“I hate getting stitches,” she commented. “This is going to hurt like hell.”
“Yeah, it will,” Scott agreed. “But I have something that will hopefully make it tolerable for you.” He slipped out of the bathroom and grabbed the bag he’d dropped on the floor in the hallway when they’d come inside. He carried it into the bathroom and held the object from the bag up for Riley to see. Her brown eyes widened in delight at the sight of the Wild Turkey bourbon he held. “I thought this might make it easier for you to deal with me jabbing a needle in your skin. Repeatedly,” he added, tossing the empty bag in the trash and stripping the seal off the bottle. He passed it to her, and she twisted the cap off and took a deep, thirsty swig of the liquid. Scott’s eyes locked onto the curve of her throat as she tilted her head back, and when she pulled the bottle from her mouth, she let out a gasp that made him feel more than a little unsettled.
“I thought you didn’t approve of drinking on the job,” she commented as she clutched the bottle in her free hand.
“Normally, I don’t,” Scott admitted. “But considering the circumstances and your injuries, I figure hell, why not? Lord knows last time I had to give myself stitches in the field, I’d have killed for a good stiff drink.”
“At least I have someone to help me with them,” Riley said. “I can’t imagine trying to sew this up on my own and doing a good job of it.” She took another swig of bourbon and then added in a careless tone, “If you keep this up, I might just fall in love with you.”
They both froze at her words, and a pall of discomfort settled over the room. They stared at each other, the silence an anvil between them. Scott scrambled to come up with something to break the awkwardness. “Love” was not something he wanted to think about, discuss, or be associated with. He barely even knew Riley. Her tossing a word like “love” around so casually made him uneasy and nervous. Judging by the expression on Riley’s face, she shared his sentiments. She broke eye contact and studied the bottle’s label as if it were the most fascinating thing she’d ever seen.
Scott cleared his throat and held up the fishing line and sewing kit. “So let’s get this over with, shall we?” he suggested.
Riley shrugged. “Yeah, whatever,” she muttered, looking away from him and focusing on the bottle she held. She took another swig of the bourbon and shifted over on the edge of the tub to make room for him. Scott cracked open the supplies, setting everything up to sew the gashes in her side. She swallowed at the sight of the curved needle he’d picked out of the kit. “This is really going to hurt,” she commented.
“Yep,” Scott acknowledged. He pushed the towel off her side and studied the wounds, trying to decide where the best place to start was. “I’m not going to promise I know what the hell I’m doing,” he added, snagging the bourbon bottle from her. He poured a little of it over the needle to sterilize it and pondered the bottle before taking a swallow. Riley stifled a laugh as he passed the bottle back to her.
“I thought you were all anti-alcohol or whatever,” Riley commented. “At least, you’d think so judging by the way you went on about me drinking.”
“Oh, you definitely don’t know much of anything about me if you think I’m a teetotaler,” Scott said with a laugh. He dug his lighter from his pocket and struck his thumb over the wheel. A flame burst forth, and he passed the needle through it a few times before putting the lighter away. “Before I took this assignment, I stayed as drunk as I could get away with every day since December.”
“Oh really?” Riley looked him up and down, as if evaluating him in a new light. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as the type that was an…alcoholic.”
“Alcoholic?” Scott repeated, raising an eyebrow as he threaded the needle with fishing line. “I hardly think I qualified as an alcoholic.” He pinched the sides of one of the cuts together before picking his starting point and easing the needle into her skin.
“So why did you choose to spend all your time since December playing the part of an alcoholic?”
Scott pressed his lips together and tugged the line through, then began the next stitch before he answered. “My wife,” he said. “It…hasn’t exactly been a good seven months.”
“Divorce?” Riley murmured in an understanding tone.
Scott shook his head. “No,” he replied. He stuck her with the needle again, and she sucked in a breath through her nose. He contemplated telling her about it, about his life and how it’d all gone sour—all because of his job, a job he’d begun to hate but couldn’t leave. He put in another stitch before deciding to let it out.
“I used to work in the Agency’s Internal Affairs department,” Scott started, hoping she’d fixate on the “used to” in his sentence. There was no other way to tell his story but to admit to that fact. Maybe if she thought he wasn’t actually in Internal Affairs anymore, she wouldn’t realize he was still performing duties for them and had been asked to look into her. “Was there for about three, almost four, years. It was a difficult job, probably the most deep, undercover stuff I’d ever done and ever will do, but I didn’t mind it too much. It paid better than this, and it bought me and my wife a nice house.” He tied off the final stitch on the first cut and moved on to the second wound. “You know what Internal Affairs does, right?”
“I’ve heard rumors,” Riley admitted. She swigged from the bottle and offered it to him. He drank as she continued. “I think everybody in the Agency has. It’s like the boogeyman stories our parents used to tell us when we were kids, you know? Except it seems like Internal Affairs is what the handlers use to keep us field agents in line when we’re being ‘insubordinate.’” She made finger quotes around the word, and Scott passed the bottle back to her.
“Well, the rumors you’ve heard are probably close to the truth,” Scott admitted. “Though in the four years I worked for Internal Affairs, I only prosecuted one insubordination case. It’s rare we actually dealt with those situations, and when we did, it was a serious problem that the agent’s handler couldn’t deal with.”
“So what do you guys deal with?” Riley asked. She sucked in a breath as Scott slid the needle into her flesh again, and he glanced up to see her with her eyes closed, as if she were focusing on something other than the stinging pain of the needle jabbing into her skin. Her dark lashes lay against her pale skin, her features surprisingly relaxed. Her hair had fallen out of the loose ponytail she’d worn it in most of the day, and his fingers itched to push the hair away from the side of her face. He was struck yet again by how beautiful she was, and he wondered not for the first time what had brought her into the business they worked in. She had to have had better options than a life like this. He shook himself loose from staring and got back to work sewing up her side and continued his story.
“Moles,” Scott said. “Well, mostly moles. Undercover agents from other agencies, countries, whatever. People trying to ferret out our secrets, people trying to reveal the existence of activities that shouldn’t see the light of day. Threats to our security and the country’s security. That kind of thing.”
“So what happened?” Riley asked. She traced her finger along the rim of her bottle and then licked the droplet of bourbon off her fingertip. Scott finished putting the stitch he was working on in before he answered.
“The inevitable happened,” he said. “During most of last year, I investigated an agent suspected of working with foreign groups in some shady shit. It’s still classified, so I can’t get into specifics. Suffice to say, I did my job. I gathered the evidence, I put a dossier together, and I turned it over to my superiors. It was determined that the agent was guilty of treason against the Agency and the United States of America, and he was sentenced to termination. So he got passed on to the division of Internal Affairs that handles terminations.
“Except the man was working with someone in Internal Affairs, and we never rooted that out because he’d laid so fucking low he was eating worms. So instead of being terminated, the mark got away.”
&nbs
p; “Oh no,” Riley murmured. Scott saw in her face that she suspected where his story was going. “The mark retaliated, didn’t he?”
Scott snipped the end of the fishing line and set the needle on the edge of the sink. Then he sat there, his head bowed, his bloodstained hands hanging between his knees. “Yeah, he did. I don’t know how he found out I was the one who’d investigated him and turned him in. I don’t know how he found out where Amy and I lived. The official story was a home invasion gone wrong. It was far worse than that.
“I was on an overnight trip on another investigation, so I didn’t know she was in danger, that the bastard had gotten away and was…until Henry called and ordered me home. He’d suspected that something was wrong, and he’d started to follow through on his suspicions. Only he didn’t get there in time.”
“Did they at least catch the son of a bitch?” Riley asked.
“Yeah. Henry tracked him down and shot him while I was burying my pregnant wife. Didn’t bring Amy back, though. And we never figured out which son of a bitch helped him.” He sighed. “After that, I was ordered on leave until the end of August. Obviously, I didn’t make it to then.”
Riley handed him a clean washcloth, and she waited until he’d scrubbed the blood from his hands before she shoved the bourbon into his grasp. “Here, you need this way more than I do,” she said. She stood and twisted to look at her side, studying the stitches in the mirror and nodding her approval. “I thought you said you didn’t know what you were doing,” she added. “This looks good. Shouldn’t scar too badly, I don’t think.” She frowned and twisted around more. “Messed up my favorite pair of jeans, though.”
“Happens to the best of us,” Scott commented. “It’s why I don’t wear my favorite clothes when I’m on the job.” Riley gave him a dazzling smile and motioned with her head to the bathroom door.
“Come on, we should finish getting drunk and then plan our move on the Smithsonian. We’ve got to get our hands on that box before Zachariah and Ashton have our heads.”
Scott stood and stretched the kinks out of his back. “Did I just hear Ms. Riley Walker suggest we plan something?” he asked, grateful for the change in conversation from his past and his wife. “I thought you were against coming up with plans.”
Riley rolled her eyes and shook her head, pushing Scott into the bedroom area. “Shut up and drink my bourbon,” she ordered. “And don’t bring up my flightiness. It makes me feel self-conscious.”
“You? Self-conscious? Bullshit,” Scott retorted, laughing. Riley rolled her eyes again and grabbed her backpack before she flopped into the desk chair, flipping open her Agency-supplied laptop and powering it up. Scott sank onto the end of the bed and took another swig of bourbon. “You going to want this back?” he asked, waving the bottle in her direction. The bourbon sloshed with the movement.
“No, you finish it,” she said. Her tone had changed. She sounded authoritarian, businesslike, and it took him a moment to realize that she’d slipped into her agent mode. All of them had one: the ability to shut off their emotions and focus on the task at hand, regardless of what it was. He’d known agents who could become borderline machines in the process. He’d known agents who could carry that over into their personal lives, even during sex. Scott wasn’t that far gone, thankfully, but Riley’s sudden change made him curious if she was like that.
Scott frowned at the half-empty bottle in his hand. The amber liquid swirled accusingly. If his brain was slipping to thoughts of sex so soon after discussing his wife, then there was a high likelihood that he’d already drunk too much. He set the bottle onto the floor at the foot of the bed and tried to focus on Riley as she clicked around on the Smithsonian’s website, following the virtual tour and making notes in a Word document on the side. Focusing on the work and not on Riley was the key to handling the problem.
If only he could focus on work and not her. She was making the task impossible, what with her sitting in the desk chair in her bloodstained, wet jeans and no shirt, her black bra displayed for all the world—and him in particular—to see. She was thinner than she’d appeared to be, but by no means unhealthy, her skin pale and riddled with scars from prior assignments: knife wounds on her biceps and another below her right collarbone, and on her right side above the waistband of her jeans a long-healed bullet wound. There was an air of lost innocence about her that seemed emphasized by her war wounds, which inflamed Scott’s curiosity, making him want to get to know her better, if only to satisfy that curiosity while, at the same time, using whatever he learned about her in his investigation. He felt bad about getting to know her exclusively to investigate her for Internal Affairs, but he shunted the feeling aside. It was his job. It wasn’t like they were friends or anything.
Scott moved to the suitcase the Agency had delivered, stumbling as the liquor rushed to his head. He dug out a button-up shirt that he was sure was intended for him, dragged the ottoman to the desk with only a moderate loss of dignity, and flopped onto it, passing Riley the shirt without a word. She shrugged into it, leaving it unbuttoned, before continuing to study the computer screen. At some point while he’d been getting a shirt for her, she’d pulled a granola bar from her backpack and unwrapped it, and she was eating it slowly as she stared at the screen.
“Find anything usable?” Scott asked as he settled onto the ottoman. Despite his vow to not drink anymore that evening, he grabbed the bottle before he’d thought about it and took a swig. He felt like he needed heavy-duty mental fortification in liquid form before he dealt with Riley.
Riley hummed, low and frustrated, and jabbed at the mouse pad, clicking a couple of links and typing something into a search box. “Absolutely nothing,” she said, wadding the granola bar’s wrapper up and dropping it into the trash can beside the desk. “I figure our first step is to locate where the box is at in the Smithsonian. We can’t go into any of the museums without having an idea which building it’s in and end up getting busted because we spent too much time inside. We need to get in, get the box, and get out in as little time as possible.”
“Agreed,” Scott said. He set the bottle beside her computer, and she grabbed it and took a drink. “That said, how many lifts have you done before?”
“Truthfully? Not a lot,” she admitted. “Brandon liked to stick me on those, what’re they called, ‘honeypot’ assignments? I hated them with a passion. Henry usually sent me on the ones I really liked. I think he figured out that Brandon wasn’t doing me favors and that I preferred the types of assignments that involved me handing out assorted forms of justice.”
“Yeah, Henry’s a good guy like that,” Scott said. He snagged the bottle and started to take a swallow but stopped before he did, lowering the bottle and leaning to look at Riley’s computer screen. She was scrolling through a page of images representing the various items in the Smithsonian’s vast collections, and a picture of something familiar had flashed by on the screen. “Wait, wait, go back!” he urged. “Slower. I thought I saw something.”
Riley crooked an eyebrow before she obeyed. She scrolled back up the screen until the photo that Zachariah and Ashton had shown them came into view. A smile split Riley’s face, and she leaned to read the paragraph beside it. “It’s listed as connected to the Lost Colony of Roanoke,” she reported. “It’s sealed with wax, no one’s opened it or has any idea what’s inside it, and it’s kept in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. Looks like there’s an exhibit on the second floor that has something to do with Roanoke. That’s probably our best bet.” She pulled up a document with floor plans for museum guests’ references. “This has all the stairs marked. That’s a start, at least. Maybe we can stop by the Library of Congress and see if they have any blueprints on file.”
“Not a good idea,” Scott said.
“Why not?”
Scott poured all of the incredulity he felt into the look he gave her and took a swallow of bourbon before he answered. “You really haven’t done many lifts in your caree
r,” he said. “If you go out looking up blueprints, especially in a traceable place like the Library of Congress, and then an item goes missing from the same place you were studying the blueprints for, it’s damned obvious what’s happened. You leave a paper trail that way, and a paper trail is always unacceptable.” He rolled the bottle between his hands and stared at the computer screen as he mulled the situation over. Then he said, “We’ll have to do this the old fashioned way.”
“Case the place?” Riley suggested.
Scott tore his eyes from the screen and nodded. “Case the place,” he confirmed. “Starting tomorrow morning. I think Mr. and Mrs. Hampstead need to play tourist and wander around the Smithsonian’s museums for a while.”
Riley grinned and snagged the bottle from him, chugging most of what was left before she added, “But first, Mr. and Mrs. Hampstead need to get some sleep, because Mrs. Hampstead wants to be prepared for the opportunity to shoot something in the morning.”
~*~
When Zachariah awoke, he found himself laying on something soft in pitch-black darkness. He kept still, kept his breathing steady, and strained his eyes to see in the dark room. His heart hammered as adrenaline flooded his veins, adrenaline borne of fear. He tried to piece together not only where he was, but also what had happened and how he’d gotten there. He remembered the fight, ordering Riley and Scott to bail, and the terrible pain in his head. And he remembered the woman behind him, the one who’d rendered him unconscious with just a touch.
He experimented with moving each of his limbs a few inches and was surprised to discover he wasn’t tied down like he’d expected. He turned his head, listening and trying to determine if he was alone in the room.
The Unnaturals (The Unnaturals Series Book 1) Page 15