Kiss and Tell (Scions of Sin Book 2)

by Taylor Holloway

  Zoey giggled and me.

  “Of course not,” she said, “I was just curious. Is it a deal breaker that I’m not a vegetarian? Cause I really enjoy eating meat. Especially bacon.”

  “Hardly. I watched you eat those snails last night, remember?”

  “Well, technically snails aren’t outside your allowed protein selections, right?” She asked, raising an eyebrow.

  “That’s true,” I admitted, “actually an argument could be made that consuming bugs is the most ethical protein selection you could make from both a moral and environmental perspective.”

  Zoey made a face. “They were not bugs,” she said, “they were mollusks. They lived in shells.”

  “Spiders live in shells too, if you think about it,” I teased. She shivered dramatically.

  “Wrong. Spiders have their bones on the outside— it’s a carapace, not a shell. I know my biology. I’m not ever going to eat a spider. I’d sooner be a vegetarian.”

  “I ate a spider once,” I admitted, and Zoey’s eyes got huge, “in Cambodia. They fry tarantulas as a delicacy. It was extremely crunchy, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected. The texture was kind of like fried cheese curds.”

  “Um, gross. I’m glad you aren’t telling me this on the first date,” she said, shaking her head.

  “Well I told you I believed in aliens and Sasquatch on the first date,” I replied, “and that didn’t scare you off.”

  “Well I hope my choice of Pho place doesn’t scare you off,” Zoey said. “It’s my favorite. I’ve got good news, too. I got the interview with the Picayune. It’s over Skype this evening.”

  She grinned at me, and I tried to smile back at her encouragingly. I’d already realized that Zoey had a way of making me admit all kinds of things about myself that I’d ordinarily keep private (not that I actually believed in Bigfoot). At first I thought it had to do with her journalistic instincts and ability to ask probing questions, but I no longer believed that. It was just Zoey. I wanted her to know all about me so that she would like me. It was a naturally vulnerable position, this desire to be genuinely open with someone else, but not an unpleasant one. At least not yet. If she found out all about me and then rejected me… that would be very painful. But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to keep anything in reserve to mitigate that hypothetical future heartbreak. As a methodical, careful person, being with Zoey—a woman who provoked me into impulsivity— might be driving me insane.

  “Is it bad that I really don’t want you to get this job,” I told her, “I mean, I want you to get the job in the abstract sense, but I don’t want you to move. We just met.”

  She smiled sadly at me and shook her head.

  “It’s not bad. I’m conflicted about it, too. But I can’t stay at JuicyNews. Especially not after last night.”

  “What was that about, anyway?” I asked curiously, “you seemed really upset.”

  Zoey sighed. Our food had shown up and she stabbed at her soup a bit before answering.

  “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” I added.

  “My boss wanted me to record us having sex,” she said quietly after another moment, not meeting my eyes, “someone in the restaurant last night must have put something online? A photo of us? I don’t know how she found out we were on a date, but she called and asked if I would, um, produce a sequel to your first sex tape.”

  I gaped at her. She looked up and me, saw my expression, and immediately looked back down at her soup.

  “Zoey, that’s really fucked up,” I managed. “No wonder you were angry.”

  She nodded.

  “I was furious. The worst part,” she said in a tiny voice, still not looking at me, “was that for a second, only for a second, I actually thought about it. She offered me so much money. I… I would never do it,” she said more firmly, finally looking up, “but no one’s ever offered me so much money and I won’t pretend like I wasn’t tempted by it. I mean, I could pay off my student loans. But there’s just no way. People think that just because you don’t have a lot of money that you’ll be willing to do anything. Well I won’t.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not really knowing what I was apologizing for. Being me? Being a public figure that had somehow created a market for videos of me having sex? Existing in a world where Zoey would be asked to do something that screwed up? Probably that last one.

  “It’s not your fault!” Zoey exclaimed, “But anyway, I’m glad I told you. Keeping it from you was actually sort-of bothering me. I’m turning in my resignation with my piece on Angelica today, obviously. You need to be careful though. Sometimes people are really awful aren’t they?”

  I nodded. Zoey might be giving me a pass, but I’d pretty much done exactly what her boss at JuicyNews had. I’d wrongly assumed just two days ago that Zoey would do anything for money, including hack Durant Astronautics.

  My introspection was interrupted by my phone. I’d received a text from my uncle Richard. In fact, it was a group text, sent to me, my brother, and David’s brother Alexander.

  Emergency family meeting. 2pm at D house. Angelica’s supposed boyfriend was the husband of Nathan’s Russian girlfriend. He’s former KGB. Likely hacker

  I felt like the ground had just melted out from underneath me.

  “Zoey,” I heard myself saying, grabbing the check and getting up in a dreamlike haze, “I’m really sorry, but I’ve got to go.”

  30

  Zoey

  “Yeah, he pretty much just ran away in the middle of lunch,” I said to Nika, pouting in my car outside of my favorite Pho place, “it was bizarre.”

  “Hmm you said he got a text so maybe he had, like, an important astronaut meeting to get to that he forgot,” she suggested. I could again hear her eating in the background. She was on her break at the hospital.

  “Yeah maybe, but still. This is the second time he’s done this now and I’m not a fan. And now my stupid car won’t start,” I whined. This day was only half over, but I was already fully over it.

  “Are you parked next to anyone? Just ask if they’ll give you a jump,” suggested Nika. That was, of course, the smart thing to do, but I wasn’t ready for solutions. I wasn’t done complaining yet.

  “I got him that picture of the Russian guy, too,” I moaned, “I’ve got no idea where I stand with him. One second Nathan seems into me and then the next he’s rushing off again. Tomorrow he’s rushing off to freakin’ space. This is making me crazy.”

  “How was your date last night? Since you didn’t call me, I’m assuming it went well?”

  I smiled at that.

  “It was amazing, Nika, I can’t even put into words how great this man’s shower sex is. And the shower itself is, I’m pretty sure, designed specifically to accommodate said phenomenal shower sex.”

  “Oh my,” Nika said suggestively, “when did you become such a freewheeling sex goddess? Last week you wouldn’t even download Tinder because it was too risky, and now you’re getting down with this famous guy you barely know on the regular? What happened to my sweet, innocent little Zoey? The one who only spreads her legs for true love?”

  She was teasing and definitely not judging, but she also wasn’t wrong. The last few days had been very unlike me.

  “Yeah, I don’t know,” I replied, “I think she died of boredom?”

  “Well good for you,” Nika said proudly, “I take full credit for encouraging you to get out of your shell. Besides, you’ll probably be in Florida this time next month. You’re so gonna get this job. We both know this interview is just an HR formality.”

  According to Nika, her husband had been talking me up to the Editor-in-Chief for months. I was less convinced this would be a sure thing, but I was cautiously optimistic. Over the last year I’d learned not to count my chickens before they hatch.

  “I hope so,” I replied, staring at my ugly brown steering wheel of my ugly brown car that wouldn’t even start, “because I’m quitting JuicyNews and I have ex
actly three-thousand, four-hundred, and twelve dollars in my bank account with which to sustain myself.”

  “Well you have to quit,” Nika said, “that lady is nuts.”

  I’d told Nika all about the sex tape thing already. She’d been incensed on my behalf, naturally.

  “Obviously, but it’s still scary,” I said, “this whole week has just completely overwhelmed my emotional capabilities.”

  “You’re doing great,” Nika said soothingly, “it’s all going to be ok. Just get someone to jump your car, go home, write your article, quit your job, and then nail the interview and get a new job. You got this. Do what needs doing and stay focused. Look, I gotta’ run. My fifteen minutes are over. Hang in there.”

  “Say hi to the tiny babies for me,” I said grumpily, “talk to you later.”

  Nika was right, I thought to myself, I was doing alright. Nathan was going to do whatever he wanted, and I knew from the very beginning that he wasn’t boyfriend material. I wrote gossip which means I read gossip. Nathan was a consummate playboy. We were having fun right now, but that was all it was. Trying to turn our casual fling into anything else would only make me cry, and I’d already cried enough over him.

  This was the guy that got kicked out of NASA for having sex in space and then unrepentantly started a company that did exactly what NASA did but better, faster, and more efficiently. He lived on a different plane of existence from me (literally—looking out the windows of his apartment gave me vertigo). For me, success looked like not adding to my credit card debt by the end of the month or resorting to canned beans for three days in a row. The idea that we’d be compatible on a relationship level was naïve.

  I turned the key one more time and miraculously, the ancient engine turned over and purred like a kitten. The universe was already cooperating again. I could do it.

  31

  Nathan

  I couldn’t do it. Sitting in my car outside of my grandfather’s massive mansion in the suburbs, I was unable to face my family. He was Ysenia’s husband.

  It wasn’t because I’m ostensibly Catholic and felt some kind of moral guilt over breaking a commandment. Not at all. The last time I set foot in a church was over fifteen years ago at my aunt’s funeral. The whole organized religion thing wasn’t really for me, although I’d been thoroughly indoctrinated as a child and still had to contend with my mother’s disappointment over never going to mass. I tried to be a not-awful person and that was good enough to set my conscience at ease.

  No, it wasn’t the religious or moral implications of knowing she was married (which she never mentioned) that had me paralyzed. It was the fact that her husband had come after me after all this time. There was only one reason that someone who do such a thing, and it wasn’t just anger over Ysenia’s obvious infidelity.

  Ysenia was dead. She had to be. The rumors that she’d been executed for what happened aboard the ISS were either true or something equally awful must have happened to her. There was no other reason a man would come across the ocean to the other side of the world, pretend to be someone else, and try to destroy me.

  When my phone rang with an unidentified number, I nearly jumped out of my skin. Ordinarily I wouldn’t answer a random call, but my brain was so frazzled by the recent revelation about Marcus/Oleg, I wasn’t exactly firing on all cylinders.

  “Hello,” I answered, “this is Nathan.”

  “Hello Nathan,” a cool, vaguely familiar accented voice replied, “this is Oleg. We met before, of course, a few days ago, When I was being Marcus. But that’s past now. Given the number of helicopters currently circling and looking for me, I assume you know all about that.”

  Shit. He was calling me? My blood ran cold, and distantly, I wondered if I ought to be trying to trace the call or something. My protracted silence must have prompted Oleg to speak, because he continued,

  “Even if you catch me, you won’t get away with what you did to Ysenia,” Oleg’s voice was positively murderous.

  “I didn’t do anything to harm Ysenia,” I felt obliged to say, “she came onto me. I had no idea she was married. Everything was consensual. Where is she?”

  “Where is she?! She’s dead. Embarrassing the Russian state is punishable by execution, although that law isn’t on the books. The way I see it, you murdered her. You’ll pay for what you did. Trust me.”

  The confirmation of Ysenia’s fate did nothing to improve my emotional state. It’s not like I’d ever been extremely emotionally invested in her, but I would never want something bad to happen to the woman. We were just two idiots with an excess of libido. Ysenia certainly didn’t deserve to be executed for casual sex, no matter where it happened.

  “Listen Oleg,” I began, “I’m sorry that Ysenia is dead. That’s awful. But I didn’t have anything to do with that. You’re going to get yourself killed too. You need to turn yourself in and cooperate with the police-”

  Oleg’s laughter through the line cut me off.

  “You’re such an American,” he said, as if it were an insult and not something that I was deeply proud of, “I accepted my fate long ago, but I should have known that girl with the camera was up to no good today. Everyone you care about is going to pay for what happened to Ysenia, trust me. I just wanted to give you a call, so that when the moment comes, you’ll know it was me.”

  “Stay the fuck away from Zoey!” I barked, simultaneously terrified and furious that he’d realized her part in his identification. Oleg laughed again.

  “Oh, so you like the little photographer?” He said, and I swear I could hear him smirking, “That’s good information to have.”

  I was going to kill this man if I could. The fact that he wanted revenge against me was understandable. Illegal and stupid, but understandable. But there was no way I could let him hurt the things I cared about. Durant Astronautics was my life. Zoey Atkinson might be my future. Neither one of them had a thing to do with Ysenia.

  “Listen Oleg, you need to listen to me, you’ve got to stop this,” I managed, trying to reason with him, but the line went dead.

  I took a deep breath and forced myself to get out of my car. My arms and legs felt like they were made of lead, but I was able to drag myself inside the spooky old Durant mansion and into my uncle Alexander’s study. The others were all there waiting for me.

  I flopped down into the chair next to my brother, staring blankly at the ground and waiting for my elders—or David—to start talking.

  “Alright,” David said to our uncles, “we’re all here. Let’s get this over with.”

  “It’s like I texted,” Richard said to our assembled group, “the guy in the picture sent by Nathan is a former KGB agent named Oleg Kuznetsov. He was apparently married, or at least engaged to, Ysenia Antonova, the cosmonaut that, well, you know. The fact that he’s here now and is impersonating a minor Portuguese tennis star while dating Angelica Hunt, is definitely not a coincidence. I’ve notified The Senator already. He’s working with the FBI right now to try and catch him. This is about to blow up and is going to be in the news by evening. We need to game plan the fallout.”

  “He just called me,” I announced, “apparently he wants me to know it was him. He said that Ysenia’s dead, and he blames me. Clearly, he wants revenge. The only good news is that it sounds like he’s about to get caught.”

  Everyone stared at me. Although my eyes were still focused downward, I could feel the weight of their undivided attention.

  “This is good,” Alexander said after a moment, and I looked up at him in surprise. He looked as unhappy as possible while still being, apparently, happy. “At least as far as I can see,” he continued, “it makes Nathan look like a victim. Nobody likes Russian spies.”

  “Nobody likes adulterers either,” I replied, and Alexander shrugged his broad shoulders.

  “Nobody really cares,” he said, “at least not anymore. The shock of your misdeeds up in orbit wore off a long time ago. You’ve been rehabilitated. We’ll catch the guy, he’s an e
vil foreign agent, everyone will hate him. Then everyone will be even more patriotic and supportive of Durant Astronautics. This is a win for us.”

  “Are we sure that this will become public?” David asked, “I mean, if he’s a spy, maybe we’ll just trade him back to Russia or something. Wouldn’t that be the best case scenario?”

  “They don’t want him,” Richard said with a smirk. “They’ve already disavowed him. They said he’s been off their radar for a long time and would be useless to us from an intelligence perspective. No, we get to keep this one. He might be useless from an intelligence perspective, but the guy is still in for some seriously enhanced interrogation techniques.”

  “What about Ysenia?” I finally asked. “How does she fit into this?”

  I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe Oleg about Ysenia, or maybe I just didn’t want to. Perhaps Richard’s contacts had confirmed Oleg’s story.

  “She doesn’t.” Richard answered with a frown, “We still have no idea what really happened to her. She might be dead or in prison like Oleg said, obviously. She might be living the quiet life in Moscow. She might be helping Oleg right now. No one has any intel on her. The Russians, who are actually cooperating on Oleg, are still silent on her.”

  “Will you delay the launch now?” David asked me, as if it was now the most obvious thing in the world.

  “He can’t,” Alexander barked, “that’s the last thing we want to do.”

  I nodded. Agreeing with my uncle Alexander was a rare occurrence, but today was a rare day.

  “Delaying the launch would make us look weak,” I said, “we can’t just roll over and let some Russian spy fuck us over.”

  “Dude,” my brother said, “he’s only trying to fuck you because you fucked his wife! Maybe think this through? He might have done all kinds of shit to your systems. He might have sabotaged the launch.”

  “How?” I fired back, “We know all he got was the programming for the upcoming launch. He’s about to be locked up where he can’t do anything. I say we should stay the course.”