Chapter Seventeen #7
What remained of my shirt was lying near one leg of the desk, torn badly enough that calling it a shirt felt generous.
My bra was somewhere beneath it, the middle ripped loose, and my underwear had suffered an equally definitive death.
Wolf crouched down, picking up each ruined piece and placing the scraps neatly on the desk beside me.
I looked at the little pile.
He looked at it too.
Neither of us said anything.
Wolf opened the tall cabinet against the wall, reached onto one of the shelves and pulled out a dark training sweatshirt and a pair of black sweatpants. He set both beside the remains of my clothes with such complete seriousness that the contrast nearly made me laugh.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me.”
His attention returned to me through the mask.
“Get dressed.”
I glanced toward the sad collection of fabric on the desk.
“Should I try these first?”
“Mercer.”
I bit the inside of my cheek. Wolf pointed toward the sweatshirt.
“Get dressed. I’ll get you water.”
He left before I could push my luck any further.
For several seconds I sat there staring at the closed door, still warm everywhere he had touched me, wearing absolutely nothing while the evidence of my terrible decision-making skills sat in shredded pieces beside my hip.
I had just had the best sex of my life with a man whose real name I did not know. I didn’t know what his full face looked like either.
That should probably have been alarming.
Instead, I was already wondering how far I could push him next time. I wanted to know what else he had been warning me about in that car. I wanted to find the line he kept drawing between us and see how far he would let me move it.
Worse, some part of me already knew tonight would not satisfy my curiosity about him. It had probably ruined whatever chance I had of leaving it alone.
I slid off the desk and stepped into the sweatpants. They were obviously his, or at least issued for someone built more like him than me, and I had to tighten the drawstring until the waistband stopped threatening to fall off my hips. The sweatshirt swallowed my hands and hung low over my thighs.
This was going to complicate everything.
I had come to ARC expecting a job. A difficult one, sure, with classified files, international trafficking routes, armed men and a boss who had looked at me on my first day like Vale had dropped a live grenade into his unit and called it personnel support.
I had never expected to get this close to any of them. It felt like I had been here forever and no time at all.
I could still remember that first breakfast, Bear feeding everyone while Jackal talked enough for three people, Raven drinking his coffee through the chaos, Hawk and Viper contributing exactly as much as they felt like contributing.
We had joked about families that morning. Brothers and sisters. The harmless kind of conversation you had when nobody at the table knew which answers could become dangerous later.
My hands slowed on the sweatshirt hem.
Family.
My mother in Connecticut. My stepdad Marko. The house I could still picture down to the placement of the furniture if I closed my eyes.
Then Nick.
I stopped moving.
Something cold worked its way beneath everything Wolf had left warm.
Nick at NYU.
Nick disappearing.
Nick turning into the subject my mother learned to avoid because talking about him only ended with somebody angry, worried or pretending they were neither.
I looked toward the office door and remembered Raven’s screen on my first day.
The photograph.
The message across it.
TOO SLOW.
At the time, I had let Raven explain what they knew. I had stood inside ARC headquarters and pretended those two words meant nothing to me.
My stomach tightened.
Too slow.
The phrase had followed us since we were kids.
Nick used to say it when he stole the remote before I could reach it, when he beat me to the passenger seat, when he grabbed the last piece of something off the kitchen counter and ran before I could hit him. And especially at the country club whenever we played tag.
Too slow.
I gripped the edge of the desk. The man at Stuttgart had said it to me too.
The same man who had looked at me across the pool party as if the years between us had disappeared for half a second.
That day, I had heard his voice in Serbian, a language nobody around us understood, and had chosen not to tell a single person in ARC what he said.
Previ?e spora. Too slow.
I had followed him behind the cabanas because of that voice, and I had gone after him tonight for the same reason. Wolf thought I was chasing Kade, but I was chasing someone I’d known since he was born.
The same man who had killed Keller.
The same man who had put that black case into my hands and walked away without explaining why.
His freckles used to darken across the bridge of his nose every summer, especially after long afternoons at the country club, and I used to count them when we were bored in the back seat.
I had kept the pieces separated because separating them was the only way I had managed to stand in this building every day without anyone seeing what they formed.
Nick.
Nikola.
My breath shortened.
Nikola Vukovi?.
But the name ARC had given him sat in reports downstairs, attached to photographs, trafficking routes and bodies.
Kade.
My little brother.