Ziya leaned back and took hold of her tee shirt and hoodie and drew them up, inch by torturous inch.
What emerged was satin skin clad in a red, lacy fantasy that made breathing hard.
Her arms were browned from working hard in the sun and the olive skin acted as a terrific foil against the blood red of the chemise she wore. Her breasts almost spilling out at the edge, her ribs outlined against the thin material.
His hands clenched at her thighs in an involuntary gesture.
Krivi swallowed and Ziya chuckled, running a shaking hand through his hair, down the corded muscles of his shoulder and then, rested against his pounding, thundering heart.
She wrapped her legs around his waist and came forward nipping at his lips, the abrasive lace rasping against his smooth chest.
Krivi crushed her against him, and kissed her back rapaciously, thrusting his tongue into the soft cavern of her mouth with all the desperation of a dying man.
Ziya tugged at his belt buckle between them, but she couldn’t maneuver too much because of the way she was plastered against him. She was absolutely ready for what was to come next, and the hardness against her thigh gave her evidence that he was too.
Extremely.
“Make love with me,” she sighed.
He bit at her lower lip and then sucked it in a soothing motion. Her spine melted and she went back on the bed.
Krivi followed her, his rough hands delicious against the friction of the lace and her soft skin beneath. Her stomach muscles quivered as he inched the chemise up.
“Now,” she ordered as she grabbed his hand and pulled at the edge of her chemise, effectively rending it in two.
Her gorgeous breasts filled his hands and he almost lost his head.
She urged him down, down her chest and sighed as his mouth made contact with a hardened nipple. She arched her back, when he sucked it in, swirled it around his hot mouth and then used his tongue.
Ziya tore at his hair as he made sweet, thorough love to her and she curled her legs around his waist, anxious, needy to him. Needing it with an intensity that was entirely foreign to her.
“I need you, Krivi,” she whispered in his ear.
~~~~~~
He straightened from kissing her.
Krivi looked down at the soft, warm; willing woman in is ears and felt a dull battering inside his chest that had nothing to do with the raging desire boiling his blood. He came to his senses when the battering shattered the fog of desire and his sense of duty reasserted itself.
He sat up on his haunches.
Ziya looked confused. Delicious and mussed up, with the edges of red lace floating around her as she held her thin arms out to him. “Krivi?”
He ran a shaking hand through his hair and scooted further back on the bed. He ended on the rocky shore, the pebbles poking his butt and the backs of his thighs.
“You should get dressed.”
Her eyes rounded, uncertainty paling her face as she sat up, slowly, covering her breasts with the tattered edges of the chemise.
“What’s wrong?” she asked in a strong voice.
“This is.”
Ziya swallowed at the utter conviction and flatness of his answer. “Why?”
He looked at the lapping water, black, endless and didn’t answer for a long moment.
“Four years ago, a car bomb blew up my best friend and my wife who was four months pregnant. I worked for MI5 then.”
~~~~~~
Ziya took a deep, steadying breath because she had a feeling a lot worse was to come. She was also silent, knowing words couldn’t make anything better.
“Gemma, Joe’s wife, she was the love of my life. We were having an affair for most of their marriage, and he never noticed it because he was a good soldier, a good spy. I still don’t know whose kid it was that she was carrying when she…when they…”
Ziya swallowed; an audible sound and went stone cold. Because suddenly, it was as if a light had been switched on and everything became terribly clear. The hardness in him, the sense of separation she had felt in him.
The way he was so terrifyingly not afraid of death.
“I don’t want to know…"
Krivi gave her a quiet look. “You have to know. Because you’re involved in a way that I wish to god you weren’t.”
“I don’t understand.” She was so cold. So very cold.
“After they died… I went a little crazy. I took up any odd, dangerous job that came my way. And Explosive Ordnance Disposal was the worst of all. I came to know then that their attack was planned by a dangerous, demented terrorist named The Woodpecker. He is ruthless, cunning and no one’s seen his face so it is fucking impossible to catch him.”
“I see.” It was all she could say.
“I was working K&R, Kidnapping and Ransom, in Ladakh, when my ex-boss called me and told me of a DNA test that had confirmed a sibling of The Woodpecker. A ninety percent match…extremely viable for these kinds of tests. The target was in Kashmir.”
Ziya’s jaw dropped, because the look he gave her was the equivalent of a condemnation.
Her heart shattered, just clean shattered at the condemnation; there was no other way to feel it.
“No,” she said vaguely. “You can’t tell me—"
“I volunteered to observe the target and find out if she was in any way related to The Woodpecker, in any way contacting him or, generally abetting his killing activities. I also volunteered because I wanted to put a bullet in his head when I saw The Woodpecker,” he ended simply. Ruthlessly.
“I am the target.” She made her voice deliberately toneless.
He shrugged his massive shoulders. “You fit the profile. Your birth years match and you share a physical resemblance that is hard to miss.”
“What’s that?” Her voice was stronger than the rapid beating of her heart.
“Gray eyes, olive skin.”
“Thousands of people have gray eyes and olive skin.” Logic burned away the black mist of anger and grief beginning to wrap her.
“Yeah, but thousands of people are not orphans abandoned around the time that The Woodpecker’s suspected mother died in a hospital in London, giving birth to a baby girl who weighed six pounds and five ounces and was declared dead for the first thirty seconds of her life.”
Ziya took a steadying breath. It didn’t steady her in the slightest. “You do know everything about me.”
Krivi didn’t bother to agree. “I shouldn’t have kissed you, shouldn’t have looked at you. I know that. I am sorry if I hurt you, Ziya,” he said; regret making his voice deep and heavy. “You have no idea how sorry I am for that.”
She leveled cold, dead eyes at him and asked, “Am I a terrorist’s sister then?”
He shook his head.
“So you have no reason to spy on me anymore?”
He shook his head again.
Ziya picked up her hoodie with precise movements, holding onto the chemise with one hand while she zipped it up over her arms and shoulders. Then she turned to him and smiled.
It was a smile devoid of any emotion and all the more terrible for it.
“When we get back to Goonj, and we are going back at daybreak, you are fired. Please consider this your two weeks’ notice.”
Then she stood up, erect and dignified even though she felt so broken inside she knew there was no putting back together of this hurt. This humiliation. This…pain. And she made herself take one step, and another and then another.
And when she reached the tent, she opened the flap, slipped inside and shut it behind her.
Ziya lay down on her sleeping bag and promised herself she wouldn’t cry. She couldn’t cry over someone like him.
A spy, a murderer, a man intent on killing someone else. An adulterer. And all the pain and sadness coalesced into pure anger that filled her with righteous, burning indignation. That kept her awake too, but she could take a sleepless night or two.
Or twenty.
When daybreak came, she had kept h
er promise.
She didn’t cry over a man who deserved nothing from her.
And she didn’t give him another glance.
STEP TWO: INVESTIGATION
DECEMBER 2012
Nineteen
Regency Park
London
Three Weeks to Christmas
Ziya considered herself a woman of movement and speed.
If there was something that needed to be done, she did it. If there was a chore that needed to be completed, she completed it first and then took her time off. She knew where she was going, what she wanted and she never, ever second-guessed her own decisions.
People, who didn’t have anyone to depend on, had to be self-sufficient… enough for themselves.
But as she strolled the flatware section of Harrod’s, with an excited Noor sweeping ahead to make yet more choices for the big engagement party scheduled the next week, she realized that the thing that had been dragging her down, bit by bit, was lethargy.
Lethargy of a sort she’d never encountered before.
It was lethargy of the soul… of those lonely, needy parts of her that she’d thought she’d successfully repressed, blocked and shoved into the darkest depths of her heart.
A terrorist’s sister.
Ziya swallowed against the sudden bile that rose in her throat.
She had always wondered about the identity, the legacy and the genetics of the people she had come from.
Like any lonely, orphaned child who had spent way too much time in the dark, bleak places that passed for Children’s Homes in any country, including Britain, she had formed fantasies, scenarios in her head. About her mom and her dad, who would come and rescue her from the life she was forced to live. Dreams of ice-creams on Sunday and a woman that always smelled of cookies and milk.
Every child had these dreams.
Until the first time Child Services had tried to place her in foster care. And they had handed her, her birth certificate that she’d clutched in her tiny fist with all the hope of a devotee going to Mecca.
At her first foster home, there had been an older kid. A giantess (to Ziya’s diminutive six-year-old height) named Becca.
Becca had snatched the piece of paper that gave the little girl her identity and started reading the particulars out loud.
Name: Ziya Maarten.
Born on: 13th May, 1983 at Kenworthy County Hospital, South London.
Mother: Tess Maarten, deceased.
Father: Unknown.
And she had cried, cried because all the little dreams she’d had, vague, fragmented dreams of a loving father and a beautiful mother and a family that loved her had been torn apart that day. She had no one; she had no one to love her. And she never would, if Becca the Giantess had had her way.
Ziya stopped wishing for the moon that day.
Because caring meant hurting so much it was unbearable.
She coasted along, skated on the edges of the life that other people lived with such a boundless capacity for joy. They fell in love, they married and raised families; they laughed and lived life. Taking every moment, trusting someone to not hurt them unbearably.
But love involved getting hurt unbearably.
It was a writ rule, somewhere, she was sure of that.
So, she’d gone nearly thirty years without love. Without connecting with a man in that basic sense that was supposed to make the world go round.
She’d had Noor for a family, and through her, Sam and both their families who were raucous, boisterous… who always welcomed Ziya with open arms. She was fulfilled, alone and content with being exactly like this.
Solitary, skating along the edges. Focusing on her career and travel.
Rootless and free-spirited, untied by emotions and the bonds that came with it.
Until Goonj.
Until she’d come to a place and fell in love with it, made it home. It became home, it lodged in her heart, taking the place of all those nameless, faceless feelings of belonging and contentment she’d always craved. It was home and she lived there, she worked there and she loved it.
And then Krivi Iyer had come along.
Silent, brooding, invading her mind with dark eyes full of unspeakable pain. With his quick mind and strong shoulders she’d dreamed of leaning against. Especially, after he’d saved her from Sanjay Yug.
How could a man be so thoroughly heartless as to invade and destroy someone’s life?? He must have had no conscience to deliberately insinuate himself into her life, to become an invaluable part of it, and all for the sake of God and country.
A terrorist’s sister.
It didn’t even bear thinking about.
She only thought about the adulterer who had somehow gotten a last attack of conscience and effectively ended what little dreams she had tried to harbor about that elusive emotion called love.
She’d wanted to give her heart to him. And if they had made love, no, had sex, it was exactly what she would have done.
He was perfect heartbreak material. A hero, a man who spoke less and who kissed her as if he wanted to do nothing else.
And he had deliberately, intentionally cultivated all those feelings, expertly manipulating her into telling him all about her pathetic life, all those places she had traveled to and all the while he had been trying to check out if, during any of those holidays, she had hooked up with her brother, the terrorist.
A terrorist’s sister.
No one thought of the families. The people connected to those monsters who murdered people, who killed them for sport, for religion, for land and money.
People just condemned and he had condemned her without knowing the first thing about her.
Even when he had found no evidence to support his horrendous, preposterous claim he had condemned her.
Noor had been surprised, distraught when he had left with barely a goodbye, the minute they had reached home. And Ziya had been close-mouthed as usual, trying to function, to come to grips with everything he had told her.
She hadn’t been able to, and not seeing him; just made it easier for her to believe it was all a terrible dream. Just a dream she had thankfully woken up from.
But, lately the fog of numbness and self-delusion was wearing thin.
Work was no protection against the memories and the foolish yearnings of her broken heart.
Ziya wanted to simply hate Krivi for the heinous things he had accused her of.
And, in the beginning she had. With a quiet determination and stubbornness that had kept her sleepless every night for weeks.
She’d hated him and thought of nothing but everything she could have done to make him suffer like he had made her suffer with a few, well-chosen words.
He had destroyed her well-ordered, safe, little world with his accusations and the approach he had used to confirm their invalidity.
But, eventually her ineffable sense of logic had taken over, eroding the anger and she had realized he was just doing his job. Catching the bad guy. And he had used her in order to do it. That kind of job required one to do unconscionable things, and he was evidently comfortable with doing them without batting an eye lash.
After a long four months, she had even resigned herself to forgiving him for what he had done. To the way he had lied and spied on her.
Because, to her shame and regret and infinite sadness, God and country did come before Ziya Maarten’s broken, foolish, yearning heart.
But, he hadn’t had to kiss her.
He hadn’t had to save her life and be the goddamn hero of her dreams and make her…wish. Wish for things she had long ago forced herself to accept were never going to come to pass.
He could have told her, straight out from the beginning about his secret activities and she could have saved him six months’ worth of covert investigation. Failing that, when they had become…intimate, he could have come clean then.
He should have.
There was no forgiving that.
He had been willing to make
love, have sex, with a terrorist’s sister in order to do his job and catch the bad guy.
Ziya swayed blindly in the middle of the flatware section, catching the end of a table to steady herself.
Grief, bitter and acrid, rose up in a wave and she wanted to be violently sick. Her eyes smarted with the pressure she exerted in order to not vomit on the fifth floor of Harrod’s.
She swallowed the nausea back and waved weakly at Noor who was talking earnestly with the planner and texting Sam the details of the choices she was making.
It was over.
Everything was over, Ziya thought. There was no point in thinking about Krivi Iyer or what he had said to her, because it was untrue. She was no terrorist’s sister, she was no one. Just plain Ziya Maarten, manager of Goonj Enterprises in the Kashmir Valley.
An orphan, a lone ranger.
Everything had burned out.
The anger, the grief, the awful sadness that had made her cry some nights in her sleep. She had been disgusted with herself when she woke up to wet cheeks in the morning, but those instances had entirely stopped by now, six months later. Thank god.
The hit on her self-esteem she could handle, because it was easy building it up. She had great friends, a wedding to plan and a job that consumed all her energy, interest and passions.
It was her fragile heart that she didn’t know how to mend.
Krivi Iyer had broken it so thoroughly when he left, that he might as well have placed an explosive around it and blown it up inside her chest. And now she was moving, trying to cope with the disastrous aftermath of having shrapnel floating around her body, ready to move in for the kill at the slightest invitation.
She was sincerely glad she had never told him she had been dangerously close to falling hopelessly for him because she wasn’t sure she would have been able to live with the pity and condemnation she would have seen in his beautiful eyes.
It would have killed her as surely as that bomb in Pehelgam was meant to.
Ziya took a deep, calming breath and looked at Noor and the wild gestures she was making, which usually meant a crisis of some sort. It could be serviettes or dessert spoons. It could be china patterns or a broken nail.
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