Dark mission 04 - Sacrifice the Wicked

by Karina Cooper

  That didn’t leave Parker with a lot of steadfast players.

  Jonas. She could count on him to support her, but at what cost? He knew about the Salem Project—about Simon Wells and Juliet Carpenter—but he also kept company Parker couldn’t approve of. Phinneas Clarke was wanted for questioning. So, for that matter, was the company he kept, wherever it was he hid.

  But what were her options? At this point, neither the devil she knew nor the angel she didn’t looked like sure bets.

  Simon Wells? Talk about a devil. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t grasp his angle. He was a product of this human testing lab, she got that much. A marked witch. The exact thing she and her people should have been hunting down, sentencing for his crimes.

  But he was protected by the very Church she swore to uphold. Protected, and allowed the run of the Mission Parker had prided herself on directing smoothly. Why?

  Amy Silo. If Jonas was the technical god of the Mission, then Agent Silo doubled as his research equivalent. She’d earned her place in the Holy Order’s massive library, the undisputed queen of the research stacks. She kept a sharp watch on everything going in and out of her library, and not even Lauderdale himself had the clout to have her removed. A missionary, yes, but even the bishop had to answer to his favored librarian when it came to the Order’s treasured books.

  Nothing would turn her from the cause. And the cause had never been the Mission.

  The librarian’s cause was knowledge. Knowledge didn’t play politics.

  Exhaustion turned Parker’s body to useless fluff. She usually spent long days at the office, but this trumped most. The lunch she’d picked up on her way back from the meeting with Clarke hadn’t lasted past eight, and at somewhere just before midnight, her stomach now felt as if it’d latched onto her spine. Desperate for nutrients.

  She was too damned tired to cook.

  Parker let out a long, slow breath, staring past the circle of light shedding golden illumination over her chair. Her spacious condo remained dark, one part from the evening hour and mostly from the storm clouds. She turned off every light as she left the room it belonged to. Outside of the lamplight, the living room and kitchen beyond it glinted with the occasional flash of lightning, shadows dancing wildly.

  She didn’t like wasting electricity. Not that it mattered in New Seattle. The heights of the metropolis were among the most well-maintained on the electrical grid. Even should the summer storm raging outside cause the power to short, generators redirected all currents back to the top.

  It was one of many perks of living high above the rest of the city.

  “Damn,” she breathed, smoothing one hand over her copper hair.

  Thunder rattled the windows, echoing a flash of lightning that turned the fluorescent light rimming the drapes into purple-white luminescence. At her feet, Mr. Sanderson jumped. Collar bell jingling, he skidded out of the living room so fast that his claws caught at the carpet.

  Parker hid her smile.

  “It’s just thunder,” she called. “Scaredy-cat.”

  “Not,” corrected a low, masculine voice just behind the armchair, “just thunder.”

  Parker’s heart surged into her throat. The man was a damned ghost; how the hell did he do that?

  The hard edge of a pistol muzzle pressed into her skull. “No sudden moves,” he warned.

  The action mirrored her own only hours before.

  He wouldn’t dare.

  Of course he would. “Mr. Wells, you have ten seconds.” To her relief, her voice didn’t shake even a little. Ice cold, it lashed as deeply as the thunder rolling across the sky.

  The point of pain under his gun lifted. “Ten seconds is too long,” he said, but unlike every conversation she’d ever had with the man, there wasn’t anything easy about his tone now. “It’s time to go.”

  “You must be joking.”

  “Not even a little.” He circled her chair, stepping into the pool of lamplight like some kind of golden god rising from the dark. Dramatic. Oddly erotic. Was it the light? The shadows sinking into the carved angles of his face?

  The new, unstained T-shirt clinging to every muscled line of his torso?

  Parker shifted. Met his gaze, raised an eyebrow. “I’d rather sit and talk.”

  Holstering his gun in one smooth motion displayed the muscles in his upper arms and shoulders, outlined by his nylon shoulder rig. His khaki-colored T-shirt clung to the lean definition of his chest, beads of water dripping from his hair. She watched a droplet slide across his temple, trace the sculpted line of his angled jaw as he stared at her.

  Challenge.

  “Sorry, sweetheart. We can’t do that.”

  Something had changed. Between his suspension and this confrontation, something felt different. Even when he gave every appearance of seriousness, his eyes usually laughed at her. Now, she saw nothing but impatience in their glittering depths.

  Did he know about her meeting with Phin Clarke?

  Would it matter if he did? The gun’s grip nestled into her palm, hidden at the small of her back.

  “Trust me,” he said quietly.

  What did it say about her that she wanted to?

  Idiot.

  Because she wanted him off-guard—because she wanted to touch—she slid her left hand into his. He pulled her to her feet with the same easy surge of power he gave everything else. Pulled too hard, folded her too neatly into his embrace, one arm banded across her back.

  It pinned her to him. Tucked her against his longer form as if she were made to fit in the hollows of his body.

  Parker’s breath caught.

  His exhaled on a hissed curse as the unyielding muzzle of the pistol in her right hand slotted into the groove of his sternum. His eyes narrowed, thick dark lashes shielding whatever gears ground in his head.

  She didn’t know. Couldn’t read him. All she knew was that every breath only highlighted how much space there wasn’t between them. Clarified how much the smell of him filled her senses. It sparked a chain reaction from head to chest to that knocking ache between her legs, no matter how much he made her angry.

  The man was a menace.

  For a long moment, only thunder split the silence.

  Parker allowed herself a small smile. “I never make the same mistake twice, Mr. Wells.”

  “So I see.” His answering smile revealed the edge of his even white teeth. It crinkled the edges of his eyes, forcing a knotted weft of appreciation through the determination she clung to.

  Her grip tightened on the pistol.

  “I’m going to have to break you of this habit you have.” A silken promise. “Guns aren’t for playing.” His arm banded like iron around her lower back. Forced her so tightly against him that she knew he had to feel the knot of a bruise forming around her gun. He didn’t try to disarm her. He should have. The man was a missionary, no matter who’d put him there.

  Men like Simon Wells didn’t allow people to pull guns on them.

  Instead, contrary to every expectation, his free hand slid up her back. Mapped her spine, traced over the seal of St. Andrew nestled between her shoulder blades.

  As his fingers dug into her hair, cupping the back of her head, her smile faded. “Let me go.”

  “Will you shoot me?”

  “Count on it, Agent Wells.”

  “Oh, well.” The tone should have warned her. “Even a dying man gets his last request,” he murmured.

  She stiffened. “Don’t you—Mmph!”

  Simon’s kiss wasn’t the same. This wasn’t a simple meeting of lips and breath and skin. Something had changed.

  Something infected his laid-back façade.

  This kiss stripped away every thought of denial, of protest. He didn’t tease her or gently engage. He claimed. He took. His lips covered hers, scorched where they touched her. Sent tingling shivers from her lips to her spine to her fingertips.

  To her molten, swirling insides, suddenly too hot. Too wild.

  T
he end-of-shift shadow at his jaw scraped her sensitive skin as he tilted her head, changed the angle to deepen the kiss, set fire to her blood and made her forget about the gun in her hand. The syringe in her safe.

  The secrets, the lies.

  Somehow, he always managed this. Managed to get in under her skin. Beneath her guard. Closer than she ever wanted him.

  Her hand flattened against his chest, just by the gun he ignored. Muscles flexed, leaped under her touch.

  Everything in her wanted to feel skin, not damp fabric. His skin, his heartbeat trapped beneath his flesh. Her fingers found the hem of his shirt. Slid under.

  Something ragged and unrefined guttered in his throat as she found smooth, ridged muscle; something that raised every hair on the back of Parker’s neck and curled like a rough hand between her legs.

  Like steel given flesh. Like . . . like shaped aggression, strength made human.

  Everything about him turned caution to arousal. Fear to need. She wanted him. She couldn’t deny it, not when her body thrilled with every flick of his tongue against hers. Her eyes had drifted shut; she didn’t know how. She didn’t command it.

  Her body wasn’t hers.

  Simon invaded her space, her thoughts. Her peace. Claimed what he wanted, left her starved and wild in his wake.

  Parker didn’t like men like him.

  She’d never met a man like him.

  Pulling her mouth away left her gasping, her lips damp from his kiss, tingling. He let her; she had no reason to think otherwise. As her eyes fluttered open, as she clung to his chest and tried to force her body to suck in the air his kiss had stolen, Simon stared down at her.

  His gaze bored into hers, smoldering with the same inferno licking at every measure of restraint she possessed. Knowing. All too aware of the way her heart pounded in her chest.

  “I’m going to give you one chance,” she whispered. One chance was all she had it in her to give. “Talk to me, Simon. Tell me what I need to know.” Holy God, was that her voice? So husky and inviting.

  His fingers tightened around the back of her head. As if the very sound of her voice did to him what he did to her.

  Not that it’d help. “Sorry.” For the first time since Simon Wells had walked into her office days ago, sincerity filled his quiet tone. “You really have to come with me.”

  Parker’s kiss-swollen mouth quirked even as she firmed her grip on the gun. “Then we’re at an impasse, Mr. Wells.”

  “You have no idea what saying my name like that does to me, do you?”

  She blinked. “What?”

  Simon’s smile uncurled slowly.

  No. Not this again. This time, this was her scene. She moved quickly, gave no warning; calculated it with the same precision she did everything else. As the gun dug into his sternum, as his hand tightened at her back, she pressed the fingers of her free hand together and jabbed them—hard—into the hollow of his throat.

  His curse strangled, an unintelligible grunt.

  She followed up with a barefoot stomp on his instep, spun out of his suddenly loosened grip as he grabbed for the back of the armchair with one hand, and ran like hell.

  Parker wasn’t an idiot. He had height, reach, and weight on her, not to mention whatever powers that Salem gene bestowed on him. She sprinted for the hall leading to her bedroom—and the escape route out the window. She’d formulate a plan later, but for now . . .

  For now, she had him on breaking and entering, assault and battery. If he pushed her, she’d add a self-defense plea to the mix and shoot him. Let the Church try and cover that up.

  While they tried, she’d have him in interrogation.

  A growl hard on her heels warned her it wouldn’t be easy. She didn’t think it would. As a hand closed on the back of her neck, Parker stopped abruptly—too fast, no warning—and slammed her elbow into his gut.

  He took the hit. Took it as if her elbow was made of feathers and foam. Stepped into it, into her, slamming her sideways into the hallway wall. Shelves in her living room clattered. His free hand curled into her blouse front, shoved her hard against the wallpaper.

  The back of her skull bounced off his palm.

  His eyes gleamed, mere inches from her face. His features, already angled, were drawn taut, skin flushed. Mouth set.

  She’d surprised him.

  Good.

  She shifted; he let go of her head to grab the wrist with the gun, pinning it to the wall above her head. “Stop it,” he ordered.

  Like she would. “Breaking and entering, Mr. Wells,” she panted, too aware of his greater strength over hers. Of his leg shoved hard between hers, his hip pinning her tightly.

  His rain-saturated clothing slowly soaked through her blouse. Warm and suddenly too intimate for the setting.

  “The least of your concerns,” he growled back, jerking the damp strands from his forehead with a hard shake. Raw impatience. “Listen to me, you need to get out of here.”

  “I’m not leaving my home on your say-so.”

  His teeth flashed in a hard smile. “You’re a smart woman. You know I wouldn’t risk my neck if it weren’t important.”

  She knew no such thing. Far as Parker could tell, Simon Wells was a certifiable lunatic.

  But still, she hesitated.

  “You’re important enough to kill,” he said quietly, slowly relaxing his grip in her collar. His fingers grazed her throat. Her collarbones. Smoothed over the sensitive curve where her shoulder met her neck. “Which makes you important enough to keep alive. Come with me, Parker.”

  “Director,” she corrected coolly, even as her skin heated from the rasp of his callused fingertips. From the damp heat of his body against hers.

  “Fine, if it’ll get you out of here.”

  She shook her head. “I don’t trust you.”

  Again, that edged smile. A flicker of approval. But before he could say anything, it vanished as his gaze snapped to the living room beyond the hall. His features settled into hard, dangerous lines. “Shit.”

  “What?”

  “Quiet.”

  The intensity of the order drilled through her outrage.

  Her pulse kicked hard.

  His mouth thinned. Anger, she read that much. Concern? “Listen to me,” he whispered. “There are three men circling this complex.”

  “What?” Her voice slid up an octave.

  “You know how you aren’t a field agent?” He turned, slid his hand against the back of her now clammy blouse and snagged her wrist with the other hand. Almost as if they were dancing. Only she couldn’t pull away. “I am, and I’m talking to you as an agent. Move your ass, Director.”

  Was he telling the truth? Aside from the continual rumble of summer thunder and pattering rain, she couldn’t hear anything but her own heartbeat. And his.

  The holster carrying his gun—illegally worn, now that she’d suspended him—bumped her elbow as he leveraged her past her office. “Clearly, the strain is getting to you,” she said evenly.

  He didn’t rise to the bait. “You have no idea. Is there a fire escape out your window?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Good.” His footsteps didn’t so much as rasp on the colorful runner protecting the hall’s hardwood flooring. Hers dragged.

  Parker dug her heels in. His grip on her wrist twisted; she winced. “This is absurd. You need help. Whatever GeneCorp did to you, Simon—”

  His face shuttered. The light flickered behind them.

  “Time’s up.”

  With a low, wheezing drone, the electricity guttered to dead silence.

  Thick black night corralled them in utter darkness.

  This was his fault.

  Simon followed Parker’s gaze as she whirled in the dark hallway, her face a bone-white shadow of surprise in what little lightning residue crept through the dark hall.

  He couldn’t give her time to adapt. Not this time. Her name on his list proved even the Mission director was fair game. And he wasn’t the o
nly cleanup agent on the roster.

  There weren’t that many operatives out there yet, but taking on three by himself wasn’t his idea of a good time. They’d already hit the power grid in the block; not even streetlights remained visible.

  “Wait!” she whispered. She took a step back toward the lamplight—and the bull’s-eye target it’d make of her.

  He caught her by the shoulders, fingers tight in her blouse. “Leave the cat,” he said tightly. “They’re not after him.”

  “It’s not—”

  “Now!” he snapped. As his senses unfolded, as the individual bodies pinged on his witch-born radar, he dragged her back further down the hall.

  Parker’s mouth flattened into a hard white line. She caught up with his urgency—and to her credit, she caught on fast. Saying nothing, she pushed past him, a red-capped shadow.

  Although only an administrative missionary, she had serious spirit. He liked that about her.

  He liked a lot of things about her. Her copper red hair, always so tightly wound. Her midnight blue eyes, the way she thrust out her jaw when things didn’t fall into place. Her red lipstick, sultry as hell and one more plate in her polished armor.

  The sweet curve of her ass in the jeans he hadn’t thought she owned.

  Amid the wild rush of adrenaline, the thought slammed home in a surge of heat.

  Focus, damn it.

  She crossed the room, her stride long. Her feet bare. Lightning flashed outside, streamed through the flirty sheer curtains he’d never have expected from the uptight director. It painted her bedroom in fluorescent purple and blue, sank it back into darkness made all the worse for the memory of it.

  Simon knuckled at his eyes. “Move it,” he ordered quietly, shutting the door as softly as he could. She’d put a lock on it.

  Paranoid?

  In this case, just paranoid enough.

  He slid the metal catch into place, hurried across the room as she forked right.

  She ignored him, flinging open her closet and kneeling to rifle through God only knew what. Simon growled a curse.

  The look she shot him might have been censure. He wouldn’t doubt it. But spots of color rode her cheeks, and fear shimmered in the depths of her usually so steady gaze.