Chapter Thirteen
Alexandra
Dixon tenses beside me, his body like a gun ready to fire; a single spark will ignite him and someone — likely many someones — in his way will die. My heart is in my throat and my eyes dart wildly around the room, looking for somewhere to run and hide. I’ve been in fights before, I know how to handle myself, but this is above and beyond anything I’ve seen. My life is balanced on a razor’s edge, and the only thing keeping me from falling is the asshole next to me and the giant, sexually rapacious teddy bear named Moose.
I am definitely going to die. Die in the back of a seedy sex club while a bunch of sweaty weirdos frolic and fuck in the front room.
I hope they don’t include this in my obituary.
Just as the tension seems ready to explode in blood and gunfire, Moose clears his throat and stands, slowly, his arms spread in supplication.
“Look, I am so sorry about that, you two. I really didn’t mean to ghost you both, especially after the night that we shared. Well, two nights and a day. It was seriously so moving. You know, my body still breaks out in goosebumps when I think about the connection we shared, about how you both know how to smack an ass right, and that morning where we devoured caviar and blinis off our bare bodies… but you know how life on the road is. I had cargo that I had to get to Tallahassee and, well, I got the cargo there in time and then I wound up having a celebratory cosmopolitan in the seedier part of town. Hell, what am I saying? All of Tallahassee is seedy, and that’s why I love it. Anyway, I met this guy named Nicodemus. Nicodemus was a recruiter for a guy named Esteban and a hell of a kisser. He was interested in me on both counts. You would not guess who this Esteban was and what he was involved in, because, darling, it was like nothing I’d ever even dreamed about.”
Beside me, I feel Dixon relax, and I give him a confused look. In fact, everyone in the room seems to settle in, and I have no fucking clue what is going on. Dixon whispers to me, “Don’t question it. Just let him do his thing..”
Moose continues. “They called Esteban ‘the Panther’ and let me tell you, he certainly earned his nickname.”
“We’re familiar,” both the man and the woman say at once.
“Oh, so you know what I’m talking about. Just graceful, lethal, and, honestly, at least three times as sexy as an actual panther. When he’s done with you, you feel you’ve just survived a mauling. We connected, I got swept up in his life like a buoy in a hurricane, and my cell got destroyed during a naked lucha libre tournament with some of the highest of Florida’s high society. That one rapper — the bald one with the sexy voice who is always talking about how worldwide his interests are — was there. He beat me in the finals. And, well, if you’re familiar with Esteban, you know what the winner of his tournament gets to claim from the competitors, so I was busy for a while.”
“It hurt our feelings when you didn’t call, Moose. After everything we shared, to be left feeling so neglected…” the man says. “It hurt. It really fucking hurt.”
Moose moves suddenly, leaving our place at the table to walk to the other man, who now has tears in his eyes. He embraces him, and the man releases a long sigh, resting his head on Moose’s broad shoulder. “I’m not that man anymore. I am so sorry about the lack of communication. But I am here now to ask for your forgiveness and your help for some friends of mine.”
“Anything for you,” the man whispers. “Anything.”
“I promise I’ll make it up to you both. Starting now.”
Moose releases him and then turns to embrace the woman. They exchange a long hug and a kiss before Moose returns to his place by our side. Glances pass between Moose and the man and woman, and something animalistic has replaced the tension in the air. I’m now acutely aware of just how close I’m sitting to Dixon and the heat coming off his body. He and I trade a look, and the same question blares in his eyes as rings in my head: are they really about to fuck?
Moose turns to Dixon and me, and from the look in his eyes, my fear is about to become real. “Dixon, Alexandra, I want to…”
Dixon’s hand clenches mine and my heart races. This is it.
“—I won’t do it,” I say, too quickly.
“No fucking way,” Dixon says at the same time.
Moose blinks. “You don’t want to do introductions? Do you just want to go by pronouns? I mean, I’m a pretty modern guy, I can do that, but it does put us all in an awkward place.”
“You’re more than modern, Moose.” The woman follows her words with a tender squeeze of Moose’s big arm. “And if going by pronouns is what your guests want to do, we can do that.”
It takes a moment before my breathing resumes, and then I let out a relieved sigh and give an apologetic glance to Dixon.
“No offense,” I say. “There’s just no way… if it was going to happen, that I’d want to…”
“Never,” he says.
“You’ve never?” I say, confused.
“No, I have. Lots of times,” he says, using a startled tone that makes me question whether he has at all. He sounds exactly like the kids in middle school who would claim they totally had a girlfriend, but she went to a different school. In a different state. In Canada.
“Sure. I believe you,” I say.
“God damn it, don’t take that tone, Alexandra,” Dixon says. “You know I have.”
“Please, stop for a second,” the leather-wearing man says. “Look, I’m used to finding the right hole in a mess of writhing, oiled, masked-up people, but I simply cannot figure out what the fuck you two are going on about.”
Dixon shakes his head and turns to the man in leather. “Let’s get on with introductions. I’m Dixon Green, this is Alexandra Reyes, and you two are…”
“Seraphina Voss,” the woman says. The way she says her name is flowing, elegant, like the sound of silk sliding against smooth skin.
“Kyle,” the man says.
I blink. “Seraphina Voss and Kyle… Voss?”
Kyle shakes his head. “No, we’re not related. That’d be freaky, considering the shit we do to each other. I’m just Kyle.”
“No fancy nickname?” Dixon says.
“No. Just Kyle. I like my name. Do you have a problem with it?” He says.
“No, no. Kyle’s a good name. A nice name. A… sexy name,” I say, trying not to think about the fact that, until this moment, the only other Kyle I knew was a kid who sucked his thumb all the way through eighth grade.
But thumb-sucker Kyle didn’t have armed men waiting in the shadows.
“She’s got it right,” Dixon adds. “Kyle is a good name.”
Kyle nods, releases a sigh, and Moose turns and gives him a hug.
Seraphina clears her throat. “Moose said that you’re looking into someone known for doing discrete work, that you need more information about them and who might have hired them. Is that right?”
I nod and take out my cell phone, opening it to the pictures I took of the man who tried to kill me. I pass it to Seraphina. “This is him. I need to know who he is, who he’s worked for, who he’s worked with, and any information you have on him.”
Seraphina”s sharp eyes scan the image with an intensity that makes me feel like she”s dissecting every pixel. She shows the phone to Kyle, and they share a silent conversation in a quick exchange of glances. Then Seraphina hands the phone back to me, her lips pursed.
”This won”t be easy,” she says. ”But we have what you need. We know him.”
“What do you mean? It should be easy to just tell us who he is, right?”
Dixon gives me a look like I should know better.
Beneath his breath, I hear Moose mutter, “Oh, honey.”
“It doesn’t work like that,” Kyle says. “We have something valuable that you want, which means you need to do something for us.”
“I’m not fucking her,” Dixon says, too quickly. After a moment where everyone’s eyes whirl to him, he says, “Or you, or you, or any of you. I’m not doing any sex stuff.”
Moose looks incredibly disappointed.
Seraphina shrugs. “We wouldn’t ask that of you. You might be some people’s type,” she says, her eyes flickering to me in a way that makes me want to slap her for her gross misestimation of how I feel about Dixon — it’s purely murderous, not carnal, even if thinking about the muscles of his back, or his cocky smirk, or his corded, powerful forearms makes me feel sweaty. “But you’re not everyone’s cup of tea. Some of us have more sophisticated tastes.”
“What we need is for you to retrieve something for us. A flash drive,” Kyle says.
“You can just get those on Amazon,” I say. “If you have Prime, you can get it next day. Maybe even the same day, if you’re lucky. They do that sometimes.”
Moose gives me a look and I close my mouth before I can say anything more.
Mercifully, Seraphina continues if I didn’t speak. “It’s in the possession of a former associate of ours, now a rival. He is hosting an event in his home and the attendees will be the type of people that you two, Dixon and Alexandra, should be able to navigate among freely. Through some back-channel work, we have managed to get you two on the guest list.”
“Not me?” Moose says. He sounds hurt, as if he hasn’t registered that Dixon and I are presumably being sent into a lion’s den.
“We know you want to be there to support your friends, Moose. However, you cannot go. This gentleman would recognize you,” Kyle says.
“Oh. Is it Hugo?”
“No.”
“Rogerio?”
“No.”
“Frederick?”
“No.”
“It’s Jeremiah Brock,” Seraphina says. Though I’ve never heard the name, it’s enough to make Moose frown. “He’s a dangerous man. Dangerous enough that Kyle and I cannot move against him directly. When we heard he was having this event, we had covertly procured entrance for two individuals who work for us. However, one of them has since been incapacitated while collecting from an organization in Oakland who owed us a debt. Thus, we need a new pair to take their place and retrieve the flash drive from Jeremiah Brock’s home. Once you do this for us, we will tell you everything you need to know about the man in the photograph.”
“Fine, we’ll do it,” I say before Dixon even has a chance to answer. I’ve spent years of my life searching for the truth behind my brother’s death. There is no choice as far as I’m concerned.
“What’s the catch?” Dixon says.
The catch?
As if sneaking into the home of a crime boss and stealing from him isn’t enough of a catch?
Then a thought that makes my blood go cold strikes me — Dixon has so much more experience at this stuff than I do, so if he’s worried about something, maybe there actually is something to worry about. Could Seraphina and Kyle have led with the easy stuff before getting to the difficult details about the mission? What the hell have I just gotten myself into?
“The guests are vetted. Researched. Profiled. Because Mr. Brock is a very cautious man,” Kyle says. “And that is by necessity, because he has many enemies. So, to get in, you will need to act the part.”
“Explain,” Dixon says.
“The pair that we were sending to infiltrate this event were married. Happily married. They were quite physically affectionate with one another as well. In fact, they had a reputation for being extensively and publicly enamored with one another’s bodies. The fake identities, the backgrounds that we crafted for them took this into account. When you two infiltrate this event, you will assume their identities. Deviating from those could cost you your lives.”
“You have to be fucking with me,” Dixon says.
There’s nausea dancing a fucking tango in my stomach and I can’t open my mouth because I’m worried that, the second I do, I’ll vomit on the floor.
Seraphina shakes her head.
“We are not joking. Either you two will pretend to be madly in love with each other, or they will kill you.”