by Lizzy Bequin
“What?” Tina gasps, somehow making the word two syllables. I’ve got her full attention all of a sudden. She narrows her eyes at me. “Who?”
“Um…Trent.”
Tina’s eyes pop wide open. She puts down her phone and excitedly pats both hands on the counter.
“Trent Preston?”
I give her a goofy little grin and a nod.
“Oh my god, you little slut,” she teases me, a big grin on her face. “So that’s who has been keeping you up at night? When did you two start going out?”
I know Tina is just joking about me being a slut, but even she doesn’t realize just how funny that is. She doesn’t know that I still have a very valid and up-to-date V-card.
That’s right. I’ve never had sex. I’m a virgin.
It’s no big surprise, considering my relative lack of interest in boys. Still, it’s a point of embarrassment for me. Just one more thing to keep me from fitting in.
In a small town like Durbin, it’s hard to hide it if you are sleeping with someone. By extension, it’s almost equally hard to hide the fact that I’ve never done it with anyone. I’ve had to tell quite a few fibs to hide my secret. I’m sure Tina and the other girls suspect.
The guys probably suspect too. Oh my God, I wonder if Trent suspects.
“We’re not really going out,” I tell Tina, trying to defuse her enthusiasm about my nonexistent sex life. Partly I don’t want to jinx it. Partly I’m just not as comfortable talking about that kind of stuff as Tina is. “We’re just talking, you know?”
“Mm-hm,” she hums doubtfully.
Right on cue, my phone buzzes with a text message.
“Oh, I bet that’s Trent!” Tina teases me.
“No,” I lie, “Just my dad again.”
But Tina’s guess was right. The message totally was from Trent:
TRENT: Hey cutie
TRENT: We still on for later?
What I told Tina before was true. Trent and I aren’t dating. We’ve only been talking a bit, and we definitely haven’t done anything physical yet. Heck, we haven’t even kissed. So I feel like it’s a bit strange for him to call me “cutie.” But I guess I should just take it as a compliment.
Trent is one of the most popular boys in town. When we were in high school, all of the girls were tripping over themselves to get with Trent. He’s handsome, athletic, and his family is wealthy by Durbin standards. I guess if I were normal, I’d be swooning over him too.
When he asked me to go with him to the party tonight, my first impulse was to turn him down. But then I remembered my whole “fake-it-till-you-make-it” strategy, and I agreed.
I have to admit, though, I’m a little bit nervous. Trent has dated a lot of girls in Durbin, and he has a bit of a reputation for getting what he wants. Plus, I get the impression that what he wants never involves taking things slow. I need to figure out the right way to word my reply to him. I don’t want to sound cold or bitchy, but at the same time I don’t want to sound over-eager. I need to let him know subtly that I need to take baby steps with this whole going-out thing.
God, I’m really bad at this.
I’m so distracted by my thoughts, I barely notice the bell on the front door jingle.
“Amrita, we’re gonna have to get you in a twelve-step program for that phone.”
My dad takes a seat at the counter and smiles, but his face looks tired as always, heavy bags under his eyes, and a faint blue shadow lining his jaw. He pulls out a camo cap that’s folded in his back pocket and situates on top of his thinning, dark hair. His lucky cap—that things seen better days. Dad’s really into hunting, and he wears that ratty old cap every minute that he’s not in his doctor’s office. But it looks really incongruous now, with his khakis and pale blue button up with a couple pens in the breast pocket.
He has unbuttoned the top two buttons of his shirt, and I can see the faint sparkle of the simple chain that he wears every day. The pendants of his necklace are hidden inside his shirt, but I know what they are. Two thin bands of gold, one with a small, humble diamond inset. It’s the engagement ring he gave my mom years ago as well as her wedding band. He never takes them off now.
My concentration broken, I just tap out a generic message to Trent before I forget to answer him.
ME: yep! ;)
ME: I’ll text when I’m back home.
“Seriously,” my dad laughs. “We’re going to have an intervention for your phone addiction, right Tina?”
“Sure thing, Dr. Jacobson.”
His expression drops. He shakes his head and pulls his raggedy camo cap a little lower as he glances over at Tina and realizes that she too has her nose buried in her phone.
“Oh my God, Dad,” I sigh as I fill a mug for him. “That was literally the first time I checked it in like…”
“Five seconds?” he finishes my sentence with a knowing smirk.
“Hardy-har-har.” I push the steaming mug across the counter in mock annoyance. “My dad the comedian. Anyway, tonight has been super slow. I only have one…”
I glance across the room to the big man’s booth.
“…customer?”
As if by magic, the man in the suit is already gone. All that remains is his white ceramic mug set atop some money as a paperweight. Now how the heck did he leave without me even noticing?
“Just a sec,” I say to my dad.
He nods and blows on his coffee, scrambling the curls of steam rising from the hot liquid..
“Maybe the reason the diner is slow is that all the waitresses are too busy with their phones to take care of the customers” my dad calls over his shoulder. “Ever think of that?”
“For sure, Dr. Jacobson,” Tina replies, totally not even listening to what he said.
I roll my eyes as I walk my way over to the booth where the man had been sitting to pick up the mug, which is still warm despite being empty, and the money that the guy left me—a five-dollar bill. Coffee only costs one dollar here, and that includes refills. Even when I take out the tax, that still leaves me a nearly four hundred percent tip.
Shit, not bad.
Especially considering how bleak the tips have been tonight. Still, I really hope I don’t see that guy again, big tipper or not. He frightened me. And what bothers me even more—what I don’t want to admit—is that part of me kind of liked it.
No matter how I try, I can’t get him out of my mind.
Who the heck was that guy?
CHAPTER 3: CONWAY
“Can you imagine living in a place like this?” Kruger snorts in the passenger seat. He’s got an open sack of tobacco in his lap, and he’s sprinkling some of the pungent brown shreds into the trough of a folded rolling paper held between his thick, clawed fingers.
Our black Tahoe is parked at the curb. A nice big elm tree casts a shadow in the streetlight, so we’re not too conspicuous. I look out the window and pan my vision around the quiet little subdivision, which is a short drive from downtown Durbin. After the girl got off work at the diner, her father, the doctor, drove them both back home to their squat, cozy split level home that looks much like the others in the neighborhood. Kruger and I discreetly followed them here, and I drove a lap around the neighborhood before parking a block away with a good clear view of the house.
The lights are off at the Jacobson residence, as they are for most of the houses on the street.
“You don’t like it?” I ask facetiously. “A nice little house. Little patch of lawn. Picket fence. Wife to hand you your briefcase and kiss you goodbye in the morning. A cat. A dog. A couple of little rug rats. Seems nice.”
Kruger grimaces at that last part, and loosens his black, braided leather bolo tie with a clasp of turquoise set in silver. I don’t know what it is with Kruger and his cowboy fashion. That motherfucker’s never been on a horse in his life, as far as I know, and the only time he leaves New York City is for assignments like this one. He glances around the dark, quiet, tree-lined street as he rolls the cigar
ette between his fingers.
“Bunch of little rabbits in their hutches,” he grumbles.
He wets the edge of the paper with the tip of his tongue and rolls it over between the calloused pads of his fingers.
I take another long look around the neighborhood. It’s mostly little one-story ranch homes and split levels like the Jacobsons’ crouching under the spreading limbs of the elms and oaks lining the street. I can picture it during the day—kids on bikes, neighbors shouting their conversations across the street as they water their roses, the air thick with the bitter smell of cut grass and the ever present rumble of a lawnmower somewhere off in the distance.
“Nah, I could never live in a place like this,” I tell him truthfully this time. “I’d get claustrophobic. Too many people. I need to be out in the woods.”
It’s the Alpha conditioning that makes me that way. Whenever we’re not on a job, I get as far away as I can from the human race—some place wild where I can let my primal side run free. I’ve got a nice little tract of land upstate that nobody at the Alpha Initiative knows about. That’s where I go to get away from it all.
“You and your fucking woods,” Kruger laughs, sticking the finished cigarette between lips notched with old scars.
We’ve had this conversation a million times. Kruger’s a city boy. Not in the sense that he was born and raised there. Hell, neither one of us has any memory about our upbringing. We both had our long-term memories scrubbed when we joined the Alpha Initiative.
At its root, Kruger needs the city for the same reasons I need the woods. It’s the Alpha conditioning. It just affects us both differently. I don’t know if the scientists at the Initiative gave Kruger more of the juice, or maybe there’s just some innate nastiness inside him. Whatever the case may be, Kruger is a straight up predator through and through. He doesn’t even try to rein it in.
And that’s why he likes the city. Plenty of prey.
Kruger’s lighter flicks open with a satisfying, metallic clink. He lights up, and for a moment the flame glitters in his bad eye, his ruined eye, which is pale and clouded. The cigarette sizzles as he takes a long drag, filling the cab of the Tahoe with the smell of burning tobacco.
“Cancer,” I say. “Heart disease.”
Kruger shakes his head, and settles back into his bucket seat, the jacket of his gray suit scrunching up around him. He props one black cowboy boot on the dash in front of him as he smokes.
“Not gonna live that long.”
He has a point. For people like me and Kruger, working for the Alpha Initiative is a sweet gig. The pay is good, and it’s not like we’re cut out to do anything else. But there’s a reason the retirement package is so juicy. It’s because Omicron Corporation has never had to pay one out.
Most of the Alpha operatives wind up dying on the job. At least that’s what Omicron says. The truth is, they vanish into thin air, and I suspect more than a few of them have gotten fragged by their own employers once their behavior made them a liability.
I can already see Kruger heading down that path.
Slumped in the passenger seat, Kruger shifts restlessly as he smokes.
“Fuck all this waiting,” he growls before taking another long pull from his cigarette. When he speaks again, his words come out on billows of blue smoke. “Let’s just go in there, grab the little bitch, and be on our merry way.”
Kruger’s always been impatient, but tonight he’s practically humming like a high tension wire. He’s feeling the bloodlust something fierce. That’s bad. We need to do this job right. Keep things clean.
“Negatory,” I tell him. “First of all, the house is wired with an alarm system…”
“So what? Who cares about some rinky-dink house alarm? We’ll be in and out so fast it won’t matter.”
“Besides that,” I continue, ignoring his interruption. “The good doctor is always strapped up. Fucker probably sleeps with a gun under his pillow.”
When I saw Dr. Jacobson walking into the diner tonight, I could detect the slight bulge of a pistol concealed in the back of his pants, inside his waist band. Couldn’t be anything bigger than a nine mil. Probably something smaller like a little .380 pea shooter. But little guns still make a loud bang. Plus, there’s no telling what he’s got stashed inside that house of his.
For an ordinary civilian, the man is well prepared. Especially considering he’s got no military background, at least not according to the dossier we received. Who knows, maybe he’s just a good boy scout. Maybe he’s a paranoid prepper who’s listened to one too many FM radio hosts ranting about a North Korean EMP attack. Or maybe, just maybe, he’s expecting someone like me and Kruger.
One thing’s for sure, he never lets the girl out of his sight.
“You turned coward?” Kruger sneers, smoke curling from his flared nostrils like some kind of hungry dragon. “Afraid of a couple guns?”
“No,” I sniff, “But guns make noise. Alarms make noise too. Noise brings cops. Noise brings nosy neighbors out onto the front lawn to see what’s going down. Those are all headaches we don’t need.”
Kruger shrugs and flicks ashes onto the floorboard.
“Besides,” I remind him. “The briefing was crystal clear about casualties. They don’t want any.”
“You worry too much, Conway.” His clawed fingers brush fallen ashes off his slacks. “Too fucking high strung.”
High-strung. That’s a fucking laugh coming from Kruger. The guy is a bundle of frayed nerves, and it’s just a matter of time before he goes berserk. I just hope I’m nowhere nearby when it happens.
But he’s right, I am worried. There’s something about this job that doesn’t sit right with me.
Normally we do wet ops. Assassinations. Clearing out any high-level opposition to Omicron’s corporate expansion. Sometimes we do kidnappings like this one. But it’s typically to put leverage on somebody. Omicron doesn’t ask for ransoms—why would they? They’ve got more fucking money than they know what to do with. Their ransom is getting a signature on a dotted line.
But as far as I can see, the only person connected to this girl is her father, and I can’t figure why they hell Omicron would want to twist some small town country doctor’s arm. Unless he isn’t exactly what he seems.
Who knows? Our handlers didn’t tell us shit about this op. Aside from a photo and name, I have no clue who the girl is or why they want her. The only thing I do know is that this one comes straight from the top. Whoever the girl is, she must be important.
Straight from the top. That’s another way of saying it came straight from the mouth of Mr. Driscoll himself, the president and CEO of Omicron Corporation.
I met him once, when I first became a hired gun for Omicron as part of their Alpha Initiative. Driscoll seemed like a nice enough guy, in a stick-up-his-ass businessman sort of way.
But after talking to him for a few minutes, I could tell he was as ruthless as they come. It wasn’t anything he said. I could just smell it on him. Maybe he wasn’t equipped with the same capacity for physical carnage as an Alpha like me. But the will was there. The will to do things that would even make me think twice.
Then again, maybe it’s easier when you’re paying other people to do your dirty work for you. People like me and Kruger.
Kruger has smoked his cigarette down so far it’s nearly burning his lips. He pinches the orange cherry between his thick fingertips and it goes out with a hiss. There’s a faint smell of burnt flesh, but Kruger doesn’t even wince.
“You know, If you’re so fucking worried about making sure this job is squeaky clean, then why did you take it upon yourself to go into that diner, Conway? Now she’s seen you.”
He’s right of course.
I told myself that I needed to have a closer look at the target. Study her habits and get a feel for her patterns. For one thing, catching a whiff of her scent signature would help me to track her later if need be.
What I didn’t expect was the intense reaction that her s
cent caused in me.
I’m not sure what it was exactly, but her scent shook something loose inside of me. I’m certain it was the first time I had ever encountered the girl, yet somehow the warm fragrance of her fresh, young body was like something from a memory. It stirred my blood and hardened my cock into a steel rod. It’s lucky I had the diner table there to hide the huge tent I was pitching in my pants.
Plus she was gorgeous. The photo in her file didn’t do her justice. Seeing her up close was an entirely different experience. She’s gorgeous, with fair skin, a delicate little nose, and plush, pink lips ripe with blood. Her fine, wheat-blond hair was pulled back in a simple ponytail—nothing fancy. And her clothes didn’t do a whole lot to show off her body. But a girl like that doesn’t need any extra enhancements.
And the dossier got her eye color wrong. It said light blue, but those big frightened eyes of hers were purple.
No. Lavender. She said they were lavender.
“She’s a pretty little thing,” Kruger sighs as if reading my thoughts. “I’m sure looking forward to playing with her.”
I bristle at those words. I know that Kruger has funny ideas about playing.
“The target is not to be harmed,” I remind him.
“Yeah, yeah,” Kruger mutters as he splays his fingers and studies his sharp, mountain lion’s claws, retracting and protracting them slowly. “Don’t worry. I got it all out of my system last night.”
I don’t want to ask how.
Anyway, I have a pretty good idea. A few months back, the higher ups in the Alpha Initiative charged me with spying on Kruger. It was during one of his cooling-down periods between operations. You know what they say about idle hands.
I followed him through the city, keeping an eye on him from the rooftops as he prowled the dark streets near the docks looking for a mark. He picked up a prostitute and convinced her to go with him down a dark alley between some abandoned warehouses. Bad move.
When I showed up, Kruger was about one second away from ripping the poor girl’s throat out. She got away, but Kruger and I damn near tore up a whole city block fighting each other before I managed to calm him down.