Disreputable Allies (Fates of the Bound Book 1)

by Wren Weston

  Disreputable Allies

  Fates of the Bound: Book 1

  Wren Weston

  Topsy-Turvy Publishing

  Topsy-Turvy Publishing

  512 West MLK Jr. Blvd, Suite 264

  Austin, Texas 78701

  Copyright © 2016 by Topsy-Turvy Publishing

  Cover Design by Deranged Doctor Design

  ISBN 978-1-68381-021-6 (print)

  ISBN 978-1-68381-022-3 (epub)

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Visit Topsy-Turvy Publishing on the World Wide Web at www.topsyturvypublishing.com.

  Visit Wren Weston at www.wrenweston.com.

  Contents

  Title Page ♦ 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

  Chapter 22 ♦ Chapter 23 ♦ Chapter 24

  Chapter 25 ♦ Chapter 26 ♦ Chapter 27

  Chapter 28 ♦ Chapter 29

  Preview: Stolen Lies (Fates of the Bound, Book #2)

  Chapter 1 ♦ Chapter 2 ♦ Chapter 3

  Newsletter

  Titles ♦ About Wren

  Chapter 1

  Lila had everything under control.

  She padded silently into Senator Edward Serrano’s office, pulling the door closed without a sound. She had not chosen the man or his office randomly. The puffed-up politician favored oversized leather furniture and velvet drapes. Both would provide Lila with plenty of cover if a patrolling guard peeked inside. She wasn’t worried about being found, though. Her partner had carefully timed the men’s paths. According to Tristan, she would have at least twenty minutes to steal the files and withdraw from the Bullstow compound.

  Flush with time, Lila raided the senator’s mini-fridge and opened a bottle of Saveur, taking several deep gulps of the expensive beer. It tasted lightly of vanilla and smoke and money. A lot of money. She slid the bottle cap into her trouser pocket and let her fingers skate over the slick wooden box on his desk. She didn’t need to open it to know what was inside, for the mild scent of tobacco drifted throughout the office.

  After pocketing a few cigars, she tossed her black peacoat upon the senator’s desk. The heating would not be turned on again for another hour or two, but she was glad to be rid of the coat despite the chill. It was a cover of poverty she was unaccustomed to, a strange weight that barely flowed past her hips.

  Shivering, she tossed her frayed newsboy cap and the thermal hood on the desk. In a perfect world, her cheap gray shirt and trousers would come next, followed by her stiff work boots, which had already worn blisters into her heels. She could have done the entire job in her thermal suit. The skintight material kept her from being seen on thermal cameras, but she would be marked as a high-end thief if anyone saw it.

  Lila took another swig of Saveur and plucked the senator’s laptop from his desk. Stretching out languidly on the couch, she began her second break-in of the evening.

  Tapping quietly on the keys, Lila tried the most common passwords at the login prompt. Breaking into the senator’s laptop was the only part of her plan that she had not accounted for. Perhaps she was getting sloppy, but these jobs had begun to feel too routine, too monotonous, and too easy. Perhaps they didn’t come often enough to counter the drudgery of her day job. Perhaps she’d partnered with Tristan for too long, and his irresponsibility had rubbed off on her.

  Yes, she thought, narrowing her brown eyes. It was probably Tristan’s fault in some way.

  Lila typed yet another permutation of the word Odin—the most commonly used password by men in politics—into the login screen. She hoped for the sake of her government that Serrano’s password would not be so simple, but those hopes were dashed on her fourth attempt, as was the chance to test her new password-cracking program.

  She was in.

  Brushing her dark curls from her eyes, Lila scanned the senator’s desktop. She spied a folder entitled Toys, but on this occasion she chose not to trespass against Senator Serrano’s privacy. He had nearly two dozen children, after all, and at this time of the year, it might be nothing more scandalous than a gift list for the Winter Solstice. If it wasn’t so innocent, she knew she didn’t want to see what the folder might contain.

  Instead, Lila logged into the senate’s network under Prolix, the username of one of her fake accounts, and transferred a few programs to Serrano’s computer. She depended on such programs to hide her activities and to keep an eye out for snoops, and she updated them often. While they ran, she set the entire BIRD to back up on her star drive, a slice of memory the size of her knuckle. She then leaned back into the cushions of the couch and checked her watch. The guards would not patrol the second floor for another twenty minutes. She still had plenty of time.

  A light on her snoop program flashed red.

  Lila sat up instantly and put down her beer. She squinted at the snoop’s user ID. Her programs did not recognize it, which meant that the account was fake. If someone had laid a trap, she might have just armed it. She couldn’t be caught in the Bullstow compound, copying files from senate’s network. A conviction for pilfering files from the BIRD would place a hacker’s neck in the hangman’s noose.

  Lila stood up and paced back and forth while the database copied. When the screen flashed green, she dove back to it at once and brought up her programs.

  Save data on snoop: Zephyr?

  The cursor blinked on and off.

  “Of course,” she muttered, hitting enter, watching lines of numbers and letters blur across the screen. “What kind of name is Zephyr?”

  Data copied.

  Delete all logs and programs?

  The cursor blinked again, waiting for approval.

  Lila slammed the enter key once more and ripped the star drive from the laptop. The computer’s fan whirled as she twisted the memory stick into a pendant and hung it on the little gold chain around her neck. She frowned as the laptop worked. She had never been caught by a snoop before, and though she was confident in her programs’ ability to keep her hidden, she didn’t want to remain in the office one second longer than she had to.

  She crouched over the laptop once again, holding her finger over the shutdown menu.

  A loud screech pierced the air.

  Lila startled, nearly shutting down the computer before it had finished. Every fire alarm in the building shrieked with the volume and shrillness of a thousand distressed toddlers.

  Covering her ears, Lila madly sniffed the air.

  She smelled nothing but the muted, stale scent of cigars.

  Had Tristan hit the alarm as a warning? Were guards surging upstairs ready to capture her? Was it another mistake? If he had bungled things again, she would kill him. What would be the excuse this time? How hard was it to relax in the shadows, waiting to intervene only if the militia pinched her?

  Sometimes it seemed like Tristan wanted her to get caught.

  “Hurry up!” Lila hissed at the senato
r’s laptop.

  As if it understood her, the computer finally shut down. Lila slammed the lid closed and returned it to Serrano’s desk, exactly as she found it.

  Slipping on her coat, Lila broke for the window and yanked back the velvet drapes. She pulled her thermal hood over her curls and thrust her newsboy cap into her pocket, thumbing the coin-sized pendant inside. The jammer would scramble any cameras nearby.

  Tugging her thermal gloves higher on her wrist, she snatched up the bottle of Saveur, opened the senator’s window with a dull creak, and crawled onto the second-story ledge. She took care to replace the drapes behind her so that they hung straight once more and then closed the window. It sealed electronically behind her with a little beep.

  Luckily, Bullstow did not keep logs of such things. Not yet.

  Lila dangled her legs over the granite ledge and pressed her back into the glass. The stone leeched heat from her body, causing another shiver to flow up her spine. Her breath smoked in the cold autumn darkness. The floodlights on the roof flashed across the compound, highlighting the garden and marble statuary below.

  Lila squinted through the patchy fog. The boys’ school buildings and university, the private cafés and restaurants, the government buildings full of administrators, social workers, and the militia, all hid from her sight. Even Falcon Home and the stone wall surrounding the compound played coy, hidden by swirls of gray.

  Lila drained the rest of her beer and scanned the area for a means of escape. The searchlights should have been on a program. Tristan had captured their movements on camera days ago. The program was supposed to make it impossible to avoid detection, but Lila had found a way. Unfortunately, the fire alarm had kicked the beams off their program. Guards now aimed them manually, swinging the beams so erratically that she could hardly find a pattern at all. What should have been easy had turned into a tripwire attached to a thousand kilograms of dynamite.

  Lila stowed the empty bottle of Saveur in her coat pocket and lowered herself off the ledge. Swinging her body away from the first-floor window, she dropped to the cement below, stamping loudly as her boots hit. The impact jarred the knife she kept inside.

  Crouching behind a shrub, Lila tensed to sprint away.

  She heard voices around the corner of the building.

  Lila circled behind the nearest marble statue and peeked around its pedestal, narrowly avoiding the domain of a floodlight that butted up against the back of the building.

  Two men appeared, clad in the gray and black uniforms of Bullstow security. Their leather blackcoats had been hemmed only a dozen centimeters above the ground. The golden piping on their uniforms matched the rose stitched on their breast. The cut and style would have been at home in the Allied Lands three hundred years before: the style of Britain, Spain, Portugal, and France before the alliance. A Weberly revolver hung on their right hips. On their left, the hilt of a short sword peeked out. A German Shepherd trotted beside them, unfazed by the floodlights, the fire alarm, and the shouts of its masters.

  “I’m telling you, this is a test,” the shorter guard hollered over the alarm, his voice imbued with a nasal tone. He scanned the statuary as if they might suddenly hop off their marble bases and run away. “Sergeant Bates told me all about them. Someone’s out here, Nic. Someone sneaking around.”

  Lila ducked down, making herself as small as possible.

  “Sergeant Bates is an idiot. ’Bout time you learned that. The fire department never shows up at tests. Chief Shaw always warns them.”

  “If it’s really a fire, why hasn’t anyone seen or smelled any smoke, huh? Sergeant Bates says if we catch the snoop, we get the bonus.”

  “I’m going to bonus your face in a minute, rookie. We just had a test this summer. Mark my words, it’s the wiring.”

  “No one caught the snoop. We’re having another test.”

  Lila rolled her eyes. It would be two men who shouted privileged information to anyone who might be near.

  Sloppy. Very sloppy.

  When the voices finally disappeared around the corner, Lila didn’t pause to check the searchlights. She merely sprinted toward the tree line as soon as the beams turned away, and hoped for the best.

  One of the beams swung around instantly.

  Lila sprinted faster, adrenaline taking over where her natural speed left off. Her worn boots scraped at her blistered heels until the sting shot throughout her body.

  The beam edged closer, gaining, as if it spurred her toward the park.

  It caught up before Lila reached the tree line. As it nudged against her heels, she launched herself the last few meters into the trees and dove behind a marble bench.

  Lila froze where she landed, hissing as the beam lit up her boot. She didn’t move, not to scratch her wrist, not to settle into a more comfortable position, not even to hide herself more completely. Movement would only attract the attention of whomever aimed the light and squinted at where it was pointed. There was still a chance they had not yet noticed the outline of her boot.

  The night was foggy, after all.

  Lila panted, waiting. The lights would have blinded her if her head and torso hadn’t been hidden behind the bench. But she didn’t hear any voices. She didn’t hear any boots squelching in the mud, either. She didn’t even hear the expected croaks and chirps within the trees. The entire park listened, frightened at the light.

  Still the beam did not move. The guards on the roof might have stopped to pick their noses, to sip chocolate, to talk, to take a piss off the side of the building. They might have radioed for a patrol to investigate the bench. On the other hand, their superior might have ordered them to check thermal imaging.

  Lila breathed heavily in the darkness, hoping for the latter. She would be invisible over thermal, and the searchlight would move on.

  After several moments, the light whipped back to the grounds, crossing with another beam over the statuary.

  Thanking her luck, Lila crawled across the soggy ground and progressed deeper into the trees. When she thought she had gone far enough, she hopped to her feet and slipped from trunk to trunk, coming closer to the stone wall that enclosed Bullstow.

  A boot squelched in the mud behind her.

  A flashlight beam lit up the area.

  Lila spun behind a tree.

  “Told you it was a snoop,” came a triumphant, nasal shout. The shorter guard sprinted toward her, cocked his gun, and aimed a flashlight at the tree. Nic huffed along behind him, clutching his side.

  Lila’s hand flew to her hip with a practiced movement. She drew her gun and crouched low to the ground, wincing at the metal in her grip and the thoughts in her mind. Firing her gun would complicate matters significantly, but she had no other choice.

  She was no fighter.

  Swinging from behind the tree, she aimed her Colt at the rookie’s neck.

  His flashlight swung up at the same time, blinding her.

  The tranq dart hit the rookie’s forehead instead.

  “Son of a…” The blackcoat lurched stiffly. His flashlight slipped from his grasp and struck a rock as he tumbled to the ground, struggling to brush away the dart.

  The bulb shattered.

  The rookie landed beside it with a fart-like splat.

  “Rookie?” Nic called out, wheezing beside his partner.

  The guard peered into the trees. Lila didn’t have time for her eyes to adjust to the dark, but neither did he. Groping wildly, she sprinted deeper into the park, shoulders smacking into limbs, face smarting from the occasional whack of a branch. She could only hope that her eyes would recover first.

  She heard a whoosh of air.

  Something grazed her sleeve.

  Lila whipped behind a tree and brushed her arm where the phantom touch had landed. Her cheap woolen peacoat had caught Nic’s dart, and she flicked it away with gloved fingers. />
  Then she gripped her Colt and fell onto the soggy grass with a thud.

  The blackcoat advanced slowly, his outline coming into clearer focus with every step. Towering over her, he nudged her with his boot. When she did not move, he turned his head toward a radio perched on his shoulder. “Nichols to base. I’m in quadrant two. Send a med team. I caught the snoop, and my rookie is down, over.”

  Static erupted from the radio.

  Nic winced and turned his head away, rubbing his ear.

  With the blackcoat distracted, Lila drew her Colt and fired in one quiet, crisp movement.

  This time the dart hit its mark perfectly.

  The tranq overwhelmed Nic more quickly than his partner. He fell atop her, pinning her shoulder and her Colt to the ground. The man’s heavy chest crushed her fingers inside the trigger guard, and she barely kept herself from crying out.

  Digging her arm into the man’s side, she worked herself free and gingerly stretched her fingers. Nothing seemed broken.

  “Idiot.”

  A loud snore erupted, calling out their location like an overpowered homing beacon.

  “I pity your lover.” Lila turned the man onto his stomach to stop the bulk of the noise. She ran her fingers along Nic’s neck and retrieved her dart, then ran quickly to the rookie to do the same.

  The job had gotten far too hot. With nothing stolen and no other crimes evident, the first thing Bullstow would consider was the security of its computer network. Even if Lila didn’t get caught, she might never work again after such a mess.

  Neither would Tristan, if she had anything to do with it.

  Lila stowed the darts in her pocket and sprinted toward the stone wall at the edge of the compound. She ran up the side and stretched toward the top, lifting her head over the cold stone, mentally cataloging all the ways she could torture her partner with an expensive beer bottle and a few used sleep darts.

  Luckily, the searchlights on the street still had a rhythm to them, not thrown off by the blaring alarms or the fire truck hurtling closer to Bullstow’s front gate. Since she could predict the beams again, she could avoid both the light and the blackcoats who patrolled the front gate.