by Zoe York
From one end of this warehouse to another, knights of all ranks tricked out Jaguars with military-grade shocks and bullet-proof class. Over there in the corner, flecks of gold sparked the air as welders worked on upgrades to the two new Mil Mi-24 choppers purchased from former Russian agents.
Glori Storm looked up, swished her dark curls out of her face, and waved. Her mouth moved, but the screeching of metal and tool motors drowned out her words.
With his free hand, Kent pointed to his ear and shook his head.
Glori tapped her protruding belly, pointed to her grease stained-hand and the ridiculously huge rock on her wedding finger, then pushed an invisible shopping cart.
Eric’s shopping for baby gear? Kent didn’t bother hiding his laughter. The image of that mean bastard reduced to changing nappies was the only good part of his day so far. He shook his head, waved goodbye to Glori and entered the main part of the building. “Morning, Kent. No flirting.”
“Who’s flirting?” He bowed before the single mahogany desk in the grand nave of the fortified church and the pursed-lipped woman behind it. Kent lifted Ava’s hand and brushed it across his lips. It earned him a playful smack across the cheek, and he stumbled away in mock horror.
Kent pulled a steaming cup of coffee from behind his back and plopped the peace offering on Ava’s desk between two of the many computer and security screens.
Ava’s blue painted fingernails drummed near her iPad. “That’ll have to do.” She nodded to the coffee. “Checkers is ready to see you now. Careful. She wants us to call her Kendall.”
“Christ, that’s weird to hear.”
“It is weird to say. Any word from the Dragon?”
He didn’t answer. How should he respond? That the man who headed all this, his big brother, was still MIA? Instead, he shrugged and nodded toward the ceiling-to-floor length Caravaggio painting separating the nave from the transepts.
Ava didn’t belabor the point. “Thanks for the coffee.” She pressed the button to reveal the hidden elevator behind the painting and waved him on.
Kent’s Santoni loafers clicked across the inlaid marble floor, echoing off the somber walls. The only other sounds were Ava’s fingernails clacking across her keyboard.
He typed in his code, the door closed, and the elevator rushed Kent down to the fortified keep. He got off on the office level, but walked past his own workspace and headed to the massive library from which his brother ran the organization. Instead of seeing the older, darker and slightly less-attractive version of himself, Kent saw the team’s fiery doctor, Checkers. She waved him in. And now, embarrassingly, it was his turn to ask if anyone had heard from the Dragon. “So, uh, my brother, is he okay?”
“Of course. Hasn’t he called you?” Checkers’s face burned as red as her hair at his quick headshake. “Never mind that. You know how he is. Mr. Protocol.”
It didn’t make it easier. His brother—like their parents—always put work above people. But seriously, it takes a special kind of asshole to contact staff ahead of his own damned brother. Whatever. He ought to be used to it by now.
Kent attacked the awkward silence as he always did, with charm and minor deflection. The easiest target was her love life. “So, my sweet, doctor, what’s going on with you and Anderson? I hear he’s mad he got passed over as commanding officer. That can’t make pillow talk easy.”
“None of your business.”
“Of course not. But for the record, this is what normal people call conversation.”
“As acting commander, I suggest we talk about the mission at hand. I’m emailing you the dossier now. Your assignment—”
“About Anderson. Doesn’t that make it weird when he’s pulling your hair out of that bun and dragging his tongue across your—”
“Shut up.”
“Or was that just a one-off thing? Because you came to me for love advice, and I gave it. From the look on your face that next morning—”
“Shut. Up.”
“Because I think you guys—”
Checkers’s eyes narrowed behind her black glasses. “Shut—”
“Yes?”
“Up. Don’t test me. It’ll take me two seconds to switch things up and give you Remington’s assignment in Antarctica.”
“The fuck’s in Antarctica? Sorry. Not my case.” He waved her away and reached for the phone in his pocket. Fingers sliding across the screen, he opened up Checkers’s message on the mission and plopped down into the chair. “Bhutan, right? My brother sent me the basics.”
“Yes,” she answered with a relieved sigh. “Here’s your credit card for this assignment, though you shouldn’t expect many ATMs outside major urban areas. Here are a few ngultrum.”
Kent dropped his phone to collect the stack of brightly colored currency. “Will this hold me throughout the assignment?”
“It should. Your partner will have money as well.”
“Partner? Is this a military operation?”
“Perhaps...we just don’t know.”
“So you don’t think I can handle an ops mission on my own? Or is this my brother’s doing? It’s been a long time since...that incident.”
Checkers’s hand shot out, hovering over his leg. But instead of touching him, she coughed, pulled back and folded her hands over her knees. He nodded in understanding. Checkers couldn’t play Comforter in Chief anymore. As long as his brother was gone, she had to be their director. It couldn’t be easy corralling all of them.
“I do trust you, Kent. So does your brother and everyone else. But Bhutan has different rules than most countries. One of Bhutan’s rules is that all visitors must register with a state tour guide. You simply cannot do this on your own. Plus, there aren’t any direct flights into or out of the country. This person can help. Your assignment is the Amber Room.”
“I know that much.” He’d researched it on the way over: a series of gold-leaf-backed amber panels that had been given as a gift to Russia’s Peter the Great from Prussia’s monarch, Frederick William I. The room had stayed in Saint Petersburg until World War II, when the Germans came in and wrecked the place. Panels included.
“In 2003, the Germans and Russians got together to make a new Amber Room and officially proclaimed that original panels no longer existed.”
“But you think they’re lying?”
“I don’t know. No one knows, but the descendants of the last Romanov tsar—at least one wing of the family— never stopped looking. They’re willing to pay us several million dollars for its safe return.”
“And will it be safe with them?”
Checkers sat on the edge of the desk and crossed her legs. “We’d keep it ourselves and add it to the vault if I didn’t think they could handle it. No, we give it back to the rightful heirs, collect the bounty, and move on. They’ve paid ransoms to different groups for decades, and they’re tired of being screwed. You’re going to find those panels, you and Elena.”
“Elena? Is she new? Something else my brother didn’t tell me.”
“She’s not a knight. Yet. Like I said, we needed someone on the inside. Your assignment is her placement test.”
“Got it. Is she hot?”
“Don’t start!”
— TWO —
Darjeeling, India
Elena toed the crack in the floor of the Bagdogra airport as she checked the flights on the damaged arrival screen for the billionth time. The man’s plane had just landed.
What would this Knight of Ambra be like?
She’d been told little about the organization. It had an ops branch and an intelligence wing, and she wondered where someone with the code-name Duke fit in. Almost certainly, he was very high up. Maybe he even oversaw both divisions. In which case, he’d be a genius and perhaps had earned several black belts too. More than likely, he was special ops, as she’d been before her accident.
Elena forced her hand away from her scarred face and squeezed some drops in her altitude-dried eye. She blinked rapidly and so ha
d the screen, as it changed with updated information. The Duke’s plane was now de-boarding.
She eased over to the windows for a better view. Unlike most airports, this small regional one didn’t have aero-bridges. Each plane unloaded directly onto the tarmac. After wincing at her reflection in the smudged windowpane, she straightened her black t-shirt and pushed a chunk of her hair across the right side of her face.
Oh, get a grip, Elena.
This man had seen injuries before. He was a professional. She needed to act as if she remembered how to be one too. It hadn’t been so long since she’d been out in the field. So why was she six seconds from running into the bathroom?
She nodded to no one in particular, re-laced her boots, and headed downstairs. Elena rocked from her heels to her toes as the passengers rushed from baggage claim and out the doors. Smarter people around her had signs. She hadn’t thought it necessary in such a small airport.
Bullcrap. She hadn’t thought at all. She was slipping—too long out of the game.
Her private pity party screeched to an end as a monster of a man barreled through the crowd. He had to be seven feet tall with shoulders like an ox. A proper man. Big and strong. An un-green version of the Hulk.
Her fingers combed through her long bangs one last time before she called to him. “Kent?”
The man didn’t turn. She cleared her throat and tried again, this time reaching for his arm. “Kent?”
Some idiot’s hand closed around her wrist and whirled her around. “Over here.”
>Whoa. “You’re not Kent.”
“In the flesh,” he said with a wink.
Yes, a damned wink.
The tousle-haired blond was a walking, talking >GQ cover model. A white-collar button down shirt peeked out of a gray sweater. His single-breasted navy blue jacket belonged on a yacht with servants, not here.
“I don’t think you’re the Kent I’m looking for.” She stood on her toes and looked over his shoulder. Rather, she tried to look over his shoulder.
The man pivoted, twisting back into her field of vision. “Elena Haaland?”
She turned slowly, waiting for her mind to catch up to reality. The model was a secret agent. A blond James Bond.
“How?”
“How what?”
“You...it’s just...don’t take this the wrong way, but...”
One of his expertly sculpted eyebrows went up, and he whipped on a pair of brown leather gloves. “Well, you have a Swedish name, and my info says you were in the Swedish military, but you don’t look it.”
“I’m half Swedish, thank you very much. My middle name’s Reeta. Two EEs, no Is.”
“Oh, Indian. Or is it Nepali?” He scrolled through his phone. “I’ve got your info somewhere...”
“Lhotshampa.”
“La-what?”
“Lhotshampa.”
“Now you’re just making shit up.”
“Could you be any more offensive?”
The man blushed a furious red and glanced toward the floor. “Sorry. I didn’t know that was a thing.”
“A people.”
“Right, no, yes, right. A people. The dossier doesn’t mention...uh, yeah.”
>This was the best America had to offer? Good heavens. She missed Sweden already. Here she was, trying to complete a mission, and they’d sent her a man-doll. A sinfully handsome man-doll, but an idiot nonetheless. Perhaps he was her mission too. That must be it, part of the test: to see if she could retrieve the Amber Room while dragging this Kent guy along. “Clever.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m not an idiot. This is part of my mission: to see how I handle pressure.”
“I’m a test?”
“You’re here to see how I perform with a weight around my ankle. It makes sense.”
The beautiful man’s eyes widened, and a soft chuckle passed his lips. “I’m dead weight. Well, that’s nice.”
“You can drop the act. Unless your mission is to make this difficult for me? Is that it? The Dragon did say this wouldn’t be easy.”
Kent winced and slid his arm through the other shoulder of his black backpack. “Let’s pretend that I’m not actually an idiot and that we haven’t spent our first few moments together unintentionally, yet thoroughly, hurling insults at one another.”
“Okay.”
“Yes, and instead, how about we get through this damned mission in this damned country, so I can get back to my life?”
“Fine with me. The sooner this is over, the sooner my new life can begin.”
— THREE —
Kent climbed into the pre-paid red and black taxi behind Elena and tried not to stay offended. To be fair, he had dealt the first idiotic blow. Not that it was his fault. Checkers’s info on the woman said that she was Nepali. On the other hand, a two-second search on his phone proved that both facts were true.
Elena’s people—at least presumably, her mother’s people—were called Lhotshampa, by the larger Bhutanese population. In the last twenty years, the government forced the ethnic group into exile. These days, they were a people without a country. He scrolled for more, but shut down his phone when Elena leaned over to address the taxi driver.
She was a magnificent woman, aside from her attitude. Beauty and brains. She was tough and bore the scars of that toughness. She’d hidden one eye, but the breeze through their half-open, three-wheeled mode of transportation, blew her dark hair around her heart-shaped face.
And her eye.
Something was off with it. The hazel was too bright and her blinking irregular. A war injury? Likely. According to Checkers, Elena was pulled from the Arméns jägarbataljon. The chick was a Swedish army ranger, trained in one of the toughest Nordic battalions. She’d been behind enemy lines, but an eye injury would have destined her for a desk job.
This must be her way to that new life she spoke of. His brother saw his knights as a curated collection of genius. He’d once said that, for every matter, there was an expert and he wanted one of each—everything from machinery and Twelfth Century art to botany and nuclear weaponry. So what could Miss Elena bring to the already well-rounded table? “What do you do?”
“At the moment, I’m reminding our driver that he won’t get tips from taking us the scenic way around.” She switched back to local speech and thunked the driver on the shoulder.
“So you’ve been here before?”
“No, but I can read the signs.”
“Are you a linguist?”
“No, but I speak several Southeast Asian languages.”
“Sniper?”
“You’re asking me this on a public street while we’re stuck in traffic in a zero percent soundproof tuk-tuk?”
“Well, I—”
“No, I’m not. Are you trying to figure out why I’m here? Because I find myself asking the same question of you.”
He knew exactly why he was here. Redemption. “I’m the head nerd and dedicated schmoozer.”
“You schmooze?”
He shrugged. “Try not to sound so disappointed. Pretty women tell me secrets. My tongue is legendary. It opens doors, gets me out of tight situations. I’m a talented man.”
“A little anti-climatic.”
“You haven’t witnessed my talents.”
Elena leaned back into the cracked cushioned seats and counted to ten.
“I can hear you.”
Her eyes flickered over and she started counting again.
“Let’s start over, Ms. Elena.”
“No.”
“Why not? I’m charming.”
“Y-you’re...” Her lips quivered, and whether she rolled her eyes in derision or amusement, he couldn’t tell. Best to consider that progress and keep moving. “My info says you’re the best in Sweden. Why would you leave that behind?”
Elena flipped right back into the swing of it. “I can’t tell if you’re polite or stupid.”
“Err on the side of politeness.”
“An injury.
You understand that, don’t you? What were you before? Air Force? Marine?”
“Kid genius. Ph.D in Computer Engineering from MIT at twenty years old. Hired by the FBI to update their systems at twenty-five.”
“Impressive.”
“Thanks.”
She crossed her arms, and he saw the dig coming from a mile away. “So why are you here?” Her smirk seemed wrapped in equal parts smugness and attitude.
It was a good question. He’d been on the road for a little over a day, and he already missed his computers and suits. He lived a good life, and he fucking loved it.
He leaned over, but Elena didn’t ease back, meeting this invasion of her space head on. “Well?”
“Every man and woman goes through the same physical and mental training upon acceptance to Ambra. Your previous experience doesn’t matter. You’ll go through it too. Forget any boot camp you’ve heard of. Ambra training is nine months of pure hell. All of us, to a person, have to complete a mission outside our area of expertise to keep us on our toes—no matter what our daily jobs are within the outfit. I didn’t expect it now, though. Sometimes I think the Dragon just likes to mess with me.”
At the mention of his brother, Elena’s eyebrows perked up, and a fog lifted from her face. “You’ve met him in person?”
“Once or twice.”
“What’s he like?”
Kent let out a whoosh of air, surprised at the sense of loss that settled in his chest. He missed the bastard. He’d never been gone for so long before. Part of him was, well, scared. “Arrogant. Protective. Ten seconds ahead of everybody else in a room.”
“That look on your face... I know it.”
“I have no look—”
“It’s the first genuine emotion you’ve shown since we’ve met. It’s the way a soldier looks when someone mentions a commanding officer he respects.”
“When you meet him—if you meet him—don’t let that respect thing slip.” Kent brushed dust from his shoulders and turned to gaze out the window. “That shit’ll go straight to his head.”
Elena fell into silence, and it was just as well. He didn’t need to think of his brother and instead concentrated on the road ahead of them. The less-than-ten-mile trip from the airport to the bus station took well over an hour. Cars and rickshaws fought cattle, bicycles, and pedestrians for every inch of road. Dirt bikes, some hilariously piled with a man, a woman, and two to three children, weaved through traffic around them.
