Leveling the Field

by Elise Faber

  “Because even though you’re gay, you still can admire pretty?” I asked wryly.

  Hannah clapped my back. “Now you’re getting it.”

  We all burst into laughter, but almost immediately, I began backing into the room. I needed to get back to Jess. I wanted one night without any—more—interruptions. “Thank you, guys,” I said. “I don’t think it would have gotten through my dumb”—I slanted a glare at Lily, who just smirked—“brain without your intervention.”

  “Well,” Hannah said dryly, “considering it took eight KTS agents to plan the mission to bring you two together, I’d say that’s true enough.”

  Lily stage whispered, “You owe us pizza and beer, by the way.”

  “I will gladly pay up.”

  “See that you—” Her cell rang, and she pulled it out of her pocket. “Oh, it’s my mom! I’ve got to take this.” A kiss to my cheek, to Hannah’s, before she bounced down the hall, slapped a palm to the panel by the lock on her door, pushing inside and disappearing.

  “She’s something else,” I murmured.

  How she could shift from serious, dangerous agent to cheerful, mischievous cheerleader type defied convention. But I’d seen her on missions, watched her flip that switch in her brain to become deadly and sober, and then the moment the risk was abated, she was right back to mischief and teasing.

  She had a light inside her that wasn’t unlike Jesse’s.

  It burned perhaps more overtly, was a force to be reckoned with, but it was the same . . . just as I suspected the way Hannah stared after Lily was very much the way I stared after Jess.

  Moths to a flame.

  Hannah blinked, and the longing was gone, her no-nonsense face back in place. “Get some rest, take care of my girl, and then be ready to hit it on all cylinders.”

  “No more interruptions?”

  Humor bled onto her face. “Maybe I should barge in at one A.M. demanding you pay up on that pizza and beer, just to be as big of a pain in the ass as you’ve been since joining my team.”

  I narrowed my eyes.

  “But I won’t.” A beat. “For Jesse.”

  “I’ll work on getting myself crossed off your Shit List.”

  Hannah shrugged. “It’ll take some serious work.”

  “The best things do.”

  Her gaze flicked to Lily’s door, her lips pressing flat. Then she met my gaze and nodded before turning for her room. “That they do, Leo. That they do.”

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Jesse

  This was the second time I was waking up in Leo’s arms.

  But it was markedly different from the first.

  The warm arms and the spicy scent of him were familiar. The feeling of utter contentedness was not, so I found myself sinking into the moment, soaking it in. We had a lot of work to do, things to work through on both our parts.

  But we’d found the courage to have each other.

  Which was why I knew I was never going back to the person I’d been before.

  Leo’s fingers trailed up and down my spine, lightly bumping over the skin covering my vertebrae, making me shiver and shift closer. “You, okay?” he murmured.

  “I’m happier than I’ve ever been.”

  “Because you got some sleep?” he asked lightly, his fingers dipping lower, tracing over the curves of my ass.

  “No,” I said, pressing a kiss to his chest.

  “Because I gave you orgasms?”

  “Hmm,” I teased. “They were okay, I guess.”

  “Just okay?” He slipped his fingers between my cheeks, slid them forward and lightly circled my entrance.

  I bit back a moan, my hips jaunting forward.

  He coaxed a leg up and over his hip, and I felt the hard length of his cock brushing through my folds. But he didn’t slide inside, didn’t do anything but stroke gently, the tip of his finger shifting back and forth.

  I shuddered. “Leo,” I moaned.

  He nipped my chin. “I warned you about that,” he said, the words scorching my skin.

  “Then get inside me,” I demanded, pushing against his hand, intending to turn for the nightstand and the box of condoms he’d unearthed the night before. But the action had his finger slipping in, and I froze, a groan tumbling off my tongue. “That’s not—” I gasped when he pushed deeper, curled it forward and hit that sweet spot inside me. “What I—” A hiss, my mouth finding his, our kiss reducing me to cinders as he stroked me deep and slow and—

  Someone pounded on the door.

  And I mean pounded because our doors were thick, and I was in a state—that state being that Leo was hard and close, my orgasm barreling down on me—so I wasn’t exactly aware of my surroundings.

  Leo was though, and he muttered, “Ignore them,” as he kept stroking.

  But the pounding didn’t stop.

  And unfortunately, it wasn’t his cock pounding into me. The door practically rattled on its hinges.

  “Just a little more,” I moaned. I was so close.

  Our cell phones started ringing. Both, right at once.

  “Fuck,” he snapped, pulling away from me, and though I understood it must be an emergency, I was mentally cursing a blue streak as I jerked Leo’s T-shirt over my head and followed him as he stalked to the door.

  His ass in those boxer briefs was just . . .

  Muah.

  He yanked open the door, revealing Hannah on the other side, her expression like granite.

  And I knew in an instant that things were fucked.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Leo

  We got dressed in a hurry.

  Ran through the halls.

  Even though we knew it wouldn’t make a difference.

  Olive was kneeling outside the door, next to a pale Ava, blood dripping down her face. Dan was at her side, clamping a bandage to his forearm, the surrounding skin stained crimson.

  Jess slid to a halt, and I squeezed her fingers.

  “They’re okay,” Hannah murmured. “They’re all okay.”

  “Except for,” Lily began, and my gut clenched, “Daniel.”

  It didn’t stop clenching, but I definitely relaxed a little bit. My teammates were safe, Laila and her team were safe. I stepped forward and peered through the cell door, the lock blown off, scorching the concrete walls around it.

  “Fuck,” I hissed.

  Jesse slid behind me, her front to my back, and I really shouldn’t be aware of her breasts pressing into me, the soft, floral scent of her. Not when I was staring at the sight in front of me.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Hannah spoke first. “Someone tried to gas those two, but they realized what happened, fought the attacker, and signaled the alarm.”

  “Who?” I asked, thinking they were lucky they’d gotten the alarm off, otherwise they might have been dead.

  “We don’t know,” Dan said. “They pumped some sort of smoke in. It was like trying to fight through concrete. They knocked me and Ava out, and by the time everyone else came, the room . . . well, Daniel was like that.”

  I glanced back into the cell where we’d been holding the former agent.

  Blood was everywhere, puddles of it on the concrete floor. It was a bizarre thing, how much blood a human body held, and it seemed like every drop from Daniel’s body was spread out on the floor. His head lay at an angle, his neck was nearly severed from the force of the slash across it, his brown eyes glassy.

  But I could swear there was something like fear frozen on his face.

  Fear where I’d only ever seen a smirk.

  Who the fuck had done that?

  Jesse tugged on my hand. “Come on,” she whispered, tugging me back and into the surveillance room. Ryker was at the keyboard, and we moved close to see him pulling up the camera feed then rewinding it.

  Pausing to see Jess and me on the screen.

  Then back again to see Hannah and Lily peeking in, their faces grim.

  Back further. Playing to
see Laila and Ryker skidding to a halt, the curse words that had tumbled out of their mouths evident even through the feed.

  Back. Play.

  We watched Linc dart into the room, smoke clearing in the hall behind him, Ava and Dan prone on the floor. He froze in the opening before turning back, his phone to his ear as he bent toward Dan, Olive already working on Ava.

  Back a little more.

  “There,” Jess whispered, pointing toward the screen.

  Ryker rewound it a little further and hit the button to play the recording.

  We watched Daniel pace the room, back and forth until he froze, his eyes going to the door. I saw his trademark smirk slide into place, and there was a flash as a small explosion burst open the lock.

  The door was pulled wide.

  A slender form entered, the hood from their sweatshirt pulled over their face, and I squinted, unable to tell if it was a man or woman. Not tall. Not overtly muscled or curved. A standard androgynous build.

  I leaned closer as Ryker zoomed in, trying to see something that would allow us to identify who it was.

  Nothing.

  They knew where the camera was and kept their face deliberately away. The hoodie was baggy, hiding body shape. They even wore gloves.

  Daniel moved toward the person, as though he were just going to walk out of the cell without a care in the world.

  The intruder struck.

  A knife glinting, tearing across Daniel’s throat.

  One second, he was cockily heading for the door, the next he was grabbing for his throat, toppling backward and bleeding out on the floor.

  The intruder casually stepped over Daniel’s body and disappeared.

  “Track them through the other cameras,” Laila said.

  Ryker nodded and started typing, pulling up the feed for the hall, and we watched as the intruder moved through the cameras heading for the yard, still avoiding the cameras . . . until the feed cut.

  “What happened?” Laila asked.

  Ryker kept typing. “I don’t know.” He pulled up a camera on the other side of the yard, and we all searched, but there was nothing but shadows.

  “What about the other side?”

  Ryker switched to that camera.

  Nothing.

  “I’ll go through them all,” he said.

  “We need to check the codes and keycards used to get through the doors,” Laila said.

  I nodded. “I’ll get on that.”

  Ryker had rewound the footage and was viewing what happened in the cell again.

  I started to turn for the door, intending to get to work.

  “Wait,” Jess said. “Back it up—”

  My eyes went to the screen, and I saw the person walking down the hall leading to the yard.

  “Pause there.”

  I frowned, not seeing anything this time I hadn’t seen the first.

  “They took their gloves off.”

  Blinking, I looked closer, along with Ryker and Laila. “Damn,” Ryker said. “You’re right.”

  “Zoom in,” Laila said.

  But Ryker was already doing that, and we all stared as the grainy image of the hands blew up on the screen. “Let me see if I can clean this up,” Ryker murmured, running the image through a program that could fill in the blanks between the pixels.

  “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a spot between the person’s thumb and forefinger.

  “A tattoo?” Jess asked.

  “Looks like it,” Ryker said, squinting.

  Laila rested her hand on his shoulder. “Can you clean it up anymore?”

  Ryker nodded, still working on the image.

  And we watched as it slowly came into focus.

  It seemed like a crescent moon, only there were two smaller images at each point. The photograph wasn’t good enough to make them out, though, nor the writing that made up the curved interior.

  “Have you ever seen anything like this?” Laila asked.

  All of us shook our heads.

  Laila sighed, rubbed her temple. “What a fucking mess.” She took one moment, chin dropped to her chest, and then Ryker’s hand found hers, same as Jess’s was in mine. And if Ryker steadied her half as much as Jess did me, then I knew Laila would be okay. “Okay,” she said, lifting her head and straightening her shoulders. “I’ll meet with Hannah to confirm this, but as of now, can you continue looking into the five agents from Moldova?” she asked Jess.

  Jess nodded.

  “And you’re going to follow up on the codes and keycards?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ll report to you and Hannah the moment I have anything.”

  Ryker stood up, slid his arm around Laila’s waist. “Why don’t you continue with the cameras? I’ll take care of . . .”

  Laila’s face softened. “I should—”

  Jess squeezed my hand, and we slipped from the room, hearing Laila say, “I shouldn’t care about him. I just don’t know how he went so fucking bad. He hurt so many people, hurt me. I just—” Her voice broke, and I quietly closed the door behind us.

  Hannah and Lily were discussing how to take care of the body, Linc and Olive having shuttled Ava and Dan off to the infirmary to get checked out. Since Hannah had things well in hand, I filled them in with what we’d found and what we planned to get started on.

  “Keep me updated,” she said, turning to intercept two agents from another team who’d wheeled in a stretcher topped with a body bag.

  Lily started for the surveillance room. “I’ll grab the image,” she said. “Get started on that.”

  Jess caught her arm. “You might want to give them a few minutes.”

  Lily’s eyes flared with understanding, and she nodded, moving to the body and crouching by Daniel’s left hand. Her head whipped back toward us, and she nodded for a second time.

  So, he had the tattoo as well.

  Lily came over, rubbing her temple. “I’ve seen that image before,” she said. “I know I have.”

  My eyes widened. “Where?”

  “I don’t know . . . a book or—” She broke off and pulled out her phone. “I need pictures of the tattoo. Good pictures.”

  Jess turned to help her, but I snagged her hand, tugged her back. “Lily’s got it.”

  Her eyes flicked over her shoulder. “I need to see.”

  Releasing her, I trailed them over to the corpse.

  Lily snapped a few pictures and then Jess and I bent close, studying the tattoo that he had inked between his forefinger and thumb. A moon and the writing was . . . “Quod vero dicitur per comparationem,” I murmured. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “The truth is relative,” Jess said, and Lily and I looked at her in surprise.

  She shrugged. “It’s Latin.”

  More surprise from Lily and me.

  Jess lifted her hands in surrender, “Nerd, remember?”

  “That nerddom taught you Latin?” Lily asked.

  “That nerddom taught me lots of things. For example . . .” She bent closer, murmured, “Those are scales.”

  “What?” I asked, leaning closer and seeing that the tiny images at each point of the moon were indeed scales. One in solid black at the bottom of the moon, one just outlined in black at the top. “What is this?”

  Lily sighed. “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”

  “I know you will,” Jess said.

  We spent a few minutes talking about the scales and what they might mean, but unfortunately, Jess’s nerddom didn’t cover the meaning of symbols, scales or not, and my dumbass wasn’t any help.

  Regardless, Lily at least had a place to start, and I knew she wouldn’t sleep until she had answers.

  With nothing further to do, Jess and I slipped out of the hall and headed toward our offices after a short pitstop to my rooms to grab the laptop she had apparently purchased from a local electronics store. “We might need to do the same for all of us, if our systems are compromised.”

  “Yeah, m
aybe.” She sighed. “But it’s not like I have a secure server. I’m accessing KTS’s info, so if someone has access to that . . .”

  “We might lose our chance at the info anyway.”

  “Exactly.”

  She sighed again, and I stroked my hand down her back. “What is it?”

  “Every time we seem to be making progress, it’s like we get shoved back two fucking steps.” She dropped the laptop onto her desk. “We get clues, bits of the story, and none of it makes any difference when agents are at risk out there when they’re dying!”

  Her chin dropped to her chest.

  “And every time I think we’re getting somewhere, we just end up with more questions.” She rubbed her forehead. “It just doesn’t seem like we’re going to ever sort this out, and—”

  Her voice cracked, and I couldn’t take it any longer.

  I pulled her into my arms, held her close. “It’s a shit show. I know it is,” I said into her hair. “But we managed to find our way through the shit of our pasts, and we managed to find each other.” I cupped her cheek, tilted her head up so I could stare into her damp blue eyes. “And I’m not going to give that up. I’m not going to give you up. So,” I said, brushing my lips across hers. “That means that we have to keep going, keep fighting. Even if it seems like we’re not getting anywhere.”

  Her eyes slid closed, her body drifted closer.

  “Because we have this family we’ve made, and we’re going to fight for it, fight for our friends, fight for KTS.”

  “And if it’s fucking rotten to the core?” she asked, fingers clenching on my shoulders. “Because it seems more that way, every single day.”

  “Then we cut out the rot,” I said. “We keep searching. We find these fuckers, and we get our place back.”

  Her expression shifted, going hard, going determined as she nodded. “We’re going to get our place back,” she said, nodding as she slipped out of my arms. “We’re going to make it safe again.”

  “God, I love you.”

  “Because I’m weak and considered giving up?”

  I cupped her cheek again. “Not weak.” I ran my thumb over her bottom lip. “And everyone’s determination wavers every once in a while.”