by Elise Faber
Then I smashed the rifle against my opponent’s temple.
He collapsed to the ground, tipping over and hitting the concrete like a tree dropping to the forest floor, rapidly and with a jarring noise. Sliding my weapon back over my shoulder, I took stock of my surroundings.
Stillness surrounded us, making my near-silent movements seem gunshot loud in the space, but I knew it wouldn’t be quiet for long.
Even now, I could hear the slight buzz of the earpieces the men had worn, their compatriots checking in on their fallen companions. Clearly, they wouldn’t get a response, which meant it was likely Dan and I wouldn’t be alone in the warehouse for long.
If they’d sent a crew to capture the files our source had brought—hell, if they’d cared enough to try (and succeed) in killing the source, they wouldn’t give up easily.
They were coming. And they were coming soon.
So . . . it was time to go.
I picked up my glasses, ran over to where Dan was, jumped over the wall, and opened my mouth—
Click.
“Stop fucking around,” I hissed, glaring at Dan even as I assessed him for injuries. He dropped the gun to his side, fumbled to secure it back in his holster, and I could see that blood had soaked through his shirt, making the black fabric stick to his skin. Just took one? Ha. The man was going to bleed out without help.
“Tie this for me,” he muttered, tearing open a field bandage from the kit we all had stored in our boots while on missions. It was hidden in the tongue of our footwear and coated with a special KTS-patented substance that would help with clotting.
He fumbled, starting to wrap it around the wound.
I grabbed the strip of material around his torso, binding it tightly and ignoring his grunt of pain. One, because it needed to be tight or he was going to bleed out on the floor. Two, we didn’t have time for me to dawdle over tying a delicate bow.
Three, I wasn’t exactly known for my bedside manner.
There wasn’t anything soft or sweet or gentle about me. Dan had witnessed that firsthand, so there was no need to sugarcoat anything.
Hard lines and barbed wire, bullets instead of Band-Aids, sharp words rather than kissed knees.
I’d never had any soft in my life, and at this point I didn’t want it.
Soft was useless. Hard could protect, could strike out before the hurt came. Hard was—
Booted feet on concrete.
Fuck.
I tied off the knot, hitched my shoulder under Dan’s, and started to heave him to his feet. But I’d barely begun to use my strength and he was up, looking far steadier than a man who’d just taken a bullet should.
He grabbed his pack, nodded toward the shadows. “Let’s go.”
Respect curled through me.
Unfortunately, as my gaze drifted to the wounded man’s ass, stayed there for a heartbeat too long, it wasn’t the only thing curling through me.
Bullets, barbed wire, and . . .
A hard on for one Dan Plantain.
One I’d had for too many years to count.
Fuck.
Three
KTS Satellite Headquarters
Munich, Germany
01:33hrs local time
Dan
I hissed at the burn of antiseptic trailing over my skin.
“This’ll be two weeks light duty,” Olive said.
My spine stiffened, an argument on the tip of my tongue.
“At minimum.”
Now, the argument escaped. Or at least one syllable before I was shut down. “I—”
“Nope,” Laila said, glancing up from the computer. “The first rule of KTS is no arguing with the doctor who’s patching up your ass. We only have one doc on the team and don’t want her to abandon us.”
Olive snorted. “You guys are the cool team,” she said. “I could never abandon you.”
“Shh,” Laila replied. “It’s the only way I have to keep this one in check. Or to not get any grand ideas about going off on his own.”
I huffed. “I don’t need the drama of running my own team all the time. It’s bad enough when I have to do it on occasion.”
The vast majority of KTS was broken up into teams of five to ten agents, each usually working as separate units. Sometimes we grouped up, if our missions overlapped, or reorganized briefly if a certain subset of skills was needed for a particular task. But for the most part, we each stayed with our own team, receiving an assignment and seeing it through to the end.
For the past two years, Laila’s team had been focusing on the Russian mob, and more specifically, focusing on one clan, which was heading what our team suspected was one of the largest human trafficking rings in the world.
There was a special place in Hell for people who harmed innocents.
And, one could hope, an even more special place for those who made their living by selling men, women, and children.
“I thought the first rule of KTS was to get the bad guys,” I said, clenching my jaw when a wave of pain washed over me as Olive poked and prodded at the wound on my back.
“Wrong,” Laila said. “That’s, at minimum, rule three.”
“What’s rule two?” I gritted, trying to keep my voice even as white-hot agony radiated through me.
“Rule two is to never argue with your team leader.”
“Sure it—” I broke off, biting back a curse when Olive did something that rained fire down my spine. Sweat beaded on my forehead, and my head went fuzzy. But I still didn’t want to be sidelined for fourteen fucking days. I’d had worse injuries, and the bad guys were still out there.
Starting with the ones who’d killed our source.
“Two weeks light duty,” Olive repeated. “And if you argue, I’ll make it three.”
I made a face, trying to keep my voice even. “You know my mom used to use that same threat with me,” I gritted.
“Did it work?”
Yes. Yes, it had.
But I didn’t admit that aloud. Instead, I focused on keeping still when I was really, really done with all the wound tending. Slap a Band-Aid on. Or hell, just rub some dirt in it and be done.
Fucking doctors.
Wanted to be all sanitary and shit.
But since Olive didn’t appear to intend to stop the doctoring anytime soon, I shut up and held still, my gaze moving from Laila, who was transferring files from the USB onto KTS’s servers, to Ava.
Tiny. Curvy.
Strong as hell. A woman who was a foot shorter than me and still could easily knock me to my ass, and I knew most of her dirty tricks.
But she always seemed to have more dirty tricks.
When I’d asked her about those tricks a week ago, while we’d been preparing for this mission, asked her how she’d become so adept at hand-to-hand combat, her pale brown eyes had filled with pain.
Such pain that I’d actually stepped toward her, wanting to take her into my arms, to hold her close and stroke a hand up and down her spine, promising that everything would be okay. I’d held her once, and it had soothed every ache inside me. But we’d been pretending since then—to only be teammates, that we had not been intimate for a week, that we hadn’t shared all of what we’d shared.
Glorious, physical satisfaction.
But so much more than that.
Or at least I’d thought it was more.
I’d shared. I’d opened up. And it was only later, after we’d come back to headquarters, when the job was starting up again and she’d gone back to being distant, that I’d realized what she hadn’t given.
I’d told her about growing up with apathetic parents, how that used to make me angry until I’d traveled around the world and seen so many other places. That was before I’d realized how much I’d had—a roof over my head, parents who didn’t have to choose between food and paying the electricity bill. Were they a little out of touch? Certainly. Did I have a closer relationship with my best friend’s mom rather than my own? Also, yes. Did I speak to my sister far more than ei
ther of them? Yes.
But I’d had a safe childhood.
And that was more than what most of the people we helped could say.
I also thought it was more than Ava must have had. Because the shadows in her eyes were reminiscent of those in so many of the people we saved.
But I couldn’t know for sure.
Because of what she didn’t give.
I knew nothing of her parents or how she’d grown up. I knew she appreciated good food, could eat a half-dozen peaches without getting sick, and could hold her whiskey but preferred it laced with lemonade.
I knew she giggled when she was buzzed, and I loved the sound, wanted to hear the quiet, unencumbered laughter all the time.
I knew that she was quiet but whip-smart and with a razor-sharp wit.
I knew she could take out a target at twelve hundred meters, that she could knock me to the mat as easily, that she would and had killed to protect.
I knew she was tough and a fighter and very skilled.
But I hadn’t even begun to know what made those shadows appear in her eyes at the gym a week before. She hadn’t let me in that deep during that week and had deliberately kept her distance afterward.
And the longing to know her, to understand her past, her future, her worries and fears and hopes and dreams had never gone away.
On that mat a week ago, with me fighting the urge to take her into my arms, Ava must have realized she’d given away something of what was beneath those walls—that she wasn’t merely the self-assured, confident yet distant agent she appeared to be to the rest of the team.
That she felt, and felt deep.
Except, I’d only caught a glimpse of those deep feelings before she’d shut down again, those pale brown eyes hardening . . . and then she’d taken me to my ass all over again.
Needless to say, I hadn’t been in any position to hand out hugs.
And the moment had passed.
We’d continued with our session—fighting hard enough and with enough intensity to be realistic practice, but not with the intention of wanting to hurt each other. Still, by the end, we’d been breathing rapidly, sweat sheeting our bodies, and each left with more than a few bruises.
I’d also been left with an ache.
To soothe her hurts—because I wasn’t a total asshole. But also to get inside the walls—because Ava was fascinating to me—and, fine, I might be a partial asshole—because I’d also been desperate to get in her pants again.
From the moment I had laid eyes on her, I’d been enthralled by the juxtaposition that was Ava.
Small, but mighty. Curvy, yet lithely muscled and graceful on her feet. Tiny, but able to take down targets twice her size. Glasses-wearing, yet the most talented sniper at KTS. Hard, so damned hard and impenetrable and unfeeling on the outside.
But I’d caught those glimpses of soft, of vulnerable.
Contradictions.
She was full of them.
Hence, my fascination.
And presently, the object of that fascination was propping up a wall opposite me.
Glaring at me.
As though she were thinking, how dare I have the audacity to get shot on her watch. I might have been affronted—it wasn’t like I’d been intending to get shot—except that Olive decided at that same moment to pull some Nurse Ratched bullshit with the exit wound on my back.
“Fuck,” I hissed, trying not to move even as it felt like she was digging her fingers into the injury.
“What’d you do?” Olive asked, not stopping, even when I squirmed. Her question was half-distracted, and I’d have given her my collection of dumbass yo-yos I’d started accruing in elementary school if she would only just stop.
“What do you mean?” I asked, sweat dripping down my temples.
A beat, her voice now completely distracted as she tugged hard on something. I bit back another curse, heard a plink as whatever she’d pulled from my back landed in the metal pan at her side. “It looks like you rolled around in gravel.”
“That’s . . . uh—” The edges of my vision went dark, and I blinked, rapidly, trying to clear it. “. . . basically what I—” I wavered, feeling my body lean forward, even as I could do nothing to stop it. “The floor was dirty and—”
A firm grip on my uninjured shoulder prevented me from faceplanting.
And finally, Olive stopped jabbing at me. “Too much?”
I opened my mouth to tell her I was fine, but Ava beat me to the punch. “Yes, Ollie. It’s too much.”
“I’m—” I began.
Olive didn’t argue with me or say anything further. Instead, I felt a prick, the slight sting of morphine hitting my system, and the pain immediately edged back.
“Thanks,” I murmured, giving in that I’d needed the relief, even as my eyes drifted to Ava’s.
She continued to hold on to me, fingers gripping my shoulder firmly. It was the most innocuous contact, and paired with a bone-deep ache across my chest and back, I knew I shouldn’t be so aware of it, shouldn’t be feeling it so intensely, as though those fingers were reaching into my soul and holding me in place.
And that was the morphine talking.
She shifted slightly, her fingers brushing along the bare skin of my arm. Her skin wasn’t silken, or at least not the skin on her hands. I’d felt silken skin in other places, but that covering her fingers and palm was calloused and work-worn, slightly rough against the back of my biceps.
Hers were the hands of action, of a woman who worked hard and put her life on the line at regular intervals.
I fucking loved her hands.
I wanted them to stay on my skin. No, I wanted her hand to drift lower. Or better, to gesture Laila and Olive out of the room and to let both of her hands do some investigating.
Further that, if I were making a list of all the things I was wanting, I wanted to not be wounded, to be back at my cabin in Georgia, for her to be touching me because she’d decided to let me into those walls and because she wanted me just as much as I wanted her.
That she wanted my body. No. That she wanted more. To see inside me. To allow me to help her carry every old hurt, every painful memory. Fuck, I’d take her just wanting my body, because at least I would have part of her again.
Even if it was a small part. Even if it was the only—
Another tug, another pulse of pain had me jumping.
“Sorry,” Olive said. “I’m almost done.”
My list of wants dissipated as I swallowed hard, my stomach churning, the black intruding on the edges of my vision again. Fuzziness intruded on my thoughts, my tongue feeling thick and furry, my fingertips tingling. I found it suddenly difficult to make my lips form words as a pleasant floating feeling descended through me.
“You’re not going to yak, are you?” Ava’s question made me blink rapidly, struggling to focus.
But then that focus narrowed to her, to her fingers on my skin, to her pretty brown hair that was the color of . . . “Mud,” I said, my mouth feeling like it was packed with cotton.
“Mud?” she asked.
I nodded, felt my head spin in the process, and reached up to press at my temples. Maybe that would stop the whirling.
“What’s mud?” she pressed.
More blinking. More temple pressing. “What?”
A sigh. “Dan, what’s the deal with the mud?”
“Your hair,” I said. “It’s so pretty—”
Ava’s eyes drifted over my shoulder. “How much morphine did you give him?”
“Too much, apparently,” Olive said. “He never takes the stuff. I formulated the dose for his weight.”
“Light bones,” I told them.
“What?” they both asked.
“I’m a light bones.”
“Lightweight,” Ava said. “I think you mean lightweight.”
“Yes, that.” I nodded again, and it was really hard to get my head back up. “I’m a lightweight, and your hair is the color of mud, and it’s so pretty, and�
��”
Ava’s gaze darted back to mine.
“—and I want to touch it.”
Her eyes widened, lips parting.
And I passed out.
Four
KTS Satellite Headquarters
Munich, Germany
01:46hrs local time
Ava
Holding the hulking mass of muscle against me so he wouldn’t tumble off the table and hit the tile floor, I turned my head toward Laila and lifted a brow.
“Mud?”
My friend, and perhaps the single person on the planet who knew why I hid my emotions behind thick, protective walls, grinned. “But it’s so pretty.”
“Shut up, you,” I muttered.
Laila giggled and glanced back at the computer screen, where she was going through the USB we’d recovered. The files had already been encrypted and sent to KTS’s main headquarters, where they would be gone over with a fine-tooth comb by a team that specialized in this kind of data. But we wouldn’t be good agents if we just sent off intel without learning every bit of information we could. Each agent had some technical capabilities, and while we might not be able to compete with the tech team on all levels, we could hold our own. Plus, we had been trained to be nosy, to squeeze all of the juice out of the proverbial orange, to turn the puzzle over and over and over until it was solved. So, it wasn’t exactly a surprise that we’d be diving deep into the data.
There was a chain of command, of course, which was why the files had been sent off, and why Laila would be leaving in the next few days or so with the hard copy of the data to take back to headquarters. She would personally meet with the tech team while she was there.
The difference between KTS and other agencies was that while their agents followed the chain of command, we also worked outside of it. Laila’s team’s directive was to take down a part of the Russian mob—the Mikhailova clan—and we wouldn’t stop until that was done. For that reason, we didn’t leave the data-combing solely to our techs, just as our techs didn’t spend all their time chained to their desks.
Every agent had skills in combat, in hacking, in compartmentalizing and analyzing information to look for patterns and trends and anomalies.
