Chapter 6 Beacon
BEACON
The following evening, Blackjack appeared in the ballroom doorway while I was losing a fight with my knee.
Wheels up was the day after tomorrow. Henry and Doc had set the window that morning, and I’d been working against it ever since.
I’d taken the brace off twenty minutes ago and had my thumb buried in the muscle above my kneecap.
The throbbing hadn’t eased. The radiologist’s six-to-eight-week recovery estimate looked more optimistic by the day, and not in a way that favored me.
He stood there for a moment before he spoke. I kept my thumb where it was and looked up.
“I could use a drink,” he said. “What about you?”
“I’m beyond using one. I need one. Badly. Whiskey, if there is any.”
He returned with two glasses and set one in front of me. I picked it up and drank.
“Thanks. You’re a godsend, and if you tell anyone I said that, I’ll deny it.”
“Of course you will.” He smirked and pulled a chair around, on which he sat backwards like he had yesterday.
I motioned to his folded arms across the top and his spread legs. “Is that a guy’s chair equivalent of wearing a ball cap the wrong way?”
“How is it I never tire of you giving me shit?”
“It’s because I’m sexy.”
The look in his eyes turned to heat. “As fuck,” he said barely above a whisper.
He was still in the same clothes he’d been wearing all day, and there was a crease across his forehead from leaning on his hand while working. He looked tired yet was still the hottest man I’d ever met.
“How’s the knee?”
“Functional.”
“You took the brace off.”
“Because it’s been on for too long, and the muscle underneath it is screaming.”
“Want me to look at it?”
“You’re an orthopedist now.”
“There are a lot of things you haven’t discovered about me yet.”
I took another sip of whiskey. “Tell me something that has nothing to do with the bombings.”
He thought about it. “Kingston and I worked a ranch in Sonoma one summer to earn extra cash. He got kicked by a horse on the third day, and I had to do his share for a week.”
“What was the horse’s name?”
“Biscuit.”
“Your brother was taken out by a horse named Biscuit?”
“He’ll deny it, but my parents would confirm it.”
“That’s about your brother. Tell me something about you.”
“I followed him around like a puppy dog. I still do. If Kingston does it, Bishop follows.”
I rested my good arm on the table and my chin in my hand. “Interesting.”
“How so? Seems pretty boring, if you ask me.”
“I don’t see you that way at all.”
He shook his head. “You don’t know me that well.”
“Well enough, Blackjack. The man who built an organizational architecture for a private intelligence operation in ten minutes told me he follows his brother around.”
He didn’t answer immediately. “Kingston would’ve gotten there.”
“Eventually,” I muttered.
He stood, turned his chair around, scooted mine so I faced him, then worked his fingers into my thigh, above my knee. I groaned with how good it felt.
“So, tell me something about you,” he said in a voice so sexy my thoughts drifted to his hands moving farther up my leg.
“Do you really expect me to be able to talk while you do that?”
“Come on, Katarina. Talk to me.”
Putain, that voice would be my undoing.
I closed my eyes. “Si tu continues comme ca, je vais te demander de me porter là-haut et de me baiser.”
My eyes snapped open when his fingers stilled.
Blackjack was watching me with a look that made every nerve ending in my body fire at once. Then he leaned forward, his mouth close enough to my ear that his breath hit my skin.
“That can be arranged, Katarina.”
I gasped. “You—how—”
He tapped his left ear, where a barely visible earbud sat. “Auto-translate. Been on all day.”
All day.
The blood drained from my face and then rushed in again with a vengeance. Every off-handed comment I’d muttered in French this morning flashed through my mind like a highlight reel from hell.
“You could have told me.”
“And miss you saying you want me to take you upstairs and fuck you?” He worked his thumb into my thigh like he hadn’t just detonated a bomb in the middle of the room. “Not a chance.”
“I didn’t say that’s what I wanted.”
He slid the fingers of one hand higher on my leg. “Sure you did.”
Our heads snapped toward the door when Magnolia came into the room. She sat at a table near the rear and opened her laptop.
“So, how does a girl from Lausanne end up on an intelligence council?” Blackjack asked.
“I wasn’t a girl from Lausanne. I was a girl from everywhere. Anna and Polina raised me here, but my education was all over Europe. France, Germany, Austria. Minerva sent me where the work was, and the work was everywhere.”
“When did you know this was what you wanted?”
“I never wanted it. It was what I was born into. My grandfather died for it. My parents died for it. The choice was ‘carry it or put it down,’ and putting it down was never an option. Not for a Stepanov.” I turned the glass in my hand.
“That sounds like an obligation. It isn’t.
It’s an inheritance I’m proud of. However, I’m not sure anyone asked me if I wanted it before they handed it to me. ”
Blackjack worked on my leg but didn’t say much. Magnolia had left the ballroom, and it was quiet enough that I could hear the wind outside and the occasional sound of someone moving in another room, but in here, we were alone, and there was a certain peacefulness to it.
I asked about his parents. His mother was a former State Department diplomat who’d spent most of her career in Latin America.
His father was an engineer who’d risen to CTO at a major defense contractor before retiring.
He talked about both of them with the easy affection of a man who knew he’d gotten lucky.
“My mother would like you,” he said.
“Why?”
“Because you don’t shy away from anything, and she spent twenty years in rooms full of men who expected she would.”
“That’s a generous assumption based on knowing me for less than a month.”
“I’ve seen you drag yourself out from under a crossbeam with a broken arm and refuse to leave a collapsing building. I’ve seen you declare a war that a dozen people signed up for because you said it first.”
He stood and refilled our whiskey glasses from the bottle he’d brought in with him.
“What would you call it?” he asked, motioning to the organizational chart on the board.
“Call what?”
“This.” He gestured at the room, the board, and us. “It needs a name.”
“I’ve been thinking about that.”
“So have I. Tell me your idea, and I’ll tell you mine. Count of three.”
I raised a brow, then nodded. “One, two, three, go.”
We said the same word in the same breath. “Genesis.”
I looked at him. He looked at me. That we both came up with the same name was eerie.
“The Genesis Consortium,” I said.
“That’s it.”
I raised my glass, he raised his, and we drank.
Later that night, after we’d all had dinner, Henry raised the same question Blackjack had. “We aren’t Minerva anymore. Who are we?”
For the second time, Blackjack and I answered together. “Genesis.”
“The Genesis Consortium,” I added.
I surveyed the room, and everyone in it was nodding.
Lyra’s eyes filled with tears. “It’s perfect.”
The last thing I should’ve thought of was my inability to do the same, but I did.
When Blackjack and I said good night later at the top of the grand staircase and I made my way to my room, I wondered whether I should feel guilty about not being able to cry for what we lost. Not that it would change anything if I did.