6. Wren
WREN
Assess. Ascertain. And act.
I rolled my eyes as I paced.
Bullshit.
For the next day and a half, the only things I could assess were the quality of the food and the frequency of water bottles that were delivered to me.
They were brought by a very bored-looking and stiff-faced older man who had to be a butler.
He was too old to be a guard or soldier, and I wasn’t sure what to make of him.
He didn’t linger long enough, anyway, and he said not a damn thing.
I didn’t ask, as wary of him as any other who could’ve shown up.
With his dropping off the essentials that would keep me from dying from thirst or starvation, I knew that Viktor valued me alive rather than dead.
So far.
The butler also led me to the same bathroom where I’d taken out my contacts.
I had no means of escaping then. With a gesture of his hand, he indicated for me to have my bathroom breaks.
Then later, to shower. A spare change of clothes was folded and on a shelf, but I refused to behave like an extended stay guest. I put my clothes back on and wondered how long I would need to wait before Viktor Volkov would determine whether I had answered his questions sufficiently.
Keep dreaming.
The longer I was stuck in this room with only the company of my mind, I grew more worried and convinced that he was just prolonging the lead up to my death.
He’s going to kill me.
These were the Volkovs. A brutal Bratva. Criminals like the ones my mom and dad had wanted to put away. They consorted with hitmen and drug dealers, torturers and whores. All of the lawless kinds of individuals that the agency I worked for wanted to take out.
I couldn’t ascertain anything positive. I could only pace back and forth and wonder what they were after to have captured me at all.
Clearly, they wanted to know why Adrik was almost killed.
The reason wasn’t a grand mystery. They had a plethora of enemies who would love to take out a leader.
Or the next leader in charge since according to Smithson, Dmitri Volkov hadn’t passed away yet.
Just because I was an agent didn’t mean that I had to be connected to whoever ordered that hit. I wasn’t even an agent that they could kidnap for any other intel. I was too new here. I truly didn’t have anything else they could need to know.
Unless they were trying to keep me as a hostage.
That didn’t encourage any positivity.
I also couldn’t act on anything while I was trapped and locked in this small, bare room.
Waiting was the only course of action that was provided to me, and I had never been good with that.
Waiting was a form of torture I couldn’t endure.
When I was sixteen, I waited for an entire night and all through the next school day for my mom to come home after her shift. At the end of that wait, I had been informed that she was killed in the line of duty.
Then a couple of years ago, I waited for a week to know if I had been assigned to a fieldwork position. At the end of that wait, I was smacked with the disappointment that someone else—a superior’s nephew—had been chosen for the job I wanted.
Other things had built up over the course of my life, even little things like waiting on something in the mail that never came or stressing over the delay for exam scores to be released, contributing to a lousy sense of patience.
I wasn’t the best at waiting, and the longer that I had to be in this room with zero access to the rest of the world, the more convinced I became that Viktor was doing this on purpose. A form of psychological warfare.
The warfare was over, though, because the next time that door opened, it wasn’t Lurch. It was the tall, muscled form of Viktor Volkov himself.
He entered without a word, teased me by leaving the door open, and leaned against the doorframe.
His face was still unreadable with all those rough-hewn lines and angles.
But when he crossed his arms and settled in to rest his back against the doorframe, it looked like he was interested in keeping me company again.
Like he was determined to get some different answers out of me.
He would be shit out of luck there.
Lying to someone like him could be the difference between survival and death. It was a fine balance that I had to dance around, but I seriously didn’t have anything else to tell him.
I didn’t know who wanted to kill his brother. Any number of criminal morons could claim that goal.
I hadn’t been informed of an assassination attempt. Smithson had barely told me anything since I’d started.
And I had no idea why I could’ve been shot at as well. Well, I had a theory, but nothing to back it up yet.
“Feeling refreshed?” he asked blandly.
I furrowed my brow. Refreshed after sweating nervously and anxiously in this small room while my mind could race—prohibited from deodorant or a single hint that I would live to see the next day?
No, I wasn’t fucking refreshed.
I felt trapped and cornered.
I couldn’t remember the last time my BO had gotten this bad from not having standard hygiene products.
And I wasn’t sure that knowing I’d taken 7,934 steps back and forth in this room mattered, but it was the only scrap of sanity that I could hang on to, not forgetting that number.
I let my deadpanned stare be my answer.
But when he didn’t budge, I fought the hysterical urge to laugh.
Feeling refreshed?
What the fuck kind of question was that?
He couldn’t care.
He could smell how nervous I was, like some monster that was lured to the scent of fear.
Realizing that his stupid sense of sarcasm and snark relaxed me was hilarious, though.
He’s a killer, a criminal. Not some joke.
He let out a breath, watching me so closely with a weird intensity in his eyes that had me feeling like I was too exposed. Naked, even. Before I could blink, he stepped back and grabbed a chair from the hallway.
Without a word, he brought it in and sat on it, straddling the back as he faced me.
“If your first day on the task force was that day, why would you assume that you would be a target worthy of being shot at?”
Well, hell.
He had to start with the hard questions.
“I don’t know.”
He pulled out some papers from the inside of his jacket, a suit that looked way too fine on him than it should. He was still a criminal. Dressing up nice only proved that a wolf could try to change his appearance as a sheep.
“Before coming to our fine city of Las Vegas, you worked with fraud.” He glanced up from reading papers. “Small business fraud.”
I frowned.
“Right?” He held up the papers then snapped his fingers. Then he reached in his other pocket and got a pair of glasses out and held them up for me to take.
I accepted them and slowly put them on.
Dammit.
Now I didn’t have to guess at how dangerous and sexy he was. All the details were clear. No more fuzzy outlines. I blinked again, realizing they were my glasses. But they weren’t. I preferred contacts, yet this was… my prescription.
Jesus.
He looked up my glasses prescription?
It wasn’t necessarily an intimate secret, but it was my personal information.
And it told me that he had spent all this time that I was waiting wisely. He’d looked into me. Thoroughly. Once more, I battled with that awkwardness of being exposed. Studied.
“Right?” he repeated, holding up papers that showed my record of employment. He shuffled through them, showing them to me one by one. My résumé. My application to the Las Vegas office. My transcripts from college. And high school too!
“Looks that way.”
“Seems strange to me that a rookie would assume she’s so special that she’d warrant a hit placed on her as soon as she would arrive.” He dragged his dark gaze over me, and I fought the urge to cross my legs and arms to shield myself from his view.
“I told you. I have no idea why someone would shoot at me.”
“Who ordered you to that stakeout?” he asked.
I didn’t answer, too scared to reveal anything now. When he held all the cards and had clearly investigated me, I had to be careful of anything else I’d add to his knowledge.
“Your superior?” He held up a photo of Smithson, a black and white ID image that didn’t do his toupee any favors.
“Is this the kind of entertainment you enjoy? Asking me questions that you already know the answers to?”
He eyed me up and down again, this time with more kick and heat in his dark-brown eyes.
I resisted the urge to cross my legs again, this damnable rush of desire making me aware of what it could be like if a beast like him wanted to eye me in another way.
“Are you interested in entertaining me?” He flapped his hand down, bracing his forearm on the back of the chair.
I cleared my throat.
Assess. Ascert—
“Because I’ve got some ideas of how you might be able to do that.”
Oh, God.
He’d been fantasizing about me already?
That is not good.
That’s not good.
Come on. You are stronger than this. You are better than this.
I frowned, fighting the odd realization that I could ever lower my standards to be drawn to a criminal like him. To accept how hot and wicked and exciting it would be to—
Argh!
No!
“I do too,” I tossed back as flippantly as I could manage. It still sounded breathy, dammit. “For starters, since you’ve already gone through a file on me and have found all the answers you want, you can let me go.” I smiled without letting it reach my eyes.
He did it again, dragged his gaze over me like he had X-ray vision, seeing through my clothes.
And my body did it again.
My nipples beaded and my pussy throbbed.
I cleared my throat once more
“Let you go?” He reached the bottom of my chair, his fingers brushing against the underside of my thigh.
His fingers hooked under the seat and he wrenched me toward him.
The feet scraped over the floor. I jolted, surprised he’d touch me even like that.
From the one-sided direction of his tug, the chair moved forward diagonally and I had to swivel on the seat to face him again.
“Just when we’re getting closer?” he taunted. He licked his lips as he watched me pant.
Don’t look at his lips.
Don’t look at his damn lips.
Do not look at his fucking lips.
“I do have some information here,” he said. Before I could calm down, he reached closer and gripped the other side of the chair, tugging me toward him again. The feet scraped loudly. The chair rocked forward. I jolted and tensed again.
He released his hold on the chair and rested his elbow on the back of his chair as he rifled through the papers he’d printed out. Putting his chin on his hand, he tossed out one sheet after another to let them flutter onto my lap or fall to the floor.
“You clearly have experience with looking into fraudulent accounts. Like this one. This one. That.” He flicked the papers out that showed the articles of arrests for fraud that were uncovered from my input when I worked in Oregon, where I’d lived before coming here.
“It’s ironic that you haven’t been around long enough to see the evidence of fraudulent activity ‘in house’.”
He held out pictures of Smithson talking to Rico Johnson. Another one like it had been taken as a still shot from surveillance of Smithson taking money from a thug.
The papers flew out at me, landing in my lap or on the floor.
“Maybe you need some more time to get to know your colleagues…” He held up a photo of Smithson on a yacht with another Mob boss. He folded it loosely, making the paper stiff enough to trace the edge of it along the hem of my shirt that was missing a few buttons from when he’d tackled me.
I ignored the tingle of awareness of his touching me like that.
I refused to be affected by this.
Him flirting.
Him ogling me and watching me like he wanted to lick every inch of me.
Him caressing me and seducing me.
Assess. Ascertain. Act.
I couldn’t do any of them. Because I was stuck on how Smithson could be up to that kind of activity. He could be corrupt. It was the first idea that had come to mind when I had been targeted for a shot.
That someone could have assumed he would be there and they’d been shooting at him.
It was the only logic I could test out as a theory, but like Viktor was taunting me for, I hadn’t been here long enough to know him. Or the department out here.
Struggling with the possibility that my own agency could be corrupt or withholding information, I stayed as expressionless as I could.
“Because when you told me that you were tasked with looking into Rico Johnson, that means you’re indirectly looking into my family.” He held up a photo of Adrik speaking with the politician wannabe.
There was too much I didn’t know yet. That ignorance could very well get me killed. Because while I understood that fine balance between survival and death was a complicated dance with him, I couldn’t begin to know if he was lying to me.
Photos could be doctored, after all. He was a skilled liar, cheat, and criminal with no code of morality.
Regardless of what his intention was by talking to me now, he was getting far in the scheme of planting seeds of doubt in my mind. He was scattering crumbs to guide me away from what I thought I could rely on. Like my job and coworkers I had yet to get to know and count on.
He’d started with the psychological warfare of making me wait.
He’d moved on to seduction.
And now he was playing mind games with me, tricking me into doubting whom I could trust.
It won’t be you.
I leveled an even glare on him.
No matter what, I wouldn’t ever trust him. With anything he said or did.