CHAPTER TWO
Tarasovich’s name echoed on repeat through my mind, reverberating inside my cranium as a lancing pain pierced my brain.
“Callie?” Payton murmured. “Are you okay? Let’s find you a chair.”
“No,” I whispered, and then I cleared my throat and asserted myself. “I’m fine. It was just… You were right to warn me. Thank you.”
Payton paused, his jade orbs studying me. “Love, if you need some time to—”
“No! I couldn’t possibly—” I blurted before composing myself. “Now that I know the reason, I can’t stall without going insane from the what-ifs.”
He nodded. “Alright then. I mean, quite right.”
It was a tricky job managing two merged teams, but Payton pulled it off. Sometimes, I wondered if his proclivity for calling people by their last names stemmed from needing clear boundaries to cement his authority, and vice versa, since everyone referred to him as Mr. E or Emerson.
Everyone but me, that was.
Payton cleared his throat.
I blinked, realizing my ogling had made him somewhat uncomfortable, even if a smirk teased his perfect Cupid’s bow lips. Really, the Englishman had been gifted with a face sculpted by the gods, as if the divine had come together, combined their talents, and crafted the visual definition of symmetry and classical handsomeness that they then bestowed upon one mortal man.
Payton pinched the bridge of his nose. “Bloody hell, luv, you’re killing me.”
I was tempted, so verytempted, to grab him by the hand and find a secluded spot. Even with the burning fear of my tumultuous past resurfacing, I couldn’t help being drawn to him. As bad as it made me sound, I’d slept with all my boyfriends over a year ago, but Payton still abstained. Admittedly, my efforts at seducing him were less than stellar—but withholding for a year?
He claimed he felt special being the only one left to cross that line, and while some days I longed to call bull on his notion, I couldn’t deny how his mere presence held me enthralled at the most inopportune moments—current case in point.
After several failed attempts, I’d vowed to save what shredded tatters of dignity remained and let him take the next step if he wished to deepen our intimacy.
“Does he even want to be in this relationship?”the blond, curly-haired devil over my shoulder whispered, his poisonous words sending goosebumps racing along my skin. He’d reappeared behind me this time, though Corbin’s and Bryce’s warm welcome had distracted me from when exactly he’d disappeared.
Shut it, I hissed, once more lamenting my inability to do so out loud. It would make no difference.
The ghost was a manifestation of my trauma and guilt.
“If that was the case, then I’m only restating your own thoughts. If this man had any intention of fucking you, he would have acted on it. What’s he waiting for, Callie? You already know. Deep down, you realize that he wants nothing to do with your perverted farce of a relationship.”
You’re not real, you’re not real, you’re not—
The phantom crowded in closer, and a chill skittered down my spine. “If I’m not real, that’s worse because you have no one to blame but yourself for this self-sabotage. Remember that when you’ve destroyed everything good in your life with your insecurities, then I’ll finally be satisfied that you suffered the consequences of your actions when you toppled my empire.”
Normally, he faded between existences as quietly and quickly as a blink, but this time, he vanished so violently that I imagined my hair blew from the force of the wind left behind in his wake.
“Callie? Are you okay?”
I coughed to hide my gasp of air, having missed how still I’d gone during the interaction. My hands rose to massage away the lingering cold. “Sorry, sorry! I’m fine. This idea of Tarasovich resurfacing hits harder than I expected. We should head in.”
Payton straightened, tugging at his cuffs. “Of course, luv. Let’s go.”
He escorted me the fifteen feet we’d wandered from the door, the warm presence of his hand at the small of my back confusing my jumbled thoughts. Despite what the demon haunting me—or my own self-doubts if I was going crazy—said, Payton never shied away from the chance to touch me and always treated me with a brand of warmth reserved especially for me.
I froze in the doorway, ignoring the twins calling out their greetings as my eyes fastened on the face that had just so callously taunted me in the hall. For a heart-stopping moment, I worried he’d come to life. The apparition, probably because of my tendency to avoid looking at or acknowledging it, got the gist of his appearance, but lacked the high-definition detail that bowled into me from the picture projected on the smart screen.
His ice-blue eyes were so devoid of emotions that it lent him a robotic quality. The only sign of humanity was the evidence of a past weakness—a jagged scar that began on his chin and trailed down the right side of his neck. He’d nearly been decapitated from the blow. Whereas some people might use the near-death experience to straighten up, he viewed it as a warning, utilizing his sudden blast of mortality as an excuse to grow more monstrous in order to avoid another dance with the Grim Reaper.
“W-What—” My voice choked off, forcing me to pause, swallow the lump in my throat, and try again. “Why is Nikolai Ivanov on the screen?”
“Oh!” CJ, the tech savvy twin, clicked a button, and the picture disappeared, though Ivanov’s likeness lingered, burned into my retinas. “Sorry. I forgot he was still up there.” Uh, because he wasn’t the boogeyman of your childhood, CJ. Understandable. “We were piecing together a timeline for Tarasovich, so I pulled my notes—well, our notes on Ivanov, and—”
Jace, CJ’s brother, elbowed him in his ribs, cutting off his lookalike’s rambling. “Enough with the word vomit. She’s a smart girl. You don’t have to spell it out for her.”
CJ looked chagrined. “Right. Sorry, Callie.”
“It’s okay,” I choked out.
Nikolai Ivanov was dead. I helped kill him. He couldn’t do any more harm.
“You sure about that?” His whisper ghosted over my shoulders.
I didn’t turn around.
Payton rubbed my arm. “You’re freezing, luv.”
“Huh?”
The final, living presence in the room announced himself. “Hello, Callie. You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” the Director of Delta, Greg Miller, noted, keen as always. “Emerson, where are your manners? Help her to a seat.”
In the middle of Payton doing so, elevated bickering reached us, approaching our location.
“You made our job ten times harder than it needed to be! Did you have to incite them? They were leaving on their own,” a voice boomed.
“There was no choice! I didn’t like their attitudes,” an equally loud Russian man replied.
Ah, our last two team members, Brock Johnson and Aleks Zander, had arrived. Technically, the Russian’s legal name was Alekszander Kozlov, as he’d confided one day, which basically meant “goat.” Very few people knew that fun fact, including his employers at Delta. Aleks signed all important paperwork with the adapted moniker of splitting his first name in two.
“They are in a gang!” Brock shouted. “Of course they have fucking chips the size of Manhattan on their shoulders! And you did have a choice. You could have ignored them while we focused on our protection detail instead of insulting some random gang banger’s masculinity. You started a brawl!”
“Oh calm down, Boulder,” was Aleks’s reply. He used to call Brock “Rock” until he discovered it was complimentary, what with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, the mega movie star and former wrestler—ergo Aleks’s switch to Boulder. His word plays weren’t half as creative as Corbin’s. “I was bored. Mary me.”
Brock tripped. “The fuck?”
“You know,” Aleks elaborated, “take me to court. Put me on trial. Mary me.”
Despite the trembling induced by Ivanov’s picture, I couldn’t help but smile at their interaction. Their antagonistic love to hate each other routine never failed to generate fond amusement, especially with the Russian’s penchant for butchering the English language.
Swift Serbian sounded, harsh and low, before Brock switched to English. “The fuck is wrong with you? You mean ‘sue me.’”
“Da. I remember it is some boring female name. Mary, Sue. What is big difference?”
Sounding as if he was on his last dash of patience, Brock ground out, “First off, it’s not a person’s name. Sue is the verb, the action of suing somebody. Secondly, it is a big deal because I thought you said ‘marry.’”
“I did. Mary.”
Brock growled. “Fuck, you’re impossible.”
“Nyet, you are in possible, Boulder. In possible of being stupid.”
“Hey, Alexa? Go fuck yourself.”
I winced. Aleks passionately hated the Amazon smart device that made him the butt of so many jokes.
Their argument devolved into explicit Russian insults. As the only other person who spoke the Slavic language, the collective attention shifted my way in curiosity.
My cheeks flushed on cue. “Uh, you probably don’t want to know what they are saying.”
Corbin beamed, propping his elbows on the tabletop and waggling his eyebrows until they disappeared beneath his tawny fringe. “Oh? Do tell.”
Jace elbowed him this time. He’d have bruised bones by the end of the meeting if he kept it up. “Cut it out. The director’s here. We can tease Callie about her embarrassment later.”
Greg Miller snorted. “Hey, don’t mind me. In fact, just pretend I’m not here. I’ve missed this. Excuse my candor, but it’s so damn good to be home.”
The reminder of his extended absence prompted a more serious nature to descend upon the room.
“Where were you, by the way?” Corbin, with his class-clown persona in full swing, boldly posed the question we all thought but were too polite, shy—hi, yeah, me—or disciplined to voice.
Director Miller winked, and his timing coincided with the slow build up of Aleks’s and Brock’s entrance.
“We not miss something, da?” Aleks demanded. “Party is here.”
“No, you haven’t missed anything,” Director Miller assured him. “In fact, you might be about five minutes too early. Corbin was attempting to persuade Callie to interpret your schoolyard insults.”
Brock had the decency to look chastised, glancing my way. “Sorry you had to hear that, du?o.”
His apology cut off as Aleks shouldered him aside to precede him into the room since, as the largest and tallest pair on the team, they wouldn’t both fit through the doorway together. “Medvezhonok! You are here!”
He scooped me up from the seat in a bear hug.
“You saw me this morning,” I wheezed out. His wavy locks, dark at the top before fading into a light blond ombre just beyond his shoulders, tickled my nose.
“Bah,” he scoffed, placing me on my feet and beaming at me with arctic blue orbs that shone with warmth despite the frosty cold color. He switched to his mother tongue. “I am always happy to see you, little bear. We are soul mates.”
I coughed and blushed, my gaze flying to the director as he watched on, thankful that only Brock, who snorted, understood the Russian’s bold claim. “T-Thank you, big bear.”
Great, Callie, my mind hissed. Way to make things awkward. Someone makes a confession like that, and you thank them?
Brock coughed to hide his laugh as he strong-armed Aleks aside and gave me his own greeting. His thick, voluminous black hair stood up, always enticing me to run my fingers through it.
As if I’d projected my thoughts, he grinned as he spoke slowly in Serbian, “You’re good for that” —he used a word I didn’t know— “Russian’s over-inflated ego, sweetie.”
Brock was teaching me his native tongue, and though I couldn’t read Serbian and my pronunciation was less than fluent, I picked up the ability to understand the oral language quickly.
Lingo and coding were about the two things I would hang my hat on, having been necessary skills throughout the upbringing I’d endured.
Oftentimes, Ivanov wouldn’t give any warning beforehand, and I’d have the duration of a train ride to study enough conversational phrases to navigate through a city or broker a deal. Failure wasn’t a viable option since the consequences meant a beating to near death under the guise of “training,” followed by a weekend spent trapped in a tank of water with total sensory deprivation.
After mastering so many vernaculars, my brain picked out patterns. They could cold drop me in an unfamiliar country, and I’d learn on the fly just by tuning into the natives as they interacted and conversed with one another.
“I didn’t intend to brush him off like that,”I corrected.
Brock’s cheeks dimpled. “On purpose or not, it got the job done.”
The director must have grown bored with us speaking in foreign tongues, so he clapped his hands to draw our attention. “Okay, everybody, grab a seat. We have a lot of work to get through, and I want to assign tasks ASAP. Even though this potential lead might be cold, it can’t hurt to hit the ground running.”
The hair on the back of my neck rose.
If they had information on Tarasovich, I could only imagine what kind of horror someone stumbled upon to draw this conclusion. The Meatgrinder was, after all, the person responsible for Corbin’s and my fear of elevators.
I ended up between Brock and Payton, despite Aleks’s attempt to shove Brock aside once more to claim the spot beside me.
“Let’s get started, shall we?” The director nodded in CJ’s direction. “CJ, if you will, I had the techs prepare a slideshow of sorts.”
The writhing mass of unease in the pit of my stomach deepened. He was going to subject us to pictures?
CJ fumbled a little, straightening in his chair. “Oh, of course. Did you share it through the cloud?”
The director face-palmed and dug into his pocket. “No, sorry. I forgot.” He tossed a small thumb drive across the table. “It’s on there.”
“Old school,” CJ commented, gamely plugging the memory stick in.
“More secure,” the director countered.
“Sure, if you don’t care about possibly losing—”
Jace elbowed his grumbling twin, cutting his words short. “Just pull it up, yeah?”
CJ acquiesced without further fanfare.
Two seconds later, a map opened on the smart screen. A faint boundary outlined what seemed to be the Idaho state line, with a dot marked just beyond it in the wilderness of Montana.
I shivered.
Good God, Tarasovich had been in the United States?
“This location is where we discovered—well, discovered gives us a lot of credit. The entire ordeal sort of fell into our laps, but we’ll get to that in a minute. So this is the warehouse we tracked two of our people to once they’d deescalated the situation.”
I paused. “Wait, they survived?”
The director frowned. “Yes, they did. Is that significant?”
“Maybe not, but you should assign them a protection detail.”
“Would you care to elaborate?”
I glanced at Payton—for guidance or reassurance, I wasn’t sure. It’d become a habit since he was the leader of the team. He nodded, though he couldn’t have had the faintest idea about what was streaming through my inner thoughts. “Um, well, I think Veseli’s refusal to hand me over as payment contributed to Tarasovich’s fascination with me. If your people are the ones that got away, then he might grow obsessive.”
Brock’s armrests creaked ominously beneath his white-knuckled grip, while the rest of the team kept their reactions in check. They’d somewhat acclimated to my blasé manner of tossing out past atrocities and had learned to bottle their displeasure in the moment and pop the cork on their emotions later in private.
I was thankful for this new dynamic.
“Tarik Veseli, right?” the director questioned, scratching his head. “He was the Albanian criminal who initially kidnapped you until Ivanov allegedly killed him to steal your hacking talents for himself?”
My teeth gritted. “In layman’s terms, sure.”
He paused. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”
My eyes shut as I released a breath. “I know. Don’t worry about it. They are my hang-ups. Veseli… How can I explain?” My teeth chewed on my lower lip, abusing the flesh until Brock’s large hand settled over mine. “I never had a clue about my stepfather’s heavy hand in arranging my trafficking. Throughout my time with Veseli, he protected and indulged me when he could. His soft spot for me was the catalyst for why his partner, Andrea, betrayed us to Ivanov. He thought Veseli was going soft, and that it would get both of them killed.”
The director gave me an encouraging nod when I gauged his response. Dr. Harper’s go-to label for how I talked about Veseli always started with “Stockholm” and ended with “syndrome,” and that oversimplification never failed to have me skipping a session with him out of anger.
I rolled my shoulders as I continued. “In hindsight, when I learned of Drew Jensen’s involvement, I realized how altruistic that had been on Veseli’s part. He could have made his life so much easier at any point if he’d divulged my stepfather’s machinations, but he shielded me from the harsh reality. He let me idolize the man in my mind while growing up, and in the same breath, I cursed Veseli’s very existence. The truth remained a secret until Ivanov took glee in weaponizing that information against me.”
Ivanov’s ghost materialized, looking pedantic. “Now, Callie, you know I was only assisting you in seeking revenge against the man who wronged you. Father figures should not break the trust of those in their care.”
I paled, swallowing the lump lodged in my throat as I willed away the manifestation of my trauma. That detail had slipped my mind until just now, apparently. Ivanov’s entire motivation for kidnapping and forcing me to kill my stepfather and “spare” Natasia all stemmed from him working through his own self-flagellation and guilt after he killed little Kazimir, whom he’d raised from birth as his flesh and blood until he discovered his wife’s deceit.
Director Miller’s eyebrows jumped, pulling my attention. “It’s interesting that you lumped yourself in with them when you talked about betrayal.”
I shrugged. “Director, after discovering my stepfather’s treachery, I realized that Tarik Veseli treated me more like a father than anyone else in my life, and he died before I could understand and thank him for it.”
The director chewed that over. “Okay, fair enough, and Callie, please call me Greg.”
I nodded instead of verbalizing a response.
He huffed but clicked to the next image of the presentation without commenting.
The inside of a cavernous warehouse contained a monstrous box crafted entirely of dark metal. The structure gleamed menacingly on steel I-beam stilts in the bright lighting, looming overhead like the lethal blade of a guillotine.
“This was the contraption that two, well, technically one, Gamma agent narrowly escaped from.” Miller clicked again. The new position of the cameraman revealed the underbelly of the large container. Driving chains and tracks operated four outlier boxes on each corner of the greater body.
“And your people were in it but survived?” I double-checked.
“Yes. It was a fire maze designed to make them run like hamsters on a wheel, all while they remained unaware.” A picture of the interior popped up, brightly lit to reveal a long corridor. “These photos were snagged with high-wattage lights. The way the survivors described the experience was that the dim recessed bulbs only showed a few feet in front of them, disguising the turns so they thought they were running down an endless hall. In order to survive the deadly flames, they would dip into the corner boxes, all timed just so to prevent them from studying anything for fear of a gruesome death if they failed to reach the next waypoint.”
A short video played of the alcoves around the corners of the main contraption.
Greg continued. “They said the loud explosions of fire disguised the movements of their safety nooks. Unfortunately for the bad guys, they picked the wrong victim. She kept her cool, relied on her immense experience as a firefighter, and realized the significance of the rising temperatures with every four revolutions. It saved their lives.”
“That’s fucked up,” Brock grumbled.
“It is. That’s why we made the leap to Tarasovich. When speaking with the woman and our agent, they recalled that the criminal who commissioned the trap had mentioned a Russian sounding name. They are pretty sure it was Tarasovich, but, well, there were a lot of distractions keeping them preoccupied at the time.”
“Understandable,” Jace quipped.
“Yes, I’d have to agree with you.” The director turned to me. “So, what do you think, Callie? Could this be Tarasovich’s work?”
I paused, glancing over the slideshow which had begun looping through at regular intervals. “Running hopelessly to escape a gruesome death until you couldn’t possibly go another step? It’s not as messy as his usual style, but yeah, that level of mental torment is right up that psychotic bastard’s alley.”