by Nana Malone
The Assassin
in 5F
Nana Malone
Copyright © 2021 by Nana Malone
Published by Rakuten Kobo Inc. as Kobo Originals
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover photography by Brandon Sosa Photography
Cover design by Qamber Design & Media
Production by Bright Wing Media
All rights reserved. For information about permissions to reproduce this book address Rakuten Kobo, 1-135 Liberty Street, Toronto, Ontario, M6K 1A7.
ISBN 9781774533628
Website: www.kobo.com/originals
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
More By Nana Malone
Landmarks
Cover
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Body Matter
Chapter 1
Lyra
I had shot him.
My hands were slick with sweat, and I trembled as I sat in the darkness and waited.
I’d done it. Followed orders.
Center mass, point-blank, I had shot Marcus Black or whoever the hell he really was.
The man that I thought I'd been falling in love with wasn't real. He was a phantom. Just like the last man I’d thought I was falling in love with.
You know what they say; if you meet assholes all day, you're the asshole.
I'd fucked up. Again. God, what the hell was wrong with me?
You clearly have a type.
I must. Or, given what had happened, I was just a moron. Jesus.
Deep down inside, a small voice spoke up. Maybe he was wearing Kevlar. At The Firm, we had this specially calibrated, ultrathin Kevlar that we wore on missions. It could stop a bullet. It would hurt, but it could stop a bullet.
Which was why I was sitting in the dark on Marcus's couch in his apartment with my gun in my hand. Because he was coming back. He wasn’t dead. If I’d shot him the way I’d been trained, he'd be down. But I hadn’t. I’d left him an opening. But surely, he must know not to come back. Hell, if he'd shot me, there was no way I would be going home.
Unless you wanted payback.
And that was part of the reason I was there. I was worried. He knew where I lived, knew my routine. He could turn up at my job and take us all out with sniper fire from a roof somewhere.
I had to make sure he was dead.
Don’t lie. That’s not why you’re here.
I didn't want to think about that. The real reason.
My stomach roiled and folded in on itself over and over again as I worried and waited. If he was interested in retribution, he could blow my cover. He knew all the ways to hurt me. He obviously was not the man I’d thought he was.
And you aren’t the damsel in distress he thought you were.
I knew if I was smart I’d file an exposure report and be moved. He’d never find me. But instead, there I was, waiting in his apartment for him to return from the dead.
You really can pick them, can’t you?
I didn’t even know what I was doing. There’d be hell to pay when Roz found out he wasn’t dead, and I’d had plenty of time to tell her my suspicions during the debriefing. Sure, we'd gotten the girl home. Made sure she was safe. Everything we're supposed to do. In that two-hour span of returning to headquarters, debriefing, and returning our weapons, I hadn't said a word.
Not once had I been like, Hey, remember that guy you suggested I date? Turns out he is an Exodus agent and I shot him. Unfortunately, I'm worried that he is still alive, but I'm also worried he's not alive because I actually care about him like a dumbass.
Fuck.
I ran a hand over my face, trying to calm the adrenaline. As high as it was spiking now, I knew that when it crashed, I would pass out and be vulnerable. And that wasn't something I could allow.
All you can do is wait.
My phone rang, and I answered it quickly, keeping my voice low. “Yeah.”
“Are you okay?”
I breathed a relieved sigh. “Hey, Addie. Yeah, I'm fine.”
“Are you sure? Listen, I wanted to talk to you. Can you get on a secure line?”
My secure line was in my apartment. “Um, not yet. There’s something I have to take care of.”
“Oh, enough said. You had to get some? Anything to ease that adrenaline, huh?”
I swallowed hard and lied through my teeth. “Yeah, you know me. Can I call you back?”
“You know what? Forget about it. Let's talk tomorrow morning, yeah?”
“Yeah. You're okay, right, Addie?” She was usually so together that I didn’t have to worry about her, but she seemed off.
“Yeah, I’m just worried about the influx of Exodus agents. Something is going on.”
“I agree. There’s something we’re not seeing.”
“Let’s talk about it later, but we need to figure that out.”
Before we hung up, I asked the one question I’d missed during the debriefing. “How did we get the girl by the way?”
I could almost hear the smile in her voice. “I tased the fuck out of one of those Exodus agents. You should have seen him. He flopped around like a sausage.”
“Jesus, Addie.”
She just laughed. “What? It was a shame, too. He was built just like I like them. Tall, muscular, probably great in the sack. But Exodus, so yeah, can't hit that. I can’t bone the enemy.”
I coughed a laugh, trying to hide my misery. “Absolutely not.”
Her words were soft. “Are you okay? You sound off.”
“Oh, you know, just waiting for Marcus.”
“All right. I'll see you later, okay?”
“Night, Addie.”
I hung up my phone and leaned my head back. I was in deep shit. If I couldn't even tell Addie what the hell was going on, I was truly, completely alone.
* * *
Marcus
Two nights after getting shot by Lyra, I watched her sit in my flat.
She shot me. That little bitch.
I couldn't believe it. After everything we’d done together, Lyra fucking shot me.
Did you think she wouldn’t?
The only thing I could do about it was to bring her in.
Stop lying. You're not bringing her in.
I shoved down that bite of truth. I wasn't the only one on the team who had taken a hit. Someone had tased the fuck out of Rhodes. Procedure was to call it in, which I’d done. But I’d broken protocol when I hadn’t divulged that I knew my shooter. She'd shot me with my own gun, which was humiliating enough in all honesty. But Rhodes had been tased. Why the fuck were they using Tasers? The agent who tased him could have easily shot him and taken him out permanently if she’d had a gun.
Something was not right, and I was going to find out why.
I'd been watching Lyra. She was smart. She'd gone to my flat. As far as I could tell, she was staying indefinitely. I'd been watching the cameras I had planted in the smoke detector and the television.
I thought
maybe she'd give up when I didn’t turn up the first night, but the next evening, as soon as work was over, she'd gone home to her own apartment, showered, changed, grabbed her weapon, and went back to mine. I knew that, because while she'd been at work, I'd planted cameras in her apartment too.
Why was she waiting after she'd shot me?
Maybe she knows that you're alive.
God, she'd shot me point-blank, center mass. If that didn't scream that the woman had no intention of me living, then I’d be damned.
She knows you're an Exodus agent, so she assumed that you were wearing protective gear.
My brain wanted to believe that she'd taken steps to protect me, but why shoot me in the first place? Yeah sure, she had orders to follow, but she didn't need to shoot me.
So what are you going to do about it?
I didn’t know the answer to that yet. How long would she wait for me?
Rhodes had wanted to know why I was staying in the secondary safe house across the street, and I had told him that I felt like I was being watched. It was the only explanation I could give. I had been cleared right away for duty, but the doc had me riding a desk until I could breathe without stress again. All thanks to fucking Lyra.
I didn't want my place swept. I didn’t want anyone but me finding Lyra there. So I told Rhodes it was clean. I couldn't tell him the real reason because then the team would swarm around her. There would be questions about how she knew who I was.
I had those questions as well. I had important things to ask her. Like, was any of this real?
For forty-five minutes, I watched as she checked the fridge, looked for a television show, and then watched out the window. But she wasn’t scared.
Too bad little girl, you should be scared.
As she hummed to herself, I eased out of the shadows, carefully. Aware of the reflection on my windows.
Ten feet.
I watched her. Her curls bounced as she hummed to herself. I remembered the feel of them. The smell of her shampoo, the way she would have to twist her hair at night.
Her hair hadn't been curly two nights ago. She'd worn it straight. Did she straighten her hair for missions?
And then it hit me. The woman on the beach at Stellan Tusk’s party. There was a reason I’d been drawn to her. It had been Lyra.
The Firm was all over this.
Five feet. Four feet. Three—
Before I knew what was happening, Lyra jumped up from the chair, turned around, and delivered me a thrusting sidekick that grazed my side as I was already deflecting it.
“Ah, glad to see you're still in fine form,” I groaned.
Her eyes went wide as they roamed over my body. “You're fucking alive?”
“No thanks to you. I have to say, love, I'm really disappointed. First, that you shot me, which was utter bollocks, by the way. But then you somehow managed to not kill me.”
She strategically moved closer to the kitchen, putting space between us.
“If I wanted you dead, you'd be dead. You seem to forget that we're trained for a bullet to the head.”
I swallowed hard. She was trained for a bullet to the head, as was I. So why hadn't she done that?
“You and I are going to have a conversation about the people you work for and just how long you have been following me.”
Her brows lifted. “Me, following you? Oh, that is such bullshit, and you know it. You're the one who targeted me.”
I frowned. Something pricked at the back of my brain, but I ignored it. Now was not the time to get sentimental or start looking for a reason to believe her.
I pulled my weapon out of my back holster.
She smiled. “Oh, are you going to shoot me now? No silencer? Geez, you're really living on the wild side. One sound of that gunshot, and people would come running. And I don't think you’ll be moving too fast. How's the chest?”
My voice came out as a growl. “Thanks to you, now I can't go on field duty for a minute.”
“I could say I was sorry, but I'm not. You're a liar.”
We circled each other. “Oh, really? That's ironic coming from you.”
“You lied to me.”
“We both lied to each other, sweetheart. And guess what? When we finally dropped the pretense, we actually connected.”
She rolled her eyes. “As if.”
“So you’re telling me you didn’t see me differently after we fought Prochenko?”
She sniffed. “So you do know who he is.”
I grinned at her. “Of course, I do. Exodus has been after Victus for years.”
“Don’t you mean working with them?”
My brow furrowed. “What the fuck are you on about?”
She shook her head. “Everyone knows Exodus agents started working with the terrorists they once fought shortly after they split from The Firm.”
I coughed out a laugh then. “Oh, really? Everyone knows that? What pack of lies are they feeding you over there, love?”
And then she did the unexpected; she lunged her whole body at me. I had to stumble to catch her, because she was right, I wasn't exactly in fighting shape at the moment. My shoulder hurt like a son of a bitch. I spun her around, ducked her punch, grabbed her arm, and turned her around to face the wall.
She heaved in front of me, her body quaking. And then her foot came down on my instep. I shifted my stance and held her hands over her head. I braced her in position with my hips while I patted her down for weapons. “No, you don’t, you naughty thing.”
I was too busy thinking about the way she was grinding her hips against mine, and I was so distracted I missed her sweeping leg. We tumbled to the ground with her on top of me. Despite the pain in my chest, I ground out. “Are we still pretending you wanted me dead?”
With ease, I rolled us over and settled my hips between hers.
She struggled in my grip, and I loosened my hold so that I wouldn’t hurt her, but I didn’t let her up. She narrowed her gaze then bucked her hips, one side higher than the other, rolling us back so that she was on top again. “I meant it when I shot you.” Her voice was whisper soft.
“Liar.” I lay beneath her for a moment, challenging her with my gaze. “Say you wanted me dead. Lie to me again while I can feel just how much you want me.”
“I hate you,” she whispered.
“I know.”
She writhed against me like a wild cat, all fury and vengeance.
I tried to buck her, but she gripped and held on tight with her thighs.
I tried not to think of the last time she'd been on top of me just like this. The last time her hips had bucked on pleasurable terms.
The two of us rolled around the floor like that, each vying for the upper hand. I didn't want to hurt her. I outweighed her by fifty pounds, easy.
“Fuck, Lyra. Stop it. You're going to hurt—”
And then she delivered an elbow right between my neck and shoulder, and I yowled. “Goddamn it.”
She scrambled away, trying to get to her feet.
I caught her foot and pulled her down under me. “Goddamn it, you will listen to me.”
When I held both of her hands at the wrists in one of mine and placed my other one on her throat, she glowered up at me. “Fuck. You.”
“We've already been there, remember?”
That caused more bucking. But without the use of her hands, it was harder for her to work herself free.
“Listen to me. Something is going on. You could have shot me properly two nights ago, using your training, but you didn't. And you were there at Stellan Tusk’s party. You were the one on the beach.”
She wiggled under me. She opened her mouth, presumably to tell me to go fuck myself again, but then her gaze flickered to mine. “I hate you,” she repeated.
“No, you don't. For what it's worth, I don't hate you either. I shouldn't trust you, but I don't hate you. All you have to do is listen to me, Lyra.”
And then the unthinkable happened. The more she wiggled and buck
ed, the more my cock thickened.
Her eyes went wide, and then her fucking pupils dilated.
I leaned down to growl at her. “Turning me on isn't going to end this conversation. We are going to talk.”
“Oh yeah, you feel really eager to talk.”
She lifted her hips again, and this time I groaned as her sweet heat came in contact with my rigid cock. “Little girl, if you keep playing with fire, it's not going to end well.”
“Fuck you.”
I dropped my head then and sealed my lips to hers as I groaned into her mouth. All the pain and anger from that night poured out of the both of us, throwing a large part of it over our bodies and lighting us both on fire.
Chapter 2
Lyra
What was I doing?
My libido piped up immediately. What you're doing is getting what you want.
My hips were splayed wide open beneath Marcus as my tongue slid over his. He tasted of coffee and seriously bad decisions. And he still contained my wrists in his one hand. He was on top, and he was definitely in charge.
I wanted to break the kiss, to pull away. I wanted to stop, to make it end, but I couldn't. Every time I started to draw away, he would lick into my mouth just so and make this deep growling sound in the back of his throat. And I would be sucked in again.
Oh yeah. Marcus Black was definitely in charge.
And look, judge me all you want, but the moment he started moving his hips, I couldn't help but match his strokes. The zing of electricity that pounded through my body like a live wire was just too good. So damn good. And before I knew it, I was moving my body just how I needed, and suddenly, I had use of my hands. I should have been using them to hit him, push him off, get away. But instead, I slid my fingers into his hair and tugged. Bringing him closer, practically crowding me and shutting out all the light so that all I could see was him. He had taken over my world both physically and mentally.
It was him who finally dragged his lips away from mine. “Lyra. I need you.”
This was where I should have shaken my head and told him to stop, where I should have said this is a bad idea. I don't want this. I don't love you. You're a liar and I hate you.