She barely glances my direction as Cordelia leads her out of the room. I pause, making like I’m checking my pockets for something I’ve lost, and then I stroll to Beta’s side.
“Can you play that surveillance video one more time?” I ask him.
He obliges me without question. And I watch the two of us wrapped in such undeniable pleasure, however short-lived it was. Whatever the outcome of our story, I know this much—what’s on that feed is anything but a performance.
This thought lingers at the back of my mind as I stand in front of a mirror tying off a third suture at my split-open temple. Two more and I’m done. Not half-bad for a night’s work. Then I stare at the man in the reflection. He has salt-and-pepper hair and lines at the corners of his eyes. He seems to have a permanent five o’clock shadow and occasional dark circles under his eyes. I lift my shirt and map the many scars tattooing my flesh, each one a memory of a life I saved and others that were lost. I wonder when this man who looks so much like me ceased being a boy and turned into someone so jaded, weathered and untrusting. But I already know the answer. It was the day they tattooed the crow’s feather on my arm, the day I pledged my life to the Order. I might have only been at the tail end of my teens, but it was then that the boy with his whole life ahead of him became both a preserver and taker of life, all for the greater good.
Wasn’t it?
The question is getting harder and harder to answer.
I run a hand through my hair and then splash cold water on my face. When I step out of the exam room—the one I forbade the base doctor to enter—Lora is there.
She forces a bland smile.
“Your turn,” she says. “Figured I’d come tell you—and see how you were.”
I clear my throat, wanting to believe the concern in those deep brown eyes.
“Five sutures and I’m good as new,” I say. “Don’t worry, I know if—”
“If I wanted to kill you I would have already?” she interrupts.
I laugh. But the truth is, whichever one of us wants the other dead, it’s not time yet. There’s too much to learn no matter whose side we’re on.
“Here,” she says, pressing a thin metal card into my palm. “To get into your room.”
I raise a brow. “Oh? Separate rooms, then.”
She smiles softly. “Yep. But I’m right next door if you get scared when things go bump in the night.”
I slide the key card into my pocket, then run the tips of my fingers along her hairline.
“Sweetheart,” I say. “Don’t you know? My favorite part of the night are the things that go bump.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Z
“ONE OF US is guilty as sin,” I whisper.
“Yes.” His fingers roughly trail down the side my face, slide under my jaw and thumb my chin, forcing my gaze to stay fixed on his.
“And it isn’t me,” I add in a confident purr.
“It isn’t me,” he says.
“One of us is a liar?”
His smile is small. “Darling, we are both liars. Lying is what we do. It’s in our marrow.”
I lean into him, letting my breasts brush his chest. “It isn’t all we do.”
Muscles cord in his neck as he swallows thickly. “No, we have many skills.”
I shimmy my hips a fraction closer, gloating at the harsh sound of his breath. I have to take my victories where I can. “So many.”
He has the door open and me inside before I can take my next breath.
His knife is cool against my throat. He doesn’t tremble. Neither do I. My blade is pressed to his throat, too, the tip teasing at the jugular. We dance on the edge, holding the other’s death in the palms of our hands.
“I suppose this is what you call an impasse,” he drawls lazily, as if our mortality isn’t pressing in from all sides.
“I would call it admitting that you are the mole,” I murmur. “Because I’m sure as hell not.”
He rolls his eyes. “Because of course a mole would saunter through the Order’s headquarters saying, ‘It is I, the mole, here to steal intelligence for a price.’”
“Aha.” I press the blade a fraction more—any more pressure and I’ll draw first blood. “So you admit you are betraying the Order for money?”
“No.” His nostrils flare in annoyance. “I simply said that is what a mole would be doing.”
“Just tell me why you did it,” I snap, annoyed to feel hot tears pricking the corners of my eyes. This isn’t what I do. I’m not a crier. I’m ice. I’m stone. Now that the queen has been reinstated to the throne, I’m the most feared female secret agent in the world.
I’m not a woman who makes it a habit to blubber over a man.
Tension ebbs from his body as his gaze hoods. “Put down the knife, Lora. We need to talk straight for a change.”
Shit. He takes me by surprise and I hesitate. He takes the advantage, twisting me around so my arm is pinned, the knife useless by my side.
Then a flash of sharp pain bursts from the side of my neck. The bastard stabbed me!
Wait, no... I grow light-headed. Max didn’t stab me with a knife. He...he injected me.
“Sodium pentothal,” he rasps in my ear. “The Order’s own special version. I’m getting to the bottom of this.”
The world moves slower, as if oxygen has transformed to invisible molasses.
“Truth serum,” I giggle, shocked he pulled one over on me. I’m impressed. It’s a first for me. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“Sit on the bed.” He pushes me down and I comply like a rag doll. “Lora. Pet, what the hell have you gone and gotten yourself mixed up in?”
My head lolls on my neck as I study his cruel, unreadable expression. I feel as if I’ve just woken up from a three-hour nap on a sun-drenched beach. As if I’ve had a bottle of wine and the world’s best orgasm. The truth serum is taking over and making me totally uninhibited. I could try to fight the effects. But right now I enjoy losing my iron grip on control. And besides, if X is trying to manipulate me for information, his line of questioning will soon reveal all.
“You.” I flop on the bed. “I’ve fallen into the X rabbit hole, and in X Land we are all mad.”
He swears a string of oaths under his breath as he paces the room’s perimeter.
“I am trying to protect you,” he says.
“Mmm-hmm. Just like that time when we were climbing Ben Nevis and it started to storm?”
“Ben Nevis?” He pauses. “There’s a trip down memory lane.”
I close my eyes. “Isn’t it though?”
Back at Frasier Academy, we went on a school trip to the tallest mountain in the British isles. When the weather turned foul, Max and I got separated from the group. We were caught overnight in whiteout conditions, huddled under an overhang of rock and clinging to each other for warmth.
“It was the first time we ever spent alone in each other’s company. Remember how you told me stories that night?” I sigh, boneless and wobbly. “You told me how the Disney version of The Little Mermaid was bullshit and in Hans Christian Andersen’s version the mermaid turns to sea foam at the end and loses her immortal soul.”
“Not exactly the happiest tale. My game has improved since then.
”
“You told it so beautifully. It was the first time I ever really saw you. The real Max. Not just the rugby player who was stronger and smarter than all the other boys. You showed me depths that night and I’ve been drowning ever since.”
“Drowning?”
“In you.” My eyes grow heavy as sleep sets in. “Drowning in your depths.”
X
My phone buzzes with an encrypted message. I do the obligatory ocular scan before it translates from what looks like the matrix to English. It’s from Cordelia.
Lora’s story checks out with yours. But something’s still not right, just as you suspected. Her lack of injuries, her cool demeanor. I know of her history in acrobatics. That much is true. But she wasn’t pulled into the Order because of it. She came here one night, pounding on the very door you entered through this evening, screaming for her life. We let her in, Max. We let her in because she said if we didn’t, she would be killed. She was beaten bloody and thought to be a civilian. Her identification checked out. We let her recuperate, were prepared to wipe her memory and send her back onto the London streets. But she would whisper things in her sleep, things about a man named Peter. Frightening things, even for me to hear. We thought it was the man she was running from, but now we aren’t so sure. He might be the man who sent a mole to us. I trust you’ve given her the sodium pentothal by now. Find out who Peter is, and if she is his mole, dispatch her at once. Surveillance is on in your room. We will be there if you need backup, but I don’t suspect you will.
I clear my throat and look at Lora, so peaceful and beautiful in sleep. I sit next to her, take her hat off and run my fingers through her hair.
“Lora,” I croon softly. “Lora, it’s Max. Can we talk?”
She hums and smiles, her eyes fluttering open to meet mine.
“Hi, Max,” she says, her voice so sweet I almost don’t recognize it.
“Tell me about Peter,” I say with practiced coolness.
She lifts a languid hand and rests it on my thigh, giving me a soft squeeze.
“Do we have to? Peter ruins everything,” she pouts.
