by Eva Chase
She held so much controlled but ruthless power in that slender body. I could have watched her work it for hours. Whatever had shaken her yesterday, she’d bashed its head in and thrown it out the window.
That same woman had softened enough to come apart under me last night, to curl up against me and fall asleep. But as much as I’d enjoyed that, I had to say I enjoyed this side of her even better.
She was seeing her mission through today, with her trio of dupes that she’d wrapped around her finger. I’d be waiting on the sidelines, but it’d still be quite the show.
I sat up, reaching for the right wry quote to make her roll her eyes at me, and she whirled at the movement. The look on her face—jaw tight, eyes clouded—stopped me. Her shoulders tensed and then came down as she consciously willed herself to relax.
“Bash,” she said, evenly enough. “We should talk.”
“Talk away,” I said, but my stomach had sunk. She was upset.
She sucked in a sharp breath, somehow looking fiercer than most of the soldiers I’d faced off against even in her loose sleepshirt and leggings. “This can’t happen again. I’m sorry I let it happen at all. Last night—I didn’t rein myself in when I should have. I hope we can move forward as we were.”
Did she really think I’d abandon the seven years of work we’d done together because she didn’t want to fuck again? A prickle of jealousy might have run through part of my mind thinking about the other men she’d recently slept with without expressing any of the same qualms, but I’d taken this leap knowing who she was. It wasn’t as if I’d have even wanted a grand romance. I’d be here for her however she needed me.
It’d just seemed for a moment there that she did need me that way. To hold her, to adore her, to make her cry out with bliss.
“If I overstepped at all,” I started cautiously.
“No,” Jemma said quickly. “You were—You did everything right. It’s on me.”
She closed her eyes for a second as if gathering herself and crossed her arms over her chest. Then she looked straight at me with a determined expression.
“The thing is, I use sex as a tool to maneuver people for whatever ends. I’ve only ever used it as a tool—and if I happen to get off, great. I don’t know if I can turn off that mindset and just be with someone honestly. And I never want to find myself using you like that. You mean too much to me to risk it. All right?”
Whatever niggling jealousy I’d felt disintegrated with those words. We didn’t talk about the various ways our relationship had warped far beyond simple employer and employee across the years. I never acknowledged that there wasn’t anyone I felt closer to in the world, and she’d never indicated it was the same for her. Until now.
Maybe she saw the acknowledgment as payback for the devotion I’d admitted last night, but I could tell from her tone and her eyes that she meant it. I’d take that over another hot-and-heavy session any day.
“Of course it’s all right,” I said. “If that’s how you feel, then nothing has to change from how it was at this time yesterday. I’ll have your back like I always have, we’ll topple the assholes who think they run the show, and it’ll be great.”
She relaxed completely then, with a small but relieved smile that—damn it—made me want to kiss her. I’d gotten awfully good at roping in those urges, though. So what if it might be a little harder now that I knew what I was missing? I’d hone my self-discipline even more.
Apparently it did need a little more honing, because I couldn’t help adding, “But I meant it when I said it’s not your job to protect me.”
The corner of her mouth twitched as if she’d caught it from turning into a frown. “Then don’t think of my decision as being for your protection. Think of it as being for mine. I don’t have much conscience to go around—I’d like to keep any weight off it that I can.”
She turned and knelt down beside her suitcase. Her agile fingers unearthed a plastic envelope from a hidden compartment I’d never seen her open before. “That’s also why I think it’s time I told you a little bit more about what I’m—what we’re—doing here.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed, and I eased over to join her, keeping the sheet spread over my lap. Carefully, she opened the envelope and slid out a faded photograph, the edges creased.
The picture showed two young girls sitting side by side on a wrought-iron bench with a ratty shrub looming behind them. The older girl couldn’t have been more than nine or ten, but I could easily recognize her as Jemma. She’d had the same penetrating gaze and thick red hair back then, her face and limbs just as pale and angular in the sack-like dress she was wearing. Her arm was slung around the younger girl, who was equally pale and skinny, but with softer eyes and hair somewhere between blonde and red.
“They didn’t take many pictures,” Jemma said. “This is the only one I got to call mine.” She slid her thumb along the bottom of the photo to rest beneath the younger girl. “This was my little sister, Olivia. Four years younger. The only thing that mattered to me other than—other than living up to expectations was taking care of her.”
Her use of the past tense hadn’t escaped me. “What kind of expectations?” I asked instead, because that seemed like a safer question.
“That part isn’t important,” Jemma said in a tone that told me we weren’t touching on that subject at all. “The gist of it is, we were trapped in a place run by a sort of monsters. Monsters that sometimes ate kids when they got to be a certain age. I got out of there the only way I could find how, and I did everything I could to be ready to come back and get her out too…”
I knew something about growing up with a monster, but I could tell she didn’t mean quite the same thing I would have. She paused for a second, but when she spoke again, her voice was just as steady as before. “Do you remember the mountain village you came with me to in Utah?”
Six years ago. I couldn’t see how I’d ever forget it, even though she’d left me behind for whatever quest she’d been on, staked out partway along the path. She’d made it back to me hours later clutching a swelling wrist to her stomach, her eyes as glazed and face as drained of color as a corpse.
I’d seen that vacant hopeless look on men who’d just glanced down and seen that a blast had taken their lower half straight off. It’d never bothered me half as much on my fellow soldiers as it had on her.
“I remember it was bad,” I said.
“Well, yes.” Her fingers pinched the photograph. “That was where they’d moved to. Our family and the monsters. She should have had almost another year before they’d have taken her, but—the one that wanted me, it must have been pissed off that I slipped out of its grasp. So it took her early. She was already gone. I didn’t make it back in time.”
My mind leapt to my siblings—to hustling them out of our parents’ house and hitchhiking across three states to the grandparents we’d never met. Promising my grandmother that I’d go back home, that they wouldn’t have to deal with some thirteen-year-old delinquent as long as they took in the little ones.
It’d hurt, leaving my brother and sister behind, going years before I saw them again, and I’d known they were safe. I’d known I’d gotten them out.
How agonizing would it have been if I’d lost them along the way?
It’s my fault, Jemma had said last night, looking like she’d seen a ghost.
“You did everything you could,” I said. “I know. I was there with you helping you prepare. You were practically still a kid yourself, Mori.”
“I was eighteen.”
“And already pulling off more than anyone I knew three times that age. You had to balance being ready enough to really save her with getting there in time.” I remembered my own childhood tightrope walk with a twist of my gut. “Was there any way you could have tackled the ‘monsters’ if you’d gone there earlier, before they took her?”
Her jaw worked. “I don’t know,” she said. “At least I could have tried. But that’s not the poin
t. That’s the past. Since then, I’ve had to— To get out, I made a deal with one of the monsters. I bought myself ten years. That time’s almost up. What we’re doing here, it’ll help me break that tie so I’m free of it. I just need to do that, and then I’m going to destroy all of them, with all the means I have. If I have to burn down the rest of the world in the process, I don’t really care—but I don’t want you getting burned. That’s not what you signed up for.”
“I signed up to kick all the ass you need kicking and to pitch in whatever other ways I can,” I said. “If some of those asses belong to some kind of monsters, it doesn’t really matter to me. The lines of work I’ve been in, there’s always a chance of getting burned. It comes with the business.”
“This isn’t like any business you’ve ever been involved with before. These things are… worse.”
I held her gaze. “I don’t fucking care. Okay? If there’s something I need to know to help me stay ahead of them, by all means tell me, but I’m not going to run.”
She looked away for a moment and then glanced back at me, her eyes fiercer than before. “They can’t touch you, not really. All you need to remember is not to make any deals. Even if you think it could save me. It won’t. If I’m gone, then I’m gone.”
“Fair enough,” I said with a nod.
The answer appeared to reassure her. She slipped the photo back into its envelope and tucked it away in her suitcase. “If everything goes well tonight, I’ll have that worry off my back.”
“Have your detectives come up with a solid plan?” I asked. “You sounded a little concerned in your last text.”
“Oh, that. I think we can pull it off. Garrett’s determination, John’s optimism, and Sherlock’s genius make a pretty potent combination, exactly as I expected. No, the problem is more that the damned genius seems like he might be forming suspicions I’d rather not have to tackle. But with the heist moving forward this quickly, I think I can dodge them.”
Her tone had softened with something like fondness as she’d mentioned the three men’s names. Not an emotion I was used to hearing from her.
“You’re starting to like them,” I said.
“What?” Her head jerked up, and she blinked at me. Then she laughed. “I don’t like people. It’s not my style.”
I raised my eyebrows at her. “Oh, really.”
“You’re an exception. They’re…” She waved her hand vaguely. “I don’t know. They’re interesting. That’s not the same thing.”
Jemma didn’t tend to care about things she didn’t find interesting anyway. I leaned back on my hands, watching her with curiosity. “What’s interesting? You didn’t think they’d be as good as they act, but you’ve discovered they actually are?” What were the chances of that?
Her gaze went distant for a second, with a hint of longing that woke up my earlier jealousy despite everything she’d just shared with me.
“No,” she said with a crooked smile. “Although they might be. It’s more that I’m starting to see how much they might be like me.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Jemma
“He’s just getting the check,” Bash said over the phone. “The way service has been going in there, I’d say we’re waiting another ten minutes.”
“Great. Just enough time to finish my coffee.” Stretching out my legs beneath the little glass-topped table I was sitting at in a café around the corner from Richter’s chosen lunch spot, I plopped another sugar cube into the mug for good measure. Then I took a gulp of the bittersweet liquid. The bitter side woke up my brain a little more, and the sweet side smoothed out my nerves. My head still felt slightly fuzzy from two nights of disturbed sleep in a row, but I could work around that.
Bash shifted on the other end of the line with a rustle of his down jacket. “Shouldn’t you let me handle this? Richter knows you—or at least he knows about you.”
“It’s a two person job. I don’t trust anyone else with it. If you do your part right, he won’t even notice I’m there.”
“When we were working out the London plan ahead of time, you said we weren’t going to need a sample.”
Bash’s tone was mild, but there was a hint of a question in it. I wet my lips.
“I always knew we might want to doctor the real figurine. That’s why I had you take the sample from our departed friend in Freising. This way the trio will get what they wanted, no embarrassment, no need to worry too much about my role in the whole thing. Now that I’ve seen them in action, I got thinking that if I leave them in the lurch, they won’t let it go. I’d rather not have to deal with vengeful criminal investigators on my tail.”
Bash hummed to himself. The sound might have been skeptical, or maybe I was reading too much into it.
My answer had been pretty much the whole truth. Since arriving here, I hadn’t really thought about where I’d be leaving Sherlock, John, and Garrett at the end of my plan. I’d been too focused on getting us to that end and trusting that I’d worked everything out. The jade figurine they’d end up with didn’t have the slightest trace of DNA on it, because it wasn’t a murder weapon. The real murder weapon was an excellent copy that Bash had since tossed in the Pullinger Weiher lake.
When I’d decided on that outcome, I’d had a laugh to myself imagining the three most brilliant crime-fighters in London fumbling to explain themselves after the proof didn’t present itself as expected. Now the thought had become less satisfying. I wasn’t a monster like Bog, spreading misery for the pleasure of it. All of my plans had a purpose.
Whatever their flaws, the three men did by all appearances care about bringing Richter to justice. And there was plenty of justice that Richter was due. On the balance, it now seemed more prudent to throw him under the bus rather than them.
Which meant I needed a little piece of him to plant.
“The waiter has brought the check,” Bash reported. “Target getting his coat on. I’m moving into position now.”
“Same here.” I got up. “After this, I’ll see you tonight.”
“Everything’s ready to go.”
“Perfect.” I paused. “Thank you, Bash.”
“I am made of faith and service, Majesty,” Bash said in his wry Shakespeare-quoting voice.
The comment settled my nerves more than the sugar had. When I’d first woken up this morning nestled against him, I’d been afraid that I’d completely fucked up the one good sure thing I had in my life by, well, fucking him. But he’d taken my concerns in stride. He’d listened to my story about Olivia and the shrouded folk without badgering me with questions I didn’t know how to answer yet. Exactly as I should have expected him to.
I’d yet to see anything really shake Sebastian Moran. It was too bad that was such a turn-on as well as being an excellent quality in a right-hand man.
It was so absurd that he’d suggested I was starting to care about my trio of investigators. It didn’t matter how appealing they could each be in their own ways—they were a means to an end. When I slipped out of their lives, when they realized I’d used them, they’d be glad to see the back of me. Bash was my constant, my rock in the rapids.
Although if he ever did leave, I could go it without him too. I had to remember that.
I left a fiver on the table and tugged my hood up over my hair as I headed out. We’d gotten another damp dim day, but at least it wasn’t outright raining like it had been this morning. I dodged the shallow puddles on the sidewalk.
When I turned the corner, Bash came into view at the other end of the block. He walked with a brisk stride, the collar of his puffy jacket pushed to the bottoms of his ears. I picked up my pace to be ready for the interception and curled my fingers around the little scalpel inside my sleeve. He tipped his chin in a slight nod before he started jogging.
Richter strode out the restaurant door—a tall, broad-shouldered man with eyes sunk as deep as his nose protruded out. Bash ran right into him, their shoulders colliding.
“Hey, watch
it!” Richter shouted as he swayed backward.
I ducked past the two of them with a flick of my scalpel. There and then gone, so shallow and swift a scratch that Richter wouldn’t see it had happened until he was sitting in his car. A papercut he hadn’t noticed at the time, he’d have to guess.
A tiny splatter of blood was all I needed.
I dropped the blade into the baggie in my pocket and hurried on down the street. “Watch where you’re going,” Bash was saying in a belligerent voice. As soon as I’d slipped around the next corner, he’d back off and end the distraction.
A few paces down the nearest cross-street, I waved over a cab and hopped in. My pulse thumped at an eager tempo as I gave the driver the name of the hotel.
I’d done it. The last piece was in place. Now all that mattered was making sure tonight didn’t fall apart before it happened.
The trio had made plans to hole up in Sherlock’s room for most of the day, hashing out the final details. I stopped by my room to drop off my illicit acquisition and pick up the morning’s purchases before heading upstairs.
John answered my knock. He ushered me in, excitement beaming from every inch of him like lights on a Christmas tree. Clearly I didn’t have to worry about him getting the last-minute jitters. Last-minute boners was more likely.
“You’re absolutely sure they won’t get hurt?” Garrett was saying to Sherlock where they were bent over the table looking at a diagram Sherlock had drawn.
“The last thing I want to do is electrocute a member of our precious Scotland Yard,” Sherlock replied. “I’ve studied the matter thoroughly.”
“Only you would consider a twenty-four hour education to be ‘thorough’,” Garrett retorted, but with half a smile. He glanced up, and his smile touched both sides of his mouth while also becoming more hesitant. “And here’s our Firecracker. How did the shopping go?”