Damien did his best, then handed both to the woman.
“The car downstairs?” he asked.
“It’s being refueled, but should be ready when you are. Anything else, sir?”
“No, that’s it. Thanks.” He gathered his duffel and glanced around the room he’d spent almost no time in, which was a shame. Yamamoto knew how to host.
Damien departed, feeling a weight on his shoulders that counterbalanced the electric charge in his veins.
Mission Huck Finn was a go. It was the culmination of years of work, and it looked like it would be successful. If only his personal life wasn’t about to go to hell.
Poppy sat up and glanced around her at the grand library and its kinky trappings.
Where the hell was he?
She threw the blanket back and swung her rubbery legs over the side. Despite three orgasms, she was still aroused, though she didn’t think her body could handle any more. She would be tender and sore for a week at least, but it was worth it.
The marks were faint. She traced the thin red lines of the rubber flogger with her fingers, twisting to see them better. There were a few puckered scratches from the knife, but nothing that broke the skin. The rope had left impressions on her skin, but they were beginning to fade. They were probably her favorite markings, and she would mourn their loss.
The worst marks seemed to be on her wrists, where they’d been bound during sex. There wasn’t so much as a single permanent mark on her, but her arms felt as if she had weights attached to them. Maybe he’d kiss them and make them better. She giggled at the idea, still giddy on endorphins and the highs of subspace.
Poppy’s stomach growled again. She hoped he came back with food soon. There was no telling how long they’d cuddled and snoozed after the last round of sex. If she hadn’t been famished, with her tummy rumbling so loudly, she was willing to bet they would still be intertwined.
The library doors creaked open across the room.
Oh thank God, food.
Poppy hurriedly got back in the bed, fluffed the pillows, and sat back against the headboard, pulling the comforter up to her shoulders. A chill had set in as time passed. Maybe they needed to move to the fireplace—or better yet, her room. Would he want to play again? She hoped the answer was yes. He’d given her what she’d wanted and more.
A man of the wrong ethnicity rounded the bookshelves and approached the bed.
What the fuck?
“Um, this is a closed scene, sir.” If the man standing at the foot of the bed didn’t own the sheets she was lying on, she’d have told him to hit the road. Though she hadn’t exchanged more than a handful of words with the dynamic Dom Yamamoto, he had presided over the meals and delivered a brief opening address to the retreat attendees. He was every bit as striking as the pictures on the website made him out to be.
“I do apologize, and offer you my humblest regrets.” He inclined his head and his dark curtain of hair fell forward.
Dom Yamamoto was known for his mannerisms and dramatics. In a world of daisies, he was the orchid. Even now, he wore dark-red leather pants and a Japanese silk robe.
Under normal circumstances, Poppy might be excited by his attention, but not tonight. He wasn’t her sir for the night.
“What’s going on? Where’s …”
She didn’t even know his name to ask about him.
Dom Yamamoto circled the bed and held a note toward her.
Poppy stared at his offering for a moment. What was this? High school? She got enough of this at work. She took the note, dread pooling in her stomach.
Rapunzel,
This wasn’t how I wanted tonight to go. I don’t have time to explain everything, but Dom Yamamoto can. I have to go, and it kills me to not—
Poppy skimmed the rest of the note, which wasn’t much. Something had come up and he had to leave. Blah blah blah. He hadn’t even offered her the courtesy of a face-to-face good-bye.
“Please leave,” she said, without looking at Yamamoto. All the giddy happiness blossoming in her chest withered.
“Poppy, may I address you by your given name?” Yamamoto even spoke in a refined manner, almost with an accent.
“If you’d like.” She scooted to the edge of the bed, taking the sheet with her. Yamamoto followed as she went on a search for her play bag, which had a change of clothes in it. At least her walk of shame wouldn’t have to be a nude dash.
“Poppy, he had to go. This is no game, I promise you.”
“I’m sure.” She found the bag at the foot of the bed. She realized she had never done a walk of shame before, so this was a weekend of firsts.
“Do you need anything? I was informed you might require additional aftercare. I’m at your disposal.”
She whirled to face the man, shuffling back a few steps when she realized how close he was. Though his reputation was flawless, she didn’t know him. He was a stranger. Aftercare was special.
Tremors shook her body, but she sucked in a deep breath and wrapped the sheet tighter around her.
“Poppy?” In a warped way, it was nice that Yamamoto was trying to ensure everyone was happy and cared for, but it didn’t change the fact that Poppy felt used. Used and discarded because “something came up.”
She shook her head. “Look, I get that you’re taking care of your customers, but I don’t need you. I don’t know you. I want space and to be left alone, please.”
Yamamoto studied her for a moment. “Please take a moment to think about your actions right now. You’ve experienced a heightened emotional and physical state. Your body chemistry is changing right now—”
“Leave me the fuck alone,” she shouted, and then clapped a hand over her mouth. She rarely cussed outside of a scene, and was never rude.
He studied her in silence for a moment before producing a slip of paper. “Please keep this. It has his phone number on it, and I know he would like you to check in with him so he can make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell. I’ll think about calling him. Now, please leave so I can get dressed.” She snatched the crumpled piece of paper from his fingertips.
She was breaking, falling apart. Tears pricked her eyes. Her nerves screamed and her chest felt empty, as if something had been ripped from her. But he’d never been hers, not really. It still didn’t change the emotional connection they’d shared. For him, it might be easy to drop everything and leave, but not for her. The subdrop from this would be shattering.
Yamamoto watched her for a moment longer, the corners of his mouth slightly downturned. He clearly didn’t like her choices, but she couldn’t muster the energy to care, as long as he left. He shifted his weight and a muscle below his eye twitched, but whatever he was thinking never left his lips.
Poppy watched the man turn and glide away from her. There was no other word for how he moved. She held her breath and waited for the door to click shut before sinking onto the bed. Her sobs were deep and strong enough to make her body shudder.
Damn that man.
Damn him.
Poppy dug a lighter out of her bag, usually reserved for lighting candles. She held the note to the flame and watched the paper crinkle, turn to black and ashy scraps.
She didn’t need him.
Men came and went. He’d just used the express lane.
Chapter Six
Damien downed his third cup of coffee and resisted the urge to leap up and pace. Huck Finn was too important to miss a single detail, but he was so full of energy he couldn’t stay still.
The joint task force for the mission was comprised of the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Toronto Drug Enforcement Unit, and Chicago police. Everyone gathered at the mobile–staging center, a large trailer with workstations and a very cramped meeting space. Everyone wanted a piece of this pie. If Huck Finn went down next weekend as planned, there might easily be twice as many officers, with two more departments involved and four times the suits.
The agent in charge of
the case, Giovanna “Gio” Veronesi, stood next to Damien’s seat, flipping through a few pages of her notes. Their director, Howard Cooper, stood not far off, his beady gaze narrowed and aimed at Gio’s back. The man had tried everything to pull the case from Gio, but he didn’t have the years or experience working in Chicago to do it. He would be on hand to stand in front of the camera and take the glory, though. That was fine. Damien had worked with Gio for years on Emilio’s crimes, with no more acknowledgment than a nod of thanks for proper paperwork. It pissed Damien off, but not Gio. The woman had always had a calm, levelheaded approach. As much as Damien wanted to be lead on this one, it was probably best that she was the lead agent.
Hell, his mind was still partially back at House Surrender, with a tattooed, golden-haired siren. His balls were so blue he didn’t know if he’d survive how much he wanted the woman.
Damien resisted the urge to check his personal cell phone for a call from her. A text. Morse code. A doodle. If he were lucky an erotic picture or a video. He hadn’t heard from either Rapunzel or Yamamoto all day, and he hadn’t had time to worry about it.
“Gio?” he muttered.
“One sec.” She flipped a few more pages.
He held his tongue. This was Gio’s show, after all, but they were working with a small window of opportunity.
“Okay. Let’s roll,” she said, for his ears alone. Gio straightened up, adjusting her suit jacket and flipping her wild curls over her shoulder. She might be only a few inches over five feet, but Gio was one spitfire of an Italian, and one hell of an agent.
Gio stepped into the space at the end of the room. There was a whiteboard behind her. They’d sketched the layout of the area, and how the men would be positioned in a best-case scenario. The audience slowly hushed, and she waited until she had their full attention.
“I want to thank everyone for being here. I know this is seven days earlier than expected. We’re missing manpower, but the team we have is the most skilled set of officers I’ve had the honor of working with.” She turned slightly toward the board and glanced at her notes.
“Chicago DEA welcomes you all,” Cooper said, stepping forward to hover at Gio’s side. The man dwarfed her in stature, but Gio shone in the spotlight. If she didn’t like the trenches so much, she could have done a nice job as a suit.
“Thank you, sir. Let me get everyone up to speed. At roughly eighteen hundred hours on Friday, José ‘The Money Man’ Morales”—she pulled a photograph from her file and stuck it under a clip above the whiteboard—“phoned our Chicago area kingpin, Emilio Molina.” She pulled out another photograph and stuck it next to the accountant’s. “He said that the quarterly accounting meeting was going to be moved up. At the time, that was all we knew. At oh one hundred hours this morning, we heard from our undercover agent, Matías Govea. He’s been embedded with the new Valdez cartel, and he got a message out from California, where he’s positioned with the Columbian leaders. Not only are The Money Man and Emilio meeting with enough drugs and cash to put them away for a very long time, Aarón Valdez himself will be meeting with Emilio.”
“We want Aarón Valdez alive.” Cooper pointed at the photograph.
Gio pinned a third photograph to the board and took a moment to stare at the faces that had haunted them, ignoring the director’s comment. Damien glared at the picture of Aarón Valdez. The man had killed at least two DEA agents stationed in Mexico, simply because he could. Damien couldn’t imagine what it must be like for Matías to be embedded with the man for months. Damien had only worked briefly with the undercover officer, but he was a damn good man, and a fantastic undercover agent.
“All right. Our main objective is to snatch Aarón Valdez, José Morales, and Emilio Molina, in that order. We know there will be others with them, but at this time our undercover personnel can’t communicate who that will be, for obvious reasons. I don’t think I need to remind anyone of Douglas Marlowe’s death.”
The room grew still as officers gritted their teeth or clenched their fists, each wanting a piece of the man who had committed such atrocities. They’d never recovered all of Douglas’s body.
Aarón Valdez was a man who combined the early violence of the Columbian cartels with the smooth efficiency of more modern operations. It was Damien’s assumption that the man was a sociopath, but they’d know more once they had him in custody. His subordinates, like Emilio, weren’t much better. In Emilio’s case, they were worse. He was a magnet for every serial killer and gangbanging thug who liked to deal out pain and death. Emilio’s name had become synonymous with the bogeyman in the lower-income areas of Chicago, used to scare misbehaving children, or as a curse upon your enemies.
For Damien, though, getting Emilio was a personal matter.
Three years prior, Damien had been responsible for field training a handful of recruits. They’d gone on a normal buy bust operation. An agent posed as a customer, and once they had confirmation that a sale of drugs had taken place, the team would swoop in and arrest whoever was there.
It had gone horribly wrong in a hail of gunfire, and Damien had lost a fresh-faced new recruit named Kimberly Wendell in the parking lot of a laundromat. He’d only known her for a few days while they put the mission together, but she’d been one of those people whose smile sparked something inside of everyone she met. Damien had looked at her and seen someone who would rise far in the DEA and change things.
Kimberly Wendell was an agent Damien would never forget.
Getting rid of this scum would do the world a hell of a lot of good.
“José Morales, the accountant, never meets with their people in the same place. He always chooses a remote area away from the city, preferably early in the morning, and someplace where the terrain is flat. This location is all of that.”
Gio turned to the board and began explaining how they would use two ditches and a large culvert to hide the heavily armored SWAT officers. They would coordinate the attack so that six vehicles packed with the rest of the joint task force would drive in and they would exit from moving vehicles. It wasn’t ideal, but they couldn’t be certain about the exit route any of the suspects would be taking, so they had to catch them together.
Damien knew this part by heart. Gio and he had rehashed it many times in the weeks leading up to this operation, back when it was going to be a simple sting to grab Emilio and the accountant.
Now it was much more. They could potentially cut the head off the snake, eliminating a large portion of the drug trade in the Chicago area.
Gio fielded questions from the other agents, officers, and suits who weren’t from the Chicago DEA office. Their team already knew the whole mission inside out.
It was a crap deal that the mission wouldn’t happen as planned. While Damien was more than happy with the team they had, the rushed timetable made errors more likely.
And it had cost him the weekend with Rapunzel.
He couldn’t resist.
Damien pulled out his personal cell phone and stared at the notification bar. No new messages.
Rapunzel should have been cared for and looked after on Friday. It made him grind his teeth to think about her finding comfort in someone else’s arms, but there was nothing else he could do about it. He had expected some word from her yesterday, but now it was Sunday and still there was nothing, from her or Yamamoto.
Damien bit the bullet and resorted to text messaging. He hated it, preferring to just call a person when he needed to talk to them, but it wasn’t the time or place.
To Yamamoto: How’s my switch?
“If there aren’t any more questions, we want to be in place in fifteen minutes.” Gio paused and the room fell silent. “Okay. Stay safe, stay alive. Getting these bad guys isn’t worth losing anyone here. Let’s roll.”
The room erupted in movement, officers calling to each other, organizing their individual teams.
“Damien.” Gio beckoned him to where she was in conversation with two suits, easily recognized because of th
eir clothing, completely inappropriate for the field. A suit was always properly dressed for the camera, rarely for the job at hand.
“Damien, I’m afraid Archer isn’t going to make it in time. He’s on his way in from a wedding and is still about ten minutes away. Can I swap you out with him?” Gio turned to the map. “That’s going to put you in the east ditch.”
Right in the middle of the action, where he wanted to be.
“Sure thing, boss.” Damien grinned.
Gio suppressed a sigh, and actually didn’t roll her eyes this time. He liked to ruffle her feathers a little every now and then. “Okay, they should load up to drop you soon. See you in an hour.” She gave him a fleeting smile and turned her attention back to the suits.
Damien heard them mention a press release and a news conference, and barely resisted the urge to shudder. A suit he was not. Damien might live out his days fighting in the inner-city trenches, and he’d be perfectly happy to do so. It got his blood going, the adrenaline pumping, and each suspect he got to stare in the eye while reading him his rights was one more who wouldn’t plague innocent people for a while.
He grabbed his flak jacket from where he’d stowed it under his chair and strapped it on. The trailer was almost empty, so he headed out to one of the vehicles that would drop them off. Despite the large contingent of manpower, the area was quiet. People moved like shadows in the near darkness, doing their best to remain silent and undetectable. They couldn’t know if Valdez had scouts coming to the location early to check it out before the meet.
Damien wasn’t bothered at all by the last-minute change. As a senior agent, Gio had wanted him with the teams swooping in, which would have meant that the first wave got all the immediate action. With Agent Archer delayed, Damien would be taking charge of his team, which consisted of a half-dozen DEA agents and a complete complement of Chicago SWAT officers in full gear.
An unmarked van, outfitted for SWAT purposes, was idling with the last group loaded and ready. Unlike the suits, these were Damien’s kind of people. He’d worked with many of them before, and knew them on a first-name basis. Benches lined the sides of the van, and officers were sitting and standing, packed in as tightly as they could be.
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