It was Veronica Sophie thought of when she broke the neck of the first man who’d lied to her, who’d lured her into a darkened house and attempted to relieve her of her wallet. That she remembered when she was so dirty and tired she didn’t think she could go on.
Then Aaron, one of their moles in Second Division, had called.
“Oliver has her,” he’d said, his voice almost inaudible through the phone lines.
“I know that. Is she alive?”
“She won’t be in another twelve hours. He’s crazy, Sophie. He tortured her for as long as his superiors would let him on camera, then stopped the tape and took out a blowtorch.”
“Why didn’t you call me sooner?”
“He has the whole place locked down. The phones weren’t even active until check-in tonight.”
“Why now?”
“Second Division wants her brought in. They’re going to be pissed when they see what Oliver did to her.”
“Will they hurt him?”
“Might.” The single word sent a chill through Sophie that had nothing to do with her rain-wet shoulders. If Oliver was in danger, then he must have really damaged Veronica.
Forcing herself to calm down, she gripped the phone tighter. She could still save her sister.
“Are you protecting her? Or are you protecting him?”
“Does it matter, so long as you have your sister?”
“No,” she’d said, leaning her head against the wall of the payphone booth. “I guess it doesn’t.”
Aaron spoke quickly, giving her the route that the van would take when they left the lab with Veronica. “If she makes it that long,” he’d added, preparing her for the worst.
“Wait,” she shouted into the receiver, her fingers cold around the hard plastic. “Bring me the security tapes.”
“Oliver turned off the cameras.”
“Just the linked one, though. Right? Not the ones that stay on internally.” She knew security systems, still remembered all the information that had flashed before her eyes when she’d been only fifteen. There was always a backup, always a record.
“You a masochist or something?”
“She’ll need a doctor. It’ll be easier for me to get Veronica the right treatment if I can see exactly what happened to her.”
She waited for him to hang up the phone and stepped back out into the light rain that dusted the street and her jacket. The rental car Lyle had arranged—it had been waiting at the airport, the keys acquired through a quick pass in the crowded terminal. Sophie never even noticed the eyes of the person who slipped them into her pocket. It might have been the eighty year old woman in the wheelchair or the teenage girl squealing about the latest American pop artist. Hard to say.
The fourteen hours she’d waited for the van to come sliding down the wet, curvy road were the longest of her life. Approaching the compound would have been a death knell for her twin, so she waited for hours, behind the bushes that grew out of the gully. The wind brushed the hair off her shoulders, but she didn’t push it out of her eyes—her fingers clutched the roll of jagged metal that she would spin out onto the street the moment she saw the van. Black. Large. No windows.
Oliver could never know Aaron had helped her. Even Lyle couldn’t. The more communication, the more opportunities for a leak. They were everywhere.
If they weren’t, Veronica would have never been caught.
Her muscles were screaming when she finally saw the headlights cut through the haze. The van was going faster than it should have been on the curvy road. Her sister would be in danger if she stopped it. She wouldn’t change her tactics, though, no matter how fast they were going. If they managed to get past her, Veronica would be in the hands of Oliver’s superiors. She wouldn’t join them. Sophie knew that for sure. And that meant they’d kill her.
She flexed her legs, then slowly rose from her crouch, making sure to stay away from the path of the headlights. The mud soaked through the knees of her cargo pants when she dropped down again, throwing the roll so that it spread out across the road.
They hit it at 45 miles per hour. Sophie darted back to the shelter of the gully while the van spun around twice and swerved off the road, slamming into a tree. The squeal of the brakes and the sound of crunched metal faded into the night, leaving only distant birds and the cooling tick of the engine. Assessing the risk, she circled the van, staying low. No movement from the inside.
The front of the van was a mess, pieces of the engine twisted together and steaming. Oliver’s lost one asset, she thought coldly. No, two, she corrected when she saw the passenger side. Whoever had been sitting there hadn’t been wearing a seatbelt. His head had hit the windshield and shattered against the bulletproof glass. It was a mess of red and gray, small shards of white bone crumbled behind the wipers. Some of it had drifted down to the dash.
The driver moaned.
She rounded the tree, touching it absently with one hand, and came up next to the drive. He was alive, trapped between the seat and the wheel. Conscious.
Using her foot as a wedge against the van, she pulled him free. He wasn’t injured, not really. Dazed, perhaps. Coherent. The man collapsed on the small hill that led up to the road, right into one of the wedges left in the grass where the van had spun down.
Sophie looked toward the back of the vehicle toward the sealed double doors, anxious to get to Veronica. Her twin was back there, if everything had gone according to plan. Back there and hurt.
“Do you have Veronica?”
“Yes,” the man moaned, going back on his elbows.
“How do I get into the back of the van.”
“Fuck you.”
She drew her gun and slammed it into his face. It left a red streak across his mouth, tore through the skin until she thought she was pressing it against the bone.
“How do I get my sister?” she screamed, bringing the gun down again. Again.
“Button. Console.”
She held her breath and crawled into the van, scrambling her hands through something she didn’t even want to think about to clear the panel. A light blue button seemed out of place on the sleek dash and when she hit it there was a sound like a great deal of air being released at once.
The back was open.
Backing across the driver’s seat, she craned her torso around the wheel and slipped back onto the ground, almost landing on her ass. She caught herself by looping her arm through the seatbelt and swung back to surer footing.
It was uncomfortably quiet, like the whole world had stopped. Even the birds were gone now and no other cars had passed. The man on the ground was breathing heavily, each breath breaking through the solitude of the forest, assaulting her ears. When she turned to face him, he’d moved to rest on one knee. She lunged to restrain him and he used both hands to try and disarm her.
She shot him through the head. He slumped anticlimactically to the ground as the shot faded into silence along with his breath.
Without a pause, Sophie moved to the now-open doors where light spilled out onto the ground. She was wet, shivering, covered in the blood of two different men.
It took long seconds to pull the heavy doors apart enough so that she could slip through. They could have been jammed in the crash or it could have been another of Oliver’s tricks. She didn’t know.
She’d opened the back. Seen Veronica.
Her mind stopped at that. Almost always blanked at the sight that had greeted her in the back of the van. Aidan was still talking. She watched his lips separate and press together; her body felt too hot under her nightgown, the rage from the past and the horror of the present at odds with what he made her body feel.
“Didn’t think I wouldn’t figure out what you are?”
“It certainly took you long enough,” she said, focusing on his eyes. They grounded her, smooth and flat. He was angry. There was no spark in those eyes, and it made her regret.
He clenched his fist again, and she turned her head to look at it.
“Hit me then,” she insisted, sticking out her chin in challenge. If he did, it would make things easier.
Waiting a beat, Aidan reached out and took her chin gently between his fingers. When he could see her face again, he noted that she’d paled. Exhaustion, most likely. He’d pumped a syringe into her when he entered to find her curled on the couch and that stuff didn’t fade quickly. She was incredibly strong, he thought, to have fought her way awake tonight at all.
“I don’t hit women,” he insisted.
“Liar.”
“I don’t. Not unless it’s job-related. I’m not going to hit you because you have a big mouth.”
“Last I checked, you like my big mouth,” she said, her lips curving up. “You seemed to in London, at least.”
“Shut up.” His hands were shaking. She was the only woman who’d ever made that happen, but she was also a fucking liar. A sociopath. A killer.
Ending her and preventing more of her evil was the obvious choice.
Impossible, though. He admitted it to himself even as he castigated himself for the weakness.
“Aidan.” She got his attention by moving her wrists together. The cold metal made a jarring sound in the quiet house. For just a moment, both their faces were illuminated by a passing car, but it was gone before he’d even heard the sound of its tires on the road. “Untie me, please.”
“Right.”
“Please. My arms are tired.”
“I know what you are now.” He could hear his own exhaustion. Now that he saw her again, all he wanted was to drive into her melting body while she clenched around him, begging for more.
Sophie wanted him, too. Aidan could tell. While he thought about what to do with her, she arched her back, moving her nipples against the sheer lawn nightgown again.
“Touch me.” Her breath moved quickly over her lips until the skin looked soft and warm. She used her tongue to wet them. He shifted in his chair. Again.
“I don’t want you now.” He was a liar.
“You do.” She tilted her head and focused her eyes on his lap. “You want me bad.”
He looked down at his obvious erection, straining against the front of his jeans. Using the palm of his hand, he rubbed it, considered her. “You’re an attractive woman and you’re almost naked,” he began.
“And you know what it’s like to be inside me.”
“The same as any other woman.”
“No, Aidan. That was different. Between us, it’s better. It’s hotter. I’ve never come like that before.”
His brain melted at the memory of her nails digging into his back.
She could get free of the handcuffs. Her wrists would heal. But the red snap behind her eyes—that she dreaded. The memory of Lyle reaching down and closing his fingers over her arm, teaching her to break free of restraints, was close to the surface. He’d moved to Veronica after her.
Hearing her scream had been worse than the pain. Worse even than the healing.
I have to forget, she told herself. Forget. That was all Sophie wanted now. Just Aidan and the absence of the memories that burrowed down deep in her head and made life rotten. Since Veronica had died, her world had shattered and every day was just a weak effort to push forward into a tenuous future.
Aidan was silent beside her. She matched her breathing to his, desperate for the intimacy of shared inhalations. There was no way to convince herself that she didn’t have feelings for him, she admitted. But they couldn’t get in the way of what needed to be done.
Oliver had to die. If she’d failed, she’d go back and choke the life from him until his face purpled and his eyes bulged. Using a gun had been a mistake, perhaps a greater mistake than not abandoning Aidan in Dubai. If she’d left him there, though, she might have spent two more years to chase Oliver. Between work and running missions for Lyle, that was her only obsession. Her hobby. What she did in her spare time.
And she’d never gotten close to him. Veronica was his ghost, his mistake that kept him up at night. Oliver had never known the secret Lyle had kept from him, that Veronica wasn’t one-of-a-kind. Two girls fit the mold Sophie’s adopted father had fashioned long before he understood that they would both grow to love and hate him in equal measure.
Sometimes Sophie convinced herself that Lyle had loved her sister—made it easier, she supposed, to justify everything she’d done for him. If he’d loved Veronica with the same hopeless desperation that Sophie did, then she could understand why he’d become so reckless. Five years ago, he’d never have let an agent stay with a man who’d kidnapped her, after all.
Though five years ago, Sophie would have never suggested it.
Five years ago she would have killed Oliver, then stormed into the hall and taken out his unsuspecting secretary. Would have looked Aidan in the eyes and shot him close enough to leave powder burns. Adele had seemed a little concerned when she’d asked for the knockout ring. Like she’d lost her edge.
She couldn’t let the light leave his eyes, though. Not after everything.
It would be an easy matter to snap one of her wrists, to use her nails to cut his carotid artery before he could move. She’d done it before, felt the sink of her flesh into another’s, the hot rush of blood over her hands. Not his.
Instead she forced her shoulders to one side, pushing her arm as far as it would go through the cuffs. Just far enough to reach Aidan where he sat beside her. Cautious, she rested her fingers against his lower back.
“Why didn’t you kill me?” His muscles tightened under her fingers but he didn’t move his body away.
“I couldn’t. Why didn’t you kill me?”
“I still might.” He turned, met her eyes and captured the hand that had fallen back to the bedspread.
“No, you won’t.” His hand was large, hot in hers. She curled her fingers into it, irrationally seeking comfort from the man who’d confined her.
“Oliver isn’t dead, Veronica.”
“Sophie.”
“Veronica.”
“Is my sister.”
“I can’t let you go.” He ran a hand through his hair, gripped and pulled. “You’ll try to hurt him again. This time he’ll kill you.”
“As if he could.”
“He’s better than you Veronica, and when he wakes up he’ll be done playing games. He’s let you be this long because it amused him. Oliver liked the stories. Now you put a bullet in his lungs.”
“Sounds like that’ll make it hard for him to give a kill order.”
“Stop making jokes,” Aidan snapped, frustrated. “What am I supposed to do here?”
Part of her wanted to argue, but the sun was encroaching on the deepest part of dark and the pale light washed his face with exhaustion. Sophie didn’t want to put the look there, didn’t want to see it at all.
“Just touch me.”
“What?” He shook his head, his hand reflexively gripped and unclenched.
“I want you.”
“I don’t trust you.”
“And maybe Oliver will make you kill me tomorrow. But I haven’t been able to be close to a man since my sister died. Aidan, it’s so good between us.”
Sophie wet her lips, enticing him. Though she continued speaking, his mind searched for a way for it to work. Still. Despite everything. Despite the betrayal and Oliver and what he’d done to Venus. Hadn’t told her that yet. Wouldn’t, until she asked.
“It can’t work.”
“You can leave my hands cuffed,” she said, not comprehending what he meant. He didn’t correct her, Foolish to discuss feelings when she was warm and soft beside him. When she wanted him.
Maybe the most foolish thing was that he believed her. She did want him. Unless he was less perceptive than he’d imagined—and he knew he was damn good at his job, at understanding people, at seeing what they were hiding—she’d wanted him in London. She’s moaned and writhed under him, dug her nails deep into his back.
He wanted that again. Wanted her. Couldn’t t
rust her. Fuck.
Aidan was too aware of her breathing.
The rise and fall of her breasts. The pink of her nipples barely discernable through the short nightgown.
The wet heat he knew he’d find between her thighs.
God.
He wanted to touch her.
He’d been denying himself exactly what he wanted. Everything he wanted. For years.
His breathing turned erratic. She just watched him.
“You can leave me tied up,” she said again. “I’m not going to try to escape either way.”
He couldn’t trust her.
“I just want you, Aidan.” She breathed in hard. Whoever she was, whatever she was, she smelled like vanilla, like roses. It teased his nose, sparked his senses.
He was fucked.
She shivered when he knelt on the bed between her spread thighs, leaning down to take a nipple in his mouth. He sucked hard through the rough fabric and shivers erupted through Sophie’s body. Seeing her uncensored response to him made him want to take more from her. To take all from her.
Aidan moved down between her legs, using one hand to push up her nightgown while the other toyed with her wet, hard nipple. Once the white fabric was bunched around her flat stomach, he could see her spread pussy only inches from his mouth. In London, the taste of her had nearly driven him crazy.
Now he plunged his tongue into her slick folds, dragging it up to tease her clit and he knew that he’d lost his mind. She tasted better now, like amber honey on his tongue. The low moans spilling from her mouth urged him on, and he didn’t stop even when her thighs quivered in the bonds.
“Aidan, please,” she said, and he sucked her clit into his mouth until she came, thrusting her hips into his face shamelessly.
“More,” he growled against her wet flesh. Her entire body was shaking, but he didn’t care. He wanted to wring her of all her passion, to take her until she was as empty as he’d felt when she left. Aidan released his hold on her nipple, flicking it once before bringing his hands down to tease her sweet pussy.
Two fingers pushed inside her. His cock tightened when he felt her heat surrounding him. She was so fucking wet. For him. No matter what else had been a lie, this response wasn’t.
Blacklisted: Blacklist Operations Book #1 Page 18
