The Unnaturals (The Unnaturals Series Book 1)

by Jessica Meigs

  Letting out a slow sigh, Riley rolled over and slipped out from between the sheets, easing off the bed as quietly as she could. She stuffed her feet into her tennis shoes, laced them up, and then scooped her phone and room key into her hand, pocketing them and grabbing her backpack before creeping to the door. After a moment’s hesitation, she went back and retrieved one of the pistols and a knife that had been packed in the suitcase. One more glance behind her revealed that Scott hadn’t moved an inch. Satisfied that he was still sleeping, she slipped out the door and eased it shut behind her before starting down the hall in a rapid walk, dialing Brandon’s number as she did.

  It took only three rings for him to answer the phone. “I expected you to text me your confirmation, not call,” Brandon said.

  “It’s four in the morning,” Riley replied. She reached the elevators but opted to take the stairs down instead. “You shouldn’t have expected anything from me at four in the morning.”

  “True,” Brandon acknowledged. Riley heard a rustle of papers and guessed that he was still at the office.

  “Burning the midnight oil, Hall?” she teased as she reached the third floor landing and began her descent to the second.

  “In a manner of speaking,” Brandon replied. “I had some things to sign off on. No big deal.”

  “So what did you need me to come in for?” Riley asked. She thought she heard a squeak somewhere above her and paused, listening carefully. When the noise didn’t repeat itself and no others followed it, she continued on, picking up the pace again.

  “I need to talk to you,” Brandon said. The clatter of computer keys followed his statement.

  “You’re talking to me now.”

  “I mean in person.”

  Riley sighed and rolled her eyes. “What in the world could you possibly need to say to me that you didn’t tell me earlier or can’t say to me on the phone?”

  “Riley, you work in this business,” Brandon said. “You tell me.”

  “Brandon—”

  “See you in a few,” Brandon interrupted, and then he hung up. Riley scowled as the device in her hand went dead, and she almost gave in to the temptation to dial him back and yell at him for hanging up on her. Instead, she shoved the phone back into her pocket and emerged into the hotel’s lobby.

  The lobby was quiet, the only soul in sight a concierge manning the desk near the elevators. He looked bored, his head propped against a single hand as he flicked through a magazine. Riley praised whatever deity bothered to listen to her that she’d never had to resort to a job like that. She’d much rather deal with the almost endless danger and excitement of the job she’d been recruited into at seventeen; if she ended up behind a desk, she was sure she’d try to kill herself as soon as possible. She gave the young man a short, polite wave and stepped outside into the warm summer night.

  It felt like it had been an eternity since she’d been outside, but in reality, it had only been a handful of hours. Regardless, she stopped on the sidewalk just beyond the hotel’s entrance and closed her eyes, breathing in deeply. It wasn’t the greatest quality air—it had a stench of diesel and exhaust to it, like every large city she’d ever been in—but it wasn’t recycled hotel air, and just that one breath settled her nerves. Then she opened her eyes and started down the sidewalk, stopping at an all-night coffee shop to buy a mocha frappe and two doughnuts—one for her and one for Linus—before she headed to the Agency headquarters, where Brandon presumably waited for her.

  The lobby of the Agency’s headquarters was just as quiet as the hotel’s had been. And just like the hotel’s lobby, the Agency’s was pure class, marble and tile and comfortable plush chairs and couches in warm, inviting colors, the public face of the Agency’s front as a nondescript, appointment-only investment firm. Riley’s tennis shoes were almost silent against the tile floor as she strode through the glass front doors and into the lobby, heading straight for the marble and wooden circular desk near the elevators. There wasn’t a soul in sight, save for the single security guard sitting behind the desk. He was a handsome man, a year or two younger than her, dark-haired and blue-eyed, his security guard uniform neatly pressed. The gold nametag on his shirt read “Bradley.” He glanced up from his smartphone, and a gorgeous grin split his face as he saw her.

  “If it isn’t Ms. Riley Walker,” he teased, rising from his chair and stuffing the phone into his pocket. “How you been? I heard you’ve already been here today.”

  “And how did you hear that, Sam?” Riley asked, raising an eyebrow as she leaned against the desk and smiled at him. He held up a clipboard full of papers and waved it at her before dropping it onto the desk in front of her.

  “My trusty clipboard, of course,” he said. “It told me you signed in this morning, unfortunately after I already left.” As she found a fresh page and started to scribble her signature onto the sign-in sheet, he added, “When are you going to let me take you out to dinner?”

  “Maybe on my next day off,” Riley said, finishing her signature with a flourish and tossing the pen to him.

  “But you never get off days,” the man protested.

  Riley gave him a cheeky grin. “Exactly,” she said, skirting around the desk to get to the elevators, dropping the remains of her coffee drink into the trashcan as she passed it. “I’m headed up. See you later, Bradley.”

  “My name isn’t Bradley!” Sam called after her. She laughed as the elevator doors slid shut between them, concealing him from view.

  The elevator was just as nicely appointed as the lobby downstairs, wood paneled with gold accents and a mirrored ceiling that she knew from personal experience concealed a batch of security cameras. She didn’t bother looking up at the mirrors as she mashed the button to the fifth floor, and as the elevator ascended silently, she wondered what was going on that would goad Brandon into calling her to his office not once but twice in a single twenty-four hour period. Whatever it was, it couldn’t have been good.

  The elevator moved smoothly and silently to a stop on the fifth floor, and the doors parted onto a quiet, white-on-white lobby, the same one in which she’d sat in just that morning. The lobby wasn’t as brightly lit as it had been that morning; the lights had been dimmed, and her steps echoed as she crossed the white-tiled floor to the white doors that led to the handlers’ office complex. The door swung shut behind her without a sound. Riley took a few moments to scan her surroundings. The sight of rows of desks greeted her, the computers on each one displaying login screens. A redheaded woman was hunched over a workstation on the far side of the room, typing steadily. Riley started down the hallway formed by glass-walled conference rooms and stopped at Brandon’s office door at the end.

  The door stood ajar about six inches, and Riley pushed it open a few more and stuck her head into the room.

  Brandon sat behind his massive mahogany desk near the center of the room, reclined back in the plush leather office chair with his feet up on the desk. His suit was rumpled from a long day of wear, but his dress shoes still shone in the light from his desk lamp. A folder was in his hand, and he was paging through the papers inside, a look of intense concentration on his face and a pair of wire-framed silver glasses perched on his nose. He looked like an upstanding, hardworking businessman, a mental image that only served to put a grin on her face, since he was anything but.

  “Working hard?” Riley asked as she pushed the door open wider and slipped inside. Brandon startled and looked up quickly from his paperwork, which only made her roll her eyes. He’d been playing that game for years, letting her think she’d actually managed to catch him in a moment of inattention. The man probably didn’t even know what inattention was. “You wanted to see me?”

  A slow smile spread across Brandon’s face as he saw her, and the expression was enough to make her cringe inside. She liked Brandon; she really did. She was sort of obligated to, since he was her handler. But whenever he gave her that look, she couldn’t deny that she developed a distinct case of the willies
. It was like he was the predator and she the prey, and she hated the feeling. He closed the folder he was browsing and tossed it onto his desk before dropping his feet to the floor. “Riley,” he said, pushing himself out of the chair. “About time you got here.”

  Riley shrugged and pushed the door closed behind her. “You told me to come by, so here I am.” It wasn’t like she had a choice in whether she would show up; not showing up was not and never had been a real option. “What’s going on?”

  Brandon circled his desk and approached her, and when their eyes met, she read his intentions there clearly: the hard, determined look in his eyes, mixed with want and desire. Despite her history with the man, she found herself shrinking away from him again internally. She liked Brandon; she really did. But she no longer felt an attraction toward him, not since after she and Kevin had fallen in love. And certainly not after Brandon had shown his true colors when she’d told him of her relationship with her deceased partner: he’d gone off the rails when he’d learned of it, slamming her against the wall and shouting right in her face about loyalties and them, always them, and his anger had been so palpable that she’d been genuinely frightened of him. Ever since, she’d tried to step carefully around him, as if she were walking on eggshells she was afraid to break. And as he reached her, that fear resurfaced and she sidestepped and slipped past him, angling for one of the visitor chairs across from his desk and slouching into it, setting Linus the Backpack on the floor beside the chair as deliberately as if it were full of Faberge eggs. He stood by the spot she’d just abandoned for a long moment, his shoulders tensed, his fists clenched at his sides, visibly angry at her refusal, which sent a stab of cold fear through Riley’s gut. But then he relaxed and smoothed both hands through his hair, returning to his desk as if nothing had happened. For some reason, she found his nonchalance even more ominous than his anger.

  “I’ve got something I need to talk to you about,” he said. “And it’s something you’re not going to like, but it has to be done.”

  “Does this have to do with me getting snappy in the meeting earlier?” Riley asked, a surge of panic rising in her chest. “I didn’t mean to, I swear. I was just tired and hurting, that’s all. You know how I get when I come off missions where I take a beating.”

  “Yeah, you can be a total bitch,” Brandon agreed, looking amused at her scramble to defend herself. “But no, this isn’t to do with that.” He spun the folder he’d been looking through around and slid it across the desk to her. She leaned forward, pulling it closer, and scanned the page in front of her.

  “This is…” Riley trailed off and flipped the page to the next one. “You’re not going to be my handler anymore?” The revelation was a slap in the face, and she wasn’t sure what she was feeling: anger, relief, annoyance, elation? It was a perfect storm of emotion, and the mixture of feelings confused her, but she pushed it aside and focused on the papers in front of her and on Brandon’s words as he answered her question.

  “I can’t be,” Brandon said, and she could hear a note of genuine regret in his voice. “Not if you’re transferring to The Unnaturals. I don’t work for that branch of the Agency, and I have no authority there.”

  “Then I won’t transfer to The Unnaturals,” Riley said, pushing the folder away. When it came to choosing between known and unknown quantities, her survival instincts always leaned toward the known.

  “It’s not that simple, Riley,” he replied. “This comes from someone higher on the chain than me. And I’ve already signed you over to them. This,” he motioned to the folder, “is part of the agreement. You’re to be transferred to a new handler, in this case Zachariah Lawrence, who is the senior field supervisor in The Unnaturals.” When she scowled, he added, “It’s not that bad. Zachariah used to be one of mine, until he hit his level ten and transitioned into being a supervisor after—” He broke off and shook his head. “Ancient history. But he’s good. I promise. I don’t train agents to be anything but excellent. And you’ll like him, once you get to know him.”

  “It’s not a question of whether I’ll like him or not,” Riley said. “I like him already. He seems like a good agent. But that doesn’t change the fact that I feel like I’m not being given a choice—”

  “You’re not,” Brandon said bluntly, interrupting her. “The Agency isn’t in the business of giving people choices. It’s in the business of doing the jobs people either can’t or won’t do. And right now, your job is to work with The Unnaturals division of this organization. Got it?” He sat patiently, waiting until Riley gritted her teeth and gave him a short nod. “Good. Now sign the damn paperwork.”

  Riley picked up the pen from the desk near the folder and rested the point against the paper, but she didn’t sign right away. Instead, she asked, “What happens if I say I won’t do it?”

  Brandon let out a slow, weary sigh and ran a hand over his eyes. Riley recognized the look; it was one of exhausted frustration, the same type of look he gave her on a relatively routine basis. “Riley, what do you think would happen?” he asked. “Just sign the damn paper. Shit. What the hell’s happened to you?”

  Riley slammed her pen down without signing as Brandon’s words tripped a deep-seated and long-held anger that she’d buried and had struggled to not let surface in the past six months. “What the hell happened to me?” she asked, almost snarling the words out. “My partner died, that’s what happened to me. And you acted like you didn’t give a shit!”

  “And I didn’t,” Brandon said. “Agents die almost every day. That wasn’t the first time we’d lost one, and it won’t be the last.”

  “He was one of yours!” Riley only barely managed to avoid adding, “And he was mine!”

  “And? That doesn’t change anything.”

  Riley stared at him for a minute, unable to comprehend that he genuinely, honestly didn’t care that one of his agents, one of the people he’d spent years training, had died a violent, bloody death, practically right in front of her. It made her wonder how he’d react if she were to bite the bullet. “You’re still pissed, aren’t you?” she said, speaking slowly as a thought occurred to her. “You’re still mad that I left you for him, aren’t you?”

  “I’m not,” Brandon said, but the hurt look in his eyes gave away the truth. Riley shifted uncomfortably in her chair: she could tell he was lying through his teeth. She didn’t know how to feel about him lying and what he was lying about; how was she even supposed to react to something like that? Surely he didn’t expect her to drop everything and lunge across the desk to throw herself at him. They were long past that. They’d been past anything resembling reconciliation on a romantic level the moment he’d informed her of the investigation he was launching into the death of Kevin Anderson—and that she was the prime suspect in his murder.

  Brandon continued to stare at her, almost unblinking, waiting on her response. The tension in the room seemed to crackle as the silence between them clung on, like arcs of invisible electricity darting around the room. She fought not to squirm in her chair and cleared her throat, looking down at the papers and folder still sitting on the desk in front of her. Finally, if only to diffuse the pressure permeating the air, she grabbed the pen she’d slammed onto the desk and shook her head.

  “You’re still a shit liar, Brandon,” she muttered. She scribbled her signature on the appropriate line before shoving it all back toward him. “Are we done now?” she asked. Despite her efforts to keep her voice steady, the coldness of her anger and the tremor of her uncertainty leeched into her words. “I’d like to get back to the hotel and go back to bed before Scott notices I’m missing and sends out a search party.” Seeing a perfect opportunity to reroute Brandon’s brain from whatever he was thinking of to a different topic entirely, she wrinkled her nose and added, “Is he always so damned uptight, by the way? He went off the rails earlier because I had a scotch with dinner.”

  “Truth be told, I don’t know him that well,” Brandon admitted, finally tearing his eyes a
way from her. She felt the muscles in her shoulders and back loosen just a little as he averted his gaze; she hadn’t realized how tense she’d become until the soreness in her back kicked in. He straightened the papers and closed the folder, sliding it into the top drawer of his desk before standing. Riley rose with him, and he took her elbow as he led her to the door. “One more thing before you go,” he said, his voice dropping as if he were worried that someone was listening in. Riley raised an eyebrow and looked up at him, and for the first time in the conversation, he appeared to be something other than angry or annoyed—he looked, if anything, worried. “Be careful, okay?” he finally said. “There will be more than just Zachariah with eyes on you. The last thing I need is for you to end up the subject of another investigation.”

  “I’m always careful, Brandon,” Riley assured him. She forced a bright smile onto her face, though it didn’t quite reach her eyes. Instead, her nerves were starting to get the better of her. Eyes on her? Who was going to be watching her, and for what? Before she could question anything else, he goaded her out the door and shut it behind her, leaving her alone in the hallway to puzzle out what he had told her and what it could have meant.

  ~*~

  Scott lurked behind a tree outside of the Agency headquarters, taking refuge in the darkness beneath its canopy as he watched the building from across the parking lot. There weren’t many cars in the lot; he recognized Brandon’s Lexus and Henry’s Explorer, but he didn’t know who owned the other four that were there. But that wasn’t why he was watching the building, though. He was more concerned with why Riley had felt the need to slip out of the hotel without a word to him.