Primal Bargains

by Raleigh Davis

  I see her climb back through the window. She looks back once, her eyes burning with anger. With one hand I reach out, the other cupping the fiery pain in my balls. But I can’t reach her.

  I don’t even think I can have kids anymore. I curl up on the floor and pray to die. And pray that the thief has broken her neck jumping out of the window.

  Rustem comes rushing in what feels like hours later. “What happened?”

  “Go.” I gesture to the window. My voice is creaky. “She went that way.”

  “She?” He frowns but looks out the window. “I don’t see anything.”

  “Motherfucker.” I grit my teeth and curl up into a tighter ball. “She fucking got away again.”

  Last time she shoved me down some stairs. This time she gelded me. I’m going to enjoy catching her so much.

  “That was a woman?” Rustem crouches next to me, watching me with detachment.

  “Yes.” I bang my head against the floor. “It was a woman. And she was going right for the safe.”

  Rustem shakes his head. “Why weren’t you wearing a cup?”

  I blink at him, my mouth dropping open. “Why the fuck would I wear a jockstrap in my own house?”

  He shrugs. “So things like this don’t happen. You have to be prepared.”

  “Are you wearing a cup right now? Do you always wear a cup?”

  “A man has to be prepared,” he says mysteriously.

  “Do you wear it to bed?”

  He doesn’t say anything, which I take to be a yes.

  I shake my head. “Must be interesting for your sex life.”

  Feet come pounding through the downstairs. Then up the stairs.

  “Shit.” I pull myself to a sitting position as best I can.

  “I saw the whole thing on the cameras. Are you okay?” Tess demands the moment she sticks her head in the room. Her hair is falling down around her shoulders, her eyes are bright, and her cheeks are flushed. Even with the worry on her face—and my poor bruised dick—she looks amazingly enticing. And thank God she was safe.

  “I am,” I grit out. God, this pain will never end.

  She falls to her knees next to me, so much more concerned than Rustem. “I couldn’t quite see what happened at the end. Did she break a bone?”

  Only the most important bone in my body.

  “Got kicked in the nuts,” Rustem says. “It’s his own fault.”

  “No, it isn’t.” I haul myself up, wincing with every move. But I do manage to hold out a hand to Tess and help her up. “He thinks I should be wearing a jockstrap.”

  Rustem nods solemnly.

  She looks between us. “I think I missed something here.”

  “You missed a lot.” I gingerly make my way to the bar hidden in the globe in a corner and pour myself a glass of scotch. I need some major pain relief, and this is one of the best scotches money can buy. “Came through that window”—I gesture with my glass—“and went straight for the safe.”

  “Jesus.” She stares wide-eyed at the window. “But only the outdoor alarms went off. Should we call the police?”

  “No.” My answer is curt. “Nobody gets called. She’ll try again. And I’ll catch her next time.”

  Tess’s eyes narrow. “You grabbed her breasts this time.”

  “By accident.” I smile slowly. “You look cute when you’re jealous.”

  She crosses her arms. “I’m not jealous.”

  But she is. “Rustem,” I tell him without looking away from her, “go home. There’s nothing more to do tonight.”

  “Cups,” he says before he leaves.

  I just shake my head. “Why do I keep him around again?”

  “Come on,” she says to me. “Let’s find you an ice pack.”

  I try to look especially wounded. “I think I need your help to walk.”

  She falls for it, coming under my arm to brace me. I tuck her next to my broken ribs, sighing as she wraps her arm around my back. I was pretending to need the support, but it feels damn good to have her here.

  “God, I’m so sorry,” she says. “The alarms went off, but she still got in. I don’t understand.”

  “Let’s go through the footage,” I say. “As soon as I get an ice pack.”

  “Oh!” Tess is so excited she pauses halfway down the stairs. “You pulled off her mask—and we have a perfect shot of her face. We can ID her now.”

  I take in a slow breath. It doesn’t matter that she got away; now that we have a good picture, we’ll know exactly who she is in a matter of hours.

  And from there I’ll be able to track her down and trace who paid her to do this. Shit, I might not even have to find her physically. With a name, I can get bank accounts, credit cards… I’ll have her entire life.

  I start us down the stairs, pulling Tess along. “Finally some good news.”

  “You’re feeling better,” she says, trying to keep up.

  “That news was the best painkiller I could have had.”

  Chapter 28

  I never thought my facial-recognition software ran particularly slowly, but as I wait for it to ID the intruder, I feel like time has stopped. Or is going backward.

  Come on, come on, come on, I chant to myself.

  I look over my shoulder at Gideon, who’s watching the screen with a neutral expression. He should be way more excited about this, but maybe he’s still in pain. He went down like she struck him with a two-by-four. Seeing it happen on the screen scared the shit out of me.

  Without thinking, I turn to reach for him. He doesn’t like to be coddled, but this isn’t coddling. This is me reassuring myself.

  He turns into my touch, the stubble on his jaw rasping against my palm. “I’m okay,” he rumbles. “But I’m beginning to see Rustem’s point about always wearing a cup.”

  He wants me to smile, but I’m not really feeling it. Suddenly I understand why he’s so paranoid about… everything. That was terrifying, what just happened.

  “We have to find this person,” I say. “This has to stop.”

  One corner of his mouth quirks up. “Believe me, I want that too.”

  “I’m sorry I didn’t build the perfect security system.” Guilt clenches around my heart. The system went off, but it was useless in the end. He got hurt, again. And we’re no closer to actually figuring out what’s going on.

  I’ve failed him, and that hurts like hell.

  He wraps his fingers around my wrist, his thumb over my pulse. “No. I don’t want to hear that. It worked. She came in through a second-story window, never got caught on the five million cameras and sensors you put out there—she knew we’d beefed up security. So she flipped the script.”

  It doesn’t help ease the guilt. “But she didn’t have wings, so how did she do it? And one of the sensors definitely went off. I sent one of Gage’s guys to check it.”

  His mouth flattens. “They have more to answer for than you do. Seriously, they didn’t see anything?”

  Motion on one of the video cameras catches my eye. A fluttering from a tree branch, like a bird or something. But it doesn’t quite move like a bird.

  I zoom in and enhance the image. Huh. It’s a piece of fabric, flapping in the breeze, but it’s really high up in the tree; I doubt it got blown up there.

  Suddenly it hits me. “She came in through the trees.”

  “What?” Gideon sits up. “That’s impossible.”

  “Crap,” I mutter to myself, cycling through the cameras, looking for the right ones, calling up the older video files. “I was looking at the ground, not the trees. And she knew it.”

  Sure enough, when I pull up whatever footage I’ve got of the trees just before the break-in, there’s a telltale rustling through the branches, the opposite of how the wind is moving. And I can trace the odd disturbances from the fence line to the house, but I don’t get any glimpse of the woman herself.

  “That’s impossible,” Gideon says. “The trees aren’t that close together. Some of them are twenty fee
t apart. The jump from the nearest tree to the roof is at least ten feet.”

  A member of the security team comes in then, looking sheepish and holding what looks like a remote-control car in his hands. “We’ve informed Mr. Cannon about the breach,” he says. “And we found this near the sensor that was triggered.”

  He hands it over. It is an RC car, only it’s weighted so that it would trip the sensor.

  Gideon looks ready to throw it into a wall. “A distraction. She set up a distraction with a fucking toy. And then went in through the trees.”

  “Do not punch or destroy anything,” I warn him. “I worked too hard on this system.”

  “I wouldn’t break anything you made,” he says gruffly.

  The security guy—I think his name is Steve—clears his throat. “About the trees… Todd thought he saw something, but we figured it was an owl.”

  “It wasn’t.” Anger vibrates through Gideon’s tone.

  I hold up my hands. “None of us was expecting this.” I hold up the toy car. “Or this. I’ll get together a fleet of drones and start flying them tomorrow.”

  I can’t imagine what this thief is going to try next. The fence and the grounds have sensors, but I’ll put in more cameras and point them up, and then the drones will be pointing down—everything will be covered. But I get the sense she’s going to probe for every weakness.

  “You can go,” Gideon says to Steve. “I’ll leave disciplining you for this failure up to Gage.”

  The man swallows hard, then leaves.

  “Wasn’t that kind of mean?” I ask. “You didn’t lay into me, and it’s mostly my fault.”

  “I don’t care what he thinks of me.”

  I hold in my silly, pleased smile, because this isn’t the time or place. But it’s touching all the same.

  The computer emits a low chime. My facial-recognition program is done running.

  I reach for the mouse so fast I almost fall out of my chair. Gideon grabs my upper arm to steady me.

  “One injury tonight is more than enough,” he murmurs.

  Face flushed, I scroll through the findings. The picture was good enough that the computer could pull out all the features, but…

  “Doesn’t exist in any government database?” I ask myself. “That’s not possible. Did it run all the state and local databases?”

  I look over the parameters again. Yep, it went through every database I have access to—federal, state, and local. Which covers pretty much everyone in the US and even has some nongovernmental databases as well.

  “What’s it mean?” Gideon asks.

  “It means we’ve got a good picture of her,” I say, “but we’re the only people who do. She’s never had her picture taken for any kind of official ID. Not even a college student ID card.”

  Gideon rubs his jaw. “Yeah, you’re only looking into domestic databases. We should try some foreign ones.”

  I give him a look. “That… that might be illegal. And some of those are massive.” Like Britain’s, which uses surveillance everywhere. Or China, which has made a flipping art form out of recording and tracking literally everyone.

  “I know a guy.” He pulls out his phone and makes a call. “Gage?” he says as soon as they’re connected.

  “I already heard,” Gage says tightly. “My guys aren’t amateurs, but it sounds like they screwed up. What the fuck is happening there?”

  “Our thief visited again. And she came in through the bedroom window.”

  “She?” There’s a long pause. “And your bedroom window? On the second story?”

  “She attacked him again,” I supply helpfully. “But we got her picture. Well, Gideon did.”

  Gideon’s expression clearly says that if I mention his wounding in any more detail, I’m going to be in big trouble. “As near as we can tell, she went through the trees. Tess is launching drones tomorrow,” he says when Gage starts to interrupt. “The important thing is, she didn’t get the notebook. And we’ve got a big lead on an ID. Except she’s not in any domestic database. Tess already tried.”

  “Send over the picture,” Gage says. “It could take all night though.”

  “We’ve got time.” Gideon takes the keyboard from me, starts typing away. “Want me to use the usual server?”

  “Yeah. You got hurt again?”

  “A minor injury,” Gideon says blandly, “to an unimportant body part.”

  “She hit you right in the balls, huh?”

  I choke back my laugh, because it really isn’t funny. She broke into the house, hurt Gideon, and she’s still out there, biding her time. If I let go of this laugh, it will have a hysterical, wild edge.

  “Got it,” Gage says. “I’ll run it now.”

  “Thanks,” Gideon says. “And don’t be too hard on your guys. Nobody even thought about someone coming in through the damn trees.”

  “Don’t worry about them. And tell Rustem that job offer is still open.”

  “I definitely won’t do that. Bye.”

  Once he’s hung up the call, I pull up the photo of the intruder again. I didn’t study it too closely before because I was so eager to run it through the facial-recognition algo.

  She’s young, maybe early twenties. Her hair is a deep, rich brown, the kind of color I wish mine were. The kind of brown that wealthy women pay for. Her eyes are wide set, her cheekbones high, and her mouth is stretched just enough to be interesting.

  “She looks familiar.” I’ve seen her somewhere recently, I’m almost sure.

  “Yeah, she was just in my bedroom.” Gideon squints at the picture. “Actually, I feel like… It’s more like déjà vu when I look at her.”

  “I also just spent almost an hour running her picture through a facial-recognition program. That could be it.”

  But I’m not entirely sure about that. Something about her features snags at my brain and tugs.

  “Maybe we’ve spent too much time obsessing over this woman.” I tilt my head. At this angle, the familiarity is even more striking. Like I was looking at her cockeyed before.

  Gideon sighs, rubs his hand over his face. “That’s probably it. Come on, you need to get some rest.”

  “I’m fine,” I insist even as I yawn. “What about you? You need rest too.”

  He pulls me up out of the chair suddenly and embraces me hard. “You shouldn’t have been here tonight,” he mutters into my hair.

  He’s the one who originally made me stay here, but I don’t bring that up. Because I don’t want to leave now.

  “I’m fine,” I say. “I mean, this person hurt you, but I don’t think she really wants to hurt you. If you hadn’t been in the room, she would have tried for the safe and that’s it.”

  “But next time she might try something worse. She might get desperate.” His hold on me tightens.

  My heart kicks, but not at the idea of my getting hurt—if she gets desperate, he’ll be the one she’ll lash out at. She’s already done it twice. I swallow hard. “She’s not coming after me. I don’t have anything she wants. And… and I’m not leaving you.”

  “I could make you,” he threatens. But he doesn’t let go.

  “You won’t.”

  He doesn’t contradict me. He just leads me back to his bed.

  Chapter 29

  Tess is still sleeping when Gage walks into my office the next morning. She had a rough night, and I couldn’t bear to wake her. I told Rustem to bring her breakfast once she was up and to make sure she had the coffee she likes.

  I’m guessing I’ll be stuck in here for a while. We’ve got a lot to discuss.

  Archer comes in behind Gage, looking grim. Right as I’m handing out coffee, Bishop and Cassian show up.

  Perfect. The gang’s all here.

  I pull up the photo of the intruder on my laptop, spin it around to show them without any preamble.

  Nothing. No shock of recognition, although Gage has already seen it.

  Cassian narrows his eyes. “Isn’t that your bedroom?”<
br />
  “Yep. Does that face ring a bell?”

  They all start to shake their heads.

  “Son of a bitch,” Archer breathes. “It was her?”

  There’s a mutual exhalation as they all come to the same realization.

  “Who is she?” Bishop asks.

  I look at Gage. “Well?”

  His smile is tight, humorless. “I don’t know.”

  Fuck. That is not what I want to hear. “She wasn’t in any database? Not a single one?”

  “She was in a database.” He holds up his fingers. “Three. Dubai, Vienna, São Paulo. Nothing to do with government records or any kind of ID. Dubai was a bank security system, Vienna was some cameras near Saint Stephan’s Cathedral, and São Paulo was outside a private residence.”

  “You hacked the security cameras of a private residence?” Bishop is frowning.

  “We share information.” Gage looks pissed. Super pissed. “So no name. Yet. We’re working on cross-referencing the bank records, seeing if we can pull anything from there. This particular bank can be… reluctant to provide aid.”

  Meaning they want to protect their clients’ privacy because their clients are up to some shit.

  I sigh, roll my head around on my shoulders to work the kinks out. “Okay. I’ll leave it to you.”

  “So you trust us. Now.” That’s from Archer, who’s never looked away from the photo on the laptop.

  Cassian frowns. That’s the first time I’ve seen him make that particular expression in years. “What?”

  Archer finally looks up at me. His gaze is direct, unblinking. “If you trust them, they have a right to know.”

  That is one thing I hate about Archer even though I’m closest to him—he likes to push people into corners. Corners they can’t get out of. He’ll say some shit about how I owe these guys after everything we’ve been through together, but it’s also just plain old shit stirring. There’s no need for them to know.

  But there’s no way to keep it secret now, thanks to Archer.

  “He thinks we’re trying to steal the notebook.” Gage is the first to figure it out.

  “I did at first.”