Department 57: Bloody Crystal

by Lynne Connolly

  That shouldn’t turn her on, shouldn’t send her into this frenzy of need, but it did. It did, and she wanted more, even more. “Make love to me, Rhodri.”

  “No.”

  She cried out in frustration, but before she could plead with him, he explained. “I might fuck you. If you want that.”

  Then she understood the difference. She ached for his cock inside her, right now. His fingers were a poor substitute. She wanted that thick, hard rod of flesh deep inside her, pummeling her to a vicious orgasm. And she wanted it now.

  Cool air swept between them when he withdrew a little, but the sound of the zipper came as a relief. He would do it. He kept his fingers inside her, keeping her on the keening edge.

  “Fuck me, Rhodri.”

  “With pleasure,” he growled, stepping closer again. Flesh against flesh, hard against her back. Not enough. It wasn’t in the right place. Whimpering, she stepped back, rubbed him, but he pushed her to stand right in front of the window again. A pause, then he grabbed something, nudged it against her feet. A low, long footstool. “Get up.”

  Eagerly she hopped up, and although he withdrew his fingers, he didn’t pull away from her. He moved close, pushed his cock between her legs. If anyone was looking, he could probably see more now. Or she. It didn’t matter.

  “Touch it.”

  She stroked the head, collected the bead of moisture. She lifted it to her mouth, licked her finger with lascivious pleasure. Salty, delicious. Caviar couldn’t possibly taste better. Then she touched him with her wet finger, traced a figure eight around the head, brushing over the opening, caressing, teasing him to give her more. He obliged and brushed his lips against hers neck, nibbling a path up to her ear. “Put it where you want it. Make me fuck you.”

  “Yes, anything. I’ll do anything for you.”

  “I know you will. And I’m going to ask more and more from you.” His low growl showed her how much he felt, as did the shot of pure lust that arced through her mind. No more. She took his cock in her hand, curling her fingers around his length, and eased it back along her crease, pausing to tease herself but unable to wait any longer.

  When she pushed him inside, she had to lean forward and nearly lost her balance. Flinging her hands out, she caught the window frame.

  “Stay there,” he said. “That feels better. I can go deeper if you lean forward.”

  She was so close to the glass that his first thrust pushed her breasts to bounce against it, the cool surface chilling her nipples to aching hardness. She leaned back against him. She had what she’d dreamed of, his fine, hard cock thrusting deep into her willing body. She moaned his name. “Rhodri, please, take everything.”

  He pressed a finger against her anus. “Everything?”

  She sucked in a breath of shock. “If you want it.”

  “Never before,” he rumbled. “I’ve never wanted this before, but I want to own you, to know every part of you. But not like this. I can’t wait. I need you now, Cerys.” He withdrew and plunged in, deep and hard. If he didn’t have his arm around her waist, the force could have catapulted her through the window. But he kept her safe. He always would.

  Her ponytail had lost its elastic fastening, and her hair flowed loose around her shoulders, catching the rays of the sun, strands flying across her face as he fucked her, increasing his pace, plunging deep and deeper still. She kept her legs wide open, as wide as she could manage without losing him.

  “Play with yourself, Cerys. Tweak that clit. Let’s see if we can get you a double orgasm.” She put a shaking hand on herself, found her clit, hard and engorged now, and she pinched it, howled with the response that shot shards of pleasure through her whole body. He dragged her closer, his other hand squashed between them, his finger still rubbing her anus, frantically now. He let his movements push his finger against her with every stroke.

  “Can you imagine what they’re seeing?” His voice, breathier now, came in gasps, but he still spoke. He could have used a mental voice with less effort, but he chose to fill her mind with images of them, writhing together, her pussy wide open for anyone who wanted to see, his cock powering in and out of her, forcing her up to a place she didn’t know, somewhere she couldn’t recognize.

  But he gave it to her. With a cry, she opened—heart, soul, and body. Everything he wanted he could have, and he took it as if he had a right to it.

  But he gave himself. With one final deep thrust, he cried out—a full-bodied, lusty roar—and emptied his body inside her. At the same time, the first pulse of her orgasm began. He slid his hand down from her waist, took over from her, nudged her fingers aside, and tweaked her clit. That was all it took. She shook, cried out, and could do nothing but lean against him and trust that he would support her as she came and came and came.

  He waited, growled her name, and she clenched his cock, milking him of every drop, leaving nothing behind. She wanted everything he had to give, and he gave it to her.

  The glass felt cool against her forehead as he pulled out, releasing a flood of moisture. She glanced down, giving a shaky laugh as she saw the mess they’d made of the velvet footstool. “Guess we’d better add that to the bill.”

  He put his hand around her waist and lifted her down, as gentle now as he’d been vicious before. He turned her in his arms and smiled shakily. His hair hung over his eyes, dripping with sweat, as was the rest of his body. She hadn’t realized how much effort he’d put into it. His lungs were going like bellows, but he was smiling, and his eyes melted her with gratitude and love.

  She leaned into him, felt their bodies slick together, and planted a kiss on his lips. “That was amazing.”

  “More than amazing.”

  He took her hand and led her away, toward the door that presumably led to the bathroom. “Bath or shower?”

  “Both.” Her senses slowly returning, she smiled up at him.

  He caught her forearm and drew her close for another kiss. When his lips finally left hers, he’d persuaded her. “Was that good? Maybe want to try it again, this time in an ordinary hotel room with me fuzzing us? That way you’d have to trust me completely to keep us both safe.”

  “You know I will. That was the most incredible thing I’ve ever experienced.” She grimaced. “And it took my mind off what just happened completely. You brought us into the now. I didn’t know anything else. I’d have forgotten my name next.”

  “And I’d have reminded you because I’ll never forget it, Cerys.” He murmured her name against her cheek. “Cerys, Cerys. I’ll remember it for both of us.”

  “Shower first.”

  This time she led the way.

  Chapter Sixteen

  They showered, bathed, made love, ate, bathed again, and finally slept. Sometime later, they woke up, and he fed her, lovingly offering his neck for her to take. She did it neatly, wished he could do the same, but she knew he wouldn’t. Not at this stage in the operation. “We have to take care of you now,” he said, laying her gently against the sheets.

  “Why now? Oh yes, the baby.” She’d been so tired she’d almost forgotten. But not completely. Never completely.

  “Do you know how happy you’ve made me?”

  She shook her head. He leaned over her and gave her a sweet, lingering kiss. He was good at those. Really good. “Very happy. More than I can say. Tomorrow, or whenever we get up, I’m going in to the Department to make a will in your favor. You and the little one. You’ll never want for anything again.”

  She reached up and gripped his arms, her fingers curled over his bulging biceps. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  “Still, I want to do it.” In the dim light of the bedside lamp they’d left on, she saw the doubt in his eyes, felt it in his mind.

  “You’re an agent.” She had to accept what he was, what he did. “Can they train me?”

  “Do you want that?”

  She considered. Would she want it if he was out of the picture? Not that he would be. But yes, yes, she would. “If anyon
e had offered me the gig last year, before I knew you, I’d have said yes, I think. It might be scary, but there’s this feeling, you know, power or something.”

  “Justice.” He smiled, so soft and loving she knew she’d carry the mental picture with her to her dying day. “But you can’t until the baby’s born.”

  “There are other things I can learn. It’s not all physical, is it?” He shook his head in response. “And if I have to sit out the next nine months, so do you.”

  “That seems fair.” He frowned. “But only if—”

  “You’re going after Wilkinson.”

  He sighed. “I have to. I know him. I’ve learned him. I’m part of the core group. We’ve been chasing him for years, ever since he attacked Bryn’s wife and tried to kill her. Not that she was Bryn’s wife then. That came later. I’ve followed him across the globe, and now it’s time for the endgame. I can’t stop now.”

  She gave a wry grin. “I know. I wish I didn’t. He’s hurt a lot of people, hasn’t he?”

  He gave a jerky nod. “Killed them too.”

  “Don’t leave me out of this.”

  “I can’t work effectively, knowing you’re in danger.”

  “Where am I safest? In the Department—learning more techniques to take care of myself and our baby—or outside, depending on you to protect me?”

  He gave a harsh laugh and lifted his head, staring at the wall behind her before lowering his chin and gazing at her again. “Okay, you win. You’re right. Come in with me. Cristos can enroll you, and he will if I ask him. We cross boundaries, work all over the world.”

  “Like the CIA or MI6?”

  He cupped her cheek, stroked his thumb over her skin. “Except we don’t owe loyalty to any one country. Agents are usually citizens of one country or another, but that’s different. It’s more like Interpol, in that it’s a cross-frontiers organization. You work for the Department. You go where you’re needed, do what’s wanted. Our primary loyalty is to other Talents, wherever they are.”

  “That sounds good to me.”

  Dawn was filtering across the sky now, and since they hadn’t bothered closing the curtains, a dim light began to creep through the room. She lost her powers, her fangs tucking themselves away for another day. She watched as the same thing happened to him. But he still looked immensely powerful to her, a haven and her man. Hers.

  “Always,” he murmured. She spread her hand over his chest, feeling those solid slabs of muscle.

  “I guess we’d better get a good day’s sleep.”

  “That’s another thing,” he told her. He reached across her for the remote, and she heard the curtains swish across the windows, but she didn’t bother to look. The increasing depth of darkness told her the drapes were thick, probably with blackouts. “While this operation is on and the danger has increased, Cristos is likely to order us to live by night. It will increase our safety and maximize our effectiveness. My effectiveness,” he reminded her.

  “You’re talking to a girl who spent most of her adult life on night shift,” she murmured, cuddling up close.

  *

  As night began to curl its rosy tendrils around the skyscrapers, the car arrived to take Rhodri and Cerys to work. She felt miles better. A long sleep, longer bouts of lovemaking, and some good food—as well as blood from Kai—had improved her condition back to normal. Rhodri looked merely hot instead of scorching, having taken much the same route to recovery. The recuperative powers of Talents put them back on form, and now all she wanted was to stop Wilkinson making any more money off the backs of Talents.

  But there was one more shock left in store for her.

  In an ordinary-looking conference room with a black ash table, blue upholstered chairs, and a wood floor, she met the others in the core team. She’d met most of them before. The dragon Domenici, lounging in a chair too small for him, the mermen, grim-faced Bryn and smiling Kai, who sat together, exuding an air of easy familiarity. Cerys remembered Kai telling her he’d had a different relationship before his current partners and wondered if one of them could have been Bryn. She couldn’t imagine it, and then she could, and the breath left her body as a vision of the dark merman and the silver-haired one flashed before her, their bodies entwined, tails curled around each other, kissing in the depths of the ocean, lazy bubbles rising to break on the surface far above.

  No, oh no. Not here.

  Cristos sat in, and she found him as intimidating in his way as Will Grady. Not as massively built, but with the same kind of charisma and air of effortless command, as if he didn’t know he was doing it.

  Fabrice sat at his side, not in a business suit this time, but a pair of khakis and a polo shirt. Rhodri had told her he worked in advertising, and she couldn’t think of a better career for a persuasive Sorcerer.

  One person was absent. Esti. Cristos explained that. “Esti is still undercover now. She’s persuaded Wilkinson that she’s on his side, but we officially know about her, so she can’t come back until the job’s done. It was touch and go, getting him to trust her even that far. Worse to tell him she’d still be of use.” His fine mouth firmed. “She couldn’t use her Talent on him—he’d have known—so she had to use other methods.”

  Cerys found she didn’t want to know exactly what Esti had done to keep her position in Wilkinson’s organization.

  Cristos flicked a glance at her and continued to talk. “We can’t leave her there too long. Wilkinson will sniff her out eventually.”

  Something released inside Cerys. Not that she had a particular fondness for Esti, but she’d sensed that the Sorcerer was on the level, the type of person who didn’t lie. If Esti had lied to her all along, she couldn’t have trusted her judgment any more. She’d let the woman deep inside her, and who knew what she might have planted?

  “They’ve moved the Chicago unit, obviously. Cleared out the night you escaped and sent people to pack the valuables later. We were already there, of course, but the people were only sent to pack and put the items in storage. They had no idea where the unit had moved to. Thanks to Rhodri, we have him marked now.”

  She shot a glance at Rhodri. Had he been holding out on her? He grimaced. “I did my best. I managed to get something under his skin, that nanomarker you sent me.” He glanced around. “New tech. It barely breaks the skin, but it works its way deep into the system. A hell of a thing. It should take him a while to track it down once he realizes he has something. Esti’s bug is working fine. Listen, I don’t want Cerys put in danger. She’s a civilian, but she wants to train.”

  “Is there something I can do?”

  Bryn nodded. “We can always use someone to monitor. We need eyes here, people who can locate plans of buildings, of the terrain, and patch it through.”

  She wasn’t sure about that, never having operated anything more complicated than a laptop. “I’ll do anything I can. I can’t just wait.”

  “Cerys is deeply involved in this case,” Cristos put in. “We discovered something recently, or rather, Will did in London.” His expression softened, his eyes losing their steely look. If anything, that made him scarier. But Cerys met his gaze and waited. “Wilkinson, or one of his agents, found out about you years ago. Around five years ago, to be exact. They watched and waited. Your job made it easier to put people in place.” Yes, she could see that, with the peripatetic staff that Dave had employed. Thinking of Dave reminded her she had a score to settle with Wilkinson too. From what Rhodri had told her, everyone in this room had a personal grudge against him. “So some of them were watching me?”

  Cristos nodded. “And one of them killed the manager of the bar. We think whoever killed him did it rather than let him alert you that you were being watched. Those men who attacked you the night Rhodri found you? They were sent to bring you in. One ingested enough drugs to bring you down, or so they thought, and that was the one that died.”

  Tears sprang to her eyes. “Dave was like a big brother. He looked after me, gave me a job. He wasn’t the hug
ging type, but he did take care of me.”

  Cristos nodded. “That’s often the worst part of operations like this. They call it collateral damage. I call it a tragedy. We will stop Wilkinson, and make no mistake, he will die. Eventually. I want to strip him first, get the locations of all his laboratories, and records of his discoveries. Before I leave you to plan your attack, one more thing. I have another agent working for Wilkinson as a tech. It’s taken nearly a year to get her in place. Her job is to disable all the computer self-destruct mechanisms. I want the hard drives of all his computers almost as much as I want the man himself.” He got to his feet. “Let me know what you’re planning, and I’ll provide backup for you and anything else you need.” He paused at the door. “But make it fast. I want him captured, and I want that operation closed down. We’ve lost too many people already. I don’t want to lose anybody else.”

  *

  Rhodri would far rather have gone into this place, taken Geoffrey fucking Wilkinson by the throat, and throttled him slowly, for Cerys, and for what he’d done to her, but he had to be fair. He wasn’t the only person who wanted to do that. Wilkinson had done his best to kill Bryn’s wife, Crystal, and Kai’s spouses. He’d imprisoned Domenici and his wife, Nicole, who, with Crystal, was currently ensconced in a room near the one he occupied with Cerys, under close guard for their own safety. Tyler, Kai’s husband, had taken their wife, Zoe, to a safe location. None of them liked the disruption, but Wilkinson had to know they were closing in on him, and mad dogs were even more vicious when cornered.

  This was the endgame. It had to be. His only consolation was that he’d left Cerys in safety, watching from the monitors, directing the teams when they needed to know which way to go. While they didn’t have a plan of this building, they could trace Talents once the primary team had found and closed the jamming devices.

  So he had to do that. Find the control center, secure the computers, and close the jamming devices. Easy. He glanced at Kai. His spouses wouldn’t recognize him now. His hair was tied tightly back, he wore all black—like Rhodri—and he had knives strapped to his hips. The firearm he preferred wasn’t big, but it would do the job.