Chapter 4
Four
Pulling out the chair at the desk where his gear is laid out, he sits and lets his knees fall open. It’s tempting to let my eyes drift down to the towel, but I keep them on his face as he sips his drink.
The day is starting to feel heavy. Between the traveling, the anxiety he’s giving me, and the mental beating I’ve been giving myself, I’m about ready to sleep, but this conversation needs to happen, and if I have to go out tonight, I’m going to have to suck it up and find the energy anyway.
“What do you know about the operation?” he asks, loading bullets into a clip.
“Nothing,” I admit, frowning. “All I was told is that you needed someone to pose as your wife.”
“Ah,” he says with some amusement and finishes loading the bullets.
The magazine clicks as he slides it into his gun. Clearly, I am missing some vital information and am beginning to feel like an idiot.
“So, what do you want me to do?”
Maintaining the helpless, vulnerable-girl persona is key because I get the feeling that York is a bit of a big fish in the British government, and getting information on him could be very significant for us.
It’s tempting to get frustrated with how this is going and being kept in the dark, but I’ve got to let him run the show.
The fine lines deepen on his forehead as if I’ve asked a complex riddle, and aggravation flares when he doesn’t answer immediately.
I tamp it down and exhale with a little laugh. “Do you want me to interrupt a meeting you’re going to? Act as a distraction at some point?” I pull my hands out from under the pillow and sweep my hair back. “Am I accompanying you somewhere to help you blend in?”
A sour laugh tears out of his throat, and he tilts his head back for effect. It startles me, and I flinch as his chin drops and his eyes pin me. There is no humor on his face.
“Dove,” he begins, the word dripping from his mouth as he leans forward, “you are the operation.”
“What?” I whisper.
The back of my neck tightens, and the sensation moves up to my scalp, like I can sense a gun trained on me. Fear. It’s there and potent as my heart kicks up, but there is also so much more. Anger, confusion, indignance.
My gun is on the other side of the room still.
“You fucked me, and now you’re going to kill me?” I stare at him. “Well, at least things make sense now.”
“Do they?” He takes another drink, resting the gun on his thigh.
Maybe he’ll be too drunk to aim when the time comes.
“This assignment was too vague . . .” I trail off for a moment. “I also didn’t understand why I didn’t have an independent rendezvous and extraction point.”
He contorts his face in a knowing, judgmental way, which makes me feel like an idiot. Why didn’t he kill me immediately though? Why this performance and the stress of letting me know it’s coming?
“Shit,” I whisper to myself.
My last act on this planet was letting a psychopath fuck me. Jesus, my lack of prudence and self-control was begging for this. The Agency wants me dead . . . but why?
“Well,” I manage confidently and rise to my feet as my heart thunders in my chest. He rises with me—unease overtaking his face. “I know I can’t get to my gun before you put a bullet in me, so let’s get this over with.”
His face shifts, and he rolls his eyes, ejecting the clip from his gun and sitting back down. I stop breathing and watch him as he leans forward, elbows on his knees, and clasps his hands together.
“Sit down. I’m not going to kill you,” he says, annoyed. “Although, I am rather surprised you chose to be a good sport about it.”
Relief floods me, and I drop back to the bed, hyperventilating as the adrenaline courses through me. I want to cry with relief, but I don’t dare. Pinching the bridge of my nose, I work to get my breathing under control.
“I anticipated you going for your gun or the window, not surrendering.”
“This is a no-win for me.” I wave to the room, which is essentially a kill box.
He’s perfectly positioned between me and my gun and me and the window, which is my fault. I trusted him. My preparations for escape were based on someone outside this operation trying to kill me, not him.
“So, you don’t even try?” he says with contempt.
“What do you want me to say? I’m not an agent. My level of training is far below yours,” I lie, shaking my head. “What would you have done if I had gone for the window or the gun? Honestly.”
“Well, I probably would have let you escape and then just grabbed you again . . . but if you went for the gun, I would have put a bullet in you to avoid a standoff.”
My brows shoot up.
“Just a flesh wound. Nothing serious.” His mouth turns up at the corner slightly.
I’m not convinced this threat has passed, but I can’t help losing my cool a bit. Getting up, I stalk over to him and slap him across the face. Recoiling, his nostrils flare and his eyes lock onto me as he slowly stands.
“You fucked me even though you were here to kill me.”
“Consider that your one free shot,” he says calmly. “If you ever strike me again, I’ll be sure to return the favor.” Pushing me aside, he moves away from the desk. “I may have been hired to kill you, but I never intended to.”
“Why?”
“Because I’ve been looking for you.” He grabs my gun and then tosses it to me. “I’ve been doing my research. Raven is an interesting program, indeed.”
My skin tightens with the sense of being threatened again, so I don’t respond. What does he know?
“Tell me why your government is disavowing such a promising program, little dove.” He unzips the garment bag and pulls out the suit.
“They aren’t,” I say confidently.
“So, I’m here for no reason?” He shakes his head. “I’ve been stateside for a while now, Chicago to California and then back to Chicago …”
California . . . Chicago. My brain whirs through my memory banks. “Babylon and Carthage,” I whisper. “You’re why they’ve gone dark.”
“I’m why they’re dead.”
Dead? My palms sweat, and my tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth. The Agency hired him to shut down Raven . . . but why . . . why would Russel cut off this information stream? It’s been wildly successful.
I bury my face in my hands for a second and try to piece it together. “This doesn’t make sense.”
“Maybe someone was compromised,” he says ominously. “Maybe you all were . . . maybe, maybe, maybe.”
“What about everyone else? Why are you stopping at me? I won’t help you track them down,” I say indignantly.
He chuckles. “They’ve hand-fed me all of you, but I was only working as far down the list as it took to get to you.”
“I’m not anymore valuable than the others.” I shake my head.
All I can do is hope that he’s as ignorant as the rest of the world about who I really am .
. . about who any of us really are. I can’t assume what he knows or what he’s after, and I certainly don’t want to give him anything he doesn’t already have.
Although this is a massive risk for him to take if he doesn’t know anything real.
“The Agency is going to come after both of us if I don’t turn up dead like the others,” I point out, wringing my fingers again.
“Are you advocating for your own death?”
“No,” I snap. “But you better have a lot of goddamned pull with your government if you have any hope of us getting out of here alive.”
“Strictly speaking . . . this is off the books for me.” He turns and regards me. “I do a lot of work off the books, Tripoli.”
“Fuck’s sake,” I hiss. “Why are they doing this? Why are you doing this?”
A grunt is all he gives me for a moment. “Whatever their reasons and whatever mine . . . I’ve given you your life, and I don’t need to explain myself. So, instead of getting flustered and becoming useless to me, how about you get dressed.”
I move to my suitcase and start shuffling through things in a daze.
“And I’ll accept your thanks whenever you’re ready.”
My head snaps around as he buttons a black dress shirt, and I consider slapping him again, although I believe him when he says he’ll slap me back. With a quiet laugh, he pivots and pulls his pants on.
A myriad of emotions wrestle around inside me as I pull up a pair of jeans and fasten them. Russel knows how my brain works . . . but it’s always been an asset—a big one—and it wouldn’t explain why they are killing off the whole program.
“If I had to guess,” York says unprompted, turning back to me, “I’d say a Raven has become a mole, and they’re not sure which of you it is.”
My skin heats. If they believed that, they’d find and kill the culprit, not all of us, right?
He moves into my space as he tucks in his shirt. “You wouldn’t know anything about that though, would you?”
“No.” I swallow as he peers into my soul.
I’ve been exposed to a lot of valuable information, most of which isn’t garnered from an op’s objective, but rather simply from the players themselves.
Sure, I’ve snagged a national secret or two over the years .
. . the things I know and who I know them about are catastrophic, but no one really knows that I’m cataloging everything, all the time.
If I were going to sell information, it would be all the shit that I never reported back on, and that’s my insurance policy. It always has been.
“Whatever you think you’re going to use me for . . .” I shake my head. “You—”
“I dare you to finish that sentence,” he whispers, and the threat dies on my tongue. Warm hands run down my arms, and he leans in until his lips brush mine. “You’re going to be a good girl and do what you’re told, aren’t you?”
The ever presence threat in his tone and body language now makes me want to shrivel. I may not be the helpless window dressing I pretend to be, but that doesn’t mean I stand a chance against him at the moment. If I ever expect to escape him, I have to keep my cards close to my chest.
Looking into his eyes, I let a tear break loose and then nod. He watches closely as it falls and then brushes it away for me.
I step back and fetch my backup gun from the couch.
I know it’s empty as soon as I pick it up.
He’s good. Thorough. He’s testing me, though, and I have to play into it because I shouldn’t be able to tell from the weight that it isn’t loaded.
I turn the gun on him and pull the trigger immediately, letting out a sob when nothing happens.
Sometimes faking it is exhausting.
He rips the gun out of my hand, and I brace myself, but he doesn’t hit me as expected.
“Last warning, little girl.” He tucks the gun into his waistband and then drags me back to the edge of the bed. “Finish packing.”
“Um.” My voice wobbles as I close the case. “Do you have a burner I can use? I need to warn a friend to disappear. Just one message, I promise. You can watch me do it.”
“Friends are liabilities.” He grabs my case. “And I don’t believe you really have one.”
He opens the door, jams my luggage into my arms, and pushes me out into the hall.