“Romeo works for the Executive in the United Kingdom,” says Agent Novenine. “He’s posing as Lawrence Fisher, a wealthy investor from London. His partner, Uncle, is serving as his personal valet and chauffeur. Their target is Mellie Hart, who’s been traveling between here and London pending her divorce from Gallagher Hart. We’ve decided that some coordination is necessary to prevent any further mishaps.”
“I have to work with him?” I spit out.
“The Hart family is participating in a sailing race next weekend,” she says, ignoring my outburst. “Echo and Romeo will attend together and claim to be former acquaintances who reconnected at the Woodland Castle. Is that understood?”
No. Alpha and I have worked with other operatives before, but not like this, when we’ve already started a mission. There are too many variables that need to be reconsidered, too many issues that could crop up. Normally Agent Novenine would be instructing us to continue our mission separately, as if we didn’t know the other operatives at all. At least from glancing around the briefing room, I can see that no one else is on board either.
“Hold on,” says Reese. “I thought we’d merely be sharing our plans, that sort of thing. I’ve already taken out two Ophidian directors, and I don’t have the time to incorporate a new cover story involving your operatives.”
“You can and you will,” Agent Novenine says, her tone indicating that she’ll shut down any further argument. “I’ve already spoken to your handler about it. For this mission, you’ll be serving both of our nations and not just your own.”
“Wait,” I say desperately. “I was going to close the mission on my date with Jamison Hart. I can’t do it if I have a boyfriend—”
“Not a boyfriend,” she says. “A first date. If you’ve read Jamison Hart’s file thoroughly, which I’m sure you have, you should know that he’s extremely competitive and goes for what he wants. This can only help your mission.” She spreads out several files on the table. “While Echo and Romeo are distracting Mellie Hart and fueling Jamison’s jealousy, Alpha and Uncle will set Mellie’s jeep to explode at the sailing race. Echo will get closer to Jamison at his stepmother’s funeral before killing him at his colleague Damien Fabre’s wedding. You will have one month to close the mission.”
Agent Novenine begins to distribute the files, but this marks the end of any discussion. Ignoring everyone else, I shove my chair back and stalk out of the briefing room. As always, Alpha will make sure I get anything I need, including a bunch of files I don’t actually want to memorize.
By the time I reach my dorm, I’m practically shaking with rage, my insides feeling as if they’re going to explode. I crash onto my bed and shove Fiver aside, releasing a muffled scream into my pillow. I didn’t want to kill Jamie. I didn’t want to lose control over every aspect of my mission. Part of me wanted to make it last forever, but that’s clearly no longer an option, if it ever was.
But that’s when I realize what all this means. Instead of being locked up in solitary confinement, I’m being given extra time to spend with Jamie. For the next month, my cover story actually requires me to get closer to my target without killing him. I can do whatever I want.
I can even be normal.
Instead of crying, I begin to laugh hysterically, the sound bubbling up from the depths of my gut. Somehow I managed to find Jamison Hart during the game of Sardines, and I escaped from the Woodland Castle without getting caught, and Agent Novenine didn’t even sentence me to solitary confinement. And now I don’t have to kiss my target for an entire month?
For once, it feels like a celebration.
six
“Shit.”
I’ve been dreaming about sailing on the ocean with Jamison Hart. His lips are so tantalizingly close to mine that I can actually see the salt flecks in his eyelashes. We’ve been swimming in the water together, and his body is radiating a warmth I just want to soak in forever. We still have an entire month, he whispers to me. How are you going to keep yourself from kissing me during all that time? I shrug, smiling mischievously. The real question is how you’re going to keep yourself from kissing me, Mr. Hart...
The voice cuts through my dream again. “Ow! Seriously?”
My eyes fly open to see Juliet struggling out of an evening gown on the other side of the dorm. Her long wavy hair makes her look like a character from a fairy tale, even though her white gloves are soaked through with blood. My roommate’s real name is Joey, but like most operatives, we only use our code names with each other.
“What’s wrong?” I ask groggily.
“Nothing,” she says, ripping off her bloodied gloves before finally managing to unzip her dress. She grabs a blanket from her bed and wraps it tightly around herself, like a cocoon. “I messed up, Echo.”
“Not as much as I did.” But now that I’m fully awake, I can detect the odor of alcohol wafting across the room. My roommate is drunk. Beyond drunk. This isn’t unusual for her, but the frequency of it has been going up a lot lately.
It’s entirely possible that she’s right and I’m wrong.
“I doubt it,” she says miserably. “I made an idiot of myself in front of Franklin.”
“Your target?” I ask, confused.
“No. Fox.” Juliet gives a tiny hiccup. “I came back from my mission and he was in the elevator, and he just looked so handsome... I forgot that’s his thing, you know? I couldn’t help myself.”
Now I understand why she’s upset. Fox is an operative who appears attractive to everyone, even though he has completely average features if you look at him closely. I always avoid eye contact with him, because I don’t want to find myself in a situation where I might want to kiss another operative with my poisoned lips. He could have been a Romeo, but we already had one at the time. Instead he was made into a Fox, the con man who’s so smooth that you won’t ever know what hit you, if you even notice anything happened at all.
“What did you do?” I ask her.
“He asked if I was okay, because of all the blood.” She gestures at her stained gloves. “I had to slit my target’s throat earlier, and it did not go well. But I’ve been spending so much time around Franklin that I forgot to stay away from him. So I said no, I wasn’t okay, and then he took off my gloves, but he accidentally brushed against my hand...”
Juliet trails off, looking as if she wants to puke. If the palm of her hand comes into contact with anyone else’s skin, they find themselves wanting to sleep with her. That’s why she’s a Juliet, the seductress who kills her targets when they let their guard down during sex. Not an Echo. I’m surprised to hear that she’s been working closely with Fox, to the point where she’s calling him by his real name. It sounds like a dangerous combination even to me.
“The thing is, I wanted him too, you know?” Her voice gets small, really small. “I was so drunk, Echo. I forgot for a minute that I was... you know. An aberrant. I didn’t even realize he’d touched my hand at first. I thought he really wanted me. But the look on his face when I let go of him...”
Juliet swallows hard and gazes at me with despairing eyes.
“He looked like he’d been hit by a train.”
And then she leans over and pukes onto the floor.
There’s a tentative knock at the door. “You guys okay in there?” It’s Kilo, Juliet’s partner, an older man who can lift a motorcycle with his bare hands. He’s married to another operative, Tango, and they’ve treated Juliet like their daughter ever since she was brought to the Executive as a child.
“I’m fine, Kieran,” she calls out, coughing. “Don’t worry about me.”
There’s a brief pause. “Okay, Joey. See you tomorrow.”
As his footsteps recede from the door, Juliet collapses back onto her bed, still coughing. At least it doesn’t sound like she’s going to puke again. This doesn’t happen all the time, maybe once every few weeks. I clean up after her and it’s never mentioned again. In return, she vacates the dorm whenever I just need to be alone.
This wasn’t so difficult when we were children. All Juliet was being taught back then was that she wasn’t supposed to bare her hands. She was so diligent about it, didn’t ever seem to be curious about what would happen if she took off the white gloves. It wasn’t until later that I realized she’d already found out what could happen if she did, and she didn’t want it to happen ever again.
But now, as adults, she’s gradually becoming more and more careless. The Executive requires her to bare her hands for missions, to the point of sentencing her to solitary confinement when she refuses to do so. Being a Juliet is affecting her, the same way being an Echo has affected me, only far, far worse. She has to do a lot more than kiss her targets, and then she has to kill them with whatever method Agent Novenine believes will fit into her cover story.
I’m like a black widow, she’s whispered to me more than once, her eyes wide in the darkness. But I wear white gloves. Isn’t that messed up?
Go to sleep, Juliet, I usually mumble.
What does it feel like? she’s asked. To kill like that?
To kill without consequence, she means. It must seem so easy to her, to be able to give one little kiss and then walk away, as if I lack any personal responsibility for my target’s death. And maybe it’s true, to a certain extent. Look how much it’s shaken me to see someone die in front of me tonight. I could never slit someone’s throat like that, much less stand to have their blood covering my hands.
But even Juliet doesn’t know how much it affects me, how I’m still haunted by my targets even if I rarely stick around to see them die. I have to memorize everything about them, their personalities and likes and dislikes, and it’s like they get under my skin and never leave. The best I can do is bury each target in the back of my mind, never to resurface except in my nightmares. And then I make myself act unemotional about it, about as close to Alpha as I can manage. Whereas Juliet deals with killing by getting drunk after every mission, I deal with it by turning in the opposite direction. By pretending I don’t feel anything at all, like my partner.
I never said I was great at it.
It’s too late to go back to sleep, but still too early to start memorizing files for the sailing race. And yet anything has to be better than staring into the darkness, listening to Juliet’s drunken snoring, all the while fighting to suppress my memories of previous targets.
So instead of getting back into bed, I head for the stairwell and make my way down to the training gym. Underneath the fluorescent lights, I pull on a pair of boxing gloves, preparing to take out my anger on a red punching bag. This is my alcohol of choice at the moment. Because I’m an Echo protected by an Alpha, I pretty much never have to engage in hand-to-hand combat. But like all other operatives, I still have to train for it in case I’m forced to fight my way out of a mission.
Right now, it’s a way for me to fight the targets swarming in my own head.
I suck in a deep breath and land my first punch square in the center of the punching bag. It feels solid. It feels really freaking good. I find myself landing another punch, and another, and another, until I can’t see anything but red.
But that’s a lie, isn’t it? Because I can see a face in the middle of the punching bag, too, every detail sketched perfectly inside my mind. It’s a familiar face, one that I blame for every bit of anger and pain I’m feeling right now. But it’s not Agent Novenine, and it’s not Romeo, and it’s not even Alpha.
No. It’s me.
seven
A whistle breaks my concentration. My next punch glances off the side of the punching bag with barely enough force to move it. I turn around to see Romeo standing at the edge of the mat, clapping so slowly that it’s almost condescending how obvious he thinks his sarcasm needs to be before I get it.
“Go away,” I say, making my voice as caustic as possible. He’d better get the hint, or else I’m going to start punching something that isn’t an inanimate object. I turn around and hit the punching bag again, square in the middle this time.
Now I am imagining his face after all.
“We’ve got to work on our cover story,” Reese says from behind me, unfazed. “Alpha said I could find you here.”
I pause for a moment, feeling a mixture of unsteadiness and confusion. This definitely isn’t a routine punching session for me, which means August must have seen me from the doorway and left again without saying anything. Normally when my partner sees me like this, he just comes in here and steadies the punching bag for a while before saying, Finished? And I nod, and then later we hang out in his dorm, sitting on opposite sides of his bed, while he reads out loud from whatever superhero comic we’re going through at the time.
Over the years, I’ve come to understand that we like the comic books for different reasons. August appreciates the reminder that aberrants can be good, that we can help people without killing anyone. Because even though we serve the nation by closing mission after mission, it’s really hard sometimes to feel like we’re the good guys. It’s possible to run away, of course, but no one ever tries. You’d have to leave everyone and everything you’ve ever known and never see them again. So for most of us, it’s easier to stick with the Executive until retirement.
I tell myself retirement doesn’t always mean death.
For me, at least, the comic books serve as reassurance that aberrants can still have friends and lovers. If I was in one of those stories, I’d have to be a supervillain, because poisoned lips aren’t ever going to be the key to saving the world. But even the supervillains in comic books have partners and sidekicks and admirers. I might even get to be part of an evil team that hangs out all the time.
So the fact that August saw me in the training gym, but didn’t come in here to steady the punching bag and ask if I was finished, makes me feel incredibly unsettled. Instead of reading a comic book to me, my partner left and told someone else I was in here. Is he actually avoiding me?
The thought doesn’t improve my mood whatsoever.
“I said, go away—” I start again.
A hand grips my shoulder, spinning me around. Reese has moved closer to me, his gray eyes narrowed in annoyance. “It’s not like I want to be in this godforsaken country either. I mean, just look at the awful state of your healthcare. Heaven forbid I suffer an injury while I’m here. But your Executive is missing a Romeo, and Mellie Hart has been a target for quite some time, so we’ve been ordered to cooperate by our handlers. I’d hoped you could be professional about all this.”
I fold my arms across my chest, feeling skeptical. “And what about the roof, then? You were practically begging me for a kiss at the Woodland Castle. Did that seem professional to you?”
He gives me an amused smirk. “Believe me, if I wanted a kiss from you, I wouldn’t have to beg. I’ve read your file, Eliza. Your lips are poisoned, which means you can’t even give someone a peck on the cheek. Aren’t you curious about what it’s like? To kiss someone without the knowledge of impending death?” His gaze lingers on my lips. “Well?”
I flush, glancing away. “As if I would ever let you touch me.”
“Well, looks like you’re going to have to,” he says. “It’s our cover story.”
“Forget it,” I snap. “It’s just a date. I don’t have to kiss you.”
He appraises my expression for a moment, then shrugs. “All right, if that’s what you want.”
So we’re being professional after all. I lower my arms, breathing an internal sigh of relief. I didn’t need to worry about him overstepping my boundaries on top of everything else. My emotions are already giving me more than enough trouble with this mission.
/>
But just as I start to let my guard down, he throws a punch at me.
I instinctively fling my hands upward, blocking his attack easily. But the skin-on-skin contact feels like electricity, shocking me to the core, and I can’t even think for a moment. As if my body is moving of its own volition, I find myself throwing a punch back. He blocks it instantly, and I manage to dodge the next punch he throws. And then, back and forth, we spar with each other across the mat.
But after a while, I can tell that Reese is holding himself back. If he wanted to, he could have me on the ground in an instant. He’s toying with me, proving that he can get me to touch him whenever he wants. I can’t decide if it’s unprofessional, or if it’s actually completely professional because it forces me to agree to work with him in the way we’re supposed to. But I can’t take it anymore.
After sidestepping the next punch, I tackle him to the mat, jamming my forearm against his throat, my face inches from his.
“Stop. Trying. To. Hit. Me.”
But I can see the smug look on Reese’s face. He wanted this as well. He wanted to goad me into taking him down and putting us in close quarters, wanted our bodies to come into physical contact. He’s not being professional at all, and I’m pretty sure he’s hoping that I just go ahead and kiss him to get it over with.
Do I even want to be this close to him?
Yes.
No.
Yes.
I haven’t been this close to anyone who wasn’t a target in forever.
A movement in the corner of my eye makes me glance up. Alpha is standing in the doorway of the training gym with several files in his hand. I freeze where I am, all too aware of the fact that I’m straddling Romeo, who’s still smirking underneath me. But I can’t tell what my partner is thinking. Is he remembering where I learned how to do all this? The hours we spent in here, me and him, attacking and defending against each other, until I could confidently take him down to the mat even when he wasn’t holding back?
Code Name Echo Page 4
