by Ronie Kendig
“Yeah. You’re in the background, but I know my man when I see him.”
“Why are you not partying instead of watching TV?”
“We’re heading out now. But I had to call. Let you know I’m officially jealous that you’re there with a king and a proper duke.” Her smile bled through the phone. “Think they’d miss it if you nicked a ring for me?”
“Are you proposing again?”
“You have to say yes sometime.”
He grinned like an idiot. “I must go.”
She gave an exasperated sigh. “A ring—at least try.”
“I love you,” he said, still smiling. Thinking of the ring waiting for her back in London. He’d propose at Christmas. He’d already asked her father for his permission. Old-fashioned, yes, but it was a good show of respect.
His comms crackled as he pocketed his phone and wandered closer to the tent, adjusting his earpiece.
“Six, you’re needed near the king.”
Stiffening, Wafiyy didn’t hesitate. “Roger that. Moving in.”
When there were only two meters between him and the king, one of the Saudi soldiers trudged toward him. “Sorry, brother. Not feeling well.”
Again Wafiyy’s comms crackled. “Harbah. Two. One. Five. Initiate rise. Rise. Rise.”
Warmth sped up his spine and neck, then arched over his crown and ears. A pain much like drinking a milkshake too fast on a hot day. Heel of his hand to his temple, he grunted.
“Who is this? Clear the line!” Captain Shanks ordered.
“What was that?” one of the team asked.
“Strange. Sounded mechanized,” another said.
Wafiyy swept his gaze across the festivities. Noted the Saudi soldiers, the British Blades—as they called themselves—and then the royals laughing and chatting beneath the white tent’s dangling net lights.
Spine straight, blood cold, he intercepted the king’s server and lifted the glass from the tray. Using a test strip, he dipped it in the sherbet drink, a favorite among wedding guests and the king himself . . . and let the pill slip from his cuff.
Sudden awareness spiked through his mind as the tiny white tablet plunked into the liquid and melted.
The pill. He didn’t recall concealing it there yet knew he had. Must have. Why was he not alarmed?
He was alarmed.
Yet he delivered the glass back to the official server, who glanced at the test strip, which did not discolor, indicating the sherbet was safe—or had been a moment ago. Wafiyy watched with satisfaction as the crystal goblet was set before the king.
Deep in conversation with the Duke of Kelton, the king reached for the glass and sipped it. Nodding, he returned to his discussion.
But only for a second.
His throat would tighten. His blood would thin. Run down his nose.
The crown prince quickly handed his father a napkin, thereby coming in contact with the blood. With the chemical. Father and son would die within minutes, despite the medical staff rushing to their aid. The bride’s dress was now stained crimson. Another casualty. That couldn’t be helped. It was symbolic, yes? The blood by which her husband—being dragged from the king and his brother—would take the throne. The blood by which . . .
I will rise.
CHAPTER 2
JABAL SHAIB AL-BANAT, EGYPT
It had all started here five years ago, and if Leif Metcalfe had any say, it would end here, too.
Crouched atop the mountain peak, he stared out over the rugged terrain. And that was putting it mildly. The ridges in this section of the Sahara Desert were serrated and forbidding. If you fell, you fell to your death. To his three were the glittering waters of the Red Sea. He shook his head. If he and his team had headed east, they’d have found water. Civilization. But they’d chosen the mountains for protection from the sun, heading south, then west.
Leif roughed a hand over his face. That whole mission had been screwed up. It didn’t make sense. How could he recall the mission with perfect clarity, but not the chopper crash or the faces of the team, half of them left dead on the mountain? And what about the months preceding it?
“You don’t expect us to buy that, do you?”
“It’s the truth,” Leif growled. Yeah, it looked bad. Smelled bad. But that was the truth.
“Guerrero is dead,” Reimer bellowed. “Died on the table.”
Stricken, Leif leaned forward and grabbed the back of his head, hiding his face in his arms. They were dead. All of them. Nine soldiers crashed on a mountain, only one came out. It was like some sick, twisted joke.
“Your whole freakin’ team is dead—except you!” Reimer’s dark eyes condemned. “Mighty convenient. What’d you do, run? Leave them to burn and die?”
Leif came out of his chair. Launched over the table. Struck Reimer in the nose. A strike so hard and fast, Leif didn’t know he’d done it until four Marines were stacked on him, pinning him to the scuffed vinyl floor.
Now he stared out across the land, trying to extract any little nugget from the debris field of that disaster. Trying to reassemble the puzzle with most of the pieces missing. Recall those faces, men he had fought with.
They’d crashed here—well, not on this peak, but lower. The al-Banat range comprised four mountains. Impact had happened southeast of Leif’s current location. He’d come to amid the mangled chopper. Chunks on fire, billowing smoke and fumes into the air. The black plume had drawn the attention of local ISIS fighters. He and those of the team still alive regrouped, inventoried their wounds and weapons. Fought their way out of the hills. Even though several of his guys were badly injured, they managed to give the fighters the slip. Leaving their dead behind hadn’t been by choice. Survival forced them to mark the location and return.
“There weren’t any bodies, Metcalfe! There was nothing but charred wreckage!”
Leif’s attention skipped to the hillside in the distance. After five years, most of the evidence had been scavenged, but he’d come all the same. Allowed himself to climb Jabal. Yet he could still see the darkened area of the explosion.
How? How had they gone from a mission to quietly interdict on behalf of a village to waking up on a mountainside, burning?
Smoke from the crash stung his corneas and tickled his throat. He heard Guerrero cough again. “You need help, G?”
“I’ll live. Check Krieger and Zhanshi. They don’t look so good.”
Leif spotted two of their team a yard from his boots. They were piled over each other on a dark patch of the sand and gravel. Coming to his feet, he got a better angle—and cursed. That wasn’t a dark patch. It was a bloody patch.
He lurched forward, jagged pain clawing his leg. With a growl, he grabbed the wound and negotiated the rocky terrain. His boots slipped and twisted as rocks gave way.
He dropped to a knee beside Zhanshi. Head and shoulders were at wrong angles, lips blue against chalky skin. Beneath him, Krieger groaned.
Protecting his injured leg, Leif guided Zhanshi to the ground so Krieger could extract himself. He didn’t look wounded, but internal injuries were deceptive. “Hurting anywhere?”
Krieger shuffled back to the wall of dirt. Slumped against it, a distance in his gaze. A shake to his limbs.
Leif gripped the man’s shoulder. “Hey. You with us?” He cringed at the fresh pulse of warm blood sliding down his own calf.
Confused eyes wandered to his. Then Krieger shook his head. “Yeah . . . no.” He ran a hand over his face. Glanced up. Cursed as he threw himself away, toward a ledge.
“Easy, easy!” Leif warned, motioning to the gaping drop-off behind the big guy, then pointing at the chopper wreckage looming above. “It’s lodged. Not coming down.” He nodded behind him. “You’re on a precipice.”
Krieger’s knees and panic buckled, sending him to the rocky path. He let out a string of curses and cradled his head. “Why do I feel so screwed up?”
That was the one thing they’d had in common—for some reason, they had all felt
off. Shock from the crash, he’d guessed.
A chill settled into Leif’s bones, and he blinked back to the present. Night had fallen. He retrieved his gear and set up camp. Beneath the twinkling black, he tugged out his phone and stared at the blank screen. Imagined there were messages from Iskra. He sighed, roughing a hand over his face. He’d never met a woman like her. She’d altered his world, and making sure his team eliminated the man who’d wrecked hers had opened something in Leif he didn’t think possible—love.
Yet she had also upended his strategically placed walls. Ones that kept nosy people out and shielded him from whatever those missing six months hid. Then there was the mission, the Book of the Wars and its warning about some super-army, which was important to Iskra. To finding her brother.
Somehow, through two separate situations, that book made Leif want to find himself. She wanted to help him, but . . . something in those dark corridors of his past said to do it on his own. That she wouldn’t like what she found. He probably wouldn’t either.
He powered up the phone. It came to life with a short vibration. A few seconds later, a dozen messages populated the screen. Four from Iskra, six from Iliescu, and two from Canyon.
With a groan, Leif shut it off and dropped back against his sleeping bag. He hooked an arm over his eyes. Not yet. He couldn’t face them yet.
***
OUTSIDE BETHESDA, MARYLAND
She had killed people for a living, left others devastated, and now she had a personal vendetta against the car in front of her. An RPG would be overkill. Maybe a few well-placed shots through the back window.
No, too messy. And someone would see.
Walk up, knock on the window. When the guy rolled it down, she could pitch in a canister of sarin gas.
No, it could leak out and kill her objective, the person standing on the corner in a reflective jacket.
Options, options. What was left?
Ram his bumper, say it was an accident. And then Leif would be angry when he returned and she had to explain the damage to the SUV and the bill for repairs.
That was, if he ever returned. Iskra glanced at her phone. Why was everyone trying to teach her patience today? It was her one failing in life.
“Mama, pochemu on tak dolgo?” Taissia asked from her booster seat in the back seat.
“English, remember?”
With a huff, Taissia rolled her eyes. “Why is he taking so long?” she repeated in English, gray eyes flashing. “Better?”
It was hard not to smile. “Much.” Her daughter had Iskra’s impatience and her father’s intelligence. It was nice to be free of Hristoff and start learning things like that and—finally—calling her daughter by the name she and Valery had chosen. “And he’s taking so long because he’s”—a jerk . . . no, too mean—“slow.” She tapped her fingers on the steering wheel, resisting the urge to nail the horn.
“You do realize it’s a crime to plan assassinations in the school drop-off line, right?” taunted Mercy Maddox from the passenger seat.
“It’s not, actually,” Iskra said, sliding a glower toward her friend, who shared this morning’s ride to the belowground facility that housed the team’s headquarters. “The real crime is that we have to wait behind people like this who are not ready and don’t have the world to save before their first latte.”
“Mobile-ordering that latte right now before you decide to take out a hit on a single father of twins.” Mercy lifted her phone and opened a coffee shop app as boy-girl twins emerged from the luxury vehicle in front of them. “Ha. Called it.”
“You only knew it was him because you have a crush on him,” Iskra said as the sedan finally eased away, allowing her to pull forward in line.
“Can’t have a crush on someone I don’t know.”
“Of course you can,” Iskra argued. “Fans do it every day with music idols and actors.” She rolled down her window and smiled at the monitor standing on the school sidewalk. That reflective jacket flicked early-morning light into her eyes. “Good morning.” She reached back and released her daughter from the booster seat.
“Morning, Taissia.” The monitor opened the car door. “How are you?”
“I’m good.” Her daughter flipped her long brown braid over her shoulder as she hiked up her lavender backpack and retrieved her doll from the seat. “But my mom needs a latte before she kills someone.”
Iskra sucked in a breath, faced front, and slid her finger to the window control. As it rose, she said to Mercy, “If you laugh, I will kill you.”
“I like my body parts too much to risk it.”
Breathing a chuckle, Iskra exited the parking lot and merged into traffic.
“I did order you a latte, though.” Mercy shrugged. “Better to be safe than dead.”
Iskra groaned. “You have to stop that. Look what you’re teaching my daughter.”
“Self-preservation is a vital lesson in survival. I thought you knew that.”
A few months ago, Iskra wouldn’t have guessed that Mercy Maddox would become a friend she could trust. “I will give you grace,” she teased, “because you help me navigate the domestic bliss of motherhood.”
“And a love life.”
On that subject, they would have to agree to disagree. Especially since Leif had been gone for the last month. “Each afternoon, Taissia asks about him, when he’s coming home.”
The silence carried them for several miles, letting Iskra wander the emptiness of his absence. They weren’t married or living together, yet they had spent most of their time together after his team killed Hristoff.
“I check every day for proof of life,” Mercy said quietly.
There had been no ping on his location because that was the way he wanted it. “Leif might not have been an operative, but he knows how to move without tripping protocols that will tell us his location.”
“True, but there are . . . methods of finding him—without facial rec.”
“But they haven’t found him. You haven’t.”
Mercy sighed. “No.” She grunted. “He’s totally Rip Hunter.”
“Who?”
With a wave, Mercy shook her head. “Nothing. Not worth mentioning, and I will kill Leif for making me come up with a DC hero who matches him.” She shifted toward Iskra. “But it works, you know. Because Rip was able to navigate the time barrier and was also a skilled tactician and strategist. So it’s really no surprise that Leif has been able to avoid detection and stay off my radar, even considering my mad HackerGirl skills.”
They stopped by the coffee shop, where Mercy ran in and picked up their drinks.
“I told him I would go with him,” Iskra said as they sat in heavy traffic again. But that hadn’t been realistic because she had a daughter, who was her priority.
Never had she felt this conflicted. The last three years of her existence had been all about securing freedom for Taissia from the stranglehold of Hristoff Peychinovich. But then she kissed a blue-eyed sailor and forgot her priorities. Now she was here, being a mother to Taissia. Trying to give her daughter a normal life. But Iskra Todorova never had a normal childhood. How could she give what she’d never experienced?
Maybe, if she just played the role long and hard enough, it would work.
“What about you and Baddar?” she asked.
After a guffaw, Mercy eyed her. “Wait. You were serious?”
Iskra shook her head as she drove into the belowground parking. “You can pretend if you want, but I am not fooled. He is smitten with you, and you—”
“—are not interested in dating anyone. Besides, I have that guy to find, Andrew.” Mercy lifted an eyebrow. “He tipped his hand, and I’m going to hunt this dude down until he begs me to stop.”
It was Iskra’s turn to wing up an eyebrow. “If he is as skilled as you say, I would be much more careful about trying to find him. An operative who doesn’t want to be found will deem you a threat.”
“Baby, I am a threat!” Mercy snorted, retrieving her mes
senger bag from the floorboard as they parked. “But kidding aside—I hear you. I didn’t get here by being stupid but by being smart and relentless.”
Iskra smiled and reached for the door handle. “That is why we get along so well.”
They entered the bunker but hesitated at the cacophony skittering up the concrete steps.
“Sounds exciting,” Mercy said. “And loud.”
“But not involving many.” Lured by the voices, Iskra descended into the hub.
In his office, Deputy Director Dru Iliescu stood behind the desk, one hand on his belt, another holding a file, which he stabbed at a cowering Barclay “Cell” Purcell. “You get on this, and you get it sorted. I find out you’re not doing everything in your power—”
“I am doing everything in my power.”
“You’ve had it for three months!”
“Yes, and it’s written in a two-thousand-year-old language and references code names that aren’t used today, because, hello? None of us was alive then to record them,” Cell said, his voice pitching.
“Don’t get a mouth on you now.” Iliescu glowered, his gaze sliding to Iskra and Mercy before again skewering the comms expert. “I need more than three names.”
Cell rubbed the back of his neck. “If you want more, you have to let me off the leash.” He almost seemed repentant. “Just . . . a little.”
“What part of ‘heck no’ don’t you understand? We are not opening this up to foreign analysts.”
“I’m foreign,” Iskra said, inserting herself into the conversation.
“And you’re here,” Iliescu snapped, “where I can monitor what you do with intel you come into contact with.”
“Sir,” Cell said with a huff, “it’d only—”
“No!” Iliescu nailed Iskra with a look, then Mercy. “Briefing in twenty in the hub. Now, clear out. I have work to do.”
Cell snatched the file and pivoted toward the door, brow knotted as he shoved between them.
“Barc,” Mercy said, hurrying after him.
Iskra kept her distance yet remained close enough to hear.
“Who were you asking to talk to?” Mercy asked.