by Nana Malone
And this wasn't some case of him owning me in some patriarchal kind of way, but more along the lines that we owned each other. I'd been just as desperate as he was. And that feeling, when he first sank deep as he bit my bottom lip, I would never feel that feeling again. Relief, rightness, soul-aching tenderness, and fury all rolled into one.
Fury because how dare he lie to me. How dare he make me believe he cared about me and then turn out to be someone I didn't know at all. And then how dare he insist that he cared about me and that his lies were a necessity.
You told the same lies.
And that’s what was making it so hard for me to hang onto my fury. I had lied to him too. I had looked him in the eye and deceived him. That was the job. But for once I wondered, where did the job end and Lyra begin?
So now, I throbbed for him, ached for him in a way that I had no business feeling. Like his cock had left an echo inside me, staking its claim and making sure everyone knew that it had taken up residence and nobody else would ever be able to fill its place. And there was also that place in my heart that no matter how many times I tried to board it up, it still ached and pinched in want of its freedom. And wanted to be free to care about him, even though he was telling me things I couldn't believe. Even though I thought he was still lying to me.
He wasn’t right. There was no way he could be right.
How could everything I'd been told about my life be a lie? And worse, how could he be so great? After all, we'd all been told what Exodus agents were like. We'd been told about their cruelty, their manipulation. That we had better shoot first and ask questions later if we encountered one of them.
But he dared to challenge everything I'd been taught. And I wanted to just believe that he was lying, but I couldn’t. He could have killed me, but he didn’t. He could have reported me, and he hadn't.
It's all part of the manipulation.
Or was it?
There was one way to find out. All I had to do was verify whether or not he'd been telling me the truth. I could walk into records and just look up the information. But I told myself I wasn't going to do that because he was obviously lying. That’s what Exodus agents did. They were liars.
But so are you. Wouldn't you like to know the truth?
So I spent the night tossing and turning, thinking about Marcus, his hands, his mouth, his dick, and most importantly, his words. By the time I got ready for work, I wanted to exorcise him from my brain, and there was only one way to do that.
So now, like a fool, I was doing the one thing I’d told myself I wouldn't do last night.
I knew what I was doing was dangerous. It was a bad idea. It was all the things you’re taught not to do in Espionage 101. Don't spy on your own team. And if you do spy on your own team, don't get caught. But there I was in the archives, looking through things I had no business looking through.
I didn’t want to believe Marcus. I was determined to prove him wrong.
Are you sure about that?
I had security clearance for the records room. It was where new agents learned about past missions. Learned the players and the history. But some portions of the records were not entirely accessible, and that was where I was getting creative.
You know something's wrong.
I knew no such thing. I was only getting peace of mind. At least that was what I was telling myself, but something inside me believed him. Exodus was a problem that wasn’t adding up.
I needed answers.
I pulled the files of our last mission.
Everything seemed fine on the surface, perfectly normal. Then I dug in and looked a little deeper. The girl's father, Max Teller, was the head of a multinational oil company. There was a big deal coming up related to a merger.
I quickly scanned over the information.
And then I saw that her father had been the only member on the board of directors who voted against the merger and acquisition.
The way their board was structured, they needed a unanimous vote. Everyone had to say yes.
And he had said no.
So someone kidnapped her? Who would do that?
The question was, who had the most to lose? I pulled up files on each of the board members. The ones with the most to lose and most to gain.
Are you sure this is a rabbit hole you want to go down?
I couldn't help it. I was already on this path, already digging in places I shouldn't be digging.
And then I found what I was looking for. Tucked away in one of the files, I found an outgoing encrypted communication dated two days prior to our rescue mission.
Had someone notified Exodus that we would be there?
As I continued to search though, no other communiqués were encrypted.
“So why this one?” I muttered to myself as I wondered if I could have it decrypted.
For that, I needed a hacker. Someone who could keep their mouth shut. For obvious reasons, I couldn’t use anyone internal. But I had a couple of sources who might work. They were Addie’s people though, so I was going to have to reel her in if I wanted answers.
I quickly downloaded the file and checked over my shoulder. The key to doing something that you were certain was going to get you in all kinds of trouble was to look like you were supposed to be doing it.
Anyone who looked suspicious was immediately suspect. And the last thing I needed was another psych eval.
Another quick sweep had me further down the rabbit hole.
I could hear Marcus's voice in the back of my head. The girl's parents didn't contact The Firm. They’d tried to handle it privately. And there it was, tucked in another nondescript file like it was completely unimportant. Never to be examined, but it was right there in front of me.
The request for extraction, also encrypted. The question was, why? This was one of those things that was important for newly recruited agents to learn. Why we got involved, what situations warranted our involvement.
There was absolutely no reason to encrypt that communiqué.
The other anomaly was that the request hadn't initially gone up through the usual chain. This one started at Command then filtered down to us.
No, this hadn’t come in as a normal request, which meant it was a favor. But for who?
Maybe that's why it was hitting me wrong. The way we normally handled requests was to examine protocols and other mission parameters. Determine what was urgent and what wasn't. A knock request was a personal favor, but for who?
The more I dug, the less I found. Dammit, who was important enough for a request like this? And if it wasn't the girl's parents, then who?
A sick feeling swirled in my gut. Was Marcus right?
Had he been telling the truth? All this time, as I'd been fighting him, had he known something I didn't know?
And if Marcus was right that the request didn't come in through the usual channels, then who the hell had we handed that girl off to?
I did a quick search, and soon discovered that mere hours after the board of the oil company unanimously voted for the merger, Max Teller received the happy news about a reunion with his daughter.
I sat back in the chair with the proof in front of me. “Holy shit. Marcus was right.” But there was another problem. Someone had sent an encrypted communication out from The Firm just hours before our mission. But to whom, and why? That's what I needed to find out.
* * *
Marcus
“Do you want to tell me what the hell you're doing here?”
“If I said no, mate, would you leave me be?”
Rhodes leaned over and glanced out the window. “And I ask again, why the safe house and not your perfectly good flat across the street?”
“It's not a flat, mate. You're slipping.”
He frowned at me. “Sorry, it’s these meds they gave me. I make more mistakes with them on board. I'll get it handled. Are you tight bro?”
I shrugged at his casual switch to American slang . “I feel fine. I get the odd metallic taste in
my mouth, but the doc says my concussion symptoms should be clear in another day or so, and after that, I'll be cleared to be back out in the field.”
He nodded. “Yeah, all right. Are you going to talk to me about it, or are we going to do the thing where we pretend everything is fine?”
I shrugged, wincing slightly. “Are we going to do what?”
“Talk about that fucking bruise you have on your chest. How did it happen?”
“I got shot,” I said with a huff of laughter.
“Yeah, but bro, I know you. You would have fought like hell. So what actually happened? We didn’t find a body.”
“Yeah, you would have fought like hell too, but you got tased, didn't you?”
He scowled at that. “And you know what? I'm pretty sure it was a woman.”
I frowned. “Why do you think it was a woman?”
“I don't know. She seemed to do it gleefully.”
I laughed at that. “And you think the person who attacked me was a woman too because she was gleeful about it?”
“Yeah. It's like under the mask, she smiled, you know?”
I laughed so hard. “Mate, you don't think that's a stretch?”
He pressed his lips together. “No, I don't think that's a stretch. We both know The Firm uses whatever tricks they can. Watch, they've dug out someone from my past and hired her just to fuck with me.”
“You recognize that that sounds paranoid, right? I thought you were the one over here trying to convince me that I was mad.”
“Well, you're mad, of course. But that's nothing new.”
Rolling my eyes, I asked, “This personal vendetta that the Firm has against you… What did you do?”
“See, this is where I can't tell you things.”
I chuckled to myself. “Yeah, well.” I wasn't exactly telling him things either.
I hadn't mentioned a damn thing about Lyra. And as it was, he was circling around far too close to the mark. “So, why are we hiding here instead of in your flat?”
“I'm not hiding.”
Liar.
“Dude, if this isn't hiding, I don't know what is. And the fact that you're watching your current flat tells me a lot. Who do you think is following you?”
“I just want to keep an eye on things.”
“Isn't it easier to spy on your girlfriend if you're actually, you know, in the building?”
“I'm not spying on her. I'm watching my place. I know Curtis, Maggie, and Michael think that there's nothing to be worried about, and I don't really think there is either, but I'm thinking better safe than sorry because… I don't know. Something's been off ever since Stannis Prochenko showed up. To keep her safe, I'm easing out of the equation.”
He watched me shrewdly. “You think I don’t know the smell of bullshit?”
I decided to come a little clean with him. “I got shot. But I have the impression the person didn’t want to do it.”
He frowned at me. “So you're telling me the person who shot you didn't want to shoot you?”
“If they'd shot me properly, I'd be dead. We both know that. From what we know of The Firm, they're really efficient.”
He pondered that. “Yes, we were both lucky.”
“That's just it. I don't think luck had anything to do with it. I’ve got theories percolating. I’m just working it out.”
He nodded. “Right. What are you going to tell Lyra? You've gone to visit an ailing aunt in the UK?”
I scowled at him. “I don't know what I'm going to tell her yet.”
When in fact, I'd already tried to tell her something. We’d gotten a little distracted, of course. A shiver ran through me at the memory. I wanted her so bad.
But it wasn't sustainable. One of us was going to slip up and expose the other. Either that or one of us was going to end up dead. I really, really hoped it wasn't the latter.
Rhodes just watched me and waited.
“Rhodes, what would you think if I asked you if you thought we’d been sold a bill of goods about The Firm?”
He laughed. “What's that supposed to mean?”
“We know The Firm supposedly works with terrorists, right?”
“Everyone knows that. They put on a front, but they have ties to sources of the biggest terrorist agencies in the world.”
“Yeah, but what if they’ve been told the same about us?”
He laughed. “What's with all the what-if scenarios? Obviously, they can tell themselves whatever they want in order to survive, right? We know the truth.”
“Yeah, but how do we know it's the truth?”
He frowned then. “What the hell are you saying?”
“I don’t know. We say it's the truth because it's what we've been told. But what if the truth is somewhere in the middle?”
“Are you suggesting that they're not the devil? They're responsible for a lot of hell. They traded that kid to a power broker. Her parents got her back, but only after her father agreed to a merger his board of directors was pressuring him to approve.”
“I’m just saying, could it be we haven’t been told the whole story?”
He stared at me like I was losing it. “Mate, of course, we know it was The Firm. That's straight from intel.”
“Yeah, but intel can lie. There is something else going on here.”
“You have really been thinking about this.”
“Mate, all I’m saying is, things don't add up… We're playing a game of life and death. We need to be certain.”
He clapped a hand on my shoulder. “There's nothing more certain than us being the good guys. Recognize that.”
“I'm not arguing that point. I'm just wondering if the agents at The Firm are dirty after all.”
Chapter 4
Lyra
I was just coming out of a mission debrief when someone grabbed me from one of the darkened side halls.
Instinct kicked in immediately. I twisted at the hold, managed an uppercut, which was blocked, and then someone wrapped their arms around me tight. Hot breath tickled my ear. “Hold fucking still. I'm not going to hurt you.”
A shudder rolled through me as recognition hit. “Fuck you, Tyler.”
He released me gently, easing me away from his body. “Look, I didn't mean to frighten you, but I wanted to talk to you for a minute.”
Talk my ass. Surprising an agent like that could get someone dead.
“About what? You and I have nothing to say to each other.” I struggled in his grip. I was still secured around my neck, but he wasn’t trying to hurt me.
“Lyra, can't you see I'm trying to help you?”
“How is that exactly?”
“Whatever it is you're doing, whatever it is you think you're chasing, you need to stop.”
“Fuck you, Tyler.”
“Been there, done that. You know what's really funny? It won't be the last time either.”
“You wish. Now let me go.”
He sighed. “One of these days, your little tantrums, your little I'm Roz's protegee and nothing can touch me thing is going to get you killed. You need to be more careful when you’re nosing around where you don’t belong.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a warning. Can't you see I'm trying to help you? Tell me what you were looking for.”
“You know, even though you're saying the right words, I don't think you actually know what help means.”
He sighed. “I know you went on a little adventure today and had a look through the records. I know you downloaded data.”
I swallowed hard, working to keep my face neutral. How the fuck did he know? Was he the one who had the alert set up? “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He grinned. “Ah, you're a better liar than you used to be. But lucky for you, I have a level-five clearance. I went back in and erased your tracks. You’re welcome.”
All I could do was blink, stupefied by what he’d said. “I didn’t ask for your help. Moreover, I haven’t done anything wro
ng.”
He swallowed hard, his gaze locked on mine, his lips a hair’s breadth away. If he wanted to, he could kiss me.
Inwardly, I shuddered, resolved to bite his tongue if he did. But the adrenaline dump of real fear made my body loosen. “Tyler, why did you come back? You were assigned to London. I was perfectly happy when you were there. What is the fucking purpose of your return to LA?”
“Roz reassigned me.”
“Yeah, I know that, but it doesn't explain why you said yes. You’re level five. You get a say in your assignments.”
“Maybe I wanted to see you again.”
I scowled at him.
He winced. “You're still mad? Way to hold a grudge.”
“I'm supposed to forget when someone used me, embarrassed me, humiliated me in front of my colleagues? Yeah, that’s easily forgettable.”
He sighed. “It's not how I wanted it, Lyra.”
“I don't care. Are we done here?”
“Not until you tell me what you’re looking for.”
“None of your business.” There was a part of me that wondered if maybe I could trust him, but then I remembered everything he’d done and wondered what was wrong with me mentally that I’d even considered trusting someone like him. “I have nothing to say to you.”
He ran a hand through his hair. “You are always so fucking stubborn. Just listen to me for a minute. I am on your side. I’m trying to look out for you.”
“Do you think I’m dumb enough to believe you? Let me go.”
Kramer, another level-five operative, rolled by us and gave Tyler a smirk.
I growled at him. “I fucking hate that that's how they all look at you. Like you're the man or some kind of player and I'm the sad sack who fell for it.”
His gaze shifted back to me. “That's not how anyone sees you. When are you going to realize that everyone really respects you?”
“Yeah, if you say so.”
He sighed and released me. “Whatever it is you’re doing, you need to be more discreet.”
“Go to hell.”
“I am not your enemy, Lyra.”
“Aren't you?”
The muscle in his jaw ticked, and then he sighed. “You're asking the wrong fucking questions.” He reached for me again, tucking a finger under my chin. “When you finally realize at some point that we’re on the same side, I hope it won’t be too late.”