Fuel for Fire

by Julie Ann Walker

  Gag a maggot.

  Roper Morrison was the lowest, most vulgar man the good Lord ever strung a gut through, and as she hustled over to his desk, Chelsea thought she could still feel his hot, sweaty fingers on her skin. However, a quick glance at his laptop reminded her that all the indignities she’d suffered in his employ were worth it. She’d planted the virus, and Morrison…er…Spider was going down. Booyah!

  On second thought, she should have added that to her text message. Who cared if it would have made Dagan point and say, See? What kind of trained field agent texts something like that?

  Her. That’s who. The impulse to shoot a fist in the air and indulge in a hip shake was strong. Instead, she satisfied herself with grabbing the bourbon. Her eyes caught on the myriad cheap phones in the drawer. Burner phones. If she didn’t already know that Morrison was a slimy, criminal piece of dog shit, that would have been enough to convince her. He probably had a different phone for every awful venture he was involved in.

  Shutting the drawer, she walked back to the sofa and handed him the bottle. The old man reclined against the leather cushions like some sort of over-pampered sultan.

  Which makes me what? One of his harem girls? She’d sooner swallow a bag full of rusty nails, thank you very much.

  “You really should eat or drink something to restore your electrolytes, sir.” One thing she’d learned was that Morrison liked to be fussed over.

  Fussing was an easy enough thing to fake. All she had to do was ask herself, WWMD? What would Mom do? Because her mother, bless her sweet soul, was the queen of doting and fussing.

  Morrison waved her off, then twisted the cap on the bottle of booze.

  “I’m going to run and fetch something for you anyway,” she lied.

  Turning on her heel, she padded out of his office, stopping to toe into her shoes before making her way through the massive penthouse toward the front door. The opulence of the place still got to her. Vintage Limoges vases, gold-leaf detailing on picture frames, the Picasso painting hanging on the dining room wall… Just a few of those pieces sold on the black market would net her a sum bigger than the debts that had made her backstory so believable.

  Her daddy would have said that Morrison was shittin’ in high cotton. She said he had more money than any one man should. And oooh, the temptation to grab a few pieces of wealth on her way out was strong. But she was no thief. And besides, the twenty G’s Morrison had already paid her for her first month’s work would go a long way toward reducing her remaining student loans. Once those were paid off, she would use every extra cent she made to pay off the mortgages. And then…then she would finally be able to rest easy, knowing her parents’ house had been saved, knowing their home had been saved.

  She made a left at the half bath with its antique marble pedestal sink and passed the kitchen where Juanita was busy making Morrison’s breakfast. “Bye, Juanita!” she called cheerily. “I’m off to run some errands for Mr. Morrison!”

  Juanita absently waved her hand, and Chelsea felt a little kick of excitement. She was almost home free. She’d done it! She’d really done it!

  Scurrying across the foyer, she pulled her favorite trench coat from the hall tree. Her hand was on the knob of the front door when it turned inside her grip.

  Steven Surry, Morrison’s head of security, burst in so quickly, she stumbled back, dropping her coat. He caught her arm before she could ass-plant, and the expression he wore was the facial equivalent of a thunderstorm. Every hair on her body lifted in warning of a potential lightning strike.

  “Where the bloody hell do you think you’re off to, huh?” he demanded.

  “I…” Chelsea’s throat was as dry as the fruitcake her father had always made for Christmas. She had to swallow to gather enough spit to try again. “I was going to run some errands, and—”

  “What errands would those be?” he cut her off, cocking his head and eyeing her suspiciously.

  “M-Mr. Morrison is nursing a hangover. I’m going to buy him some coconut water. It’s packed with electrolytes and—”

  Surry held up a hand and she gulped. Audibly. When he heard the noise, his gaze narrowed further. Steven Surry had eyes as dark as the pits of hell and ebony hair that seemed to absorb all light. In another life, one where he wasn’t working for Morrison, Chelsea might have considered him handsome.

  “You’re not going anywhere.” Since he still held her arm in a hard grip, it was easy for him to spin her around. With a not-so-gentle nudge, he herded her back through the entryway.

  She considered making a break for it. Maybe if she darted around him, she could get out the door. But then what? Wait patiently in the hall while the elevator arrived?

  Sure. That’ll work out wonderfully well.

  Her other option was the emergency stairwell. But as soon as she ran, Surry would know she was up to something and he would immediately give chase. She harbored no fantasies that she could outmaneuver Surry—who looked like an NFL running back—down twenty flights of stairs.

  Nope. Better to retain my cover and wait to see what’s happening.

  She didn’t have long to wait. “We’ve had a security breach, and you’re staying with me until I determine whether or not you’re involved,” he grumbled.

  Security breach…

  Those two words made her gulp again. Surry pulled her to a stop, pinning her with a stony-eyed stare.

  Okay, so now she was starting to come around to Dagan’s way of thinking. She really wasn’t cut out for this shit. The fact that she was giving herself away left, right, and center was proof positive.

  She had just enough time to reach into the pocket of her blazer and press the volume-up button on her cell for a three-second count before Surry grabbed her hand and extracted her phone. He looked down at the black screen. “What are you up to with this, huh?”

  “Nothing,” she lied, her heart pinwheeling inside her chest. The stupid organ banged into her stomach, making her nauseous. “I was just putting my hands in my pockets.”

  And hoping I held down that button long enough to activate the distress call.

  Ozzie, BKI’s techno-geek extraordinaire, had programmed all of their cell phones with an emergency feature. If they held down the volume-up button for a one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi count, their phones would automatically text a Mayday to the rest of the group. Then the cell would send out its GPS location. Pretty brilliant. Chelsea only hoped she’d used it correctly.

  “We’ll see about that.” Surry pocketed her phone before grabbing her arms and tugging her wrists behind her back.

  “Hey! What the heckfire do you think you’re doing?” She hoped to cover her terror with bravado, and she was insanely grateful that she’d learned early on in her CIA training to wipe the call and message log on her phone after every call or text, and to make sure to keep her contacts encrypted. “Take your damned hands off me!”

  “Please,” Surry scoffed. “After a month with Morrison, no doubt you’re accustomed to a bit of manhandling. I’ll apologize for any ill treatment later. Once I know you’re innocent.”

  She’d be waiting the rest of her life for that apology.

  Oh, holy friggin’ crap. She should have bolted when she had the chance. Maybe, just maybe, she could have beaten Surry on those stairs. A smart operator might have taken the chance. A brave one certainly would have. But here she was, marching past the kitchen and toward the scene of the crime, all without lifting so much as a pinkie to fight her way free.

  She really wasn’t cut out for this. She hated proving Dagan right.

  Dagan…

  Just the thought of him gave her hope. Because if anyone could get her out of this mess, it was him.

  Chapter 3

  Dagan had lived in fear of the day Chelsea found herself in an ungodly mess. And now that day had come. Good thing he was ju
st the man to get her out of it.

  “We going in or what?” Ace asked from his hiding spot in the alley next to a stack of crates. “I mean, I can continue to do my best impression of the Little Match Girl, but my feet are going numb.”

  “Wait for it,” Dagan whispered. He was crouched beside a dumpster behind Morrison’s condominium building. The air was ripe with the smells of garbage and damp concrete. Little puddles left by the recent rain shower reflected their strained faces and the steel-gray sky overhead.

  No joke. March in London was dreary as hell. Even if the day was unseasonably warm at a little over sixty degrees Fahrenheit, Dagan couldn’t wait to grab Chelsea and hop the first plane home. Not that Chicago in late March was anything to cheer about. Far from it. Winter tended to hang on until well into April. And the ice and snow—to mention nothing of the damned wind—were enough to slice a man to his bones. But at least there the sun peeked out occasionally.

  “Wait for what, pray tell?” Christian hissed from beside him. “Why are we messing about here? Every second counts, yeah?”

  Dagan gusted out a martyr’s sigh. “For fuck’s sake. Yes.” Every second that had passed since they received Chelsea’s Mayday had felt like an eternity. “But going in half-cocked could screw our chances of pulling this off without a hitch. Considering it’s Chelsea’s neck on the line”—her smooth, decidedly lickable neck—“I’d like to avoid hitches at all costs.”

  Ace grinned over at him. “You really do have a soft spot for her, don’t you?”

  No. What he had for Chelsea was a heart-on. It was like a hard-on but with feelings and shit. “Believe me, when I think about Chels, nothing is soft.” He figured he might as well admit it. After this morning’s ass-chewing from Emily, it wasn’t like there was any use denying it.

  “I knew it,” Ace whispered to Christian, turning his hand palm up. “Pay up.”

  “I left my wallet back at the flat,” Christian said.

  “Likely excuse,” Ace told him before turning back to Dagan. “But seriously, why aren’t we marching up to that door and hot-wiring the security pad?”

  “We’re waiting for the maintenance man,” Dagan whispered, trying not to let it get to him that his friends had been making bets on…what? His love life? Or his decided lack of anything resembling a love life? “He always comes out for a smoke break at this time.”

  Ace skewered Dagan with a narrow-eyed stare. “And you would know that…how?”

  Busted. “All those times I said I was going to the gym or the library or the park?”

  “Don’t tell me.” Ace raised a hand. “You were here, surveilling the building.”

  “And Morrison’s downtown offices, too,” Dagan conceded. As they say, in for a penny, in for a pound.

  “I thought we agreed surveillance might draw unwanted attention to Chelsea. You know, odd if suddenly there were men skulking about right when she started her employment.”

  “We agreed not to do any group surveillance. But I never said I wouldn’t go out on my own and—”

  “Never mind.” Ace waved him off. “You’re sweet on her, which makes you paranoid and overprotective and apparently a liar-liar-pants-on-fire.”

  Dagan did feel bad to have misled them. But if he’d admitted what he was up to every day, they would have tried to stop him. And he could not have allowed that. He had needed to know everything he could about the places Chelsea spent her days. It was the only thing that had kept him sane.

  “We’ll kick your ass later,” Ace promised. “Right now, I want to know what happens after the maintenance man comes out for a smoke. What’s the plan?”

  “We tranq him. We take his key fob. And we enter the building without hot-wiring the security pad and potentially setting off an alarm. The building is rigged with security cameras, but if we take them out as we pass, we should be able to get in and out without anyone the wiser.”

  “Bob’s your uncle,” Christian said, which Dagan had learned was the British equivalent of there you go or sounds good.

  Dagan pulled the wrist of his black jacket back to glance at his watch. “Any second now, the maintenance man should—” That’s as far as he got. Right on cue, the guy in question pushed through the back door, fresh cig dangling from his lips.

  Dagan pulled on his ski mask and, from the corner of his eye, saw his brothers-in-arms do the same. Quietly sliding the dart gun from the holster on his hip, he took aim. The world around him slipped into a fog. The only thing he could see or hear was his target.

  The little pistol was loaded with six rounds of thiopental. The stuff wasn’t lethal. At least not in the dosages they used. But it could put a grown man down in about three seconds flat. Trouble was, it generally only kept him down for somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes. After that, the victim would be groggy and nauseous, but nonetheless functional. Which meant after they tranqed the guy, they needed to get in and out in short order.

  Blowing out a breath, Dagan squeezed the trigger. The dart left the barrel with a muffled-sounding thwack and flew true. It embedded itself in the meaty part of the maintenance man’s shoulder.

  The guy yelped, dropping his lighter as the unlit cigarette fell from his mouth and landed in a rain puddle. He ripped the little dart with its fuzzy yellow tail from his arm. “What the feck is—”

  That’s all he managed before his knees went weak and he stumbled.

  Shit. Maintenance Man was going to go down like a sack of potatoes, and Dagan could just see him whacking his balding head on one of the two steps leading from the back door to the alley. If he did that, nighty-night could very easily turn into the big sleep.

  Dagan holstered the dart gun and charged from behind the dumpster. Half a dozen bounding steps allowed him to catch the guy before he could go timber. Dagan grunted. The dude wasn’t a lightweight. But Dagan managed to gently lower the unconscious man to the ground, careful to keep him out of the cold puddles.

  “Holy guacamole. That’s some fast-acting shiznit,” Ace said. He and Christian gathered around Dagan to stare down at the man. “Next time, I want to shoot it.” Ace reached for the weapon on Dagan’s hip.

  “Hands off.” Dagan slapped him away. “I’m the one who thought to pack the dart gun for this mission, which means I’m the one who gets to use it.”

  “Stingy,” Ace huffed.

  Some people might think it strange to be joking at a time like this, but when you lived like they did, always on the edge, you learned never to lose your sense of humor. Because if you did, you might never find it again.

  “Right, then,” Christian said. “Let’s go get Chelsea.”

  Chelsea…

  Her name alone was enough to kick-start Dagan’s heart.

  After snatching the key fob from the retractable bungee cord clipped to the front pocket of the maintenance man’s coveralls, Dagan tapped it against the security pad. A loud buzz was followed by a soft click as the door unlocked.

  “Ready?” He glanced over his shoulder.

  “Let’s do this thing and blow this bloody island,” Christian grumbled. Given what had happened to Christian before he left the SAS, Dagan couldn’t blame the guy for having no love for the country of his birth.

  “Yes. Let’s go get our girl,” Ace added.

  Our girl…

  Dagan figured that was as good a description of Chelsea as anything. With her clever mind, sharp tongue, and soft heart, she had become a favorite of the Black Knights. But if he was honest with himself, he knew he would like to exchange the word our for my.

  “My girl…” That old song by the Temptations spun through his head, giving him an earworm as they pushed into the building. A long hall stretched in front of them. “There!” he hissed, pointing to the camera mounted in the corner of the ceiling at the end of the hallway. Its red light was a beacon in the gloom of the corridor.


  Ace aimed a laser pointer at the lens of the camera, overloading its light-sensitive chip. Funny, people thought security cameras provided just that…security. But disabling them was cheaper and easier than getting a hand job from a masseuse at one of Bangkok’s famous rub-n-tugs.

  In a matter of seconds, they were piled into the staff elevator. Every ding of the passing floors going up all twenty stories corresponded with a dozen beats of Dagan’s heart.

  Come on. Come on.

  It had taken fifteen minutes from the time they received Chelsea’s Mayday to the time they got to Morrison’s condominium building—five minutes gearing up and five minutes getting there. Another five minutes had been wasted waiting on the maintenance man to appear. And now more seconds ticked by as the elevator made its maddeningly slow journey toward the top floor.

  A red haze crept into Dagan’s vision. If Morrison or one of his goons had dared to lay a finger on Chels, so help the assface.

  The elevator announced their arrival at the penthouse with a cheerily discordant bing-bong! But it took a couple of seconds longer—seconds during which Dagan bit his tongue to keep from screaming his impatience—before the silver doors slid open.

  The three of them were out of the claustrophobic little box in a flash, creeping along the wall toward Morrison’s front door. Once again, Ace made quick work of the surveillance cameras at each end of the hall by hitting them with the laser light. It took Christian only slightly longer to pick the lock. Then…

  We’re in!

  The CIA had trained Dagan to control the speed of his pulse. But when it came to Chelsea, the usual tricks didn’t work. His heart slammed against his rib cage like his little brother had slammed his shoulder against the locked passenger door of Dagan’s truck the morning Dagan had forcefully admitted him to rehab. The memory of Avan that dreadful day was as unwelcome as it was crystal clear, and the only way Dagan could ignore it was to concentrate on the sound of his own blood thudding in his ears.