In Chaos (Undercover Book 3)

by Adalind White

  “How often do you drink it?” the not-stranger asked.

  The tension in his voice sent a shiver down my spine. This man didn’t seem the type to get worked up about unimportant matters.

  “Every day,” I said, pinching my lips.

  Why was I answering this guy like I was a schoolgirl trying to impress her teacher?

  The not-stranger swore under his breath.

  “Do you remember how long you’ve been drinking it?” he asked.

  My chin jerked up, and it took a lot of energy to not scream at him. What a stupid question! How could he ask me if I remembered how long I’ve been doing anything? Who was he to question me like that? Didn’t he know who I belonged to?

  The thought scared me. I didn’t belong to Aleksei. What was happening to me?

  I’d been drinking the tea since the day Aleksei took me to that apartment. With horror I realized I didn’t know how many days or weeks ago that was. My hands trembled when I took the phone from my purse to check the calendar.

  The man came near me. His proximity messed with my poor mind even worse. The strong déjà-vu was like a punch to the gut. I wanted to double over in pain. I’ve been close to this body before. I could almost, almost remember it.

  I must have known him. I simply must have known him.

  “Don’t call him,” he said.

  I let the phone slip from my hand back into the purse.

  “I wanted to check when I got that phone,” I said. “He gave me the phone the day I moved in to that place.”

  That place. A few minutes ago, I’ve been thinking of that apartment as my home.

  “Four weeks,” he said. “You moved there four weeks ago.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  He threaded his fingers through my hair, cupping my head with infinite tenderness. My breath caught in my throat when he lowered his head, pressing his forehead against mine.

  “Do you trust me?”

  My heart skittered at the echo of those words inside me. I remembered asking Aleksei the same question the very first time we were alone in a room.

  “I don’t even know who you are,” I said, pulling my head back, desperate to break the intimate contact between us.

  His hands were still in my hair but he didn’t force me to stay skin to skin with him.

  “Of course you know,” he said and this time his voice sounded more than a little familiar.

  I believed that I knew him, despite not remembering him.

  “They say all men kiss differently,” I said. “Make me remember you.”

  My cheeks flushed with shame at the note of begging in my voice. I should storm out of that room and quench this unexpected desire using Aleksei’s body.

  His arm snuck behind my back as if he guessed that I was about to bolt out. He pressed me against his body, and buried his mouth in my hair

  I heard the strain and the smile in his voice when he spoke.

  “Why do you think you kissed me before?”

  My breasts tingled. I could not have been close to this man and not kissed him. Desire radiated from him, feeding my own desire. I wanted to resist it out of sheer stubbornness. The bed was literally inches away from us. Everything would be well if he took me there. No more confusing questions. No more haziness and fear.

  “Now I remember,” I said derisively. “Of course we never kissed before. You’re my dad.”

  Surprisingly, he laughed. It sounded like a bark which, to my confusion, conveyed mirth and relief. The shiver that coursed through me when he pushed me against the wall was not surprising, but it was confusing. Pleasure exceeded fear.

  “That’s right, baby,” he said in a husky voice that fed the embers of desire inside me.

  His lips hovered over mine. His hand had fisted in my hair painfully, keeping my head still, forbidding me to close to the distance to his lips.

  “You may call me Daddy.”

  My body throbbed in response to the words. This time there was no echo of my sessions with Aleksei. The fire started in my mind and spread through my body, fanned by suppressed memories.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  He shook his head and pressed his body harder into mine. It felt maddeningly familiar.

  “It will come to you,” he said, and I could hear hope and desperation in his voice.

  It was important for him that I remembered. A small voice in my head urged me to do everything in my power to please him.

  Nick

  The clock on the wall warned me that I was running out of time. I had two deadlines to beat. If I didn’t get her out of the hotel in the next hour, Aleksei Stepanov would come looking for her. If I didn’t get the adrenaline spike, the effect of the Spice might overcome the attraction she felt for me.

  I wished I had hours, days to seduce Skye all over again. I wanted to sneak through her defenses like a thief in the night. To use the privileged information, I had of her tastes and reactions in order to open her up to me. I didn’t want to force my way back into her mind.

  Unfortunately, I wasn’t a thief. I was a beggar and beggars couldn’t be choosers. I had to use what I had at my disposal. The first tool was a kiss.

  Her body responded immediately. The tension in her muscles changed. I could feel her move from frustration and confusion to hope and pleasure.

  Oh, what a lucky beggar I was! She opened her mouth and allowed me to explore her.

  “What’s my name?” she asked.

  I nearly called her Belle, but I stopped in time. Whatever I told her while she was so deep in the Spice fog, could stick in her mind forever.

  “I will tell you,” I promised, “when you remember my name.”

  If she considered complaining, that thought vanished from her mind when I walked her backward into bed. I wanted to kneel between her legs and tease her into a cascade of small orgasms.

  Time was not on my side. The sturdy wood columns in the corners of the bed would be perfect to tie her spread eagle. She always loved it when she was completely in my power. Back when she knew who I was. Even if she agreed now, this would not be real consent.

  Who would have thought that our lives depended on the missionary position?

  Chapter 19. Skye – “Skye”

  All the memories came flooding back when I screamed his name.

  “Nick! Oh, my God, Nick,” I kept repeating, touching his face frantically, as if to make sure he was really there, to make sure it was really him.

  He came full force inside me when I said his name. He must have struggled to hold back until I had my epiphany. He jumped out of bed as soon as he was done.

  He held out his hand toward me.

  “I love you, baby, and we’re going to do this as much as you want,” he said, “but now we have to run.”

  “What?” I said, shocked.

  “Your phone can be traced,” he said, grabbing my hand. “He can get here any moment.”

  He.

  Aleksei.

  My eyes grew round as I realized how totally dead I was going to be once the Stepanovs found out I was with the CIA. I owed my life to the people who built my legend for holding up to the inquiries the Stepanovs must have made about me.

  We hurried out of the room, and I couldn’t help snickering as we hurried to the elevator.

  “What?” Nick asked.

  “I was thinking of the advantages of having sex fully clothed,” I said.

  He relaxed a fraction. When we got to the elevator, I saw another familiar face. Viktor was standing there looking grim. This was turning into a family reunion.

  “Where are we going?” I asked.

  “There’s a plane waiting for us at a private airport outside the city,” Nick said.

  The elevator doors opened but something held me back. I couldn’t help feeling I was abandoning Aleksei.

  “Wait,” I said.

  Viktor put his hand on the elevator doors to s
top them closing and jerked his head toward me.

  “What?”

  “I can turn Aleksei Stepanov,” I said.

  Next to me, Woods took a controlled breath.

  “Are you fucking kidding?” Viktor asked. “We have a few hours, if we’re lucky, and you want to… what? Go back into the Stepanov compound and talk the next tsar into turning state evidence?”

  My mind had been asleep for weeks, but now it was working faster than ever.

  “If you get me out of here, what’s my future?” I said. “Months, maybe years of internal investigations about this mission, with no guarantee they will clear me in the end.”

  “Woods, say something,” Viktor said, turning to Nick.

  “We can’t make it in and out of their compound alive,” Woods said his eyes trained on me. “What’s your plan?”

  “I can send him a message,” he said. “He will come alone.”

  Viktor let out a harsh exhalation to express his disapproval and annoyance at my naivety.

  “He’s a bad motherfucker, but he’s not stupid,” Viktor said. “He has too many enemies to come without bodyguards, even if you promise to go through the whole Kamasutra with him.”

  “It’s not about sex,” I said, still looking at Nick. “It’s about trust.”

  A twitch of an eyebrow was all the outer display of Nick’s shock. I had a feeling he understood everything from that one word.

  “Trust goes both ways,” Nick said.

  I bowed my head in agreement.

  “It does,” I said. “You came for me.”

  “I will always keep you safe,” he said. “You feel responsible for his safety?”

  “Are you guys nuts?” Viktor asked, looking back and forth between Nick and me.

  “I got you out of Rikers, didn’t I?” I told Viktor. “I believed in you.”

  “I’m a fucking cop,” he said. “I was your asset. This guy is why we do this bloody business. These people are the monsters we hunt down.” He turned toward Nick again. “I thought you fixed whatever was wrong with her mind.”

  Nick nodded, still looking thoughtfully at me.

  “Her mind is fine,” he said. “If we go back with a prize, we’d all get more leniency about what we did here.”

  Viktor understood we were serious. He gave the original laconic answer.

  “If.”

  I ran back to the room, and got my phone. There were no missed calls from Aleksei. I had to believe that whatever Nick and Viktor had done to lure him away from me had kept him busy and he hadn’t checked my location. I sent him a two-word text: Come home.

  Chapter 20. Skye – Trust

  Viktor drove like a maniac to get to Aleksei’s mansion before he did. A mile from the house, he pulled over and let me get into the driver’s seat. He and Nick hid the best they could in the backseat, so they couldn’t be seen by potential witnesses.

  I was risking all our lives on the belief that Aleksei trusted me. It would be enough for him to check where my phone had been in the last hour, and he’d know about my thirty minutes in the hotel. If he checked the mansion’s security system, he could see the two men getting out of the car in his garage.

  He hadn’t done any of those things. Two hours later, he let me tie him in the chair.

  “Do you trust me?” I asked.

  “You know I do,” he said, tugging unconsciously at the restraints, testing their integrity.

  Trust, but not unconditional. I would have been proud of my beast if I weren’t so afraid for him.

  “I’m going to go away today,” I said.

  Aleksei froze. His eyes blazed with anger and pain. Beneath the fire, I sensed the acceptance of this information. At his core, Aleksei was a fatalist. He’d always expected me to betray him. To his father. To a business rival. To anyone who could pay for the betrayal of a prince.

  It made my heart bleed to see him so compliant, as if his fate had been long ago decided. I knew he would fight the executioners when they came. I knew he would kill himself if he was captured alive. He could not hope for a happy ending to his fairytale.

  He didn’t snarl or spit at me. He didn’t curse me. Underneath all the pain, I knew he was grateful for the moments of peace I gave him. I knew all too well how that felt. My own Master had tied me to him with bonds of gratitude and love that went beyond space and time.

  “I give you a choice, beast,” I said. “Stay in your world, no one will ever know your secret from me. Or cross over. Come in my world. I am a police officer and I will make sure you are given a new identity in return for information about the Russian mafia’s activities conducted on American soil.”

  He flinched as if I had slapped him when I said the word “police”. The frozen silence that descended between us stretched for a long time. I didn’t know what to expect. How long should I keep silent? Should I bring other arguments?

  I had never done this before. Never turned someone with words. I paid my informants. I lied to criminals. I leaned on witnesses to testify threatening to expose them to the very people they were afraid to speak against.

  If he said yes, could I trust him? Wouldn’t he put his big hands around my throat as soon as I released him from the chair? He would have time to snap my neck before Nick and Viktor got in the room. The only hope I had, if I could call it that, was that he’d want to strangle me, not snap my neck. That would give me a chance to press the panic button on the phone and be rescued, but probably my windpipe would be crushed. Alive and unable to speak.

  “Either choice you make,” I said in a warmer tone than I wanted, “we will never play our games again.”

  It was an odd thing to tell him, I realized. For a man who had to choose between two worlds, with death a real possibility in both of them, the games couldn’t weigh much.

  “If I say no?” he asked.

  “I’ll leave,” I said looking into his eyes again. “The door will lock behind me. You have about 24 hours of air in here. The generator probably won’t last that much, but it should take you at most six hours to break through the restraints.”

  The muscles bulging in his massive forearms made me amend my estimation.

  “Probably less,” I added, inordinately pleased at the thought that he would free himself sooner. “I didn’t change the code for the door. I’ll take your cell phone. The building is cut off from phones, water, gas and electricity. By the time you can mount a hunt for me, I’ll be a long way away.”

  “Very thorough,” he said. “And if I say yes?”

  “You will come with us to the States.”

  “Us?” he asked.

  “People came to rescue me,” I said.

  “Why didn’t they get you out of here before? Was this the plan all along? To get me to betray my family?”

  I looked past his shoulder for a moment, staring into the middle distance to center myself. Telling him the truth might work against me.

  “When you killed our agent but left me alive, they thought I defected. The people who came for me are my friends who risked their lives to get to me before the Agency’s assassins.”

  “Your Agency will kill you?”

  I nodded. “If I don’t leave Russia tonight, yes.”

  “If I say no, will you die?”

  “We all die,” I said. “But no, most likely they will not kill me if I make it home,” I added. “They will make sure administrative measures are taken against me. My career will crash and burn, but I’ll be fine.”

  “Then why give me this choice?” he asked, piercing me with his sparkling blue eyes. “If you don’t need me to save your life. For your career?”

  He almost spat the last words.

  “Because you are my beast,” I said eventually. “Your safety is important to me.”

  “Pity, Mashenka?” he asked softly.

  “Responsibility, beast,” I answered. “I will always be responsible for you.”

  “How ca
n I come with you?” His shoulders slumped and he was no longer straining his arms against the restraints. “Why would I turn my back on my family?”

  “You are not like them,” I said. “Deep down, you are a good man. A man who looked for freedom in these chains. I’m offering you a chance for absolution because I believe you want it.”

  “I’m not strong like you,” he said.

  “No. You’re stronger than me. Do you think I don’t know what it takes to submit to someone else? How much willpower it took for you not to disobey me. You never bowed to anyone in your life. Never feared anyone.”

  Now I remembered Mikhail Stepanov’s file. When Aleksei’s brother became a liability, Stepanov had asked Aleksei to execute his own brother. Faced with the terrible choice between his father’s command and his brother’s life, he had chosen to do his duty. The sense of duty ran deep, but duty had obliterated love.

  “Never loved anyone,” I added.

  The smallest start warned me I touched on a deep wound. Maybe he hadn’t come to terms with his own feelings. Could he accept that only his concept of duty bound him to his family?

  “Do you think I don’t know you?” I said, and I reached toward the restraints.

  My heart was pounding in my throat. It scared me how much I wanted him to accept my offer. It went beyond my professional pride, deeper than my need to have a bargaining chip in my dealing with the Agency.

  For the first time I glimpsed the complexity of my Master’s feelings for me. I wanted my beast to be safe.

  If he came with me, I had some form of control over his fate. I could look out for him. If he stayed, he’d be destroyed by his family. Sooner or later, they would see he wasn’t the monster they needed.

  As in a trance, I flipped open the clasp of the restraint that bound his left wrist. He held on to the armrest with a white knuckled grip.

  “I will respect your choice, Aleksei,” I said.

  He lifted his arm from the armrest. I knew what he was going to do before he did it. I didn’t step back when he put his hand on my throat. His palm was dry and warm. Instead of squeezing, he slid his hand to the back of my neck and pulled my head down until our foreheads touched. My legs shook as if I were in a stress position. It scared me to realize that I was allowing him to control me. Ceding power to Nick was a measure of my trust in him. How much did I trust Aleksei?