Epilogue
Hottie Operator
Um, shit.
I'm really, really fucked.
Big time fucked. The most fucked. And not the fun, can't walk right the next day, still leaking cum down my thigh kind of fucked.
This is a clusterfuck of epic proportions, and I'll be lucky to get away with my life.
It was supposed to be an easy job. The type of thing I do best: get in silently and undetected, make the grab, and get out. No muss, no fuss. I've done it a hundred times, a thousand; I’ve been doing this shit since I was thirteen.
I'm huddled in a dark closet clogged with the stench of high-end leather, the scent tickling my throat and making it hard to breathe correctly as I watch the mark.
A sliver of light streams through the crack where the door doesn't quite meet the frame; I put my eye to it, and I can see glimpses of the room beyond.
My heart is slamming against the cage of my ribs like a lion pawing at the bars of an old-timey zoo. I'm sure he can hear it. How can he not? It's deafening to me, my pulse thundering in my ears. My hands, however, are steady as a rock, as ever.
I will my pulse to slow, and it obeys a little bit. I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth in a steady, even, slow rhythm until my pulse gets on board and calms the actual fuck down.
Now.
Get the target—don't get caught—get out.
Easy.
Just like I’ve done a thousand times.
Except this isn't like the other thousand times.
The mark wasn't supposed to be here. He was supposed to be in the air en route to Hong Kong for a meeting.
I was supposed to have all night to get the thumb drive and make my escape.
No armed guards on synchronized patrols, no savage, snarling dogs, no vicious, murdering, reputed-to-drink-the-blood-of-his-enemies Romanian warlord.
Except a thunderstorm canceled his flight at the last minute and he turned around and came home unexpectedly, and nearly caught me with my hand in the only somewhat proverbial cookie jar.
Now, the aforementioned possibly blood-drinking Romanian warlord is pacing his office, cell phone to his ear, jabbering in a dizzying barrage of languages.
I've a bit of an ear for languages myself, what with my…
um…unique upbringing, so I hear Romanian, Czech, German, and French, with the occasional English variation of ‘fuck’ thrown in there for good measure.
He's pissed.
I'm not, like, fluent in any of those; I just recognize the sound of them and a word or phrase here and there—enough to know that the meeting he missed was very important to him and he's irate as fuck about it.
Whoever is on the other side is getting the ass-reaming of a lifetime in half a dozen languages for something beyond his control, the poor bastard.
Probably good he's not here, or he'd be dead.
“Just get me a fuckink flight!" he shouts in English. "NOW!" He cocks back his arm to hurl his phone at the wall but thinks better of it at the last second, and carefully sets it down on his desk with exquisite precision, as if only just barely controlling himself.
And my god, the desk.
You could land an F-18 on it. Four computer screens—the curved, Too-Much-Important-Business-For-One-Monitor kind.
Papers in precise stacks. A mug full of Montblanc pens.
A solid gold letter opener with a roaring lion's head as the pommel and rubies for eyes.
A crystal ashtray. A box of Cubans. An electrum-plated Desert Eagle .
50cal handgun lying angled on a stack of invoices.
I nearly took the gun on a whim, and thank God I didn’t.
Can you imagine? He'd know I was here. That's for sure the gun he uses to dramatically blow the brains out of a poor lackey's skull after a minor fuckup. Probably after turning and pretending to walk away, and he definitely does the brains-blowing-out with a pleasant smile that doesn’t reach his cold, lifeless eyes.
There is no such smile on his admittedly handsome face at the moment; it’s more of a rictus of pure, unadulterated rage.
He slumps heavily into the Herman Miller deck chair, toying with the gaudy weapon as if wishing there was someone he could shoot with it.
He wiggles the computer mouse and spends a few minutes doing who-knows-what, and then sits back with an irritated sigh, muttering under his breath in Romanian.
"Fuck this,” he says in English, and then picks up his phone and hits a speed dial.
"Yes, it's me. No, it was canceled." His English is superb, with only a slight accent.
"Is anyone available? Oh, very good. Have Uri bring her to me and wait in the car outside.
No, just her. Very good. Thank you. No, I am waiting for Gregor to find me a new flight.
Not until tomorrow, I think. Okay, yes. Goodbye. "
Shit.
I do not like the sound of that. It sounds like I'm in for a long wait, and probably an eyeful of something kinky.
I find a more comfortable position amid the leather jackets or whatever it is in this closet—and my god, who needs so many leather jackets? I settle in to wait. Turn the brightness on my phone all the way down and hide the dim glow inside my jacket as I tap out a text to my boss.
me:
Ionescu came back
me:
im trapped
MeanieHead:
Can you still complete the mission?
Me:
Probs
MeanieHead:
Try again.
Me:
PROBABLY
MeanieHead:
The abbreviation was not the issue. Can you complete the mission?
Me:
well, hes still in the fukcign office BOB so waht do you watn me ot do
MeanieHead:
Get the drive. Whatever it takes, Archer.
Me:
Sure thing I'll just sit here n wait
MeanieHead:
Very good. Confirm when you have the drive.
Me:
ur a real asshole u no
MeanieHead:
Get the drive, Archer.
Me
eat a dick
MeanieHead
You are a foul young woman.
Me:
its ur own fault, dummy
MeanieHead
I despise this form of communication and I despise even more your abysmal lack of spelling, grammar, and punctuation in this context. I educated you far better than this. Just get the drive and come home.
Yeah, he writes perfectly spelled and punctuated paragraphs in his texts. Me? Not so much, and it drives him bananas, which is part of why I do it. More on that later.
I sigh silently, find my earbuds case, thumb one in, and turn on my romantasy novel.
Keep an eye on Ionescu as he alternates between browsing on his four computer screens and furiously typing on his phone.
In my left ear, a crisp, upper-crust British male voice actor growls his way through the dirty dialogue, playing a millenia-old vampire masquerading as a stuffy professor with a love for history tempting an innocent young human woman with improbably large boobies and a dark, dangerous secret.
In the book, the narration switches to an American-accented female voice discussing the practical problem of navigating down a flight of stairs in a precariously buttoned shirt while improbably well-endowed.
I feel ya, girl. I nearly put my eye out on the treadmill the other day because I thought I could sprint.
Spoiler alert: I cannot sprint.
I'm sneaky, I'm silent, and I can steal your wallet out of your hip pocket while looking you in the eye. I can shimmy up and down drainpipes like a spider monkey, disarm laser tripwires, bypass alarm systems, hack into security cameras, and lay out men thrice my size.
I cannot sprint. At least not without knocking myself out, that is, and it’s kinda hard to flat-out sprint for your life while holding down several pounds of tit.
I'm only twenty-two percent into this audiobook, and the hero and heroine haven't even fucked yet, so I'm guessing this one is a slow burn.
Which is good. I like a good slow-burn romance novel once in a while, mainly because I just don't understand it.
If you want to bang someone, bang them. If you don't, don't. The whole will-they-won't-they thing is just confusing to me.
But then, the will-they-won't-they part is really about the luh—nope. Try again.
Luh—I gag. Nope.
I can read about it, but I can't even think the word. Probably some sort of Pavlovian thing Bob put in my head through his Jedi mind trick psychological warfare bullshit.
Or maybe it's just me.
No, my boss's name is not Bob, it's Robert Antony Millpark Robards the Fourth. No, really. I've seen the passport and birth certificate, and it is his real name, because he's rich and powerful enough that he can do all kinds of totally illegal shit with complete impunity.
Such as employing me to do the shit he hires me to do…
Such as stealing a thumb drive containing half a billion dollars in crypto from a vicious, murdering, reputed-to-drink-the-blood-of-his-enemies Romanian warlord.
So yeah, I call him Bob because he hates it, as in with the fire of a thousand suns.
And I live to annoy the ever-loving shit out of Bob, because I'm a tricksy, impossible, obnoxious bitch like that.
He may have quasi-raised me, he may have let me live when he could have killed me, he may have given me not just a life but a career—of sorts—that I love and am damn good at…
but my god is he an insufferably uptight son of an actual bitch.
I've met his mother, and she's the bitchiest bitch to ever bitch. Elizabeth Bathory, who? JKLOL…mostly.
I actually start to feel drowsy as I listen to my book, but then a bell dongs balefully somewhere in the house. Ionescu taps a key that puts his computer to sleep and pushes to his feet, muttering, “Finally."
He strides to the French doors of his office and throws them open, standing in the opening waiting.
A few seconds later, a stunning woman appears from the stairwell, which I can just barely get a sliver of a glimpse of through the crack.
She's tall, brunette, gorgeous, and has taken "improbably well endowed" to a medically inadvisable level. Or, at least, inadvisable according to the laws of physics. Although, based on how little those beach balls move as she playfully shoves Ionescu backward, physics doesn’t apply to that much silicone.