Against the Dark

by Carolyn Crane

  “Just signal,” Macy said. The signal was kicking her leg up backward—the heel-to-butt signal, they called it.

  “I got it.” Angel turned and headed for the guy, empty drink in hand. He watched her steadily as she approached.

  His hair was grown out just enough that he had to tilt his head a little bit to keep it out of his eyes—like a clean-cut haircut gone to hell. His scruffy beard hadn’t seen a razor in days.

  She smiled as if her pulse wasn’t going haywire. Tipped her head. “I’m Angel.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah,” she said.

  “That’s your real name?”

  “That’s right, baby,” she said, playing the pouty hooker.

  “Hey—” he motioned to the waiter who was passing by. “Drink?” he asked, eyeing her empty glass.

  “Gin and tonic,” she said.

  Their fingers brushed as he took the glass from her, creating a frisson of electricity that shot down her center. He set it on the waiter’s tray. “Thanks,” he said to the waiter.

  The waiter left them alone.

  He took up extra space even beyond where he stood. It was something a guy like this did. He would take, take, take, but she’d still want to save him.

  Up close you could see his faint freckles and the pain and the fire in his eyes. He felt so familiar to her—that’s what was scary. She’d never met him, but she knew those eyes, that expression. He was drowning in something. She knew things like that about her guys on a primal level.

  She forced herself to stay cool. Did he suspect them? That was what she needed to figure out.

  A rogue lock of hair had fallen over his glasses and he flicked his head, sending it away, as though he wanted nothing to obstruct his view of her. “Now what are we going to do with you?” he asked with a hint of humor in his voice.

  Focus, she told herself. You’re a hooker who doesn’t know he’s security. She shrugged her shoulders.

  He spread his legs open a little. “Come here.”

  “You wanna play?” she asked, heart racing. It had been such a long since she’d been around a guy like this. He didn’t add up as a nerd. He didn’t add up as a member of Borgola’s security team. He didn’t make sense to her in a lot of ways. But she wanted him; that one fact cut through everything.

  “I want you to come here,” he said.

  She stepped in close. Her girls would grab her if she gave the signal, but she still couldn’t tell if his interest was professional or sexual. A real poker player, this guy.

  He hooked a finger over the top of her bodice and pulled her even closer, and she allowed it. His skin felt electric near hers.

  “There’re a lot of bad girls at this shindig,” he said, lips too close, filling her with need. But it was his eyes she worried about. He was seeing too much.

  “I don’t need no muthafuckin’ memo to tell me there’s bad girls here,” she replied, throwing off her perfect grammar for the role she was playing.

  He scrutinized her more. The intense intelligence that radiated off him scared her.

  She looked away from his eyes, but that left her gazing at his straight, strong nose, and then his lips. Oh, yeah, his lips.

  She knew that he’d kiss her moments before he did it, as though the kiss came from outside of them, pre-ordained by the universe. Wild energy danced in her chest as he drew in; at the last moment, he paused, letting her feel his heat. Then he closed his lips over hers.

  His kiss was light and heavy at the same time, like summer fog, rich with mysterious magic. There, then gone.

  “There are rules here,” he whispered.

  His interest was sexual then. Panic and excitement shot through her. The rule was that the girls at the party would have sex with whoever wanted them. Somehow she didn’t think this guy was going to accept the ‘waiting for somebody’ brush-off.

  She gave him a dopey look—this guy would dislike an airhead. It’s one of the things she could sense in him. “Rules?”

  He eyed her, pressed a thumb over her lips. The pad of his thumb felt warm and thick. She tipped up her head and let the pad of his thumb dip a tiny bit into her mouth. He tasted deliciously destructive on every level. She wouldn’t go with him, but she could enjoy him a bit.

  He dragged his thumb off the side of her lips and she made the mistake of looking up again at those wildcat eyes. Her body rose to attention, propelled by the force of five years of celibacy.

  She should give the sign. But she had to be sure—it was all in the interest of science, right? Or getting away with burglary, anyway.

  He nipped her lip, let his nose drag up against hers. Man, even the way he moved his nose was sexy.

  Her eyes drifted shut as he kissed her again. He was invasive this time, moving his tongue along hers with a kind of erotic friction. Warmth bloomed between her legs as he slid his fingers down to her hips. She felt as if he was taking her over. No man had ever affected her like this. Interest of science, she thought dimly. Burglary. Saving Aunt Aggie.

  And then he moved his fingers lower.

  Shit.

  He pulled away, looking around while he discreetly pocketed her gun.

  “What are you doing?”

  He seemed disappointed that she’d ask such a stupid question. “Disarming you, of course. The man at the door could get into a lot of trouble for letting you in with this.”

  She cast her eyes downward, studying the line of her dress. There was no way he could’ve seen it. It didn’t make a shape in the fabric even when she walked—that was the beauty of the dress.

  “I didn’t see it,” he said, like he knew what she was thinking.

  “Then how did you know it was there? Just out of curiosity.” She smiled coyly, but she really wanted to know. “What was your clue?”

  He smirked. “Clues are for amateurs. And when you’re at Walter Borgola’s party you’re not supposed to be armed. I’ll check it under your name. Get it when you leave.”

  With horror, she saw he had her safecracking tool in his hand, too. He unzipped the little pouch and looked inside at the earbuds and cord wound around the body of the instrument. She prayed for him not to pull it out—it was an acoustic, sonar-based sensor with a small oscilloscope. She’d worked with a techie to make it during her Fenton Furst apprenticeship. It was larger than any mp3 player on the market, but usually people didn’t notice. This guy might. This guy had detected her gun across the room. How? By the way she walked, maybe? He re-zipped it and handed it to her, scanning the party. His interest in her was over, apparently.

  “You bring music? You listen to music while you’re doing ‘em?”

  “Sometimes,” she said.

  He squinted like he couldn’t quite understand.

  “You wanna try it?”

  “I’m working.”

  “So am I,” she said.

  “I’ve never heard of that,” he said. “The music thing. Don’t they at least want to believe you’re focused on them?”

  He had a point—it was a little weird. But she’d said it now. She had to sell it. He was smart, but she was smart, too.

  She shrugged. “I let them pick the music. Don’t knock it ‘til you tried it.”

  “Like what? What do they pick?”

  That was the problem with the smart guys—they had to know everything. She wondered if that’s what would land him on the slab in the morgue in the end. He still didn’t add up as Borgola security, but obviously that’s what he was.

  “Well?” He was waiting.

  Her mind raced; what would a guy pick for music? She was coming up blank. The whole damn thing was preposterous. No! He thought she was a hooker, and he was curious. She smiled and put a finger on his chest. “Let’s just say, it’s never ‘Dancing Queen’ by ABBA.”

  His lips quirked.

  She took that opportunity to snatch back the tool. “You sure, baby?”

  “Yup.” He turned away then, scanning the party. He seemed to have flipped a swi
tch, from interest to disdain. Like she already wasn’t there. He’d taken a little taste of her, stripped her of her gun, and now he was done with her.

  He really did think she was a whore. Well, it’s what she’d wanted, right?

  “Get lost,” he said.

  She felt her face heat. Get lost? She spun around and left, feeling like an idiot.

  “Asshole took my gun,” she said when she rejoined the gang.

  “Shit,” Macy said. “You shouldn’t have tried to bring it in.”

  “Well, I didn’t count on eagle eye over there taking it,” Angel said. “I bet half the people here smuggled in firearms.”

  White Jenny looked confused. “I was watching the whole time, and I didn’t see him take it.”

  “He took it.” Angel felt like he took other things too. Like her dignity. She hated him and wanted him. That old familiar feeling.

  “Well, hell, that was one hot disarm,” White Jenny said.

  “Just another pig,” Angel said, pulse still racing. “The good news is that he buys I’m a hooker.”

  Macy frowned. “The bad news is that it’s going to look suspicious if you never go back and get your gun.” Their plans involved penetrating from the inside and leaving off the roof. They weren’t planning on exiting through the front door. “We’ll have to double back and act like you forgot it,” Macy said.

  “Are you serious?” White Jenny said. “Hamburgle the perv and come back in the front door?”

  “It’ll look more suspicious to never come and get it,” Angel said. “It’ll make us instant suspects for the job.”

  “You’ll play the doped-up hooker,” Macy said. “It’ll be fine. They won’t know anything’s gone for a day or two. There’s not a choice. We have to do this job.”

  They all knew it was true. The Flesh Boys wouldn’t release Aggie until they got Borgola’s prized diamonds, and no other diamonds would do—Macy had tried to negotiate that. The Flesh Boys weren’t killers, but they were bad guys, and they had some beef with Borgola. Angel doubted Borgola even knew who the Flesh Boys were, they were such small potatoes compared to Borgola’s multi-billion dollar crime operations.

  Macy slid her eyes to Angel “The Flesh Boys are going to be sorry.”

  They all hated to imagine Aunt Aggie in the hands of those creeps. Worse, it was a little bit their fault she got nabbed—the Flesh Boys knew about some of the jobs the three of them had pulled through the years and figured they could get the Borgola diamonds. And it wasn’t like they could go to the police.

  Angel wondered what kind of environment they were keeping Aggie in. The old lady would be so frightened, so desperate to be home. Apparently they’d let her bring along her blood thinners. Small morsel of comfort.

  “You really want to escalate things with the Flesh Boys?” Angel asked.

  “Once Aggie’s free, we’re escalating all over their asses,” White Jenny said. “And your guy’s watching you again.”

  “He’s not my guy,” Angel said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  He watched her walk off with her friends, slipping through his fingers like minutes. It wasn’t just her devastating beauty, all smoldering dark eyes and cherub-cheeks and midnight hair full of glittery hair things. It was her secrets.

  Cole was a secrets man.

  He’d never met a secret he couldn’t crack, and the girl had a whole lot of them. That’s what had drawn him—eyes full of secrets. They weren’t a prostitute’s secrets, either. Prostitutes looked at you like you shared a secret together, and they used that to entice you, but their secrets weren’t even secrets in the end.

  This girl, Angel, she was no prostitute, and her eyes were full of truths that she concealed from the whole world. She was self-contained, and he found that he desperately wanted in.

  He looked away. She’s not for you, he said to himself. He couldn’t lose his focus.

  When Cole had first started on the security team, Borgola had called him in to his office and given him a lot of threats and rules. Borgola had gone on to inform Cole that the oriental rugs they stood on were priceless, but also treated with something that made them easy to clean. Borgola had made the seemingly offhand remark that his whole operation was like that: priceless and easy to clean. But it hadn’t been an offhand remark. Borgola liked his men to think he was untouchable.

  Borgola had been untouchable. Until Cole.

  Clues were for amateurs—he hadn’t been blowing smoke up Angel’s ass. Cole Hawkins was a genius at math and an expert in logistics. His superior at the Association called him a Sherlock of Chaos. He worked in equations—deductive logistical equations, to be precise. Because everything in Borgola’s twisted world could be boiled down to equations of commodity, movement, and protection—torqued with variables and coefficients to account for the way law enforcement presence warped supply routes, the way paranoia among thieves sometimes made straight lines into curves.

  Yeah, Cole Hawkins was a nerd. With the arcane equations he’d developed, he could deduce entire shadow organizations from seemingly random details, like a deadly Sudoku. It was through equations that the unseen could be perceived.

  It was through equations that he would bring Borgola to his knees.

  Though he didn’t need an equation to tell him how much danger he was in at the moment. If Dax and the Association knew how hot things had gotten at the mansion, they would’ve pulled him out days ago.

  Just one more night. He could risk it one more night.

  Because there was a ship out on the Pacific Ocean somewhere and it was full of high school-aged kids from the other side of the world who thought they’d won scholarships to schools in America.

  They hadn’t.

  Instead they were headed for the most grisly and demeaning deaths imaginable…unless he got the puzzle pieces he needed to figure out the ship’s location.

  He’d search tonight, after the party. One more night. Though that’s what he’d been telling himself every night for a week.

  Seeing the girl’s gun had hardly required an equation. He saw it in the way she stood, the fact that she held her drink in her left hand instead of her right when she was, in fact, right handed. A woman concealing a gun while optimizing access to it. Supply and transportation. A bullet in the brain. Logistics was everything.

  Lord, he was tired.

  He didn’t care about her gun. He didn’t care that she was pretending to be a hooker when she wasn’t one. Or that her mp3 player was something else. Recording equipment, maybe. It was her secrets that got him.

  He loved women with secrets. He loved to break them open.

  A foolish indulgence. It’s just that things had gotten so hot, and he was so tired, and he’d needed…what? To touch her. To take something of hers. To rest a bit.

  Yeah, rest. Like a cross-country driver thinking he’ll just rest his eyes. He hadn’t set out to kiss her, but it had been mind-blowing.

  He struggled to keep his gaze off Angel, to at least look as though he were monitoring the guests. He shouldn’t have let her distract him. He didn’t need Borgola looking at him any harder than he already was.

  Angel’s girlfriends didn’t seem like hookers, either, but he couldn’t be sure without talking to them. He smiled, thinking about the ABBA thing. Maybe she was a tourist of sorts, there to try out a bit of dangerous sex. Possibly a P.I. or a blackmail scammer. A little more time with her and he would’ve figured her out, but then he’d snapped out of it. Whatever she was up to, it didn’t concern him.

  Mapes walked up. “Where’s Sturnvaal?”

  “Perimeter,” Cole said.

  Mapes grunted. “Quite a show out there. Fuckin’ whores.”

  “Had enough of the pool?”

  Mapes shrugged. He obviously wanted to trade posts, but he wouldn’t outright ask Cole to trade because then he’d owe Cole, and Mapes saw Cole as a rival.

  This made Mapes dangerous.

  Mapes was an ex-dirty cop, too, not as stupid as the
rest of the security crew, another reason he was dangerous.

  It was ridiculous of Mapes to think Cole was a threat. The last thing Cole wanted was to climb the ladder in the Borgola security squad. He’d risen in rank over the past nine months simply by not getting transferred or murdered. His promotions were actually quite the inconvenience—the lower Cole was, the more invisible he was.

  Some spies needed to rise into a position of access in order to break into computers or whatever. Cole only needed to be present to collect his mundane details to plug into his dark equations of criminal decay.

  Cole had actually tried to make Mapes look good over the months, but it had only made Mapes more suspicious.

  He pushed off the fountain. “I could use some fresh air, if you wouldn’t mind trading.”

  Mapes shrugged. “Sure.”

  Cole strolled out onto the patio, even further away from Angel and her beautiful dark hair and dark lashes and her tantalizing secrets he wanted to bury himself in.

  The prostitutes played topless volleyball in the pool, one of Borgola’s favorite spectator sports. Unfortunately, not all his tastes ran to the ridiculous. Cole thought about the kids on the ship. Evidence suggested they were from Southeast Asia or possibly former Soviet states; he didn’t have that piece of the puzzle yet. One thing he did know: they had five days until they landed, and then they’d be lost. Borgola’s snuff films—violent, disturbing sex films that always ended in death—seemed to be filmed in trucks and shipping containers, mobile studios that could be anywhere.

  Cole had originally been planted undercover in the team to develop intelligence on a different operation of Borgola’s, sex slavery out of Myanmar. He’d worked out the details pretty quickly. And then he’d uncovered the snuff film operations. He hadn’t found direct evidence of the films; rather, he’d discerned the operation’s presence via his equations, like a ghost limb. He’d asked Dax to let him stay on and bring it down. Dax was all for it.

  Associates sometimes got planted in deep cover for years doing unthinkable little things and sometimes unthinkable big things to keep their credibility. They helped with the small plots and sabotaged the big plots and leaked information and executed people when they had to. Officially, no governments knew about them; unofficially, they were central to the international fight against crime.