Chapter 6 Helena
HELENA
Ihave had some long-ass days in my life, but I would take the time I had to pick through the wood-chipped remains of an overweight drug lord over standing on my feet for ten hours in one spot staring at a wall, and I was having a hard time sitting still in the car as we drove sedately back to the Meridian.
Erryn was on the phone, looking out the rain-spattered window at the passing city as we drove through the busy streets, and I took advantage of her distraction to study her.
I had heard stories about what she’d been like as an agent, and I was having a hard time seeing her in them.
This was a woman who had entered a terrorist camp in the middle of the desert with nothing but a forged identity, a burner phone, and balls the size of a fucking silverback.
She’d embedded herself for months—months—playing the long game inside a cell that specialized in weapons trafficking and ideological indoctrination, before tearing them apart from the inside and completing one of the hardest contracts the Triarchy had accomplished to date, singlehandedly.
According to the whispers, she’d passed intelligence out piece by piece that had been instrumental in taking down a rival international corporation that went rogue, and when the camp was finally dismantled, she had left without a trace except for the trail of bodies in her wake.
The woman across from me now looked composed.
Expensive, and mildly irritated by traffic and rain.
If I hadn’t known better, I’d have pegged her as a corporate shark with a love for Hermès and the expensive perfume that lingered in every space she had passed through.
God, I love her perfume. The urge to lean forward and sniff her had caught me out multiple times, my restraint fighting tooth and nail against my ADHD impulsivity.
“That isn’t an insight into what the intention behind the breach was.”
Her words snapped me out of my musing, realizing she was looking at me, and I had been studying the long line of her neck as it disappeared into the collar of her shirt.
“Coincidence.” The word was a breath of a laugh, and I almost felt sorry for whoever she was talking to as her tone shifted. “Would you like to keep throwing out half-assed suggestions or come back with something that is worth the money you are paid?”
She hummed softly at their answer, hanging up without another word as we pulled into the Meridian’s parking complex. I was out of the car the moment it stopped, opening her door as I scanned the complex for threats.
“I’m changing and going to the gym for an hour before dinner,” she said, attention on her phone as she headed for the doors. “It’s within the building so you are free to retire for the night.”
I didn’t answer, trailing her through the lobby to the elevator, my eyes fixed on the slender curve of her waist as we made our way up to the penthouse, before slipping off to my room to change.
The gym was on another level. She was on drugs if she thought I was letting her go without me, and the look she gave me when I wandered back out in a simple T-shirt and shorts ten minutes later was worth every minute of boredom I had endured that day.
“No.” She glared at me with one finger raised as if she was scolding a wayward pup. “Rossi…”
“Let’s call it workplace enrichment,” I said, tossing a towel over my shoulder and sauntering into the elevator. I leaned against the back wall, waiting for her.
A muscle feathered in her jaw as she stepped in a moment later, turning her back to me.
My eyes drifted down to where her jumper barely skimmed the waistband of her pants.
There was a silver scar indented into her flesh, half hidden, and it disappeared a moment later as she pulled the jumper down slightly.
“Is that a bullet wound?” I asked. She silently selected the level to take us down, and I thought she wasn’t going to answer.
“Yes.”
“Shot in the back. Dirty move,” I said. “Got any more?”
“One was plenty,” she muttered as the elevator began its descent.
“I’ve been stabbed,” I offered, stepping up next to her and ignoring the icy look of warning. “Wanna see?”
“No.”
“It’s a pretty cool scar.” She didn’t answer me, checking a notification that had popped up on her phone. “It was with a glass dildo,” I offered.
Her fingers stalled in the message she was writing. “Pardon?”
“A shattered glass dildo,” I amended, angling my leg so she could see the ragged scar on my calf. “Didn’t see it hiding in the bed sheets when I had him in a headlock. He got lucky and smashed it on the side table, then straight into my calf.”
Her eyes slid from my calf up to me, that damned eyebrow starting to rise again.
“And I nearly lost my favorite nipple to a loose floorboard,” I added.
“How the fuck do y—” She pinched the bridge of her nose, closing her eyes. “I don’t actually want to know.”
“I was hiding under the bed of an old house with loose floorboards,” I continued. “He stepped on the other end and—”
“Rossi, stop talking,” she said, just as the elevator dinged and she strode out, muttering something under her breath.
I whistled at the sight of the gym facilities, complete with a sauna, cold dip, and every piece of equipment you could possibly need.
There were two people at the far end: a young man in the weights section and what looked like his girlfriend stretching beside him.
Neither would be a threat to either of us.
Erryn headed for the treadmill in the farthest end of the building and proceeded to ignore my existence, while I headed for the stairs machine that was in the perfect position to keep an eye on the door and my charge while slowly losing my will to live on a machine that I had a long-standing love-hate relationship with.
I surreptitiously watched Erryn as she moved from the treadmill to the cable machine, her cheeks glowing from the run she had just completed.
A few wisps of pale hair escaped her bun, and she was frowning slightly, her lips moving as if she was quietly talking to herself while she worked out.
For a woman who could be as still as stone, I had never truly seen her stop.
From the moment she was on her feet in the morning, she was working and had a grip on the throats of a hundred people without letting the pressure slip for a moment.
And she’d been doing this for over a decade.
When did she rest?
I knew what I was doing. My brain was fixated on everything else rather than contemplating the one thing that I was most interested in. The one thing that shouldn’t interest me as much as it did.
I had disregarded the rumors circulating through the Triarchy as the usual general misogyny that comes with a woman reigning over men.
They will always find something to latch onto.
Erryn’s sexuality was one that had been discussed on numerous occasions, and I’d listened to the distasteful comments from men who clustered together in the mess like schoolgirls, and even then, it had irked me beyond what it should have.
But, if one rumor was true, maybe there was some truth to the others.
Theo Lancaster was a Triarchy agent who was nearly untouchable.
Her stats were amongst the highest in the Triarchy, and there were whispers that if it weren’t for her volatile nature, she would have already been tapped for a Chair herself—especially after the success of Erryn’s promotion from the field.
Theo’s stats were the only ones I hadn’t decimated after Erryn’s, and I had been watching her trajectory for a long while.
Half respect, half a baser part of me that I’d never been able to quell. A little jealous streak.
That streak flared as I mulled over a rumor I had disregarded until the moment I saw Erryn’s sapphic collection, and the brief flash of a handwritten note I’d glimpsed in the pages of a book, signed with a familiar name…
and that was how Theo had fucked her way to the upper echelons of the Triarchy elite in Erryn’s bed.
But it wasn’t jealousy over the professional implications of that rumor that I was feeling.
It was Theo.
I was jealous of the history they shared.
Well, fuck.