Play Nice

by Gemma Halliday

  He nodded. “I am.” He paused. “As are you.”

  She narrowed her eyes at him. “Are you talking about the car wreck in Kosovo or the attack on the hotel last night?”

  He grinned again. “What makes you think I was behind that?”

  “The fact that you didn’t just ask ‘what attack.’”

  He laughed out loud, his voice rumbling off the walls. “Very well done. All right, I admit, I had a hand in that. But you misunderstand my intention, Anya.”

  “Anna,” she said. “It’s Anna now.”

  He cocked his head at her, then the corners of his mouth tugged upward in a patronizing grin. He reached one hand out and trailed the back of his knuckles down her cheek. “Oh, dragi, you will always be Anya to me.”

  His hands were rough, cold, the contact making her shiver.

  “What do you want?” she asked. “Why am I here?”

  “You’re here because I didn’t want Shelli here to shoot you.” Petrovich sent the redhead a look that was clearly laced with reproach. But Shelli didn’t answer, a slight sneer of her upper lip her only response.

  “You didn’t want Shelli to shoot me, yet you hired men to kill me?”

  Petrovich shook his head. “No, no. You misunderstand. I never wanted you dead. I wanted to get your attention.”

  She raised an eyebrow at him. “Well, you have it.”

  He sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Right. Enough with pleasantries. Down to business it is. I did hire men to attack your shelter. But not to kill you. I had you attacked because I needed to see you in action again. I needed to know if you had really lost all that I’d taught you, or if it was just buried behind a veil of civility.”

  She clenched her jaw. “It was a test?”

  “If you want to call it that.”

  “So did I pass?”

  He grinned. “You’re alive, aren’t you?”

  “And if I had failed?”

  He shrugged. “I had faith you would not fail.”

  A lie. No one would have set up such an attack if he’d really had any sort of faith.

  “Why test me? Why did you need to know?”

  He leaned forward, clenching his hands in his lap. “I have a job for you, Anya.”

  She let out a bark of laughter. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  “I am not joking.”

  And by the hard look on his face, she could tell he was not.

  “I don’t do those kinds of jobs anymore,” Anna said, a mixture of dread and curiosity brewing.

  Petrovich ignore her protest. “I work in the private sector now,” he explained. “I have a small crew, but most are new. American military–trained. Not the same level of discipline we had back home.”

  Home. She had never thought of the KOS training compounds as home. In fact, as far back as she could remember, nowhere had ever felt like home. Funny that he should use that word.

  “At home, we were single-minded,” he continued. “We had discipline, drive, the greater good in our hearts. My crew, they are good, don’t get me wrong. But not as good as you.”

  “Clearly,” she said, surprised to find her voice shaking. “Or I wouldn’t be here.”

  He grinned, showing off two rows of small, yellow teeth. “Yes.” He was pleased she understood. “I need the best. I want you back, Anya. I want you to come work for me.”

  Anna looked from him to Shelli. The other woman’s face was still stone. Clearly she worked for him. Clearly she was one of the American trained people he thought so little of. Anna wondered how Shelli felt about that.

  “You worked for him all along?” Anna asked, addressing Shelli.

  The redhead didn’t acknowledge her, kept her eyes straight ahead as if Anna hadn’t spoken.

  “How did you find me?”

  Petrovich’s eye hardened at this.

  “I’m not the only person who knows where you are. You have gotten sloppy, Anya.”

  Dade. Petrovich knew about Dade.

  “That man you were with at the hotel, he’s no friend, dragi.”

  “I know. He’s been hired to kill me,” she stated matter-of-factly.

  Which clearly surprised Goren, his poker face slipping for a split second. Good, it gave her satisfaction that he didn’t know everything about her before she did.

  “So you know who he is?”

  “Yes,” she said, even though that was only half true. She knew what his mission was. Who he really was was a gray area at the moment. As much as whose side he was on.

  She’d known men like Dade. He might have been willing to work with her to find Petrovich, but she knew he wasn’t in this to do her any favors. He had his own agenda, his own reasons for being here. And his own job to finish.

  That is, if she got out of here.

  Anna wiggled her wrists, testing the bonds. They were tight enough to cut into her skin. No way was she going to wriggle out of them. Whatever she did, she was going to have to do without the use of two independent hands.

  She let her fingers explore as far as they could reach, coming up against the metal rungs of the chair behind her. Nothing she could use as a weapon, nothing sharp enough to cut the plastic ties at her wrists. She had to stall.

  She looked at Shelli again.

  “So you work for him now?” she asked. “You were his agent this whole time?”

  Shelli blinked but kept her eyes straight ahead.

  “You lied to me about everything. You tricked me. You were undercover, spying on me this whole time.”

  Nothing. No reaction.

  “Spying on me just so he could recruit me to replace you?”

  Shelli’s head snapped toward her that time, eyes dark, nostrils flared. Anna had hit a nerve. Good.

  “That’s enough,” Petrovich said. Though he was grinning again. Clearly he was enjoying the battle for teacher’s pet going on between his pupils.

  Shelli squared her jaw and turned her face away from Anna again. Though Anna noticed the barely contained contempt made her chest rise and fall a little higher with each breath.

  “Anya, you never give up, do you?” Petrovich asked.

  “You should know. You trained me.”

  “Yes, I did.” He nodded. “And I’ll tell you, I didn’t believe it when they told me you were still alive. ‘That can’t be,’ I said. ‘Anya—my Anya—would never betray me like that.’”

  “Betray you?” she couldn’t help choking out. “You used me.”

  “I trained you,” he shot back, fire flashing behind his eyes, breaking his cucumber-cool exterior for a moment. “I taught you everything you know. And you left me.”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” she said softly. Which she knew was the truth. She’d been an instrument of a government losing its power, slowly slipping toward a bloody dissolution. Had she stayed, she would have outlived her usefulness in a matter of months, maybe weeks. She’d been living on borrowed time, if what you called her life then was living at all.

  “You lied to me,” Petrovich spit out. “I grieved for you. Thought you were dead. And then, what do I find? You’re living the high life in San Francisco.”

  It was hardly the high life, but she didn’t argue the point.

  “What do you want, Petrovich?” she asked instead.

  He took in a deep breath, reining in the anger he obviously still felt toward her. “I want you back.”

  “Back?”

  “Working under me again. I trained you, honed your skills. You owe me the benefit of them now.”

  “I owe you nothing,” she stated flatly.

  But he ignored her. “I have a job.”

  “A job,” she said. “You mean murder.”

  He gave her a hard look. “You know that’s not a nice word.”

  “Killing people isn’t very nice work.”

  “People like you and I provide a service to those who are in need. We solve problems.”

  “No,” Anna corrected. “People like you provide thi
s service. I wash dogs. I don’t kill people.”

  Anymore.

  But she shoved that thought down.

  “My dragi, you are not in a position to take a moral high ground now, are you?” he asked, gesturing to her bound hands.

  “There is no way I will go down that path again,” she said vehemently.

  “You don’t have much choice.”

  “You can’t make me pull the trigger.”

  Petrovich nodded. “True. But the alternative hurts my heart.”

  “The alternative?” she asked. Even though she knew. She knew he was alive, knew where he was, knew about Shelli and his “private service” organization. No way was that the kind of information he would let her walk out of here with.

  “You know the alternative. I can’t have you working against me, now can I, Anya?”

  “Against you?” she sputtered. “I’m not working at all. I wash dogs. I put them up for adoption on the Internet. I am not working anywhere.”

  Petrovich cocked his head to the side and gave her a sad smile. “Anya. Stop fooling yourself. We both know who you are. What you do. You can hide, you can…” his hands waved in the air, as he searched for the right translation … “playact at this nice life you have been cultivating. But we both know that you don’t know how to play nice. There is no escaping your past. No pretending you are anything less than you are. It’s in you. You are who you are, Anya.”

  She felt a lump form in her throat. He was voicing every fear she’d harbored for the last fifteen years. She was who she was. There was no escaping her nature. No escaping the fact that every instinct she had was honed for one purpose.

  She could run, she could hide, she could pretend to start over. But the truth was inside her. This was her life. And, as she stared into his dark, deadly eyes, she realized he was right.

  She would always be Anya.

  “What’s the job?” she asked quietly.

  He grinned. “That’s my girl.” She detected a slight shift in Shelli’s demeanor across the room, but the woman didn’t say anything. And Anna didn’t dare take her attention off Petrovich now.

  “Senator Jonathan Braxton,” he said. “You know who he is?”

  Anna nodded. She knew of him, as did anyone with a television lately. A senator from California, he was one of the two front-runners for the Republican presidential nomination. He’d been either on the news or engaging in televised debates every night of the week. “I know the name,” she answered.

  “One of his platforms,” Petrovich went on, “is health insurance reform. He says too little of the money is going to the healthcare providers and too much to the insurance companies. As you can imagine, this doesn’t make many insurance executives happy. Some executives, in particular, with very deep pockets, who are willing to do anything it takes to make sure that Braxton and his reformation plan disappear as quickly as possible.”

  Ann nodded. “So, you want me to kill the senator.”

  “I want you to take care of the problem.”

  “By killing him.”

  Petrovich nodded.

  The words hung heavy in the room. Anna grasped her fingers tighter around the chair rails behind her.

  “When?” she asked.

  “I have a time and a place in mind, but those are details we can discuss at a later time.”

  “I’d like to discuss them now.”

  Petrovich smiled. “When did you become so demanding, Anya?”

  She shifted her weight forward toward the edge of the chair. “There’s a lot that’s changed about me.”

  He nodded. “Yes. I can see that.”

  “But you’re right about one thing,” she continued. “There is no escaping my past, is there?”

  He shook his head slowly. “No. There is not.”

  “Anya will never really be dead.”

  Again he shook his head, agreeing with her.

  “I can’t change that fact.”

  He watched her, his eyes assessing, wondering, she could tell, where she was going with this.

  She tightened her fingers around the highest chair rung, shifted her weight onto the balls of her feet.

  “The past is what it is, and all I can change now is the future,” she said.

  Petrovich’s smile was a thing of the past, his features stony. “What are you saying, Anya?”

  “What I’m saying is that in the future, neither Anna nor Anya will ever come work for you again.”

  His jaw tightened, accentuating the loose flesh the years had put there. “This was not the outcome I had hoped for.”

  “Me neither,” Anna said. Then she grabbed the chair rung with both hands, shifted her weight to her feet, and quickly swiveled to the right, whacking Petrovich in the side of the head with the chair.

  He fell to the side, hitting the floor, stunned momentarily.

  Unfortunately, Shelli was not. She sprang into action, jumping at Anna, body slamming her full force, knocking the chair from Anna’s hands and both of them to the ground.

  Anna pulled both knees up in a tight fetal position, then shoved them at Shelli, catching her squarely in the chest. Shelli hit the edge of the desk, grunting as the corner bit into her back, but recovered quickly, grabbing Anna by the armpits and hauling her up to her feet. Anna spun right, breaking from Shelli’s grasp and coming around with a roundhouse kick to her head. The force threw Shelli against the wall, her head making a loud thud as it hit the concrete.

  Anna lunged forward, toward the desk. And her gun. She was a foot away when she felt Shelli’s arms on her again, spinning her around.

  Anna whipped around to face her, quickly feeling the force of Shelli’s fist connecting with her jaw. Anna’s head twisted left, her body crumpling on the floor before she could stop herself. Trying to shake off the swaying room, she struggled to her feet.

  Shelli charged at her again, her mouth set in a grim line of determination.

  Without the use of her hands, Anna’s balance was sorely off. As Shelli lunged forward, Anna knew she didn’t stand a chance against the full force of the woman’s weight coming squarely at her. Anna planted both feet shoulder width apart, then pushed off to the left at the last minute, letting Shelli’s body glance off her shoulder. Anna used the momentum to spin around, catching Shelli square in the back with another kick.

  Shelli fell forward onto the ground, hands in front of her to catch her fall. Without missing a beat, she kicked backward, sweeping at Anna’s feet, knocking them clear out from under her.

  Anna fell backwards, landing with a jarring thud on her butt. Her teeth clacked together, and she bit her tongue, tasting blood in her mouth.

  She quickly rolled over onto her stomach, pulling her legs up under her like an inchworm and leaping to her feet.

  Only to face the barrel of Petrovich’s gun.

  “Enough,” he yelled.

  Shelli stood behind him, panting, blood trickling from a cut at the corner of her mouth. She was glaring daggers at Anna, clearly wishing Petrovich had stayed out of it and given Shelli the satisfaction of ending Anna herself. Gone was any trace of the woman Anna had shared so many easy moments with in the past months. The hatred in her eyes was clear as day, cutting through the room. Anna wondered if Shelli hadn’t been secretly hating her this much the entire time. What it must have taken out of her to sit there and pretend at being friends, waiting for the word, waiting until her employer told her she could finally act on that resentment at never being good enough to fill Anna’s role in Petrovich’s eyes.

  Shelli was close to Anna’s age, maybe a couple years younger. At what age had Petrovich started grooming her? Did she see him as the father figure Anna once had? As her protector, only to one day be here—his victim, at his mercy, no more protected by his brand of love than the people he had trained her to kill. It was different here, he had said. Compliance not a given, no undying loyalty and no promise of a swift death if orders were not obeyed to the letter. Shelli could never be Anna, and
she knew it.

  And she hated Anna for it.

  “I’m disappointed in you, Anya.”

  Anna turned her attention back to Petrovich.

  He, on the other hand, showed no emotions. Whatever he had felt for her a moment ago—or a lifetime ago—he felt nothing now.

  Numb. Just go numb, dragi.

  “I know,” she said quietly.

  “You know the penalty for traitors.”

  She nodded. From the time she came to live with him, he had drilled her fate into her. She’d been too young then to realize that traitors were everywhere. When governments changed hands daily, there was no such thing as loyalty, only survival.

  Petrovich cocked his head to the side. “I am sorry, Anya.” But again his eyes held no emotion as his finger tightened on the trigger. Maybe he was incapable of showing emotion. Maybe he really was numb.

  Anna steeled herself for the sharp fiery sensation that she knew accompanied his bullet. She resisted the urge to shut her eyes, forcing herself to face her fate head on.

  A loud shot splintered the dusty air inside the warehouse. Anna started, expecting to feel pain accompany it. But none came.

  Instead, the office window shattered, and she watched the gun drop from Petrovich’s hand, sliding across the floor under one of the filing cabinets, as blood gushed from a wound at his wrist. Someone had shot him before he’d had a chance to pull the trigger on Anna.

  She whipped her head around.

  Dade.

  CHAPTER 16

  Anna didn’t waste a second. As Shelli ducked down behind the desk, taking cover from the gunfire, Anna spun around, throwing herself backward until her fingers connected with her gun on the desk. She grabbed it, then quickly wiggled her arms low over her butt, slipping her legs down through the opening. Not an easy task when they were bound together, but, oddly enough, not the first time she’d ever done it either. She shifted, holding the Glock in her hands, straight-armed in front of her, pointed at Petrovich.

  He was cradling his injured hand in the other, his eyes trained on Anna, as if wondering just how she had pulled that trick off.

  “You have a partner?”