by Edie Harris
“I didn’t grab a coat, either.” He halted, dropping her arm to cross both of his over his wide chest. “Come stand next to me if you want to get warm.”
Her lip curled. “I’d rather cuddle with a cobra,” she lied, trying not to gaze longingly at the inviting breadth of his shoulders, hunched as they were against the wind. “At least if you were a cobra, I would understand why you did what you did. Can’t fight nature, after all.” Though perhaps he couldn’t fight his nature, either, career spy that he was. The thought pierced her damaged heart.
“I don’t have a good excuse.” Dropping onto the nearest bench, he scrubbed his hands through his hair, visibly tugging at his scalp as his eyes squeezed shut. “Yang figured out who you were to me shortly after Cyprus. And before you ask, no, I didn’t tell her what happened between us.” His hands fell to his lap, eyes opening to lock on hers. “She wanted to use my connection to you to form inroads with Faraday Industries, going so far as to suggest I...well, that I marry you. I won’t lie—I contemplated it.”
Paul and Grace Morgan. A piece of her heart cracked, crumbled. “And yet I never got a proposal.”
Irritation flitted across his handsome face, but she had the feeling it wasn’t directed at her. “When I marry, it’s going to be because I’m desperately, madly, unequivocally in love with a woman and can’t bear the thought of living without her. Not because my boss wants to get a discount on international spy services.”
That sounded...lovely. But the fact remained that he’d never mentioned love with her, only a caring. A weakness. “So you tell Yang you’re not willing to whore for queen and country, and then what? Killing me off was the next option?”
He shook his head. “Her plan moved to the back burner after Kabul, but when I was placed in Chicago, it was with the understanding that, eventually, a hit would be manufactured. I would play on the relationships I’d built with you and your brothers, earn your trust, and, eventually, sway you into making a deal with MI6, convincing Faraday that it was the only way to save your life.”
A shiver wracked her, and she rubbed her hands up and down her arms. “Sounds more like a long con than a short game to me.” Her heart thumped painfully against the constricting cage of her chest. “But I still don’t get why you agreed to con me in the first place. Why would you say yes to this?”
He reached out and captured her elbow, urging her to stand between his legs as his hands replaced hers, moving swiftly over her arms to create some much-needed heat. “I was...afraid.” He must have noted her skeptical expression, because he sighed and curved his fingers more firmly around her upper arms. “Leaving MI6 is far easier said than done, but even if it weren’t, this is my life, Beth. I’m a spy. It’s addicting, and after fifteen years, I consider myself well and truly hooked.” He met her direct gaze, regret shadowing his beautiful eyes. “What the hell would I do as a civilian? I’m a liar for a living. A soldier more comfortable sharing a fake name than my real one. And what if you—” He broke off, jaw clenching.
“What if I what?” she prompted quietly.
“What if I quit and had showed up on your doorstep and you didn’t bloody want me?” The words burst from him in an angry rush. “So much of you has been in my head for so long that it sometimes feels impossible to separate the truth from the fiction. It was too easy to imagine you telling me I was nothing but a fling. An...an amusing means of passing the time when you were in the field.”
“But you never gave me a chance.” It scorched her lungs, the knowledge that he hadn’t possessed the same faith in her as she had in him. All those silent understandings she’d believed to be mutual were tainted by doubt. She had handed over her soul, piece by piece, trusting that Vick would know precisely how to cherish it, and it burned, how wrong she had been. It burned her stomach, her lungs, her heart, her throat. It burned her tongue, her eyes, but oh, her skin was so very, very cold, in a way that had nothing to do with winter. “So you figured manipulating me and my family into joining forces with your precious MI6 would be the next best thing, huh? You could keep testing the waters and find out if I really loved you, as opposed to just pretending.”
His hands fell from her arms before lifting again to hold her hips, his fingertips anchoring deeply where they pressed into her. “Beth—”
“Tell me,” she demanded hoarsely. “Tell me how I’m supposed to forgive this. How can I possibly be with someone who isn’t willing to take the same risks I am? I was afraid, too, you know.” Her voice shook, her eyes stinging with unshed tears. “I was afraid you wouldn’t love me like I loved you, but I was prepared to work for a real future together anyway. With you. So tell me how I’m supposed to fucking get past this, buddy, because even after everything that’s happened tonight, I don’t want to live the rest of my life without you. I j-just...” The tears escaped, along with a harsh sob. “I just found you again.”
She tore away, breaking his hold and turning her back on him as she scrubbed both hands over her face. Crying sucked. Being lied to sucked. Feeling like her heart was breaking into a million itty-bitty pieces super-sucked. Gravel crunched underfoot as she paced from the bench, wanting to put enough space between them so she wasn’t tempted to simply dive into the sure strength of his warm embrace instead of working out their problems like grown-ups. She had learned her lesson the first time around, when she ran from her family instead of talking out her issues, and look where that had gotten her—isolated, shot in the arm and in Russia’s crosshairs. It was a learning curve that just wouldn’t quit. Yes, this would suck, because feelings sucked, but she and Vick were going to communicate if it killed them, dammit.
“Beth?” There was a faint hiss, then the sound of boots brushing over gravel. “Be—”
“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” came a male voice, sing-song and unfamiliar. She whirled in time to see a masked man of average height, standing behind the bench, settle a hand on Vick’s shoulder. In his other hand, the man held a pressure injector, the needle’s tip gleaming in the faint lamplight. “Catch a tigress by her toe.”
Vick sat unmoving, his lips slightly parted, blue eyes wide and trained on her, his complexion gone gray. What’s wrong with him? Then: What the hell is in that syringe? Shadows swirled and she lost sight of Vick’s face as the man circled the bench toward her.
“Hello, little girl.”
Three more terrifying words Beth had never heard in all her life.
The Louboutins were off her feet and in her hands in a heartbeat, the gravel path immediately scratching her bare skin, but her body remembered what it was supposed to do. When the assailant lunged forward, injector in hand, Beth feinted right before bringing her knee up into his gut. He adjusted quickly, whirling away, but the dangerous heel of one shoe caught on his left shoulder. With all of her strength, Beth bore down, dragging it across his chest, sensing when flesh tore beneath the pointed heel.
The man grunted in pain, but, his own training evident, he clamped the plastic body of the injector between his teeth and used his suddenly free hands to grab her wrists. Applying exact pressure, enough to make her cry out, he forced her to drop the shoes, and then kneed her in the stomach, mimicking her earlier move.
Breath lost, she fell to the ground, palms scraping over the path. As he snagged the injector from his mouth, she lunged forward, encircling his knees in both arms to yank his legs out from under him. He landed on his back with a loud “Oof!” and she crawled over his body, straddling his shoulders to deliver one blow against his jaw, then another. Knuckles aching from the driving force behind her punch, she drew back a moment too long, and he seized the opportunity.
With a jerk of his lower body, his legs lifted to lock around her neck from behind. Choking, unable to see, her hands immediately flew to his calves as she attempted to pry him off. The momentum from her thrashing thrust them into a roll, and for a split second, she was free.
&nbs
p; A noise, different from the ones her assailant was making, and her concentration shattered as she focused on Vick. Still on the bench. Still motionless. But that wordless, wounded sound...it was him, she knew it was. She dove in his direction, scrambling to catch her feet. “Vick. Vick, I’m coming, baby, I’m—”
Too late. A pinch on the side of her neck, like the sting of a particularly vicious wasp, and her world fuzzed to smoky gray and, after a nauseating moment, unrelenting black.
Chapter Eighteen
She regained consciousness to find herself stumbling forward, a semblance of walking while blindfolded and drugged. Throat parched and senses fuzzy from the chemical she’d been injected with, Beth struggled to reclaim the missing minutes in her mind. Minutes that might be hours for all she knew.
Her captor nudged her between the shoulder blades with his gun, urging her faster along the echoing hallway she couldn’t see past the blindfold. It smelled dank, dark and unused—except by this bastard, it seemed. Her elbow banged against something sharp and metallic, and she cursed under her breath.
The man laughed. “Watch where you’re going.”
“Fuck you,” she spat.
“Aw, love, don’t be like that.”
Beth’s jaw clenched at the mocking term of endearment, almost able to hear Vick saying the same exact words with nothing but teasing warmth in his deep voice. Nausea curled in her belly at the thought of him. “Don’t call me ‘love.’”
Gripping her upper arm, the man forced her to change direction, the muzzle of his gun hard and deadly on her spine. “Not exactly in a position to make requests, are you.” She sensed his shrug, even as her mind raced to place his voice, his accent. Northern English, but without the slight, pleasing lilt of Vick’s. “Through here,” he said, and then they were very obviously in a room, with a door whoosh-ing closed at their backs.
The blindfold came off, and suddenly Beth was face-to-face with her captor for the first time since he’d taken her from the park.
Nash.
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. The phantom sting of the pressure injector at her throat, the bruised feeling of her stomach, the busted knuckles—the events of the park streaming at her in reverse. Her shoes were missing, but she remembered getting in one solid stab with a sharp Louboutin heel, somewhere on his torso.
And Vick. Sitting on the bench, staring at her with eyes gone wide, but not moving. No, he hadn’t moved an inch as she tangled with Nash on the pebble-strewn path, because...because he couldn’t. He would never have left her to fight Nash on her own, not if he was at all able. Nash must have done something to him.
So here she was, stuck underground with a gun-wielding spy whose attention on her face—but thankfully not her body—made her skin crawl. Fear. She was experiencing fear, different from any she’d ever known.
She could fight her way out, but the calculations of a clouded mind were not to be trusted. While in the office suite at the Gherkin, Beth had believed herself capable of taking down McCallister. The little blonde would have fought to win, but this man would fight to kill. No tapping out for Beth if she staggered under the one-two punch of his violent aggression. “You were the one who trashed my apartment.” Malevolence echoed around him, the same aura that had lingered in her home.
Nash shrugged, but the gun trained on her sternum didn’t waver. “I have a talent for such things. Not the first place I’ve wrecked.”
“And you shot Vick, that first night.” Yang had already admitted as much during their standoff in the office.
“Again, I have certain talents. But you’ll know about those soon enough.” He jerked his chin at her. “Strip.”
Shock, followed quickly by affront. “No.”
“Strip, or I strip you.” He stepped closer when she didn’t move. “This is one of the few choices you have left in life, little girl. So make it.”
One of the few choices you have left in life. Slowly—not because she wanted to put on a show, but because her motor function remained impaired from the drug he’d given her—she tugged her sweater over her head, then fumbled to unbutton her jeans.
Benefit or curse, in her previous life as an assassin, getting up close and personal with a target had never been a requirement. While trained in hand-to-hand combat by various family members—father, brothers, her cousin Keir and her aunt Rona—not to mention the work Gavin had put in with her when they started out as partners, Beth had never been forced to kill someone with her bare hands.
Looking at Nash, blinking away the last of the chemical-induced bleariness, she realized she might just have that chance. But when—if—the opportunity presented itself, would she take it?
Her fingers curled into the waistband of her jeans as she rolled them down her legs, and then she stood in her underwear in the middle of an obviously abandoned underground bunker, staring at a man who...who....
Who intended to kill her. One of the few choices you have left in life. “What do you want from me, Nash?”
“Call me John.” Reaching for the zipper of his jacket with his free hand, he yanked it down, shedding a layer to reveal where Beth had indeed gouged him with her stiletto, a bleeding gash across his chest showing through the ripped fabric of his long-sleeved thermal. As terror of a different kind curdled her belly—with her nearly naked, and him removing clothing—he used the gun to gesture toward a stainless steel operating table. “Please lie down.”
Please. As though he were making a request instead of issuing an order. Mind racing for an escape, her gaze darted wildly around the small room—which reeked, she now noticed, of antiseptic. The panel next to the door looked to be some sort of digital scanner, probably only opened via key card or handprint. The only way to get free of the room itself would be to get hold of Nash’s gun and turn it on him, forcing him to release her. “What happens if I say no?”
Completely ignoring the wound on his chest, he lifted his shoulders, rocking his head from side to side—like a boxer loosening up before a fight. Didn’t he remember the park? He’d already nearly exhausted her with that one round, and the drugs had dealt the final blow. “You don’t want to say no.”
For the life of her, she couldn’t remember the hostage training Casey had put her through, long years earlier. And not remembering might cost her her life, if she couldn’t recall how to play out this situation. Something about...about testing limits? But not endangering her welfare.
Find out what he wants and do your best to give it to him.
Only fight when fighting is the only option.
Casey’s voice in her head should have been reassuring, but it wasn’t. Shit. “I don’t especially want to get on that table, either.” Her lungs pumped as though she’d just sprinted a marathon, and the edges of her vision began to darken. Panic attack. A real-live panic attack, and damn, but this was a far cry from the scene in her apartment a few days ago, when Vick had dropped his bomb on her about the truth of Kabul. Her skin tingled, wrapped too tight over bone and muscle and tendon, as she struggled to accept her situation.
Without Nash’s gun, she was a dead woman, and the second she climbed on the terrifying surgical table—like something out of a Thomas Harris novel—she’d lose any chance she had at getting her hands on it.
Because she saw the arm and leg restraints dangling over the metal lip of the table edge. She knew what was what, and it was worse than any Hitchcock movie. So much worse.
Nabbing a square of medical gauze from a rolling cart she hadn’t noticed, Nash dabbed at his bleeding chest. Again he gestured with the muzzle of his gun. “There are benefits to cooperating now, pet, difficult as that may be to believe.” His voice lowered, but his eerie calm persisted. “Get on the table, Beth.”
Jesus, but he was one scary motherfucker. Fear swamped her, and instinct took over, pushing her toward the table. When her bare skin hit
the cold steel, she hissed, and reality intruded—her chance at freedom, gone. And all because the mere tone of this man’s voice terrified her to her core.
Quicker than she could have guessed, quelling her admittedly weak struggles with ease, Nash lashed the wrist restraint over her dominant right hand. He then leaned over to lock in her left before tucking the gun into the back of his cargo-style trousers to deal with her thrashing legs. Once her ankles were belted into place, he circled the table, tightening each restraint with a familiarity that told Beth this wasn’t his first rodeo. “You want me to talk, right?” She could barely process what, other than family secrets, Nash would need from her, except maybe—
“You’ll talk, we’ll talk. We’re going to have some absolutely lovely conversations, little girl.” He adjusted the strap over her left wrist. “Though I should warn you, I don’t care much what you say, so long as it’s the truth. This—” he indicated the room at large with a careless wave of his hand, “—isn’t for me. Or for MI6, in case the gun I held on Colleen was confusing for you.”
Horror infiltrated her bloodstream, burning her from the inside with a cold she couldn’t fight. “Polnoch’ Pulya. You’re a double agent.” A double agent who was about to hurt her, because...because he was good at it. And this time, there were no brothers, no lovers to spring to her defense. No extraction team, as Yang had promised. Her mind blanked, and she shivered as chills raced over her clammy skin. “I...I don’t understand.” How could Gavin not have warned her the threat was real?
But...maybe he had. Before he’d left, he had tried to tell her something, and she had shut him down, too stuck in her own head and wallowing in a guilt that would not quit. Perhaps he had known the Russians wanted her, as high in their ranks as he had evidently climbed.
Gavin wouldn’t—couldn’t—betray her. Except, in terms of betrayals from unexpected sources, she was batting zero-for-two today. Her stomach roiled.
