Sinner: An Orc Bodyguard Monster Romance (Monsters & Artifacts Book 4)

Prologue

Istared at the report in my hand as I sipped my bourbon and sunk back into my couch. It was late, or early depending on how you looked at it. Once again, I couldn’t sleep so here I was in my expensive London flat, a robe thrown over my comfy cotton pajamas, trying to tell myself that I was doing a good job.

Except the paper in my hand detailed the agents we’d lost to the Protectors in the last three months and all I could think about were the mothers who would never see their children again.

It’s more than last quarter, as are the number of missing artifacts. This isn’t just a minor inconvenience anymore. This is starting to look like war.

I threw the paper, and the folder it belonged in, onto my coffee table and rubbed my forehead with my fingers. I was never under any illusion that this job was going to be easy. But no one had said a word about a secret war with a group that, lately, seemed to be one step ahead of us.

Maybe if we can find that cave, excavate some of those artifacts…

I snorted and shook my head.

Was I seriously considering using class five artifacts as weapons to stop the Protectors?

That was something Francesca would do.

I used to think she was just hardwired to be a villain, but the longer I was in this job, the more I wondered if she’d found herself in a similar position as the one I now did. Had she crossed a line with the best of intentions, only to find there was no way back?

Despite her beginnings, Francesca was a monster when I killed her. And lately I found myself second guessing my decisions to make sure I wasn’t venturing too close to that same line she had crossed. The specter of her tenure still hung over everyone I crossed paths with, every department, every decision I made. More than a year later, I was still having to prove that I wasn’t her while rebuilding what she’d destroyed, and trying to safe guard what was left.

Everyone thinks this job is so damn easy, that the right thing is so obvious. But it’s like trying to find a piece of coal in the dark blindfolded sometimes. And all I can do at the end of most days is hope that I’m making good decisions.

The change in the room was subtle, but it was that exact type of thing that Trey had been training me to recognize. I didn’t want bodyguards all the time, and for some reason the beautiful Dragon had become increasingly grouchy about my safety. So I’d agreed to training, to expand on the self-defense I already knew, as well as better my skills at recognizing environmental shifts.

It was the only reason I was able to reach into the couch cushion, draw the gun and turn before the man behind me was able to take more than a few steps into my living room.

The male was over seven feet tall, exceptionally broad, even for an Orc. He had his hands up, and though half his face was in shadow, I recognized the broken right tusk, and the scar that ran from his temple to his mouth.

“Jesus H. Christ, Darius!” I said, lowering the gun and letting out a sharp breath. “I could’ve shot you. What’s wrong with a doorbell?”

“Apologies, Angelica,” Darius’ gravelly voice was soft, as usual, but there was a tension there that made alarms go off in my head.

I jumped to my feet and motioned for him to come closer.

“What’s going on? You usually don’t come see me at all, much less in the middle of the night.”

As he moved into the low light in the room I could see the dark circles around his eyes, and the smaller scars on his high forehead and down his throat. I knew that his body was a patchwork of them, most covered by copious amounts of tattoos. They were from his time as an agent in the Archive Special Investigations Unit and also from his service in the secretive, and not quite legal, group of mercenaries called the Sinners. His last job for them had been as a bodyguard for the York family, which nearly killed him.

He swallowed and handed me a small envelope of photographs without a word.

As I flipped through the photos, my stomach dropped to my toes. I recognized the facility as one that the Protectors had been rumored to control; the trucks coming in and out were armored, like ours when we were transporting dangerous artifacts. And then there was the cooling system that was extensive and complicated, which indicated that they had huge vats of neutralizer.

“What are they keeping here?” I murmured as I stared at the pictures. “And how did you even get close enough to get these? We’ve been trying to find evidence like this for months.”

When I looked back at him, Darius’s shoulders were stooped and he had a hand on the wall, holding himself up.

“Darius, sit down before you drop. When was the last time you ate or slept?”

“I found her,” his voice caught at the end. “I fucking found her, Angelica, and I…I can’t get to her.”

It took me a moment to realize what he’d just said and when I did, something awful started to take form in my mind.

The York family was a complicated partner when it came to Archive matters. They knew about us, some of their ancestors had been Directors, but in recent decades, their business dealings had become less and less on the moral or legal side. As a result, I’d cut ties with them, unwilling to look the other way when they decided to ship artifacts to black market sites.

Three months later, the heiress of the York fortune, Nina, had been captured in a bloody attack. At that point, Darius had been her bodyguard for six years. When the gunman broke into the house, he’d nearly died trying to save her. It was only by straining the boundaries of my authority that I managed to get Darius transferred to an Archive hospital in enough time to save his life.

From the moment he was able to get out of bed, Darius had been trying to find Nina. I’d never fully understood why he was so driven, though I suspected that he’d been in love with the young woman. He had said it was about honor, something the Sinners took extremely seriously. When they made a promise, it was a bond and the highest form of dishonor and betrayal was to break it. Darius saw his job to guard Nina as one such promise.

Whatever the reason, he had asked for my help in secret to help him find Nina. I owed Darius for protecting my family during the years Francesca was in charge, and so I called in favors, used Archive resources under the guise of other things when I could. But I had never thought he’d actually find the girl.

I glanced at the pictures again and shook my head.

“Are you telling me, that she’s in here?”

“Yes.”

“No. I’m sorry but there is nothing I can do.”

“I can’t get in there on my own and I’ve already called in every favor I can just to get to this point.”

“Darius, what do you want me to do? This place…look at these guards, at the security protocols in place. And this is just the outside. This place is like a super max prison.”

Darius pushed himself off the wall and limped toward me, desperation shone in his eyes.

“Please, Angelica. You’ve used Archive resources before—”

“Those were for small things. Supplies, intel, the occasional agent to help you get in somewhere, but this?” I gave him an incredulous laugh. “It’s a full blown op, not an under the table favor.”

“Have you heard of Project Phoenix?”

I took a step back and narrowed my eyes at him.

“My sources say it’s in the planning stages, still on the drawing board.”

“It’s not.”

“How do you know that?”

He gave me a crooked grin, made all the more crooked by his missing tusk.

“Like I said, I’ve used my own favors and resources.”

“Did they tell you that the premise behind Project Phoenix is turning a living person into an artifact? Specifically, one with powerful Witch energy in their family tree?”

His smile slipped at that because he knew as well as I did that Nina had unlocked some powerful magical powers just before she was taken. And that’s when my brain conjured a less than altruistic reason for taking Darius up on his request.

Another choice to make. Another life to ruin. Another half-truth to tell. I wish I’d never taken this job.

“There’s only one reason for her to be in there if Project Phoenix is real,” I continued as a terrible plan unfolded in my mind, “and I think you know what it is, don’t you?”

He closed his eyes and nodded.

I felt sick at what I was about to do. Darius was desperate to save her, he’d do anything.

But I’m desperate too, and I’ve got more people to protect than one woman. Still, I owe him a measure of honesty.

“If I do this,” I said slowly, “if I help you, then this is no longer a few favors between friends. This can’t be swept under the rug, or hidden in a few doctored reports. It will have to be an official operation, with accountability, a paper trail, all of it.”

He was staring at me with thinly veiled hope that was a dagger to my chest.

“I understand,” he whispered.

“Darius, really be sure, please. Because while I owe you a great debt, you have to understand that when the order is given, I am not your friend anymore. I am the Director of the Archive, and depending on what has happened…,” I took a deep breath and forged ahead, “…depending on what has happened, I cannot guarantee what will happen to her.”

He jerked back as if I’d struck him and growled at me.

“You’d kill her?”

“I’m not saying that. There’s no protocols for a living artifact, but at the end of the day, she is a person, so no, I don’t believe she would come to harm.”

His hands relaxed at his sides and he no longer looked like he wanted to throttle me.

“But,” I said, holding up my hands, “that doesn’t mean she gets to go free either. There are a lot of unknowns here and I need you to be prepared for things to not go how you want them to. For me to not be on your side on this when all is said and done.”

Darius frowned, his gaze slid to the side and I could tell he was taking in everything I’d said. I wasn’t entirely sure what outcome I wanted. While I knew that the Archive would go in, no matter what because we didn’t have a choice anymore, I also hoped that Darius wouldn’t ask me to do it, that he’d walk away. It would make whatever happened afterward so much easier if I didn’t have to look into his eyes and see betrayal.

But I wasn’t that lucky.

“I understand,” he finally said, “but I need to save her. I need to know…to know what happened. To tell her…”

He swallowed the words that followed and I was grateful for it. I could do this a lot easier if I didn’t know for certain that Darius loved her.

“Alright,” I nodded and started to put up a mental wall between my affection for Darius and my duty to the Archive. “I’ll let you know when—”

“No, I’m coming with you.”

“What did I just say about this not being a favor anymore?”

Darius clenched his jaw and pointed his finger in my face.

“You need me. I’ve got the schematics, information on the security systems as well as a list of all the artifacts that were recently transported in there.”

“And let me guess, you’re not giving me any of that if you’re not in on the op?”

He grinned.

“Never give it all away at once, you won’t have anything to bargain with later.”

“Christ, you sound like my son.”

“Where do you think he learned it from?”

I pinched the bridge of my nose, already wishing I’d just taken the intel and done the op without telling Darius a damn thing.

“Fine, I’ll bring you in as a civilian consultant.”

“Thank you, Angelica.”

“Report tomorrow…or, today at nine. I’ll have a visitor’s badge waiting for you at the front desk.”

He nodded.

“Thank you,” he said again.

“You might not feel that way at the end of this.”

“I will, because she’ll be safe. That’s all I want.”

“Well then, let’s go get her. Now, if you’ll leave, I can get at least a few hours of sleep before I have to go in.”

I didn’t show him out because my mind was already finding ways to compartmentalize the terrible decisions I’d likely have to make before this was all over. I typed out a quick email to the people I’d need in my office, and a request for Darius’ badge before heading off to my bed. The last thing I thought of, before the sleeping pills finally took hold, was that if I wasn’t careful there would come a day I might not be able to look at myself in the mirror.