by Riley Pine
Good. She is still deep under the influence of the serum.
She grabs my hand and places it between her legs. “I’d much rather talk about what your capable hands and fingers can do to me. That’s so much more fun.”
My cock hardens in a fraction of a second, and my fingers twitch, inadvertently tapping where I know her beautiful clit hides beneath her pants.
“Peter first,” I say, reluctantly pulling my hand free. “Then I’ll give you whatever you want.”
She rises up on an elbow and smiles coyly at me.
“You know Peter, silly. He was your biggest competitor at Frasier, and when he found out about you and me, he went ballistic. I can’t believe you forgot.”
My brows draw together. “Peter Cain?” I ask. God, I haven’t thought about that guy since secondary school. Even then I never thought much of him. “I wasn’t aware we were competing.”
She crawls to her knees, then rests her hands on my shoulders. I can smell the perfume she must have sprayed on when we were at Harrods. Chanel. Christ, she smells good.
“Of course you didn’t know. You were always one step ahead of him—in class marks, in athletics. You did break his nose in rugby, you know.”
I chuckle. “That’s rugby, Lora. It was nothing more than that.”
“He hates you. Hates you. H-A-T-E-S you, and you never knew. You never even noticed, and that only infuriated him more. You didn’t know anything.” She squeezes her eyes shut and grits her teeth. “Make it stop, Max. I don’t want to say anything else.” She slides a hand down my torso, then between my legs until she’s cupping my balls.
I hiss in a breath. They’re watching us, our every move. They can see that she’s fighting the serum. And they can hear every word she says. But this isn’t how I wanted this to happen. Whatever she’s hiding, I won’t let her incriminate herself if it comes to that.
“Tell me, Lora. No one leaves this room until the truth comes out.”
She grips me tight, her palm rubbing up my rigid cock. “Peter Cain wanted everything you had, Max. Including me. I was broken when you left, when I thought you must have died. And he was there to pick up the pieces. He was also there when I found out you were alive, and when that knowledge wrecked me all over again. It’s so stupid, but being close to him made me feel close to you. I knew it was terrible, but I was self-destructive.”
Peter Cain.
Peter Cain.
The words niggle at a memory. What is it with that name? So he was a school rival? I vaguely remember the pain in the ass. The little lord who liked to pick on me for being a scholarship kid. Typical blue blood prick born with a silver spoon in his mouth. But I haven’t thought of him in almost two decades. So he loved Lora and likely seduced her. I’ve been with more than my share of women over the years. I might have left. But I never loved any but her.
Wait.
The memory unfolds.
Peter. Daniel. Cain.
Our instructors always used our full names for roll call.
I rearrange the letters of Peter D. Cain in my head and can’t believe it is this fucking easy.
Dante Price.
Peter Cain is Dante Price.
And that can only mean one thing...
Lora is the mole.
I open the music app on my phone and scroll until I find what I’m looking for—Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. I set the volume at medium to start, and then I lean in to kiss the woman the Order likely wants me to kill. But before my lips touch hers, I whisper to her.
“There’s a camera in the corner of the room behind my left shoulder and a gun holstered above the small of my back. I am at your mercy, Lora. Tell me the rest before it’s too late. And then either kill me or turn yourself in.”
Slowly I crank the volume a couple levels higher. Then I kiss her hard. She shoves her hands inside my suit jacket and reaches for the gun. Then she shoots out the camera and the electric panel at the door, and then points the gun straight at my forehead.
Tears streak her face.
“I loved you so much, Max. I still do. You broke me twice, and Peter put me back together. We were supposed to escape tonight like we did, but you were never meant to make it back to London. Peter may well want me dead, too, now that I didn’t follow through with my end of the bargain. But I had to know. I couldn’t kill you without knowing.”
She’s sobbing now.
“Knowing what?” I say, my voice low and controlled. She may have destroyed the door’s computer locking system, but agents will burst through the door in minutes. Maybe seconds.
“If you ever loved me, too.”
Gun or no gun, I shove my fingers into her hair and kiss her like it will be the last time I ever do.
“I have always loved you, Lora. Always. It has only ever been you.”
The hand that holds the gun shakes as she loosens her grip and then hands it to me.
“I have to go, Max. But you’ll know where to find me. Just promise you won’t make it hurt too badly, and I’ll do the same for you.”
I grin and point the gun at the woman I love. I never miss, but I’m not in the right frame of mind now. Am I?
I retreat and wait for her to stand. Then I fire. The force of the hit knocks her back a step or two, but she doesn’t fall. She glances at her arm, at the tear in her sweater where blood now seeps through.
“That did hurt,” she says, eyes narrowed.
I grin. “I had to graze you at least. They’d never believe a complete miss. I’m too damned good.”
She shakes her head at me ruefully. A drop of blood hits the floor.
“My turn,” she says, holding out her palm.
I give her the gun. “You’ll never get out of here,” I say. Though I know she will. She must know the ins and outs of this house if it is the one where she trained, where she planted herself as a mole in the Order and from which she will now be a fugitive.
She strides to me, beautiful, sexy and lethal. She brushes her lips over mine and then, as the music crescendoes, whispers in my ear. “I chose you, Max. Remember that after all this time, I chose you.”
Then she clocks me in the temple with the butt of the gun, and everything goes black.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Z
THANK GOD. I think he fell for it. What an idiot. A devastatingly handsome, frustratingly enigmatic, utterly maddening idiot. What can I say? I hopelessly love this man.
I kneel down and press my lips to X’s forehead near the small angry wound I put there by his previous injury. “I’m so, so sorry, my heart.”
I’m not apologizing for the horrible headache he’ll have when he wakes up. That is a necessary evil. I’m apologizing for lying. For letting him believe that I was the mole. That I would betray him and my fellow agents for money or spiteful vendettas.
I smile ruefully as I rise to my feet, reaching into my pocket to remove the small vial of pure adrenaline and throw it back to overcome the groggy sensation of the truth serum. I mean, technically I am the mole.
But I had to go deep undercover for this mission if I wanted a prayer of taking out Peter once and for all.
Peter Cain, aka Dante Price, might want to fool the world into believing that he is the king of the underworld, spawned from hell, that he entered London fully formed with sin in his veins and a penchant for fine leather.
Max and I both knew him when he swaggered through the halls of Frasier Academy wearing sweater-vests and tweed pants, a lost little lord, the overlooked third son of a duke.
I did arrange the sex club storming earlier this evening, but that was only because Dante was planning on assassinating X at the club tonight. The tip from my sources that I contacted at the Shangri-La Hotel on that burner phone in the bathroom confirmed it. But there is no way in hell that was going to happen on my watch. Not that anyone ca
n know.
Shouts ring out in the hall, so I back away from the door. If I go out there now, I’m as good as dead. Only one choice here. After shooting out the lock’s keypad, they’ll have to break the door down. I barricade it for good measure, I hope buying myself much-needed seconds before leaping up and grabbing the air vent. It releases and I land on the floor quiet as a cat, tossing the vent cover onto the bed above X. I allow my gaze to rest one last time on the man I have loved all my life. The only man I’ve ever truly given my heart to. And then I remove Cordelia’s utility belt from my purse, the one I nabbed upstairs during our session with Beta. I unhook the small grappling gun and shoot it through the air shaft. Good thing I don’t suffer from claustrophobia. I’m disappearing through the ceiling as the door bursts open with a sonic boom.
Yep. Exactly as I expected.
After all, this is the Order we are talking about. They aren’t going to mess around and let me run away without putting up a hell of a fight.
The problem—at least for them—is that they don’t truly know who they are dealing with.
I army crawl through the vent, turning right, then left and left again. A few months ago, I had Beta show me the safe house’s air-conditioning/heating schematics under the guise of creating a risk-management plan for evading airborne biological warfare. I was lucky enough to get the full tour on his computer—and am grateful for my ability to remember everything I saw.
I’m Agent Z. Quiet. Dependable. Deadly. I will deceive my own to save them, even if it means taking down the enemy on my own.
Peter Cain likes to call me his spider, and believes that I’m spinning webs of deceit throughout the organization that aims to take him down. But he never fully trusts me even as he is desperate to believe that I want him...and that since Max first left Frasier, that I have only ever wanted him. Peter’s even fooled himself into believing my deep love for Max was nothing more than an adolescent infatuation.
But he forgets that I’m so much more than an expertly trained spy. At my core, my deepest truth is that I’m simply plain old Lora—a woman who loves with her whole heart and refuses to give up on the only person who’s ever mattered to me now that we’ve found our way back to each other.
I am a keeper of secrets—both for the Order and for myself. Peter claims his evolution into Dante Price was natural—that becoming one of the world’s most powerful criminal minds was his destiny. But I do not suffer fools like him. Everything Peter Cain has done—every twist and turn he’s taken from what could have been a formidable path in life—has been for one purpose and one purpose only: love.
Well, at least the bastard and I have one thing in common.
Once I realized Dante Price was conspiring to hunt down and execute the Order’s most lethal agent, X, I reconnected with him and revealed my secret identity. I flattered and manipulated Peter until he was confident that he was the one who had always held my heart, and to prove my words I pledged to give him X’s head on a platter and betray the Order.
And he believed every honeyed lie.
For now X is safe. I got him out of the Lion’s Den by radioing in a crackerjack team of rogue commandos loyal only to me. All I had to do was text them my symbol—Z—and they knew to get us out.
Peter probably still has no fucking clue what happened.
The plan was for me to escape with X in an anonymous part of the city and get him to the safe house.
Riding up in the Eye wasn’t part of the plan but my own selfish decision, reckless as it was.
My pussy gives an involuntary throb.
I needed one last taste. One last worship of Max’s gorgeous cock.
My throat clogs with unshed tears. All I want is a simple life. To leave the Order and live free to love as my heart chooses. I’m tired of action. Of mayhem.
I want to be in the real world. Not the shadows.
I reach to my hip, blow a lock of hair out of my face and remove a knife from the belt. This is one of Beta’s personal inventions and a favorite of mine. I click the small button on the side and the blade turns red. Pressing it into the side of the vent, it slides through the metal wall as if it was butter. Luckily, I’m small, so the hole doesn’t have to be large. I wiggle through and tumble through the air in a neat somersault, landing right in the Order’s secret subterranean garage. I race past the rows of expensive sports cars, beelining to my pick at the end, up against the exposed brick wall.
God, I love a Ducati bike.
I might want a simple life, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have expensive tastes.
I jump onto the motorcycle, turn the key and gasp as the engine reverberates through my body. My heart pounds in my ears.
A dismayed shout rises in the distance, but whoever it is, they’re too late.
I hit the gas and I’m up the ramp. The scanner near the steel doors identifies my retinas and slides open, letting me disappear into the night.
I duck my head and accelerate. As much as my heart breaks to leave X behind, I’ve got things to do and scores to settle before I have a slim shot at a happy-ever-after.
X
I wake in the infirmary atop a metal table, Cordelia standing over me with her arms crossed and eyes narrowed.
“How long was I out?” I ask.
“A couple of hours.”
“Don’t look so worried,” I say dryly.
Her expression remains impassive.
“You don’t miss,” she says, her tone biting.
I reach a hand to my temple, feeling the knot under my skin.
“Would you mind keeping the volume down?” I say. “This is my second head injury tonight.”
The line of her regal jaw pulses, and I know she will not be easy to appease.
“You don’t miss, Max. And neither does she. So tell me what the hell is going on.”
“She’s the mole,” I say. “Is that what you want to hear?”
The Edenvale queen rolls her eyes. “Then why did she make it off the property alive?”
I swing my legs off the table and sit up, my head throbbing. “Did I mention the double head injury? Maybe I neglected to mention in our debriefing that I jumped from a moving van and dislocated my shoulder.”
She clucks her tongue like a worried mother hen. “Oh, you told me, Max. You also told me you were not in love with this woman, and I believed you. That was my first mistake. You know love has no place in what we do.”
I let out a bitter laugh devoid of even the faintest trace of humor. “Says the agent who now lives happily with her king of a husband, three sons and growing brood of grandchildren. If anyone understands what it is like to betray authority for the one they love, I’d expect it to be you.”
She opens her mouth to either protest or put me in my place, but I don’t give her a chance. “I know you lost decades with your family to keep them safe, but I lost decades, too. With Lora. So please, get off your sanctimonious horse and remember your reunion with King Nikolai. Remember how your son and his Nightgardin queen united her kingdom with Edenvale, saving them from a war that would end with more casualties than either of us would care to count.”
She throws her hands in the air. “I’m the one who perpetuated that feud. If I had maintained my allegiance to Nightgardin’s Black Watch and disposed of King Nikolai—”
“Then you’d have killed the only man you ever loved. But you couldn’t, could you?”
She groans, her haughty, laser-sharp gaze fixed on mine. “Tell me one reason why I shouldn’t lock you up without so much as a trial until this mess is over—or longer.”
I grin. “Because she has my gun.”
“I fail to see how this is a positive.”
I shake my head. “Cordelia. Your Highness. Agent Z escaped with my gun. And I have no doubt she will be meeting up with Dante Price—who I now know is Peter D. Cain.”
/> It takes a second to register, but then recognition sets in, and she actually gives a girlish giggle.
“I always told you that you were insane for putting a GPS chip in your weapons. No self-respecting thief would hang on to them long enough for you to...”
She trails off.
“Long enough for me to track them, retrieve them and dispatch the thief. But—”
This time she cuts me off.
“I can’t believe I’m going to say this, but I’m letting you go, Max. Track her to Price and bring her in. Alive.”
My smile widens. “And Price? Permission to dispatch of the criminal mastermind?”
She shakes her head. “Alive, as well. He is not a one-man operation. We need as much information as we can get from him. Do you think you can follow orders this time?”
I hop off the table, caring nothing for the physical pain I’ve endured tonight.
“Of course, Your Highness.” Sure. I’ll bring Price in alive enough. But I’ll have some fun with my old school chum first.
I take the liberty of kissing my former partner once on each cheek.
“You know,” I say, “if you didn’t think I went soft for the woman I love, you’d think I planned it like this all along—that I knew she was the mole and wanted her to lead me to Price.”
After all, I always knew the mole wasn’t me.
“Go,” she says, waving me out with a curt gesture, even as her eyes are bright with unspoken emotion. “Before I change my mind.”
She and I have a long history. This moment means the world.
And with that I’m out the infirmary door and soon on the streets of London.
I pull my phone from my pocket and launch my tracking app. A soft green light blinks on the city map as I remember Lora’s whispered words to me, that I’ll know where to find her.
Truth be told, I didn’t need the tracker. It was just my backup in case I couldn’t trust her. And, well, I can’t. But there she is, exactly where she said she’d be.
“Hello, love,” I say. “Looks like I’m headed to Paris.”
