Four Bloody Kisses

by AJ Wyatt

  The security pat down was hardly necessary in my dress, but they did it anyway.

  Hundreds of people mingled before the ceremony at the graveside. The old wealthy of Dallas, and some new and notable. We smiled our way through, and I found a quiet moment to break away and find the mausoleum of J.T. Cooper. Not an important person, but the mausoleum I judged to have the fewest site lines to the funeral. One of our drones had already set down and dropped a pistol, a small caliber with a silencer, along with a garter holster for my inner thigh.

  Not much space to hide it, but I managed. I wouldn’t be pulling it out in a hurry. Or crossing my legs, for that matter. I rejoined the boys, giving them the nod to let them know I was armed again.

  After that, there was surprisingly little to it. I thought Shane might make a move, but the CIA didn't like big messes, and a shooting at this event would be national news. Whoever else was trying to kill the boys was a greater danger. They might not care who they hurt or who sees.

  “Anything?” I asked quietly.

  “No,” Trib replied in my earpiece.

  Vice and Talon both lit up with smiles. They had earpieces too, and they loved it.

  “Does this suit make my ass look big?” Vice asked.

  “You do not have an ass,” Yuri replied.

  It was a lie. He had quite a nice ass, just small. Yuri's was thicker and more muscular. Vice bristled.

  “I could get on the cover of Ass Weekly with this, I'll have you know."

  “Boys,” I said. “Less chatter, more eyes.”

  A chime let us know we were fifteen minutes from the ceremony. Everyone gathered.

  Blair wore black, including a veil. She held a silk handkerchief that she hadn’t used yet, except to pretend to dab her eyes. Her seat was right next to ours, in the row designated for family.

  "Oh," she said. "You brought a guest. How lovely."

  "Blair," Talon said. His jaw clenching.

  “Talon.”

  Vice strode forward and held his arms out for a hug.

  “Mum,” he said. “Always good to see you.”

  She accepted the hug as gracefully as she could, and her cheeks actually blushed as he released her.

  “Vice,” she said. It was almost a whisper.

  Everyone was getting situated when Yuri interrupted.

  “Rayne, near the entrance, it’s the man from CIA. My contact, Shane.”

  “He’s here?”

  “Confirmed,” Trib said.

  “Excuse me,” I said quietly. “Bathroom.”

  Blair watched me leave, her gaze filled with suspicion. How much did she know about me? How much had Shane shared, and how much had he kept secret?

  I found Shane down one of the long walks towered over by oaks and strewn with the flowers from crape myrtles. He took a few steps back and slipped half behind a grave marker that bears a cross taller than I am. He waited and watched.

  “I’m unarmed,” he said.

  “Like hell.”

  "It's true, I didn't come to fight. Not here and now, with all this going on. Too much press. I mean, there are a dozen drones up there. Dallas Evening News, ABC, CBS. How many of them are yours?"

  “A few. What do you want, Shane?”

  The way he hides behind the marble cross makes me wonder if he really is unarmed. He'd know I want to kill him after last night, and an old cemetery is a great place to ditch a body. Thrown into an old mausoleum, it might take years or decades for anyone to find his corpse. Hell, they might never find it in this place.

  He stepped out a little farther. Now I see the band-aids on his face, the bandage on his hand. Remnants of last night, diving through the window. He got cut up pretty bad.

  “Just to talk,” he said. “I wanted you to know that I didn’t have anything to do with them blowing your cover.”

  Tension seizes my belly. What the hell is he talking about?

  “It’s going out on the wire today. Soon. Rogue CIA Agent sets off explosives at a major energy company. They're going to talk about the shooting at Osborne Energy, how you wrecked three floors with machine gunfire. They're not going to mention the mercenaries, just you. You'll be a lone nut."

  “The Agency would never do that,” I said. But did I mean it, or was it just wishful thinking?

  "You haven't given them any choice. They don't know what you want with Talon Osborne, but the United States government has plans for him. Big plans. Plans that don't involve you screwing around with him and his brother. What is it you're after? Money? Is it extortion? Blackmail? We spotted your friend Yuri at the ranch house last night too. Is he involved? Did he set this up? We know the two of you had a past relationship, Rayne. We know a lot. We just don't know what you're after."

  Good.

  “So they’re just going to tell everyone who I am?”

  “Well, not everything. They’re still the Agency. They’ll say you’re an analyst with delusions of grandeur, something like that. You know, you can still come in.”

  I laughed. The idea was ludicrous. They’d kill me as soon as they had me.

  "I'm not bullshitting. It won't be easy. You'll do hard time, but can you blame them? I'm authorized to offer you a deal: You come in right now, and we let Julianne Tribulet go free. They don't think she had anything to do with this. They think you threatened or manipulated her. You can save her life, Rayne. Do the right thing."

  “Maybe I’ll put you in a grave, where you can’t hurt us,” I said.

  “Fine. You come and get me.”

  Shane ran.

  “Trib, where’s he going?”

  Nothing. My heart began to pound. The son of a bitch was distracting me. But from what?

  “Trib?”

  I let Shane go and took off running for the funeral service. I reached the edge of the row where the service was being held and took a moment to catch my breath. The casket had been lowered, and people were mingling. I didn't see Vice and Talon. Noise began coming through on my earpiece. Multiple channels going at once.

  "—Rayne, they've gotten our signal—" Trib said.

  At the same time, another voice droned, "Recruited by the CIA six years ago, Rayne Taylor is wanted for multiple murders. She has conducted illegal operations in multiple countries. She is responsible for the Madrid bombing, which took a dozen lives, including women and children—"

  Fuck.

  They were putting it out on our own radio signal. My history with Agency, terrible things I’d done, mistakes I’d made, all of it. Death after death after death sounded in my ear.

  “Get away from the van, Trib. I’m coming.”

  “—2016, she assassinated the Secretary of the Treasury in Uraguay—“

  Stop it.

  I pulled my earpiece and ran for the van, bumping and jostling my way through the crowd. I found it empty and walked a little way past it to give the whistle signal. Trib climbed out from behind a gravestone and nodded to me. We made for the rear of the cemetery.

  Oakland Cemetery was 60 acres of land, and I knew the gist of it by heart. We found a spot where the fence was overshot by an old, thick oak tree and climbed over. I tore my dress on the way down, but it wasn’t like I had another event to go to…probably ever. Unless people were loosening up their policies on domestic terrorists at the barbecue since I last checked.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Trib was crying, but she brushed away my attempt to put an arm around her. “They jacked into our signal and started running that recording.”

  “It’s a recording?”

  She nodded. “It repeats every few minutes. They all heard. Vice and Talon and Magnus and Yuri. Magnus and Yuri left the van first. I knew I should have left as soon as the mission was blown, but I wanted to see if I could get you on the earpiece. Talon and Vice were shocked by what they heard. They said a bunch to each other in their twin speak. They ditched their earpieces. I heard them get crushed under a boot or with a rock.”

  “Come on.”


  We found a cafe on Lover’s Lane and settled in. Trib had a backpack full of whatever equipment she could step from the van before abandoning it. She took out her laptop and began typing. The text flowed across the screen as she opened command prompts and typed commands. She fairly flew to get to the cameras at the ranch.

  “More than half of the cameras are out,” she said.

  When she pulled up the ones that were left, we both took stock of the carnage.

  The ranch was wrecked. It was already full of bullet holes, but someone had gone through and shredded pillows, cut big gashes in the drywall, and left the curtains in tatters. Dishes were smashed on the floor, the refrigerator door was wide open, and the contents were thrown across the kitchen. Leftover stroganoff sprayed up the wall.

  The worst was in the living room, where someone had spray-painted a single word on the wall: LIAR.

  17

  “Shane didn’t know the real reason you found the boys,” Trib said. “So he wasn’t able to tell them that, at least.”

  "But they all know I worked for the CIA now and that I'm a killer. That's enough."

  I felt the lies I’d told so often in my life catching up with me. Who could know those things about a woman and not hate her? I was a killer, an assassin. I’d killed so many and there was no redemption for the life I’d created.

  Magnus had his own secrets, and he would have been spooked by the idea that I might have the resources to dig them up. And who knows what I wanted with him? Whatever ghosts he had in his past, he might have thought I had come to raise them from the dead.

  Yuri had his own operation to run. I don't think he'd care if I was a killer, but being with the CIA was dangerous. Someone like Shane would have been a cautious contact for Yuri, and he'd have kept it well away from Sokolov. Sokolov had seen me. If he made the connection and was as ambitious as Yuri said, it could be a death sentence for Yuri. The Bratva did not like interference from outsiders. A boss working with the CIA was as bad as an informant working for the FBI, especially considering that everything the Bratva did was connected back to Moscow.

  Talon and Vice had it the worst. I’d gone to bed with them. They’d been…intimate with me. And while I could say that it didn't entitle them to any truths I might have told, I knew that was bullshit. They now knew for sure that I lied about being a bodyguard their father hired. They’d taken an assassin into their beds. That would have felt like a real betrayal.

  I know it would have if it'd been me.

  If I had to guess, I’d have said that Vice was the one who painted the wall. It was easy to picture him doing it. I could see it in my mind.

  Except…

  “Trib, you know how I always tell you to stop compulsively putting trackers on everyone and all that?”

  “Yes…”

  "You put trackers on all of them, right?"

  "Uh-huh."

  “I love you.”

  “I know.”

  Her fingers flew over the keys, and then her brow furrowed when the data came up. The map on her screen went crazy.

  “What does that mean?” I asked.

  "Normally, I wouldn't know because I'd never seen it before. But I saw it the other night at Osborne when you were all locked in Section 7."

  Shane screwed up. It was fifteen minutes to Osborne and another thirty by chopper to the ranch. Not enough time for any of the boys to have made it back yet. He must not have expected me to remote in, or…

  “You said more than half the cameras were destroyed.”

  “Yeah, almost eighty percent actually.”

  “How many cameras did you—“

  “As many as I wanted, you said…”

  “Fair enough. Did they take out the cameras that were most visible?”

  Trib checked, flipping through the different views she had available.

  “Yeah. All that’s left are the pinholes. That’s why we can’t pan anymore.”

  "They thought they destroyed the cameras. We were supposed to go back there and see it later when it would have made sense. But your obsession with trackers and cameras has paid off."

  “It always pays off.”

  Shane helped someone make it look like the boys had abandoned me after they found out the truth. But they were in Section 7. Probably in big trouble.

  They'd have questions I didn't want to answer for sure. But if I didn't go, I'd never know who killed my father or why.

  Not to mention I’d become awfully close with them. Things might be fucked between us all, but I couldn’t leave them to die, and that was certainly what was going to happen.

  “Alright, I need in there, and I don’t have a keycard.”

  Trib shrugged. “I can’t make one with what we have in this cafe. I can get you a latte, but that’s about it.”

  “It’s Sunday, so the building should be empty. All I need to do is get on the executive elevator. How hard can that be?”

  I rang the doorbell and waited. He lived alone, so it took a little while for him to get to the door. He arrived in chinos and a button-down. Fancier than I’d expected. I wondered if he wasn't going somewhere. His gaze drifted down to my tits immediately, so Michael hadn't changed much in the last week.

  The head of Osborne Energy’s mainframe section stood at the door of his condo and tried to remember who I was. My hair was different, and I was wearing a torn black dress instead of my college intern clothes, but he put it together eventually.

  “Rayne?” He asked.

  “That’s right. I came to see you as soon as I got off the toilet.”

  “What?” He stared, dumbfounded.

  I showed him the gun.

  “Jesus!”

  “Yup,” I tapped his front pocket where the bulge was. His keys jingled. “Let’s go. Twenty minutes, starting now.”

  "Y-you don't need that. I'll do what you say. Really."

  "Cool. Grab your security card, and get in the car. You're driving."

  He got behind the wheel. The Dallas heat had done its work, and the inside of the car was sweltering. He began to sweat immediately, though that was probably partly from fear. I felt bad for him. Michael hadn't asked for this, and aside from looking too hard at my boobs, he hadn't committed any crimes or anything. If I lived through the next hour, I'd have Talon give him a promotion or something.

  We got to the parking garage, and he pulled in. He handed me his security badge.

  “You’re sure this will open the executive elevator?” I asked.

  “Yeah, totally…oh, wait! Crap. It’s Sunday. You’ll need to enter a code manually as well.”

  “Do you know the code?”

  “I—yes, but…”

  “Yes…?”

  “I mean, I shouldn’t, right?” He put his face in his hands and began rubbing furiously to get the sweat off his brow. “This is bad news. I shouldn’t.”

  “Michael, if I have to shoot you in the knee, I will.”

  “What? What’s wrong with you?”

  I opened his car door and fired a shot into the seat under his ass. Stuffing poofed out, and a spring popped up through the pleather seats and poked him in the thigh.

  “3-6-7-1-1-3-4!”

  "That's better. Now, if I'm standing over there like an asshole, and this code doesn't work…"

  "It's the right code, I swear!"

  I tried it, and the elevator whirred as it ran. It was coming down.

  “Get out of here. Call the cops.”

  I got on the elevator and was ready to input the second code that Talon used to get us into the sub-basement where Section 7 was located. Then an alarm went off in my head, and I hesitated. It took a second for me to figure out what it was.

  The elevator came down. Talon said it stayed wherever it last stopped. That meant it had last been on the executive floor. I hit the button to take me up. When the doors opened, I don’t think I could have been more surprised by what I saw.

  Sokolov stood there, staring back at me.

  I a
imed my pistol at his gut.

  “You just hit the button, didn’t you?” I asked. “You didn’t know I was coming up.”

  Sokolov smiled an ugly smile that didn’t reach his cold eyes.

  “Bad luck,” he said. “I didn’t want to shit in front of everyone. Executive toilet is nice.”

  He moved faster than I would have given him credit for, his hand swiping at the pistol’s silencer. Having such a long addition on the barrel made it quite a target. I pulled the pistol back, fired from the hip and put a bullet in his thigh, and then surged forward and buried the crown of my skull in his face. He went back and down, crashing to the carpet with his nose crushed. Blood spurts from the wound in his thigh. I’d need to tourniquet that if I wanted him to live.

  Thankfully, he wasn’t conscious enough to do anything as I removed his necktie and used it on his leg.

  He lay there slowly waking. The people downstairs waiting for me would probably be Bratva. Soldiers loyal to him. Which meant they might not shoot at him. I went to one of the offices and grabbed a rolling chair. A few minutes later, I had him tied to it pretty securely. He was starting to come around, but he wasn't going anywhere now.

  At least, not anywhere I didn’t wheel him.

  I found some WD-40 in the supply closet and figured that would do for the distraction.

  The hallway to Section 7 was a straight shot to the vault door, so I needed something that would catch everyone’s attention. As we went down, Sokolov’s head cleared pretty fast. He was a tough bastard. Most people would have been drooling for a whole day after a head butt that hard.

  “What is that can for?” He asked.

  “Lubrication, usually.”

  Sokolov grinned his ugly grin again.

  “When Yuri finally pays for his crimes, I will make him watch while I kill you. That will truly destroy him, as he deserves.”

  “You know, I felt bad for you. A little. Now I don’t feel bad at all.”