by Amber Bardan
A burning shame filled me from core to surface.
I hadn’t let my mind dwell or stray to that place since I came here. He saw me so well. What if he saw that?
What if he sensed that?
Nothing would ever be the same. He’d never look at me the same way.
Never look at me like I was beautiful.
Never call me perfect.
I wanted to be perfect if only to him. If only for him.
We can’t keep doing this.
“I’ll wait.” I sat myself down in a deck chair and crossed my legs. “But don’t bother coming back up here if you don’t bring cake.”
He smiled, but for once I saw everything underneath it, and today it was all sadness. “I wouldn’t dare.”
Haithem
I took the stairs two at a time. Karim, in typical form, knew what was to be done without instruction.
Spirits. Ice. Cigars. Caviar. Subtle instrumental music.
Everything prepared and ready for the arrival.
I yanked up the knot on my tie, flipped down the shirt collar, then folded myself into the center armchair.
“They’re boarding.” Karim stood behind my chair, a white towel draped over his arm, though a butler he was not.
“How many?” I braced my fingers on the rolled chesterfield arms—opening my chest.
“Seven.”
“Fine.” It wouldn’t matter. They could outnumber security, but they’d find some things and some people aren’t so easily overpowered.
They walked in armed, except for one, a white-haired man I knew at once. Rude, when I’d been so polite already.
I didn’t stand, instead held out a hand to the couch opposite. “Sergei Ivankov, welcome.”
His step faltered, just a small shortening of his stride. Of course he’d be surprised I’d recognize him on sight. The leader of the world’s most cunning criminal espionage agency ought to walk around secure in his anonymity. Or he wouldn’t be leader for long.
But I didn’t keep friends like Avner Malfancini for nothing.
“Mr. Soltan.” He took the seat.
His men lined the couch behind him, weapons held across their chests. My gaze didn’t shift from Sergei, but I had them locked in my peripheral. Along with Emilio in the corner and my other two men. The third stood at the door.
“Mr. Soltan was my father.” I let that statement linger.
Sergei didn’t blink. For too long.
Of course he wasn’t the one who’d killed my father—that man was dead. In the end all these people were implicit because their goal was the same.
“Call me Haithem.” I gestured to the drinks tray, and Karim stepped forward. “Ice?”
Sergei nodded and accepted the whiskey.
“Caviar?”
“I didn’t come for caviar,” he said, and swirled the glass, letting ice clink against the sides before downing the whiskey in one swallow, then slamming the cup on the coffee table. “And I much prefer vodka.”
I laughed, clipped, but guttural. If he wanted to break etiquette, so be it. This was still more civilized than painting the walls with blood. They wouldn’t do that today. Not in the beginning anyway. Not if they could secure my cooperation. The only reason why they’d wanted us to see them coming, and why we’d let them on board. Why this all didn’t simply end with a missile in my hull. “Of course.”
Karim took the white spirit from the bar freezer and refilled Sergei’s glass.
“My clients are willing to come to the party.” He sat back with the vodka.
I smiled. “I’m not taking partners.”
“They’re not seeking partnership as you well know.” He sipped from the glass, then glanced at the contents. “This is good shit.”
“Of course.”
His gaze flicked to me. “They want to buy you out.”
“I’m not for sale.”
“You haven’t heard the offer.”
I set elbows on my knees. “There is nothing that can be offered.”
His jaw moved left then right. Then he set the glass down and joined me in leaning forward. “Then things will become more unpleasant.”
“I think I’ve proved I’m up to the challenge.”
“This is a nice yacht you have.” He looked up. Around the room and at all the furniture. Then opened his jacket and set a handgun on his lap, his fingers resting casually on top. “That’s a pretty girl you have hidden up there.” He pointed up to the roof with a smirk, then bit his lip.
Adrenaline spurted through my veins.
“I keep good pussy, too.” I forced the smile to remain carved into my cheeks. “Would that be more to your taste than caviar, I could summon her?”
I tugged the sleeve of my shirt. Looked like there would be blood today after all.
He snorted. “It’s not pussy I came here for, either.”
Relief should have knocked my heart back into correct rhythm. It didn’t. Considering perhaps he knew she was here because he’d put her here, if not because he’d spied her on deck. Perhaps he was here because she’d led him to me.
No.
Not her.
Not like friends who’d sold me out. Allies who’d been planted in my life. She wouldn’t betray me. She wasn’t a spy.
Suspicions would eat me alive and destroy us both. “How did you find me?”
“It doesn’t matter how, only that we did.” That smirk was back. “We will always find you. Just like I will find your cargo no matter how well you think you’ve concealed it.” He caressed the gun like a pet in his lap. “Then I will fuck your pretty piece of pussy before I put it down.”
I hadn’t twitched, or moved, or blinked, or stayed too still. He knew. Must have been my eyes. I’d warned her my affection was a terrible thing. And here it was—that danger realized.
I scooted forward, feet flat and ready to push off the ground. “Do you think I’d make myself dispensable?”
Sergei’s smile spread to one side, and he gripped the handgun, measuring it in his palm with gaze cocked at me.
“You’ll find it won’t be easy to stop me.” My voice dropped low. Only Sergei would hear me. “But if you do, I can promise it won’t be by bullet.”
The safety clicked.
Energy exploded though my thighs. Muscles snapped along my arms, his head in my hands before his finger could twitch on the trigger. His body bounced off the coffee table, then thumped to the floor. I hadn’t known how natural it had become to end a man until Sergei’s neck snapped in my hands.
I rose on braced knees to barren silence. My pulse boomed.
Emilio stood behind the sofa, lowering the last corpse to the ground. He caught my gaze. I held it and nodded. There was a reason Emilio had been the Spanish Central Intelligence’s best. They’d called him silent death. Now he worked for me. Taught me the precise art of breaking a neck.
I scanned the room. These dead men were killers, mercenaries, assassins. They had no duty, their highest purpose was the bidder. I swiped my mouth on the back of my wrist. They’d have taken the very thing my family died for. What I’d worked and bled for. They’d have killed us. They’d have killed her.
Yet no matter how many times death visited me it never grew less shocking.
Today was worse.
It’d come quietly. Not a drop of blood to wipe away. A woman waited upstairs for me. I’d killed for her and she’d never know it.
* * *
SWEAT COATED MY ARMS. My thighs were damp. It wasn’t just the pacing back and forth, it was me. He couldn’t keep everything from me like this. Couldn’t keep me locked away like this forever. I was done waiting. Done expecting he’d grow reasonable. There’d be a way to contact home. They needed to hear things from me
. I snatched the library card from the drawer and walked to the door of Haithem’s office. He was downstairs with guests. This might be the only chance I’d ever get.
This had to be done.
I shoved the card between the door and the door frame, level with the handle. It took some jostling but then the card slid right behind the latch.
I pushed on the door. It swung—creaking.
His office was just as I remembered. Neat, organized, luxurious and all him. I ran to his desk and started on the drawers. Rummaged through stationery and other useless things. No phone. Nothing useful. I tugged on the large bottom drawer. It stuck. Locked. I fell to my knees and tried my library card trick. The card banged against the bolt. This was an entire other kind of mechanism.
I set the card on the desk, eyes coming level with his closed laptop, so fancy and thin I almost missed it. I sat in the chair and opened the lid slowly.
My fingers shook on the keys.
Have to do this. Have to.
The laptop started up and to no surprise of mine required a password. I started with the obvious, although Haithem wasn’t stupid, and in a moment of pure narcissism even tried my own name.
I exceeded attempts. Wait thirty seconds. Tried again. Wait two minutes. I leaned back in the chair and ran my hands into my hair. My knee knocked against the locked drawer then I stood, ran to the bathroom and came back with hairpins.
I took a pin between my teeth and bent it open, then slipped the open end into the lock and wiggled.
“You know I almost fell for everything.” The voice was so sharp it severed my nerves in two.
My blood thickened, becoming oil like in my veins. How the hell could he be so silent?
“I knew better, but you were so believable.” He strode into the room. Tie he’d left with gone, shirt collar open.
“I can explain.” My stomached churned.
Could I?
His fingers opened and closed. Rage rolled off him. He rotated his shoulders. Something else flowered over him, a drop-dead-lethal current. “Who do you work for?”
There’d be no lying to him now. No diffusing this suspicion with something trivial.
“I’m sorry.” I swallowed and stood, leaning on the edge of the desk. “I planned to tell you on the first night.” I dropped the pin and splayed my hands. “I was planning an article on you for Poise magazine.”
“The media hasn’t begun to know about me.” He inched closer. “If they did, I can guarantee we wouldn’t be having this conversation.
I backed up, the desk still between us. “I pitched you as an idea after meeting you in the coffee shop.” We moved sideways. “But when you asked for a confidentiality agreement I dropped the idea.”
“Yet here you are.” He took a step. “Stuck on my yacht. Rifling through the office you broke into.”
I stopped still, then stomped the ground. “I need to speak to my family.”
“Who do you work for?” In a breath he was around the desk.
I leaped back. “No one.”
“I know...” The words slipped between his teeth. “I know all about the six weeks you were gone.”
The muscles in my calves contracted as though I’d been touched by a cattle prod. He did not know.
Impossible.
“Where were you?”
My heart let loose an out-of-beat thunk.
No. I’d never say. Couldn’t.
We’d been so discreet. How could he find out?
My mind jolted as though he’d grabbed my head in his big fists and given me a shake.
He walked around me. I danced with him again. That dark dance of hands-thrown-out-for-balance revolution. My knees softened, but I turned. His thumb flicked under his chin. A swinging scythe blade, slicing arcs of tension through the air between us.
No.
“Nowhere. I was at home.”
His nose scrunched and he walked faster. Liar. He saw it. I couldn’t conceal it.
My heart choked my throat. How did this peril between us survive when I knew I was already there—already his—already transformed.
Past mistakes were irrelevant, that was before.
He moved. A blur. He’d always been so fast.
I squealed. He didn’t touch me, but I was knocked sideways by the force of my own shock. I fell against his desk. The desk I’d tried to break into.
“Where the hell were you for six weeks, Angelina?”
Pictures flipped through my head. Flick, flick, flick. He couldn’t know.
Oh, the shame.
Bile in my throat. I couldn’t say. Fumes in my throat. I remembered them. Now they were back, a dirty seduction to sleep. That Mustang, the one I loved and hated. The top up, hose in the window. I couldn’t breathe.
“I had to—” I shook my head as though there were a bug on my hair. “I had to go somewhere.”
He seized the top of my arms. “Where? Tell me, where did you have to go? Where did they take you?”
I sagged in his arms. He kept me standing. Didn’t give me the mercy of hiding away. Yet his urgent tone burst with longing—longing for my truth.
“I hurt myself.”
His grip slacked.
Everything went quiet. I stared at his collarbone. Numbness spread through my chest. Wetness soaked my throat.
Then there was sound again. And all I could hear was the wet, wet sound of my own breath.
“You had to go away because you hurt yourself?”
I’d never heard him speak like that before. As though whispering to someone in the night are you awake?
“Mum came home early and heard the motor in the garage.”
I couldn’t meet his gaze. Would he look at me the way they did? My shoulders drew up as though I could push them over my head. Would he talk to me like I was damaged? Treat me like I couldn’t be trusted with myself?
Like they do.
“But, Angelina.” He squeezed my arms, and then I had to look at him. Had to face a kind of suffering I’d felt but never seen. “I looked everywhere and there’s no record of you being in any hospital.”
My own parents so ashamed. How could he not be?
“They didn’t want people knowing.” I rubbed my arm right below where he gripped me. “Not after Josh. They let it be private and admitted me in my cousin Cara’s name.”
Everyone knew about the town mayor’s poor dead son—but not about the broken daughter.
Better for all of us it stayed that way.
“Because of Josh? Is that why you hurt yourself?”
“No.” I swallowed. I’d been well for so long. Time didn’t seem to matter. “Josh was the rock I hit at the bottom. I was generally and overwhelmingly unhappy in a way where it seemed like nothing could ever be good again.”
His hands changed on me, suddenly holding not gripping.
“And now?” His voice crackled.
I breathed. I could cope. Could cope with this and everything. “Now I know it can be better—it does get better. I’ll never, ever be that way again. I can survive anything.” I tried for a smile. “I’m basically indestructible.”
I watched every word be absorbed by him through his eyes.
“I would have that be true.”
He pressed his lips to my mouth. A hovering kiss that took nothing and tasted of salt.
So would I.
TWENTY-TWO
“I SAID DON’T MOVE.”
Haithem had me by the little toe, but I had him by something more significant. He paused, nail-polish brush poised above my foot. “I only do this for special birthday girls, you know.”
My birthday.
The words rang through me with equal measures of grief and excitement. A strange
feeling, that. I was just glad it was happening here. Happening my way. Happy to be twenty-one and a woman enjoying her lover.
I couldn’t bring myself to think about what would be happening right now at home. It probably made me a terrible person, that I didn’t want to spend my twenty-first birthday pandering to everyone else’s feelings about what the day meant to them.
“Promise.” I made a cross over my heart. “No more moving.”
He’d turned me into a little liar. Something I’d never pulled off before.
He lowered the brush.
I wiggled my toes. Pink polish streaked across my skin. I laughed, and he grabbed me, dragged me into his lap. I straddled him. My hair fell into his face. He didn’t brush it away.
“You are very lucky it’s your birthday, or you’d be in big trouble.”
I laughed again, wrapped my arms around his neck and dragged my pelvis over his. Through his pants I could feel that big wonderful organ I couldn’t get enough of.
Mr. In-control.
Mr. Powerful.
He was soft with me. And I knew why.
He grabbed my hips and pushed his hardening cock firmly against me.
Call me a squirrel, because I’d cracked myself a hard nut and made me some butter. He didn’t realize it yet. Yep, Haithem was butter in my hands. I’d let him think he was still in charge, because the man had his ego and his stubbornness—but he was soft for me.
Haithem groaned and patted my thigh. “There’s something I have to do.”
I rolled off him and lay back on the deck of this new smaller yacht.
“I’ll be back soon.”
I frowned—pouted, actually. Never, ever thought of myself as a pouter, but there you go, the strange things getting some good cock will do to you.
He kissed me. Quickly. Then he gave me another, slightly more lingering one.
We’d left the old yacht and all the staff but Karim and Emilio by helicopter in the night, a week ago. Taken a speedboat from one island to another before slipping onto the new yacht in the dark.
Unspoken tension throbbed between the men, yet the kind between Haithem and I had altered.
I’d be leaving soon.
Like the yacht before it, the main cabin of this yacht occupied an upper deck. But this boat was lithe. Ripples jetting out around us as we cut through the water.
