3. September 9, 2022
Cherry
“Demon, we need Cherry.”
Saints Peter, Paul, and Mary! Not good!
Today should have been so simple, and it turned into nothing but the classic cluster.
Step one—pick up Haskell at the airport.
Step two—sneak her into Tribe. Step three—hope that she didn’t break her promise to Haskell yet still fail to avoid Nemo so that they reunite.
Step four—they fall in love, and “Operation Cherry Plays Cupid” is in the bag.
But no! Some Judas planted a bomb, and while those two were in the same room together, it was now “Operation Shit Show” with her as supervisor.
Quickly, she clicked out of the audio link she’d turned on in the conference room. No one needed to know she’d been listening in. Her summons wasn’t a surprise, necessarily, but it gave her a few seconds to gather her thoughts.
She heard Demon before she saw him. The rustle of his tac pants and the squeak of the rubber soles of his boots as they traveled down the corridor to her desk.
Most of the men in the office moved quieter than ninjas.
Not Demon. He could, but ninety-nine percent of the time, he didn’t care if you knew he was coming your way.
Or was it that he just didn’t care if she heard him approaching?
Did he do it on purpose? Some sort of sick “I’m coming for you, so just sit there and think about that” maneuver?
A shadow fell over her and her desk, and the scent of salt and sand hit her nose. “Conference room.”
Two words in that deep timbre and the very distant remnants of his Irish lilt were all it took to make a shiver pass through her.
Looking up from her seat, she saw Demon in all his glory.
Most days, he rambled around the office in beach gear—T-shirt, board shorts, and flip-flops.
His shoulder-length brown hair would be in some version of a man bun or wet and tangled around his face, and he’d either have reflective sunglasses on or perched on top of his head.
Not today, and the heat that passed through her had her ducking her head back down and pretending to focus on her computer screen.
She couldn’t even tell you what was on it.
International secrets. Passwords for the entire office.
Hell, it could have been an online order for staples, but she was so distracted by him that she couldn’t focus on the content enough for it to be an effective hiding place from his command.
Why was she hiding? She was hiding because today was one of the rare days he wasn’t in his beach gear, and if he was gorgeous when he was in surfer mode, Lord love a duck, he was devastating when he dressed in project gear.
Something had made him decide not to just roll out of the surf like a merman.
Instead, he wore a black T-shirt, black tactical pants, and his black boots.
Sinners, get on your knees because your king has arrived!
“I have work to do, Demon.”
“It wasn’t a request.”
Looking up at him from beneath her eyelashes, she had to admire his sharp features.
Deep-brown hair loose, parted down the middle, sunglasses holding the sides behind his ears.
Green eyes boring into hers, a sparkle of fight in them, and a Roman nose flaring just slightly with every inhale like he was trying to maintain his composure.
Lips pressed into a thin line, clearly holding back a lot more words than he was currently giving her.
He really was a frighteningly beautiful man.
“You’re not my boss,” she replied, purposely diverting her gaze to her screen.
A sensory explosion of sun, sand, and salt enveloped her as his whispered reply rolled into her ear from behind. “Your boss sent me.”
Well… yes and no. What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
“I don’t?—”
If possible, his voice got quieter. “Now, Cherry. Or I’ll pick you up, throw you over my shoulder, and carry you, just like I did earlier today.”
Yeah. Volume decrease, threat increase. DEFCON Demon. Only two levels with him. Asshole and major asshole. Why was that so fucking hot?
With a sigh of suffering, Cherry shut down her computer, transferred the phones over to Nova, Midas’ AI creation, and tried to walk with as much dignity as possible toward the conference room.
Entering the room, she saw that only Demon’s regular seat and the one to his right were unoccupied.
Steel was sitting to the inside right with Haskell, one-half of the Cupid pairing in Nemo’s regular chair.
Nemo, the other half of her experiment, was standing behind Haskell’s chair, marking her as his territory.
At least one thing seemed to be going right.
Midas sat to Haskell’s left at the head of the table, typing away at his keyboard, followed around the horn by TB, their interrogator, then Waters, the team leader.
As Demon herded her into the open seat, Waters put the office security protocols in place.
In the table’s center was a starfish-shaped object that looked like a video game controller.
He pressed the red button on it, and the room’s coloring changed.
Floor-to-ceiling windows, tinted to be impenetrable to sight or sound, made the overhead lights harsher.
The inset computer monitors on the conference room table had a red glow around their outer edges.
At the head of the table, the telescreen displayed the building security map and several key security cameras, and the telescreen at the foot of the table was connected to Midas’ computer screen.
Meanwhile, there was a thumping sound as the automatic locks on the door from the conference room to the hallway bolted into place.
Waters opened the conversation. “Haskell, I think you better walk us through this from the beginning. You clearly know things we don’t, and I, for one, am tired of being in the dark.”
Cherry glanced down the table at Haskell Dawson, a blonde, Shirley Temple, curly-haired thief covered in tattoos and piercings.
The look on the pixie’s face was clearly asking permission from Cherry to answer his questions about the pressure-plate bomb scare they’d been involved in this morning.
Things were about to get dicier than tomatoes at a salsa-making contest.
A quick glance at her immediate boss and Cherry didn’t blame Waters for his current level of frustration.
He was in the dark—well, really, the entire team was—about a lot of things, especially about the origins of Tribe Corporation’s foundation.
For the longest time, things had been moving at a snail’s pace.
Now they were moving faster than she had intended.
The day had finally come to open the floodgates about what Tribe was really all about.
Secrets were going to be told. They would not reveal all the secrets, but they would definitely reveal some of the most fundamental ones.
Didn’t mean the guys were going to be happy about what they were about to hear.
Cherry gave Haskell a single head nod, permitting her to give Waters what he wanted.
Haskell only knew portions of Tribe’s shadowy presence, but it was more than the men in this room knew.
She hoped Haskell stuck to the basics. She probably would.
The woman was savvy that way, and Cherry would then fill in the additional blanks that needed filling.
Haskell explained her escape from Africa after the owners caught her breaking into a diamond mine, her past encounters with Nemo, her connections to Cherry, and her work as a contractor with Mythos—a trio of operatives who disrupted global sex trafficking schemes.
With no exit contact in Africa, Haskell had to contact Cherry for help.
After picking her up at LAX, Cherry had taken Haskell to a favorite haunt of hers, where Haskell had inadvertently sat on a chair that triggered a pressure-plate bomb.
At first, the bomb attempt seemed to carry all the signatures of Cerberus, a well-known bomber and ecoterrorist. The only problem was that Haskell knew the bomb couldn’t be his since he was a contractor for Mythos, like her, and he had no reason to blow up a woman who was his friend.
As soon as Haskell relayed what had happened in the café, Cherry knew that the conversation was taking its inevitable, disastrous turn.
Obviously, she had known this day would come, but she couldn’t have possibly predicted the explosive—no pun intended—situation forcing her hand today.
For the first time, she second-guessed her years of preparation.
By now, Haskell had finished her explanation of how she had selected her seat and was finishing up with her assessment of why their conjectures regarding the bomb were in error.
The blonde sighed. “I’ll admit, I piss people off all the time when I strike, but not enough to blow me into a million pieces. ”
TB, the team’s interrogator and all-around grouch, grunted.
He had his six-foot-seven, two-hundred-forty-pound body sprawled in his chair, and he did not look amused.
“Executions and assassinations remove individual threats. Bombs are for making statements. Jewel thieves don’t inspire that sort of violence. ”
“Exactly,” Haskell agreed. “So, as well as knowing that Cerberus was not behind this bomb, there’s only one group of people I can think of who would go to such extreme lengths to remove a single person in such spectacular fashion.
Not only are they willing to do it, but it’s typical for them to copy other criminals’ signatures in order to divert suspicion. ”
“And who would that be?” Waters asked.
With a sweeping glance at everyone around the table and studiously ignoring the angry man next to her, Cherry finally spoke. “She’s referring to the Salieri.”