by Elise Faber
Yes, that was a direct quote.
Yes, she had the actual T-shirt with the quote emblazoned on the front.
But I digress. For whatever reason, Ava was here, talking to me, and I was soaking up every second. Feeding my addiction, desperate to grasp on to any way to strengthen that thread connecting me to her.
Her eyes danced. “I can hear you thinking, ‘It really is that bad, Ava.’”
“What?”
She laughed, and I felt that husky sound deep in my heart. “I believe we’ve already established that you and the word ‘rest’ don’t really go hand-in-hand.”
I barely heard her words, I was so struck by her laugh.
I hadn’t heard it in two long-ass years.
And—
If you want her to ever hang around and laugh and talk to you again, dumbass, focus and say something charming.
The mental voice was Brit’s.
Namely, because my sister had been giving me shit from the moment she’d emerged from the womb.
And also because she was normally right.
As she was in this case.
“Thanks for saving my ass,” I told Ava, giving in to the fatigue washing over me and sitting down on the bed. “I wouldn’t have made it out of there without you.”
“You’ve saved my ass more than once.” A shrug, her expression cooling, and I had the distinct impression that I’d said both the right and the wrong thing. She didn’t like it when people thanked her for simply doing her job, I knew. But I also understood that she took pride in her work and wouldn’t entirely hate having me, as a colleague, compliment her on her skills.
“How many did you take out?” I asked.
Another shrug. “Just four.”
I grinned. Only Ava would say just four. “How many shots?”
The tension left her shoulders, and she perched onto the bed next to me. “One.”
“Ah,” I said, trying to pretend that having her so close was no big deal. “You showed off your trickiness on the others.”
She rolled her eyes. “It’s not trickiness. It’s skill.”
“I’ll remember that next time you take me to the ground.”
A ghost of a smile. “I—”
The door opened, and she jumped, hopping to her feet, her gaze zeroing in on the person—on Olive—entering. Since I’d done the same—albeit with less hopping and jumping—I didn’t laugh at her reaction.
I was aware, however, that it looked bad for both of us for Ava to be jumping away from me when Olive came in.
How did I know this, one might ask?
Because Olive’s smug expression and raised eyebrow were impossible to miss.
The words, “It’s not what you think” were on the tip of my tongue, but since saying that would be akin to admitting to the very thing that was making Olive’s expression smug and what was most certainly the absolute last thing that Ava wanted, I bit my tongue. Saying those words aloud would probably also earn me a third bullet wound, one that would be courtesy of Ava and her prized possession, a rifle named Luna.
I’d been shot once in the last twenty-four hours.
That was enough.
When neither Ava nor I said anything, Olive closed the door and moved over to the wall of cabinets, peppering me with questions about how I was feeling while washing her hands in the sink. She shut off the faucet, pulled on some gloves, and tugged at the corner of the bandage.
“Looks good,” she said, poking at the edges of the wound.
I was barely aware of the doctor’s actions, my focus on Ava, her face going blank as she turned away from me, went to the computer, and bent to snag the flash drive from the computer.
Then she was gone.
The door shutting behind her with the barest sound.
And I was left with the feeling that I’d made both progress in getting behind those heavy walls of hers, and that I’d also helped supply her the rebar to strengthen them.
Six
KTS Satellite Headquarters
Munich, Germany
06:37hrs local time
Ava
I pushed into the gym and stopped.
“Seriously?”
Dan glanced up at me with a guilty expression, quietly setting the weight he’d been lifting down. “What?”
It had been two days since the mission. One since he’d passed out unconscious.
And approximately seven minutes since Olive and Laila had left for KTS’s main headquarters.
“This is rest?” I asked, nodding at the weight bench.
“It’s light.”
Since the thirty-five-pound dumbbells he’d been casually lifting were damn near my maximum, I simply lifted a brow and said, “Would Olive think these are light?”
A flash of temper on his face, one I saw so infrequently that it actually took me by surprise, his dark tone even more so. “I like and respect you, Ava,” he muttered. “But you’re neither my mother nor my doctor. I’ve played by Olive’s rules for twenty-four hours and will continue to do so.” He picked the weight back up and began curling it again. “I promised to do light duty for two weeks,” he said. “I’m not back-flipping over here. I’m exercising—if sitting on my ass and lifting less than half my normal weight can be considered exercising.”
His irritation should have been off-putting.
Instead, it made him more likeable.
I’d never seen him grumpy, and seeing him a little grouchy made him seem more human, especially after I’d elevated him onto such a tall pedestal for these last years. Maybe we weren’t quite the leaps and bounds apart I’d always thought. Maybe we were just two people who—
And that was the crazy talking.
Dan, as an agent, was admirable. He was the kind of even, steady co-worker who I knew I could rely on. Ego didn’t get in his way, and he wasn’t afraid to lead if the situation required it, or to step back and let others take charge.
Dan, as a man, was similar. He was smart, funny, even-keeled. And while he was confident, he wasn’t one of those guys who had to prove his dick was big—
Speaking of which . . . those sweatpants he was wearing, yo.
They were definitely pointing to the fact that he had nothing to prove on that front—it was a simple fact of nature.
He shifted and I tore my gaze away, fully aware this was dangerous territory.
Talk of pedestals and similarities and thinking we had anything more in common than our line of work was insane.
“I’m well-aware of my limits,” he said.
“You’re right,” I agreed.
“And,” he rattled off, picking up the weight and curling it again, and I didn’t think he’d actually heard me, had just expected me to disagree with him exercising, so was already prepared with his counterargument. “I also know that I can’t expect to sit on my ass for a few weeks and come out of this strong.”
“You’re right,” I repeated.
“And further that,” he began.
I sat on the bench next to him, snagged the weight from his hand. “Dan,” I said. “I just told you you’re right twice in fifteen seconds. Take the victory and shut up.”
“You—” He froze. “You just said I was right?”
“Yeah, yeah,” I mock-grumbled, setting the weight on the floor. “Don’t rub it in.”
A smile curved his lips, and I inhaled, my hands curling into fists. The urge to reach out and touch him was strong, so strong that I actually found myself standing again, heading toward the door.
This was why I didn’t spend time with him any longer, why I hardly spent time with anyone. Laila was the only exception, and my team leader had pretty much bullied me into friendship, or at least, she’d pestered me into it, dragging Olive into the mix for good measure. But those connections made me nervous. Shit got real when feelings were involved, and I’d been careful to not feel anything more than respect and professional admiration for anyone.
First Laila. Then Olive. Then Dan—
No.
“Hey.”
His voice was close enough that I had to lock down my body in order to not react and not to react violently.
Calm. Calm.
The man was recovering from a gunshot wound.
I could not knock him on his ass.
“You okay?”
Slightly hysterical laughter bubbled up in my throat, and I swallowed hard to prevent it from escaping. “Just peachy,” I said, reaching for the door handle.
Except for the fact that I was ridiculously attracted to this man I worked with, a man who was dangerous to me, who was insightful and would look too deeply into my past, who, once he knew all the dark fucking secrets of said past, would look at me in disgust.
That was the danger that laid down the path of me thinking I might be able to have a normal relationship with anyone, with him.
That couldn’t be.
His hand dropped onto my shoulder, spun me gently to face him. “What is it, Ava?”
I took a page out of his book and said, “I’m fine.”
“That’s a lie,” he said. “Something happened. And it’s not me getting shot or Olive’s orders. What put that look into your eyes?”
My past.
That’s what put it into my eyes.
My past once again reminding me that I wouldn’t ever be normal.
“Dan,” I said, shaking my head, stepping out from beneath his hand. “I—”
And fucking horror of all horrors, my voice broke.
He came closer, reached out as though he were going to hug me. God, it was pathetic how much I wanted to be hugged by him, to be held gently against his chest. The last time the team had been in San Francisco, I’d watched him hug his sister, had envied the statuesque blond hockey player.
I hadn’t ever been hugged.
Not by a parent. Not by a family member. Not by a friend or lover. I’d not known what I was missing at first, and later, I hadn’t been able to let anyone get that close.
But Dan had hugged me.
That week on the orchard he’d held me close, stroked his fingers through my hair.
And I’d liked it . . . too damned much.
“Don’t,” I said, skittering back when he came closer.
One sharp word.
“Hey,” he said, his hand brushing my arm again, “you can—”
One sharp movement.
I spun out of his grip in one of those moves I’d practiced over and over and over again in my twenty-nine years, until it had become instinctive, until it had been permanently ingrained in my muscle memory.
“Oof,” he grunted as I pinned him against the door, my elbow to his throat.
“Don’t,” I repeated, holding him for only a second before guilt swelled up and bubbled over. I was manhandling someone who’d been shot all of two days before. What kind of sick fuck did that?
A Toscalo did.
A member of my fucked-up family did.
Because violence was ingrained in my blood, my history, my DNA.
Because I was just as bad as the rest of them.
“Ava—”
I pushed past him, wincing again when he grunted in pain. But I didn’t have the strength to stop, not when my eyes burned with tears, not when I was feeling so weak inside.
Not when I might reveal everything.
Seven
KTS Headquarters
Northeast England
15:05hrs local time
Dan
It wasn’t until two weeks later that I saw Ava again.
After the incident at the gym, I’d stifled the urge to go after her, deciding she needed some space. But a few hours later, when I’d gone to the room she’d been assigned, I’d found it empty, any sign of her presence erased.
Well, except for the faint scent of peaches in the air.
But no clothing had been left behind, the bed had been stripped. All of the towels had been removed from the attached bathroom, the sink cleaned, the counters wiped down.
Ava was gone, having requested leave to coincide with the light duty I was on for two weeks.
She’d left me in Munich, split off from my team while they dealt with the information on the flash drive.
Not that they’d intentionally cut me out.
Ava had given me my own copy of the data, asked me to get my brain working on making heads or tails of it until I felt up to traveling to KTS’s main headquarters and meeting up with them. So, I’d hung in Germany for a few days, recovering on Olive’s orders, feeling mostly fine, if a bit weak still, but I hadn’t returned to England right away because part of me had expected Ava to show up. For us to go through the files together.
Before the gym incident, we might have.
Before I’d pushed, she might have stayed, might have allowed me to inch closer.
But I’d pressed her.
And she’d gone.
Some agent, huh?
I’d been impatient and driven Ava away, and now I’d spent the last two weeks pouring over some fucking files on a flash drive that made up a puzzle I didn’t have any clue how to solve.
Now, I itched to apologize, even knowing she would dismiss it, that she would pretend I had nothing to say sorry for.
And as stupid as it was, as clear as she’d made it to me she didn’t want it, I still wanted to hug her.
To hold her close and erase whatever had made her so sad.
Which was laughable, I knew that.
Still, even with me knowing that, the urge to comfort didn’t go away. I was a protector by nature. She was a teammate, and that alone would have been enough for me to put my life on the line for her. But she was also a person I respected, and just because she could hit a target from over a thousand meters and could kick my ass in hand-to-hand combat didn’t mean that the urge to protect just disappeared.
Of course, all of that was complicated by the fact that she was a woman I wanted with a need that bordered on desperation.
I’d had a glimpse of that oasis in the desert, and I wanted more.
“Thanks for coming,” the object of that desperation said to the small group that had gathered in the conference room.
Our whole team was there—Laila and her husband, Ryker, Olive, me, and Ava.
Five people with one goal. Five people who made up one of many teams at KTS, all with that same goal.
To protect the innocent.
In whatever format that required.
We all murmured our greetings then sat back and got ready to listen. Ava hooked up a laptop to a dongle, and the familiar files I’d been going through line-by-line over the last two weeks appeared on the monitor on the wall.
Lettuce.
Fucking lettuce shipments.
It made no sense. We all knew the data on the USB couldn’t just simply be lettuce shipments, but neither our team, nor the specialized technical arm of KTS had been able to unearth any hidden data or deduce a code that indicated the seemingly innocuous shipments and invoices were more than produce.
We would keep working, of course, but none of us had made any headway to date.
Except, perhaps, Ava.
Because she had heavy dark circles under her eyes, and though her cheeks were pinkened as if she’d spent too much time in the sun, her skin beneath that reddened patch was pale.
She glanced at Laila, who nodded encouragingly.
“We all know this isn’t about lettuce.” She tapped a button on the keyboard, and lines appeared on the screen, circling and highlighting data. I watched as the program ran, rearranging columns and shifting rows, pooling the information within until . . . holy shit.
My mouth dropped open. Because was that really—?
“This isn’t just about the Mikhailova clan,” she said. “It’s also about the Toscalo family.”
Eight
KTS Headquarters
Northeast England
15:09hrs local time
Ava
I stared at the screen, watchin
g the program I’d spent every minute of the last week writing work. From the moment I’d first seen the correlation, the possibility that this ring had involved my family had been churning around in my head.
It was why I’d been so rattled during the incident with Dan.
The possibility had occurred to me that morning, one that seemed all too likely based on the knowledge I carried from my childhood. And even though I’d wanted to pretend it wasn’t the truth, wanted to avoid the reality that my family had dipped low even on their scale of despicable, the evidence was there.
They were working with the Mikhailova clan, and they were trading in people.
In. People.
Fucking disgusting.
And I’d grown up in their painful embrace.
I wanted to pretend to be unaffected and unbothered that the people who were responsible for my being on this planet were fucking evil.
Turned out, pretending didn’t make a fucking bit of difference.
Two weeks ago in Germany, I’d deduced the first piece, the tendril of a memory coming to the surface as my eyes had fallen onto a line of data. I’d remembered a code shown to me in boastful pride to hide protection money my family collected from the businesses on their streets, and . . . it had fit.
I’d needed to move, to take a break, to avoid the truth.
I’d gone to the gym that morning and I’d stumbled upon the very man who could so easily deduce that truth, could see too deeply, could perceive what was lurking beneath my calm mask.
Now I was about to share part of that truth, part of the secret I’d hidden from everyone save Laila. But even she didn’t know the full breadth of my depravity, couldn’t begin to understand all the things I’d seen and done and blindly turned an eye to.
The memories of those deeds, those horrible events, those actions I would never be able to make right, meant I’d ended up in the gym with a need to run and sweat and work myself into oblivion. I’d been so off my game and too easily read and frankly . . . too fucking fragile. So after that conversation in the gym, I’d known I’d needed to go, had needed space to think without constantly feeling rubbed raw by Dan and his presence.
