Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4)

by Carolyn Crane

  Her breath sounded ragged. “Hugo—”

  “CIA. You hoped to cash in on the vice president’s bounty, but why poison the fields?” Angrily, he jerked her closer. “You know who I am, but to poison the fields?”

  “It wasn’t me—it’s Ruiz.”

  “Ruiz is here to help.”

  “He’s not—I swear it.”

  “And I should believe you?” He wanted to, and he hated himself for it.

  “Think how we felt out there—we were united in saving the plants. We shared that. You felt it.”

  “Like we were united in helping Paolo? You know what they’ll do to him, do you not?”

  She sagged against his chest, given up to him, and if he weren’t gripping the knife in his bleeding arm, it might feel like something else. “I’m sorry. So sorry. You have no reason to believe me. I know that.”

  He appreciated that she didn’t try to get out of it. He held her against his thundering heart.

  “I don’t know why, but Ruiz is faking things,” she continued. “You can’t trust him. Take the soil to somebody independent—there’s still a chance—”

  He squeezed her harder. “Stop it.”

  “I’m not! It’s true. I’m ex-CIA, yes. And yes, I’ve been investigating you, but I didn’t poison the fields. You have to believe me. I could help save them…”

  “Killing plants was your specialty in the CIA,” he said.

  “Killing plants was never my specialty.” She tried to jerk from his arms but he wouldn’t let her go. “I studied crime scenes. It’s true, I hunted you for years, yes, but think how it’s been this week, working those fields together.”

  “Ruiz was called, invited.”

  “And I wasn’t? Invited? You invited me.”

  “You came and now the plants are dying. Ruiz came after.”

  “I’m telling you the truth.”

  He wanted to believe her, but he couldn’t think clearly where she was concerned. Because he loved her—he knew it now. The realization was shards of glass in his soul. He had loved her for that short space. Now he had to kill her. “The CIA knows about me?”

  “I’m no longer with the CIA.”

  “Who?”

  “The Associates,” she said. “I’m with the Associates.”

  He swore under his breath. The Associates. “What else?”

  “That’s it. They know I suspect; that’s all, but I have a feeling they’ll be showing up either way. You have about thirty-six hours before they come and take you. You’ll be traded out. Part of a package to quell a situation—”

  “Traded to the vice president.”

  He felt her body soften. Communication enough.

  “You’ve sent back photos, I presume.” He hated the sound in his voice, the weakness.

  “I haven’t,” she said. “I swear it.”

  The truth. He recognized it with his whole being. Everything between them was instinct now.

  So the peaceful life he’d built was over. At least with her dead, they might not find him. They would suspect the American farmer, but he’d be long gone with a new identity, and she wouldn’t be around to identify him.

  He spun her around, holding her wrists, backing her to the wall before she could knee him, immobilizing her with the full force of his weight, pressing her to the wall. Even if she could move, she was good enough to know she could not fight him.

  The understanding between them ran thick and primitive. He held the knife to the place where her pulse thrummed in her neck, heart thundering. The least he could do was to look into her eyes as he killed her.

  “Don’t trust Ruiz,” she gasped, eyes shining with unshed tears. “I have nothing to lose right now, okay? That’s what I’m telling you. I’m so sorry…for everything.”

  Something lurched in him as he studied her eyes. That guilt that chased her; she’d be rid of it now. He hadn’t been wrong about her—not in the deepest way. Understanding blazed between them like fire. “Your name. Not even Liza.”

  “Zelda,” she said.

  He tightened his grip on the knife. Her skin burned against his knuckles. Her breath was warm on his chin. “Choose. The knife or the gun?”

  He waited, knowing she’d take the superior intimacy of the knife. He forced himself to visualize it. He would plunge it in quick and deep.

  Their breath moved as one.

  “I have no choice.”

  “I know,” she said.

  She would die like a warrior, this woman. They were the same in many ways.

  He gripped the knife, knuckles white, pressing the tip to her neck, to flesh he couldn’t imagine breaking. He hated her and he loved her. He kept it there, as if to show it to himself—this is what you do.

  “Say it,” she said. “Please.”

  He stilled, unsure what she meant by that.

  “Say my name.”

  “Zelda.” He pressed the flat of the blade harder against her throat, depressing the skin but not slicing it.

  He could feel her tremble as he lowered it to the bony plate at the center of her chest, handle gripped in his fist. He could feel her heartbeat through his knuckles, this woman who’d betrayed him and his boy.

  He no longer considered her green eyes to be fake. Those green eyes were the eyes of a spy, a hunter. His pulse roared in his ears as he gazed into them, as he repeated her name. “Zelda.”

  She gasped in a breath, staring up at him, trembling, so alive.

  The air thundered all around, or maybe that was the earthquake ripping apart his heart. Anger and love and churned in him, and something seized him, gripped him, and he found himself bringing his lips down onto hers. He hated her and he kissed her. He kissed her with the knife pressed between them—the knife he would use to kill her. He channeled all of his emotion into that one kiss. He kissed her so hard that he tasted blood.

  He pulled back, panting. It wasn’t right. Nothing was right.

  “Don’t stop,” she said.

  “Knife or gun. You have to choose,” he said.

  The steady look in her eyes—he’d seen that look hundreds of times on hundreds of battlefields. A warrior, ready for death.

  “Your hands,” she gasped. “At the end.”

  He watched her, bewildered. And then he understood. She wanted him to choke her—as she came. “No.”

  “Your hands. At the end.” She grabbed the back of his head and pulled him into a kiss.

  Desire surged through him. He’d never wanted anybody more. He flattened her against the wall and kissed her, probing at the seam of her lips with his tongue, knife flat between them.

  “Say it again,” she said.

  “Zelda,” he grated out. “Zelda.”

  He would say it forever, because she was no longer Liza. She was a warrior, his equal, and his enemy.

  He kissed the side of her neck and pressed his killer’s body into her.

  “Yes,” she said.

  And he was lost.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Knife in hand, Kabakas twined his fingers between hers. He pressed the back of her hands to the wall, knife between their palms. She was a good enough fighter to understand that even now she couldn’t take him, even when he let her touch the knife.

  Perversely, it made her want him more.

  Is he powerful enough to blot out all the pain? Dax had asked.

  Kabakas groaned into their kiss, moving against her, fitting the steel of his cock between her legs. He kissed her neck, face warm and whiskery, as tears streamed from her eyes.

  He let her go suddenly and lifted her up and set her on the counter. She gasped as he slipped the knife between the buttonholes of her dress, moving upward toward her neck, and then downward, renting her dress in half. He looked into her eyes as he sliced the center of her bra, slicing through every shred of clothing until she was naked to him.

  Then he threw aside the knife.

  All notions of Dark Kabakas, blood-red flowers, and geopolitics fell away as h
e ripped off the last shreds of her dress. There was just this man, now, with an expression she’d never seen on a man before—grave and determined and wild.

  He held the sides of her head. He did not tell her not to cry. Instead, he kissed her cheeks, her forehead, kissing away the tears.

  She reached down to undo his belt buckle. She didn’t have to care about anything anymore. Not pirates commandeering a freighter, not condoms. Not Friar Hovde or Agent Randall.

  She felt elemental, like the sun or the wind. She felt free.

  “Zelda,” he whispered as she grabbed his cock. He muscled her hand away and guided himself to her entrance.

  Her belly pulled tight as she felt his fingers there, his cock there.

  When she felt him begin to fill her, she let her eyes drift shut.

  He stopped. “Look at me,” he grated, pulling nearly all the way out. “Look at me, corazón.”

  She opened her eyes to meet the crackly root-beer brightness of his. He thrust into her and filled her, blotting out every thought in her mind.

  She grabbed onto his hair with one fist, his shoulder with the other, nails piercing his skin. “More,” she said.

  He shoved into her again and again, breath ragged in her hair. A man completely undone.

  Then he picked her up and held her, sliding her up and down on him on his cock, fingers clawing into her ass. None of it was enough; they could rip each other apart and it wouldn’t be enough.

  She bit his lip, needing to keep them fused; she tasted his blood. He walked to the wall, carrying her, and slammed her against it.

  The swell of pleasure began to overtake her. Not yet, she thought, but they weren’t in charge. The earth and the sun and the wind were in charge and the world itself fucked them as he thrust into her relentlessly.

  He growled a refusal, tears shining in his eyes, even though she’d said nothing.

  “It’s what I choose.” He would do it. No other man would have the guts, but Kabakas would.

  She couldn’t die down in that basement with Friar Hovde. She wasn’t brave then, but she was brave now.

  Still fucking her, he laid her back down on the counter. He pressed thumbs to her neck, as if to test it out, thrusting into her, staring down into her eyes.

  This man, he was so beautiful. Her quarry for so long. “Kabakas,” she gasped, feeling the rising swell of pleasure.

  With a wild, tortured look carved onto his harsh features, he pressed his thumbs into her windpipe, cutting off speech, breath. She tried to suck in a breath but it wouldn’t come. She coughed and fought, instinct taking over at last. He tightened his hold on her as he fucked her and choked her, thrusting on and on. The edges of her vision went hazy as she began to come. The orgasm swept through her like fire, filling her head with stars and shattering her mind. She was plummeting, spinning, dissolving into pure pleasure and darkness—perfectly blameless, perfectly free.

  Chapter Thirty

  When she came to, he was gathering her up in his arms, whispering her name over and over, Zelda, Zelda, Zelda. He held her aloft, flush to his chest, and she could feel him trembling.

  The world still spun. She was naked. Her throat hurt like hell.

  “What—” she grated out.

  “I’ll say where and when I kill you.” He carried her down the hall and into her bedroom, dropping her onto her bed. He threw the khakis and shirt at her—the ones he’d lent her, still dirty from the fields. She washed them by hand every night, but she hadn’t gotten a chance to this night. “Put them on,” he said hoarsely.

  Would he let her live? He couldn’t. He was too smart. Too careful. But she didn’t want to die—she didn’t.

  She pulled on the pants and shirt, buttoning up as he watched.

  He pulled the kerchief from his pocket and tied it tightly around her mouth. It smelled of him, tasted of him.

  “You will not speak to me,” he said, even though she hadn’t tried. He pointed to a chair. “Sit.”

  She moved stiffly off the bed and sat.

  His hands trembled as he tied her wrists behind her back. He secured her to the chair in such a way that if she moved to extract herself it would only make things worse. He knew all the tricks, of course. Knew what she might try. He tied her ankles and stood back. She panted, body abuzz from the blackout, from the orgasm that had thundered through her.

  Without a word he left her.

  He’d let her live…for now.

  She’d revealed that the Association barely knew anything. She’d been telling the truth, and he had to know that. With her dead, he could outrun them and outwit them. Protect Paolo.

  But only with her dead. What was he doing? He had to kill her. He knew it as well as she did.

  Curtains covered the window, preventing her from telling time. It was night, maybe ten, maybe midnight. How long had they fucked? But what did it matter?

  She wished he would return. She didn’t want to be alone. That would be the hell of death, she thought—the utter aloneness. Her heart ached at the thought of never seeing Liza again. Her parents. Dax. She hadn’t said good-bye. There was so much she wanted to say to people.

  But that was death. You were rarely ready for it.

  He was there when she awoke, sitting heavily in a chair across the room, gazing out the window, blade on the table next to him. Had he come to kill her in her sleep?

  She didn’t have to make a sound; he’d know she was awake. Their eyes met and everything was there between them, terrifyingly clear.

  The blade. The betrayal.

  The fucking.

  It had been the most powerful experience of her life, as if he’d broken through her scars and fucked her clear to her core. She’d wanted to give up everything to him—literally everything—and for a moment she’d felt free.

  Finally he spoke. “Eventually, they will come for you, won’t they?” Whether he killed her or not, he meant.

  With a lurch in her chest, she nodded. His life here was over, no matter what happened with the plants. They would come for her. Could Dax have sent somebody already?

  “How long?”

  It was Thursday night. She shook her head. Dax had said Saturday. Could she trust it?

  “A day? Less?”

  She shrugged.

  He gazed out the window, lost in misery. Losing his home. The plants were dying—and he blamed her. Yes, she’d lied. She had been a CIA botanist. But the idea she’d hurt the plants—it killed her that he could think it.

  She mumbled, asking him to remove the gag. She wanted to tell him to check her experiments; it was possible the plants had reacted to one of the compounds she and Paolo had tried. She wanted to help—he needed to see that.

  He ignored her.

  She grunted again, and he shook his head. She growled and glared in frustration.

  His whisper, when it came out, was hoarse. “I felt like a family.”

  Her heart stuttered. She’d felt it, too. That brief, happy window. She’d felt happy.

  “I felt like a family,” he said again. “I thought, this is what a family is, being together. Feeling happy.” He looked out the window. “I’ll tell Paolo that I sent you away. I don’t wish him to think that you left of your own accord. Not for you, but for him. He loves you, I think. It will be better.”

  From behind the gag she mumbled that Paolo loved him, too, but it came out hopelessly garbled. The gag bit into the sides of her mouth with the just-right amount of pressure. He was an overachieving killer in every way.

  “I’ll play with him more. Try to be lighter. I know to do that now.” He paused, and then dropped his voice to a gruff whisper. “But when I see the hope in his eyes…I do not like it. It makes him vulnerable, that hope. Perhaps it is unfair. The boy is not me.” He stared at the window. “The small puzzle box in the cabinet, it was a gift from my father. One of the few times my father was kind. It filled me with hope.”

  Her heart broke as she imagined him as a child, reaching out, full of nee
d and hope, receiving only loathing in return.

  He leaned against the wall in front of her. “I didn’t kill his mother—she was dead, a young girl, a child soldier, when I came upon him. I was in my full gear, sent to attack a battalion that had been preying upon the countryside. Somebody had been there first. Rival guerrillas. You know how the war was at its height. The chaos. The bodies, the fires. Paolo was sitting by his dead mother’s side, no more than five, crying. He had gotten hold of her revolver. It was too heavy for him. I went to him and took it from him. His cries grew louder, frightened by the mask, I thought, until I realized he was looking at something behind me. Soldiers coming, presumably the ones who’d killed his mother and her troop. They were not happy to see it was me, of course.”

  Kabakas. She nodded.

  “Up until then, I had always killed for money. Or an idea. That day I killed for Paolo.” He gazed down at his hands, as though they surprised him still. “I was so full of rage. I wanted to kill every last person who had made him cry. I cut them all down, every one of them. When I turned back to him, he was stretching his arms up to me. I had to keep him. I had no choice. I should have brought him to an agency, but…”

  She snorted her dissent. He was being an idiot, and if she had the gag off she’d tell him so. Paolo had a good home with Hugo.

  “You are suggesting, perhaps, that he is better off with me? You understand what my enemies will do to him, do you not? Can you imagine?”

  She had nothing to say. He was right, of course.

  “I should have let him go. Especially after my enemies killed my mother.” He went to the window and opened the curtains. “My enemies worked it out that I owned that little pink house in the Bumcara suburb. Marked money, perhaps, traced in some way, I don’t know. I learned of the danger, but not in time. They set her home on fire.” He paused. She knew what was coming. “I could not save her.”

  One simple, pain-laced sentence. Those were the burns.

  He turned to her. “What Paolo has never understood was that it could have been me who killed his mother. It’s not as if I avoided child soldiers out there. Nobody could.” He looked back out the window. “I kept him all the same. I couldn’t let him go.”