A Sense of Danger

by Jennifer Estep

  A small smile played across her lips. “Everything.”

  TRUTH.

  The smug certainty slammed into my mind like a tidal wave, but I didn’t ask Henrika any more questions. That was exactly what she wanted, and I wasn’t going to give the bitch the satisfaction of playing her game.

  The silence stretched on and on. Henrika kept looking at me, and I stared right back at her, keeping my face calm and blank.

  Beside me, Desmond shifted on his feet, then reached over and discreetly pushed a button on the side of his silver wristwatch to send out a distress signal, per standard mission protocol. The two of us might have knowingly walked into Henrika’s trap, but the hotel was still surrounded by Section agents.

  Desmond frowned and looked down, as if the watch weren’t working. That’s when I realized the communication device in my necklace had gone absolutely silent and that I couldn’t hear Miriam, Gia, Trevor, or anyone else murmuring in the background anymore.

  I glanced around the library, and my gaze snagged on a small black box sitting on the desk. A pink haze surrounded the box, indicating it didn’t belong in here. It must have been some sort of jamming device, designed to knock out our communications, along with any alarms that might have been attached to the necklace’s display case. It seemed like no one at Section could hear us, and I was willing to bet they couldn’t see us on the security cameras either.

  Desmond and I were on our own. This wrinkle in the mission wasn’t terribly surprising, but Henrika had been a little more creative and thorough with her trap than I’d expected.

  Desmond must have realized it too, since he removed his finger from his watch and curled his hands into fists again.

  “Don’t you want to know about your father?” Henrika asked. “And Mexico?”

  Even though I desperately did, I forced myself to shrug. “Not really.”

  Her green eyes narrowed. “I don’t believe you.”

  I barked out a harsh, humorless laugh. “What you believe doesn’t matter to me. Just like I never truly mattered to my father.”

  Henrika frowned, as did Desmond. I ignored them both and stalked over to the bar. The three bodyguards tensed, their guns still aimed at Desmond, but Henrika waved them off. She didn’t consider me, the lowly analyst, a threat. She was probably right about that.

  I laid my satin clutch on the bar, then opened the same cabinet Henrika had, grabbed a crystal tumbler, poured myself some whiskey from the bottle she’d used, and took a large swallow. The liquid burned down my throat, but it didn’t drown out the bitterness in my heart.

  “What do you mean you never mattered to your father?” Henrika asked the obvious question.

  I used my half-empty tumbler to gesture out at the library. “My father was always far more interested in this, in being a spy and spending his time with dangerous people like you, than he ever was in me. I gave up on my father a long, long time ago. Want to know a secret?”

  “What?” Once again, Henrika asked the obvious question.

  “I was actually relieved when he died, when the great Jack Locke didn’t come back from that doomed Mexico mission. At least after his death, all the kidnappings, stalkings, and threats from his enemies stopped. For once in my life, I finally had some fucking peace.”

  I looked over at Desmond, who was staring at me with a thoughtful expression. “Truth,” I said.

  He grimaced, and a strange mix of agreement, understanding, and sympathy flickered across his face. He knew what it was like to be fucked up and fucked over by your father, perhaps better than anyone else. Maybe that was part of the reason why I was so drawn to Desmond—his heart had been smashed to pieces by his father just like mine had been.

  I focused on Henrika again. “So you stand there and keep all your smug secrets about the Mexico mission to yourself. Because you know what? I don’t give a damn anymore.”

  I threw back the rest of the whiskey, letting it burn away the lie in my mouth. I set my empty crystal tumbler down on the bar right beside my clutch, but I kept my fingers curled around it. Desmond noticed the motion, and he shifted to his right.

  Henrika pouted. “Well, you’re no fun—”

  I didn’t want to hear another word she had to say, so I slapped the tumbler off the bar, aiming it straight at Henrika. She flinched and jerked to the side, darting out of the way, and her three bodyguards swung their guns around and aimed their weapons at me.

  The second the guards were distracted, Desmond sprang into action. He plucked his watch out of his vest pocket, surged forward, and wrapped the chain around the neck of the closest bodyguard. Desmond yanked, and the razor-sharp chain sliced cleanly across the man’s throat. He gurgled, then crumpled to the floor, blood pooling underneath his body.

  I pulled my gun out of my clutch, aimed it at the second bodyguard, and pulled the trigger three times.

  He toppled to the ground, blood spewing out of the holes the bullets had punched in his chest.

  The third bodyguard, the one with the Grunglass Necklace in his tuxedo pocket, darted in front of Henrika and snapped up his gun, aiming it at me. I trained my own weapon on him in return. Desmond moved to flank me, still holding his deadly pocket watch and chain.

  Henrika stayed behind her guard, but she raised her hand, and a bright golden glow filled her palm again. I still didn’t know exactly what kind of transmuter or combusto magic she had, but if she could melt plastic with her fingertips, then I definitely didn’t want to see what she could do to my skin with her power.

  “I’m pretty sure I can kill you before you can throw your magic at me,” I snarled, not quite bluffing. “So drop your hand. Right now.”

  Hate burned in Henrika’s eyes, but her magic vanished, and she slowly lowered her hand to her side. The bodyguard kept his gun raised, though, pointing it back and forth between Desmond and me. Given the previous talk about my father and his doomed mission, I found it sadly ironic that we were engaged in a sort of Mexican standoff.

  “You okay?” Desmond asked.

  I kept my eyes fixed on Henrika. “I’m fine. Ask your questions. Section will probably be here any minute to see why our comms went down.”

  Desmond nodded and eased forward, his pocket watch still clutched in his fingers. As he walked toward Henrika, the lights flickered, and silver-blue electricity started sparking and crackling along the watch chain. The bodyguard aimed his gun at Desmond, but the cleaner ignored the other man, his gaze locked on Henrika.

  “Now, Ms. Hyde,” Desmond said in a cold voice. “We’re going to have a little chat. Answer my questions, and you and your guard just might live through the next few minutes. Keep quiet, and you both can join your two dead men on the floor.”

  Henrika gave him the same hate-filled glare she had given me, but for the third time, she asked the obvious question. “What do you want to know?”

  “Two things—who your Section mole is and where I can find Adrian Anatoly.”

  A low, masculine voice jumped into the fray. “I’m right here.”

  Desmond spun around. I kept my gun trained on Henrika, but my gaze flicked to the left.

  A man was standing just inside one of the glass doors at the back of the library, flanked by half a dozen armed guards. He was wearing a black tuxedo that highlighted his broad shoulders and short, thick, muscled body. His sandy-brown hair was slicked back and up from his forehead into a widow’s peak, and a thin white scar slashed through one of his eyebrows, like a jagged arrow pointing down through his tan skin to his pale blue eyes.

  Beside me, Desmond sucked in a sharp, horrified breath. I had never seen this man before in person, but I recognized him from the various photos I had viewed over the past few days.

  Adrian Anatoly.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Desmond

  Anatoly was here. At the hotel. Standing right in front of me.

  “Hello, Desmond,” he said in his deep, cultured voice, the one that had haunted my nightmares for months. “So n
ice to see you again.”

  Rage boiled up in my veins, scorching through my stunned shock, and I started forward, lifting my hands toward the bastard’s throat. Fuck the mission and Henrika and the guards with guns and everything else. I was going to kill Anatoly right here and now for what he’d done to Graham, for what he’d made me do to my best friend—

  “No,” Charlotte whispered, grabbing my arm and jerking me back. “Don’t be an idiot. That’s exactly what he wants.”

  She was right. Anatoly was just standing there, with a smirk on his face and his hands clasped in front of him, just waiting for me to attack. His six men had their guns trained on me, and they would kill me—and Charlotte—long before I ever got so much as a fingertip on their boss. So I forced myself to stop and hold my position. My fingers clenched around the pocket watch in my left hand. I’d lost my grip on my magic, so the electricity had dissipated, but the razor-sharp chain sliced into my palm. A small sting compared to the rage crackling in my heart.

  Anatoly’s smirk widened, and his dark, blood-red aura pulsed with amusement. “Smart man. You should listen to Ms. Locke more often. From what I’ve been told, she’s quite clever. Far more clever than you, Desmond.”

  “Who’s been singing my praises?” Charlotte asked.

  “Some friends of mine,” he replied. “No one you need to concern yourself with.”

  Beside me, Charlotte’s aura flickered a bright blue, and what looked like satisfaction gleamed in her eyes, as though Anatoly had just revealed a great secret. I thought his answer was vague nonsense, but she must have heard something in his words that I hadn’t. Then again, I wasn’t exactly thinking clearly.

  No, right now, all I could see was Anatoly standing on the deck of a boat out in the ocean, smiling, raising his hand, and showing me the phone clutched in his beefy fingers.

  More fragments flashed through my mind. The faint hum of the IEDs buried in the sand. Anatoly pushing a button on his phone. The bright red flares of resulting explosions. The energy pounding into my body like a blacksmith’s hammer, bringing heat and hurt along with it. Too much heat, too much hurt, too much raw energy, blasting over Graham and burning right through me too, no matter how hard I tried to protect us, no matter how hard I tried to hold it all back…

  “Desmond,” Charlotte said in a low, warning whisper.

  Her voice snapped me out of my memories. Sympathy filled her face, and her aura pulsed with the same emotion. The cool, steady blue of her helped me slough off the sound of the screams echoing in my mind.

  “You’re a dead man,” I snarled.

  Anatoly shrugged. “Death comes to us all in the end. But I think tonight will be the end of you instead of me. It’s a shame that you dragged Ms. Locke into your petty quest for revenge. She could have been quite useful to me, especially given her status as a Legacy.”

  His pale blue gaze focused on Charlotte again. “When I was told who your father was, Ms. Locke, I was quite surprised to find you working as an analyst. I would have expected a cleaner like Jack Locke to have molded his daughter in his own deadly image.”

  Charlotte gave him a thin smile. “Who said that he didn’t?”

  A loud, merry, mocking chuckle spewed out of Anatoly’s mouth, and he held his hands out wide. “If he did, I don’t think you would be in quite this dire a predicament.”

  “You’re probably right about that,” Charlotte replied. “I’ve always thought I take more after my grandmother. She’s the one who truly raised me. My father was more of a weekend parent.”

  “Who cares?” Henrika said, striding over to stand beside Anatoly. “Let’s kill them, and be done with things.”

  Anatoly nodded. “As much as I would love to stay and chat about fathers and their unexpected legacies, Henrika is right. We have a schedule to keep.”

  I expected him to order his men to shoot us, and I rocked back on my heels, preparing to dive toward Charlotte and shield her as best I could. If I was lucky, I might be able to latch onto enough kinetic energy from the bullets to send them spinning away from us.

  Anatoly gestured at his men. “Bring them.”

  My hand clenched even tighter around my pocket watch and chain. As soon as they were in range, I’d take out the bodyguards, then go for Anatoly—

  “Stop,” Charlotte whispered. “Wait. Think.”

  Once again, her soft voice and steady aura cooled some of my rage. She was right. I couldn’t attack Anatoly and his men. Not right now. They would gun me down in an instant. Plus, I had to think about Charlotte. As much as I hated to admit it, Anatoly was right. I had gotten her into this mess, and it was my responsibility to get her out of it—alive.

  So I tucked my watch back into my vest pocket, then raised my hands. Charlotte sighed, then tossed her gun on the floor, although she discreetly swiped her small white purse off the bar.

  Two of the guards clamped their hands around my upper arms, while the other four men kept their guns trained on me. The seventh and final man, Henrika’s bodyguard, holstered his weapon and latched onto Charlotte’s arm, jerking her forward and making her stumble up against him. After a few seconds, Charlotte drew back as far as she could and gave the man a cold glare.

  I considered what she’d revealed regarding her father. About how his work for Section had so often put her in danger when she was younger. And now here I was, doing the exact same thing. The realization filled me with shame. But I could be sorry later—after I had gotten us out of this.

  Anatoly and Henrika turned and stepped out the open glass door in the back of the library. Anatoly’s men strong-armed me after them, with Charlotte and Henrika’s guard bringing up the rear.

  The door opened up onto a wide balcony that overlooked one of the lawns behind the hotel. Anatoly and Henrika glided down the stairs, with the rest of us following along behind.

  Anatoly and Henrika stopped in the center of one of the crushed-shell paths that wrapped around the wide-open grassy space. Anatoly waved his hand, and his men shepherded Charlotte and me out to the center of the lawn. I expected them to force us down onto our knees so they could execute us, but instead the men let us go and scurried backward.

  “What’s going on?” Charlotte whispered. “Why are they leaving us out here?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Anatoly waved his hand again. “I don’t know about you, Desmond, but this scenario seems remarkably familiar to me. I thought I’d planted enough IEDs on that beach to kill you and your friend Graham, but you somehow survived. This time, I decided not to take any chances.”

  A sinking feeling filled my stomach. He was right. I had been in this exact same situation on the beach, and the outcome now was going to be even worse than it had been back then. This time, Charlotte and I would both die, and I would perish knowing that my vendetta had gotten an innocent woman killed.

  Graham would have been so disappointed in me. I’d promised to avenge him, but instead, I’d just made everything worse.

  “You bastard,” I growled. “You sick, twisted son of a bitch.”

  A deep belly laugh rumbled out of Anatoly’s mouth. “Sick? Twisted? Why, I think that it’s quite poetic.”

  “What is he talking about?” Charlotte asked.

  I shook my head. I couldn’t force myself to say the words, to confirm that my greatest fear was going to happen all over again—and kill us both.

  “It’s too bad we won’t be able to stick around and see the demonstration,” Henrika said. “I’d love to see my improvements in action.”

  I frowned. “What demonstration?”

  “I told you I used my Redburn formula to bomb my father’s London hotel. That was my first test. I made some improvements to the liquid explosive and conducted a second test, the one you were involved in on the beach in Australia.” Henrika shrugged. “But you survived, so I made yet more improvements to the formula.” She glanced over at Anatoly. “Adrian wants to see my new, improved explosive in action before he finally agrees to b
uy it.”

  Her words punched me in the gut. Beside me, Charlotte sucked in a startled breath. We’d both known the mission was compromised, and that Henrika would probably try to kill us, but I had never expected anything as cruel as this.

  “Redburn,” Charlotte murmured, looking at me. “She named it Redburn because of the marks that the explosive leaves behind on the victims’ bodies—just like the ones you and Graham suffered.”

  Her words punched me in the gut too. Not only had Anatoly bombed the beach, but Henrika had also used Graham and me as lab rats, to test her weapon and prove it could kill paramortals so she could demand even more money for the formula. And now she was going to do it again, and there was nothing I could do to stop her—or save Charlotte.

  “Henrika’s generous donations to the hotel renovations led the foundation’s board of directors to give her unsupervised access to the grounds over the past few weeks.” Anatoly gestured at the lawn. “A couple of days ago, I took advantage of that. In preparation for this moment, for tonight, I had my men plant a series of Redburn explosives all over the lawn.”

  He pulled a phone out of his pocket and hit a button on it. An instant later, a low, familiar, ominous hum filled my ears, along with a series of faint beep-beep-beeps.

  “You two are now standing in a minefield,” Anatoly called out. “Only I’m afraid there is no way out. There’s no pattern, you see, no way for you to safely navigate through. Even on the off chance you do make it off the grass, the devices are set on a timer, one that I’ve just started. You have ten minutes to say your goodbyes.”

  Damned if we moved, damned if we didn’t move. It was a clever trap, and one I should have expected.

  I cursed, then reached out with my power, hoping he was lying and that I could sense where the bombs were planted and give us a fighting chance of navigating out of the minefield. But there were too many explosives, and their energy all bled together in one dull, collective hum.