by Kaylea Cross
Once she determined the room was secure she called Trinity to get an update about the guy who had followed them. “The team got a couple images of him from CCTV footage. They’re working on it now,” Megan said to him after she hung up.
Trinity had said the guy wasn’t one of theirs, but Ty always took the word of government people with a grain of salt. If their shadow hadn’t been sent by their own to keep watch, then it was another cause of concern for them to monitor going forward. “She have any more intel?” he asked when Megan got off the call.
“Nope. They’re working on something, but she couldn’t give me specifics. So for now, we just wait.” She flopped down on the other queen-size bed and rolled to grab something from her backpack. An e-reader. She settled back against the headboard and began reading, seeming determined to ignore him.
He couldn’t make it that easy for her.
“How did you come up behind me like that?” he asked. It bugged him that he couldn’t figure it out.
She glanced over at him. “What?”
“When you left the building earlier. How did you get behind me without me noticing?”
She gave him a pitying look. “Don’t feel bad. Getting in and out of unexpected places is what I do. At least you heard me. I can sneak up on most people, even ones with training.”
If that was meant to salve his pride, it wasn’t much consolation. “So you’re not gonna tell me?”
A satisfied smile curved her mouth, showing her dimples. And he couldn’t help but wonder if she’d have that exact same look on her face after she’d had an orgasm or two. If things went the way he hoped, once this was over he intended to find out. “Maybe one day.”
But not today. Damn, she might not be the same sort of Valkyrie as Trinity, but she sure knew how to get into a man’s head. “What else are you trained in?”
She shrugged. “The usual stuff. Self-defense, counterintel, infiltration, ingress and egress. Basic weapons, combat medicine. Augmented memory. Plus my super stealth skills, and other tricks I use to steal things and get into and out of places.”
“Like safes and bamboo cages.”
Her expression sobered at the last bit. “Yeah.”
He stretched out on his own bed, putting his hands behind his head. He wanted to know everything about her. To know what had shaped her into the woman she was now. “Did you really bust out of a bamboo cage that night, while the guards were there?”
She looked down at the e-reader in her lap, her expression bored. “It was dark in the room and they weren’t paying close enough attention.”
No. But they sure had once she’d been brought back. Because of him.
He internally winced at the thought. “How’d you do it?”
She was quiet a moment, so quiet he was sure she was either going to ignore the question or tell him to go to hell, but then she answered. “One of them dropped a piece of wire while he was repairing a fence a couple days earlier. I scooped it up while he wasn’t looking in case I could put it to good use. I hated the cage. The first chance I got when the guards weren’t paying attention, I picked the lock, got out, and snuck past the perimeter.”
She was freaking amazing. “Where’d you hide the wire?”
“My mouth.”
She’d hidden it there for days. Until she’d seen the chance to use it and free herself. Then, hours later, he’d turned around and sent her right back for more punishment.
God, he wished he could undo that. It had bothered him ever since he’d found out—years after the fact. “I’m sorry I screwed you over.” Her words, not his. But they were accurate.
“They would have captured me eventually. I wasn’t thinking clearly by that point, I just wanted to get away from…everything. But I knew they’d never let me go.”
She said it bravely, as if she’d known what the end result would be. Shit, he wanted to go over there and haul her into his lap, wrap his arms around her tight. “I’m sorry it happened,” he said again, not knowing what the hell else to say.
She exhaled almost with impatience, then looked over at him. “What did you think of SERE school when you went through it? You did level C, right?”
She was trying to deflect the attention from her, and he didn’t mind answering. “Hated it. All except for the survival part, and even most of that I didn’t love because it was in the middle of January and I almost froze to death. Some sick part of me was relieved when I got ‘captured’. At least I was warmer in the prison camp.”
“Bet that didn’t last long.”
He smiled ruefully. “Nope. Pretty quick I decided I’d rather be outside freezing my nuts off in the woods rather than being beaten and water boarded.”
Her eyes held a gleam of amusement that he would have found disturbing from anyone else. “Did they put you in solitary too?”
A hard ball of guilt settled in his stomach. “Yeah.” Compared to her, he’d had it fucking easy. “A casket. Nailed it shut and blasted death metal overlaid with the sound of a baby wailing.” He shuddered. “To this day I can’t stand the sound of a baby crying.”
She rolled her eyes in commiseration. “The worst.”
He forced a smile, thinking about what Trinity had told him. That after he’d turned Megan over to the “enemy” at the camp, she’d not only been roughed up more and interrogated, but put into solitary confinement for the rest of SERE school.
Except in her case, instead of a coffin or another bamboo cage, she’d served the duration in a pit they’d dug in one of the outbuildings. She’d spent five nights and four days in utter darkness and without being allowed to sleep, unable to lie down or stretch out. They’d pulled her out only to interrogate her more, then dumped her back into the pit.
That shit turned his stomach. She’d been a freaking twenty-one-year-old girl forced into a brutal program. Yeah she’d had tier-one-level training all the way through, but what she’d endured in the SERE portion alone was worse than anything him or his buddies had undergone, and they were all SOF.
“Was there anything you loved about your training?” he asked to change the subject, hoping there was something good there.
“Oh, yeah, a lot of it was so cool.” She thought about it a moment. “Field craft and theft skills especially. Loved those classes. My instructors for those were the best. Actually, one of them reminds me a bit of—” She broke off and cleared her throat, almost embarrassed that she’d revealed something so personal.
“Of?” Ty prompted, wishing she’d continue. He wanted to know her. Really know her.
“Marcus,” she said after another pause. “Anyway, that instructor was…nice to me. A few of them were, but him especially. He even tried to run interference for me a few times, to make things easier on me. When the cadre suspected he was playing favorites, they kicked him out of the program. I never saw him again.”
“That’s shitty.” Sounded to Ty like having an ally of any sort in the program was rare. “How did you and Marcus meet?”
She held his gaze for several heartbeats, and it seemed like she was trying to decide whether or not he was playing her. “Trinity or Rycroft didn’t tell you?”
“No. Was Marcus a trainer too?”
She shook her head. “We met in Syria a few years ago. On an op. We…helped each other escape a bad situation. And when the whole Valkyrie scandal blew up in the media I needed to go to ground and had nowhere safe to go. I contacted him and he took me in immediately, no questions asked.”
Points for Marcus. But was he a rival for Ty? “You guys seem like you’ve got a really special bond.”
A soft smile lifted her lips, so warm and real it hit him deep in the chest. “Yeah. He’s kind of like my overprotective older brother, I guess.”
Ty wasn’t proud of the leap of relief those words brought. But he was damn glad to know there was nothing romantic or sexual between the two of them. “Cool.”
Now that she’d exposed some of her past, it didn’t surprise him that she instan
tly went back to the device in her lap.
“Whatcha reading? Military history?” He figured it was a pretty safe guess after the cover story she’d come up with.
She shot him a long-suffering look that almost made him laugh. “Do you ever stop asking questions?”
He grinned. “I’m a curious guy.” He sure as hell was curious about her.
Megan picked up her e-reader and started to read, tuning him out completely. “Oh, and to answer your earlier question, I got out by climbing down the balconies.”
He stared at her. Down the balconies? In broad daylight? Hell.
Megan had gone back to reading. But she’d talked to him, about personal things. That had to mean something.
By the time this mission was over, he wanted her to let him in completely.
Chapter Seven
Megan woke in a rush the next morning when her phone rang. She grabbed it from the nightstand between the two queen-size beds, her brain once again registering that she was in a hotel room in Prague with Tyler. They’d gotten in late last night, after checking out another possible target here in the city center.
That had been a bust too. It frustrated her that they were always a step behind their suspect.
In the dimness the bright screen display showed Trinity’s number. It wasn’t even five in the morning yet. “Hello.”
“Morning. We got a hit on the guy tailing you.”
She sat up. If the guy they’d spotted yesterday had shown up in their databases, then he was a threat. “Hang on, I’m putting you on speaker.” Tyler was watching her. She hit the button so he could hear. “Who is he?”
“Contract hitter for the CIA.”
Wow. “Who sent him?”
“We don’t know. And it looks like this guy hasn’t been on the company payroll for well over a year. So, it’s likely he’s been hired privately.”
“By someone involved with the Program.”
“Probably.”
Tyler was sitting up now too, and switched on the lamp between their beds. His dark hair was all mussed and sticking up on one side, the T-shirt he’d worn to bed molded across his chest and shoulders. Sexy even when rumpled. And he was totally alert now, shaking off the cobwebs of sleep the way only someone with their backgrounds could.
It had taken her a while to fall asleep last night because she wasn’t used to sharing a room, but he barely snored and it hadn’t been as bad as she’d been dreading. “Is he here for us?” she asked.
“We don’t think so. He must have noticed you around the target building yesterday morning.”
She glanced at Tyler, who shook his head. It was possible the guy had seen them. “Even if he found out who we are, there’s no way he could know why we’re here. So then why was he following us?”
“We don’t know that either. I just wanted to give you both a heads up so you could take extra precautions. And it looks like our suspect might be on the move. Our analysts think they’ve pinged some online activity in Vienna. Meet me at the rendezvous point in forty minutes. I’m chartering a private flight for us from a small local airport.”
“Got it. Anything else?”
“No. See you soon.”
Megan put the phone down and got up, then paused on her way to her backpack over in the corner. She had a roommate to consider. “Do you want first shower?”
He ran a hand through his hair and stretched out on top of the covers. “You go ahead. I’ll catch another few minutes’ sleep.”
She grabbed her things and quickly showered, dressed in a black T-shirt and cargo pants, then pulled her hair into a ponytail and brushed her teeth. When she came out of the bathroom Tyler had all his stuff packed and ready. “Bathroom’s all yours.”
“Thanks.” He reached up to scrub at his hair, making the muscles in his arms flex.
She wrenched her attention away from him and got busy packing her own gear. She didn’t want to be noticing his muscles. “I’ll wipe everything down.”
“I’ll help you once I’m done.”
By the time he’d showered and dressed, she had done most of the sanitization. Didn’t hurt to have another set of hands, though. They used bleach wipes on everything they might have touched to get rid of fingerprints, then collected them in a bag to be thrown out elsewhere.
“Ready?” she asked him as she shrugged into her backpack. She tucked her favorite blade away in a sheath strapped to her right calf, and her pistol was safely secured in the holster at the small of her back. Her other tools were stashed in various pockets in her cargo pants.
“Yep.”
Rather than finding his presence suffocating or annoying, it was sort of nice to have him there to keep watch as they made their way out of the hotel. That didn’t mean she was up for more public hand-holding, however. “Meet you at the RV point,” she told him, and headed right.
“Wait.” He grabbed hold of her upper arm. “I’m going with you.”
Yeah, no. She pulled her arm out of his grasp. “I’ll meet you there. If he’s still watching, going together will make us easier to spot. This way he’ll have to pick one of us. It’ll be our best shot at drawing him out.”
For a moment Tyler looked like he wanted to argue, but he had to know she was right, and relented. “Alert me if anything happens.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“Alert me,” he insisted.
It was easier to just agree and get moving. “Fine.” She turned around and walked away, paying close attention to what was happening around her. His quiet footfalls retreated in the opposite direction.
Alone, her senses remained on high alert as she wound her way through the historic city center of Old Town. Prague was a gorgeous city. One day, when it was safe, she’d like to come back and explore it more.
She scanned around her covertly as she passed the pretty, pastel-colored stone buildings, using all the trade secrets she’d learned from her trainers and handlers over the years. The weight of the pistol against the base of her spine was reassuring, as was the knowledge that Trinity was tracking her movements. Having backup was weird, but nice.
The city was quiet at this time of the morning and the traffic was light. A lot of the streets were made of cobblestone. Tires made a cool sound as they drove over them.
She stopped at a coffee shop, using it as an excuse to look around her as she waited in line. Except the stupid kolaches made her think of Tyler.
Steaming hot coffee in hand, she walked to the street and hailed a taxi. It took her west and then south along the river toward the National Theater, a grand, imposing sand-colored stone building where she would meet the others.
She kept her eye on the passenger side mirror, watching for any signs that they were being followed. Several vehicles were behind them. A delivery truck, two cars and a van.
Climbing out of the cab near the theater, she took a quick look around. Hand on the door, she froze when the black compact she’d seen a minute earlier appeared around the corner. It stopped.
She casually turned away from the cab and started for the steps of the theater, watching the car out of the corner of her eye. It disappeared behind another building. The theater was deserted. She hurried up onto the steps and slipped behind a column to keep watch.
Her pulse jolted in recognition when she spotted the man from yesterday appear around the corner on the sidewalk. He wore a light jacket, unzipped, and he was heading toward the theater.
She tapped her earpiece to activate it. There was no way he could see her, but if he’d followed her here then he would be looking for her. Moving from her position was risky. And with Tyler and Trinity both showing up soon, she didn’t want them walking into a bullet. “I’m here, but we’ve got company. A block away, heading west toward the theater.”
Tyler answered immediately. “Guy from yesterday?”
“Affirmative.”
“Can he see you?”
“Not anymore.” But he would if she didn’t move soon.
<
br /> “I’m on my way to you,” Trinity said. “Tyler’s closer.”
“I’m two blocks away,” he said. “I’ll—”
The man veered sharply right and crossed the street, heading straight toward her. “Gotta go,” she murmured, feeling weird having to report her decisions to anyone.
She slipped back deeper into the shadows that hugged the base of the building, watching the man. She didn’t think he’d seen her, but…
A car parked out front turned on its lights, the beams throwing her shadow against the wall. The man’s head jerked toward her and he started running.
With a mental curse Megan turned and ran, the solid weight of her backpack bumping against her spine. She didn’t bother updating the others. They’d see her location with the private tracking app on their burner phones.
She raced along the side of the theater, heading for the next street. When she cut a glance over her shoulder, the man was still in pursuit. His right hand reached into his jacket to withdraw something.
She put on a burst of speed and made a sharp left turn around the corner, darting through traffic and turning sharply left again.
“I’m almost there,” Tyler’s voice said, serious but calm. “Take your next right and go half a block, then take the alley to the right.”
She didn’t respond, saving her breath for the run. She did as he said, turning right up a quiet, deserted back street and then right up a narrow alley. Early sunlight streamed through the far end. She squinted against it and kept running, attuned to anything coming behind her.
Running footsteps.
Time’s up. She had no choice but to turn and fight.
Without breaking stride she reached back and withdrew her pistol. Whirling, she took aim at the shadowy shape at the end of the alley. They both fired two shots almost simultaneously.
Bullets struck the stone façade of the building to her left, and the figure ducked out of sight behind some garbage cans.
This alley was a deathtrap. There was nothing here for her to hide behind, and the sun lit her entire body up, forming a perfect silhouette. Engaging in a shootout with this guy was beyond stupid. She had to get the hell out of here before she took a bullet in the spine.