by Snow, Nicole
It’s dark inside and cold.
He’s not there.
Even as I unwrap a piece of candy and pop it in my mouth with trembling fingers, I know something’s very off here.
My key still works in the lock, so it’s not like he’s just abandoned me. The place is still there as if it, too, is waiting for him to come home.
Like he just left this morning and everything’s perfectly normal.
I want to believe it’s okay, nothing off-kilter, maybe something just called him away unexpectedly.
It’s not uncommon in his position to be brought on snap conferences at a moment’s notice.
But he doesn’t answer his calls, either.
Not tonight.
Not for five days after.
He never comes home. I watch his apartment like a hawk. Full surveillance.
It’s what I’m best at. Laying low, waiting for my target to show, but there’s neither hide nor hair of him.
It’s not until I’m called in for a briefing on another mission that I get the news.
Oliver Major is dead.
He’s been dead for days—fucking days—while I waited with my heart in my throat to show him even more ultrasound photos. Waited to see his face light up at the sight of that small grainy black-and-white peanut that’s our child, to plan every day of our lives together with him.
They say it was an ambush.
Someone with a knife, going straight for Durham like an angry tiger.
They call Oliver a hero, sacrificing himself to save Leland Durham’s rotten life.
And that’s how I know it’s total bullshit.
Because I’m the only one who knows how Oliver really feels about Durham.
Deep down, I know.
Galentron—and Durham—took Oliver from me.
Somehow, I keep my usual emotionless mask on with my chief officer. I don’t dare show how I feel, listening robotically to the instructions given to me on my newest target, the information, the time frame, the location, and the sin that’s made them a Galentron target.
In this case, it’s a rival researcher from a Japanese biotech conglomerate. I’m supposed to slip him drugs and manufacture some incredibly compromising photos with a hooker intended to finish his career. Easy, and by normal standards, fairly clean.
But under the conference table, my hand slips to rest on my belly, and I swear with everything in me, there’s only one mission now.
I’ll protect the life inside me.
It’s all of Oliver I have left.
And Galentron won’t take her—either of them—away from me again.
* * *
Present
Whether I realized it or not at the time, that was the day.
I knew I’d do anything to tear Galentron down brick by brick.
It might’ve taken me a little time and a lot of carnage to get here.
But this is my moment.
I’ll find out what they did with my daughter. Where she is. If she really survived.
If she can be saved.
And as a bonus, I’ll take revenge for what they did to Oliver and Heart’s Edge and thousands of people whose only mistake was going against the company.
I just have one wish.
When I find her, I hope that she’s whole.
Inside and out.
That she’s not just like her mother. Not like me.
Incapable of love.
Incapable of warmth.
Incapable of friendship.
Capable only of anger, determination, good fashion sense, and the real ace up her sleeve—an unparalleled hunger for vengeance.
Sure, it’s been building inside me for years.
It makes my spine straight and stiff as I pick up the suitcase I’ve brought with me and step forward.
I’m not playing around with subterfuge today.
We’re going to do things my way in the rainy light of day.
Big, bright, bold...
...and with a hell of a lot of noise.
I’m coming, Durham.
Ready or not, you piece of shit.
7
A Spoonful of Sugar (Oliver)
I swear to God, this woman has a death wish.
I stare incredulously over my steering wheel, watching through my binoculars—even if I only need to use one lens—as Fuchsia emerges from whatever crevice she’d hidden herself away in after barging past the gate.
She’d disappeared in a blink. She’s good, still a wildcat after all these years, so good even I’d lost her for a minute.
But now she steps boldly into sight and goes stalking across the tarmac, straight for the plane—dragging a rolling suitcase behind her.
She still wears those red-bottom heels she loves so much, the only splash of color when she’s always a panther in all black.
My wildcat.
Amazingly, she still walks like she owns everything around her.
Even when she thrusts herself into the center of a pack of Nighthawks who bristle like they’d happily take her head off in half a second, and only the fact that she’s a woman is slowing them down.
That’s the mistake most people make with Fuchsia.
Underestimating her.
And still thinking women are the weaker sex, when all it takes is one look from her to bring me to my knees.
But I’ve got to admire the gamble she’s taking. On the surface, her plan seems ludicrous, but there’s one thing keeping the Nighthawks in check and confused. It’s not just because their 'father' and handler, Dr. Maximilian Ross, was captured in Heart’s Edge and has been locked up in a cell for months.
This is still a public airfield.
Security cameras pepper the field damn near everywhere, plus those two TSA guards at the gate who aren’t affiliated with Galentron.
Airport staff, both on the tarmac and in the air control tower.
If they go after Fuchsia, it’ll be on the national news by evening once the airport sorts out the fact that these people aren’t their employees, and they’re covering for a highly wanted man.
They’d have to lie, to make a statement and dissociate themselves.
And then everything falls apart when some smart reporter who hears about the ruckus realizes those were Galentron employees, and someone at the airport was paid very well to let a suspicious person of interest through and just look the other way while one of the most high-profile criminals of our decade made his escape.
There’s too much riding on those giant men. They don’t so much as twitch a muscle at Fuchsia, let alone draw the weapons I know they have concealed under their coveralls, some with fairly blatant outlines of pistols against thin fabric.
And she knows it, too.
That’s why she’s taking gross and filthy advantage of it.
Goddamn, I love her.
But I also can’t let anything happen to her. Once she’s on board that plane and out of sight, it’ll be too easy for Durham to make her disappear.
He’s probably got at least one or two men in there with him, keeping him under guard.
And Fuchsia’s good, but she’s not invincible.
Maybe.
I scan the tarmac quickly, taking stock of the situation. As a dead man who doesn’t technically exist, I’ve got a little more freedom to do things the bold, brazen way.
The Fuchsia way.
When I catch sight of a baggage handling truck near the gate, I smile.
You’ve got to love the times when life gives you an easy answer.
I hurl myself out of my truck. I’m a little stiff, considering the last time I faced an entire pack of assholes in the field I had two flesh and bone legs—now, I’ve got a sleek titanium prosthetic on the left side.
The same sort they give runners who’ve lost legs with the curving metal struts designed to spring and flow to give you a little more oomph in your step.
I’m fifty-five.
I’ve got plenty of oomph, but the fact that one leg is a quarter-inch longe
r than the other sometimes makes my knee joints creak in protest.
Don’t worry.
I’ve still got this.
And Durham’s men are about to get a whole fucking lot of it.
The hardest part is realizing I’m actually here. I’ve been waiting for this moment forever.
We’ve been waiting.
And there’s no way in hell I’ll miss out on helping my girl annihilate the man who ruined our lives, and so many others.
That’s the thing I hate most about bastards like Leland Durham.
As splashy and powerful as he is, most people forget he even exists.
Galentron is an entity, to them. A faceless corporation. A multinational dragon with no head.
So when things go wrong, the entity takes the blame and gets labeled evil and corrupt.
Meanwhile, pricks like Durham get to stay invisible, clean.
Even with all the news coverage about secretive government contracts—which, of course, the U.S. intelligence community painted as contractors gone rogue and off-assignment, versus doing exactly what the letter agencies wanted of them—and small towns being targeted as test grounds at the cost of innocent civilian lives, he’s not front and center.
Durham could walk into the middle of downtown Seattle tomorrow, stand there and scream his name at the top of his lungs.
And not everyone would recognize him.
Which is why the people who know him for the snake he is have to make sure he doesn’t get away and pull off this body double scheme.
Doesn’t get away and disappear to a place where he could become completely invisible, and live out the rest of his days in luxury.
He might not even be megalomaniacal enough to start acting out again under a shadow corporation. Just quietly retire.
That’s not enough for me.
He doesn’t get to have an easy, restful life.
Not if I have anything to say about it.
I’ve smoothed out that kink in my knee by the time I get to the gate, and breeze past the confused-looking security guards just like Fuchsia did.
If you act like you belong somewhere, people tend not to question it.
So I just give a jovial wave and smile like I know them, leaving them puzzled and exchanging confused glances, while I duck through the gate and make a beeline for the truck.
Shit.
I’ve got to get to her before she does something crazier than what she’s already doing.
Because there’s something she desperately needs to know.
The reasons I’ve stayed hidden for so long.
Some work, you can only do from the shadows, and it takes goddamn forever.
And some work goes fast, requires hijacking a baggage truck and mowing a few guys down.
They don’t even see me coming.
I rev up the engine and go charging forward. Shoddy instincts, I guess, with Ross out of the picture. They don’t make Nighthawks like they used to.
No situational awareness.
For shame, for shame.
And that’s how I clock two of them, easy, as I go plowing into the uneasily milling crowd pretending to work around Durham’s jet, just as Fuchsia tears up the steps of the airplane boarding ramp and surges to the waiting door.
It’s not a pleasant feeling when bodies go thumping around under the wheels of the baggage cart. I hear a couple of shouts, dull crunches, but even as heavy as this thing is I don’t think it’s enough to kill those men. Not when they’re honed into heavily reinforced tanks of human beings.
Just enough to knock them down for a while.
And almost enough to flip me, too.
My heart leaps up in my throat as the sheer bulk of one of my human speedbumps sends me tipping onto two wheels. Then the clumsy baggage truck flops back down and shoots forward, sending the others scattering as I make a beeline right for the jet.
It’s enough of a diversion to distract the Nighthawks who’d started running after Fuchsia to box her in once she was on the plane, scaring them away from the steps, making them scatter like a flock of startled birds.
For a moment, she stops, glancing back at the commotion.
Grey cutting eyes land on me.
Fuck.
She doesn’t even recognize me.
I can see it in her blank, puzzled gaze, the way it slides over me, perfunctory, quick, before dismissing me as good luck and moving on.
I know I’ve changed a lot—missing an eye, missing a leg, years of ravaging age—but damn, that stabs deep.
But she barely sweeps over me for half a second, and I’m moving again, slewing the baggage truck to a halt at the foot of the stairs and vaulting out, using that extra bit of spring in my titanium leg to rocket me over the door and onto the concrete.
She’s already gone, disappeared into the plane.
And I’ve got a dozen men hot on my heels.
I don’t even hesitate.
With the rain driving down on me, slicing through my clothes to steam against my skin, driving me on with its pounding, I go, go, go.
I charge up the stairs after her.
Save my wildcat?
You’re damned right I will.
Whether she ends up fighting me like the total stranger I’ve become or not.
Because I don’t think even Fuchsia herself understands the true depths of Leland Durham’s treachery.
Or that he’s probably already waiting for her and has no intention of letting her walk away alive.
* * *
Fifteen Years Ago
I’m not even supposed to be here.
There’s something to be said for Leland Durham’s remarkable ability to upend my life.
Pulling me out of my office in the middle of the afternoon when I’d already been looking forward to going home and whipping up a celebratory dinner to officially cement my future with Fuchsia and our unborn child.
There’s a ring in my pocket.
Probably another dumb idea I know she’ll laugh at.
Sentiments and softness, the kind of things she’s been conditioned to think are weak, though deep down she loves them.
The woman can’t hide the truth from me.
She loves anything that makes her feel, and I love getting the chance to peel past the hardened layers of the soldier to find the girl who’s brave enough to bring a child into this world despite the life she’s had.
The woman who was brave enough to trust me to stay with her when she told me about that child.
The woman who’ll tease me about the six-figure price tag on the ring but won’t quite be able to look me in the eye when I slide it onto her finger, because if she meets my eyes, she’s done.
Then I’ll see the emotion in hers.
Yes, part of loving Fuchsia Delaney, Patty Brin, whatever she calls herself, is letting her keep her guard up when she needs it.
She’ll let it down when I least expect it.
The sad thing is I can’t really marry her. Not legally.
She doesn’t exist on paper.
According to official records I dug up last year, Patty Brin died in a car accident along with her parents over fifteen years ago.
Even her civilian aliases—and she has many, cycling through them depending on where she’s deployed—are all thin shells.
Shame. We can’t risk holding up under scrutiny with an official marriage license, and possibly linking her to Galentron, when the time comes to blow the coop with nothing left of this fucked up organization.
But that doesn’t mean it won’t be official to us.
Someday, I’ll find a way to make it true, even for the state.
As long as she says yes.
We can even throw our own unofficial private wedding, no officiant needed.
Hell, I’m looking forward to it. Fine excuse to give her a chance to wear the most obscene, expensive dress of her life.
And knowing her, she’ll decide to get married in all black.
That ring is in my
pocket now as I follow Leland down a dark street in D.C. at three o’clock in the morning, surrounded by a security team of over a dozen men.
To call it a long fucking day would be a monster understatement.
I don’t even know why we’re out here, really.
Durham’s been immensely cagey and secretive since he ushered me and several other top officers onto a plane under full guard yesterday.
Something about a high-profile, top-secret project with the highest-level military brass.
Something so classified we may even end up speaking with the president himself.
The biggest project Galentron has ever seen, he says.
So massive, so confidential, so good for his ego that he can’t even breathe a word about it to me until we’re alone in a secured, bug-proof room with the politicos and military chiefs who apparently summoned us out here with zero warning.
Yeah, I’m not buying it.
Things have been weird at Galentron lately.
Lines crossed.
That facility they’ve started building in an old silver mine out in that tiny Montana town for biological research...
Durham’s reaching too far.
And he’s giving me exactly what I need to finally do something about it.
Agent SP-73 is too big. Too dangerous. Too likely to fuck things up beyond any repair the company could ever do if the virus ever got loose.
Too damning.
I wonder if that’s what this meeting is about.
How to keep things hush-hush in the horribly likely event they move forward with this crap? It’s the same crap crafty young Fuchsia brought back to our data boys years ago from her raid in the former Yugoslavia. This lethal doomsday project the Soviets were working on before they went tits up, and a couple years ago, a Galentron team retrieved a sample from some godforsaken place.
They brought a man-made disease that was supposed to be extinct back to life.
I fucking shudder, and it has nothing to do with the chill tonight.
I think I know why we’re walking around in the dead of night on a wet, frozen D.C. street, silent and moving under guard, taking old streets where no one will see us—not even anyone up to more mundane kinds of no good.