Blacklisted: Blacklist Operations Book #1 (10 page)

Chapter Thirteen

England

“Aidan,” she whispered, drawing him out of sleep while they flew over the sea. “I need to tell you something. I’m sorry for what I said last night.”

“Don’t apologize,” he whispered back, his lips brushing her ear. “I shouldn’t have touched you.”

“No, damn it.” She sighed, frustrated. “I just want you to know, I wasn’t thinking about gratitude when you kissed me. When you kiss me, I can’t think at all.”

He smiled at the admission and felt the warmth spread through his body. It was a damned inconvenient time to get an erection, but
Sophie had that effect on him. Hearing her admit that she’d liked the pleasure she’d found in his arms was a heady experience.

She was going to wreck him.

“I just don’t want gratitude to be between us if we…” She trailed off, blushing.

“If we what?” He knew that teasing her wasn’t strictly kind, but he loved the way she pressed her lips together.

“If we had sex.”

“If I fucked you?” Aidan saw the blush deepen, pressed his advantage. “If I put my hands on your sexy curves and
buried my mouth between your thighs? If I kissed you there until you were wet and screaming and begging me to push my cock deep inside you.” Maybe he’d gone too far, he told himself, but Sophie took a deep breath and relaxed against him.

“Yes,” she said quietly. “That exactly.”

His whole world changed in the space of her quiet admission, there above the choppy ocean on his way back to London. What had been affection and desire, coupled with the need to protect her, suddenly became more. Not love, he told himself. Not for a woman like her, someone fragile and sweet. But the feeling was a hot mass in his chest.

“I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anything in my life,” he said, wanting to give her the same honesty. “But I have a duty. To you as well as to the people I keep safe. I can’t touch you again.”

“Don’t make excuses,” she said, putting a warm hand on his leg. “Do you want me?”

“I want you, but I need to keep you safe.”

“Taking me to bed won’t put me in danger.”

“Sophie…”

“I want you more than I’ve ever wanted anyone, Aidan.” Hearing his name on her lips made his cock tighten. “If you can’t be with me, then I’ll respect that. But really think about it. Maybe after everything is fixed…”

“After, then.” She took her hand from his leg and twined it with her own, settling them in her lap. She stared out the window and didn’t look at him even when he reached over and covered her hands with one of his.

I’ve gone completely insane
. It was the only explanation Sophie could come up with to explain her behavior since they’d gotten off the plane at Heathrow. Since they’d admitted that they wanted each other, Aidan had relaxed and spent more time actually talking to her instead of sitting, silent and grim.

He checked them into a single room at the downtown Marriot, then told her to take whatever she wanted from the minibar. As if she wouldn’t have anyway. Then he took the phone from the cradle and dragged it into the bathroom.

Sophie worked on putting their clothes into the drawers, the repetitive motions soothing her ruffled nerves. Leaving them packed may have been the more logical option, but Aidan wasn’t saying how long they’d be there. She didn’t know when she’d be able to see his boss. To finally meet Oliver. Just thinking about it made her palms sweat.

Everything action she’d taken in the last two weeks had been a mistake, Sophie thought as she stared at her reflection in the window. Two weeks had gone by and though she knew her chances of actually making it to Rome in time to teach were slim, she couldn’t help but worry over the syllabus. It seemed so ridiculous to care about something like that, though.

When she’d called Adele from Teheran, she’d told her to go ahead and plan to spend the semester solo, after all.

It was harder to stay with Aidan when she was so close to the flat she kept in Paris. Other than her parent’s rambling country home in California and Lyle’s townhouse in DC, it was the only place that felt like hers. Decorated in shades of blue and cream, it was simple and elegant. A place where she could go to relax and be alone. She slept well there.
Adele kept an apartment only blocks away. Two stories. Two bedrooms. Two windows that faced a small, sunny street.

She remembered closing on it, how she spent the first night in a sleeping bag on the hardwood floors. She woke with bright yellow light streaming through the glass windowpanes. Faced with the arduous task of putting up curtains, she’d decided to skip the whole thing and took her dog, Daisy, out into the small front yard, caged with wrought-iron fencing.

Daisy had rolled around in the grass, getting to know the lay of the land. By the time all the furniture had arrived and been installed, she’d trotted across the wood floors like she, rather than Sophie, owned the building.

She’d get back to that
flat, she promised herself. Return to take Daisy from the kennel and fill her with steak and tummy rubs until she was less angry at being left. It was just London that made Sophie have doubts. London and Oliver.

Her hands felt cold even in the heat of the room, so she pulled down the arms of her sweatshirt and tucked them over her hands. It was so hard to make herself stay, to not walk out the front door and disappear in the crowd, to abandon the whole crazy scheme when the doubts snuck in. Maybe it was Aidan, she told herself. The way he used his body to shield hers in Iran. How she loved waking to find his arm around her.

Sophie walked closer to the window and stared down at the street. From so high up, she could just make out the people scrambling for taxis in the rain. The storm almost seemed like a bad omen warning her to head back. To rewind. She traced her fingers through the raindrops that beaded down the glass and tried to convince herself she hadn’t made a huge mistake. That it was all going to be okay. The rain didn’t slow down.

Across the street she could see the blurry figure of two women having a conversation in their own hotel room. Chairs angled toward the window, they shared what looked like a bottle of wine in what she could only assume was their safe haven from the outside. She missed
Adele. Aidan’s voice, almost inaudible behind the bathroom door, was a poor substitute.

Crossing to the minibar, she opened a can of Sprite and took a long swallow. She wasn’t tired, but there wasn’t much else to do. The bed dominated the room, persuaded her to lie down and muss the coverlet. She set the drink down on the side table and curled into a ball, alone in the waning light.

“I believe you, Aidan. Settle down.” Oliver’s deep tones weren’t making him rest any easier.

“I need to know that you won’t hurt her.”

“As long as she’s not Veronica, she’s safe. I’m not going to hurt an innocent girl because she’s Lyle’s daughter. What kind of man do you think I am?”

“Sorry, boss.” Aidan stared at himself in the mirror, not missing the wildness of his eyes.

“I agree that it’s unlikely she’s Veronica. The photographs you sent me look different than the woman I’ve met in the past. Besides, until Veronica’s knife turned up with
Dima’s body, I was under the impression that she was dead.”

“Dead?”

“I heard she was killed in Japan.” Oliver sighed and Aidan let the subject drop. He could hear paper rustling through the phone.

“What are you doing?”

“Looking at surveillance photographs of Lyle and Veronica meeting a few years ago. They’re clear enough to be a good comparison. The resemblance is damned near uncanny, but this woman looks haggard.”

“Sophie isn’t.”

“Well, we’ll see.” Aidan knew that Oliver hated Veronica almost as much as he did.

“We will,” Oliver said. “Go rest, Aidan. I’ll see you Friday when I’m back in town.”

“What about Synthesis?”

“We’ll discuss leads then. Rest.”

Aidan hung up and placed the phone on the counter. Rest seemed impossible or, at least, very, very far away.

Chapter Fourteen

Oliver snuffed out his cigarette and stared at the silent phone. He couldn’t believe deep-down that Aidan had captured Veronica, though his heart had skipped a beat when the knife found with
Dima’s body was revealed to him. The woman was dead. He knew it better than anyone, since he’d killed her.

But still, he couldn’t be sure. He didn’t have a body.

The photographs from the folder were spread across his desk. One showed Veronica beaten and bleeding in Tokyo. That night was one of the best of his life.

After all, it was the cu
nt’s fault his daughter Isabella was dead.

Six years after he’d first encountered her, fucking up his computer during an operation in
South America, he’d managed to catch her. Devoid of a weapon, he’d taken her on in unarmed combat in the street and he’d thrown an elbow into her solar plexus, then jammed three fingers into the hollow of her throat.

Still, she’d tried to crawl away from him. There had been rain that night too, he remembered, watching the rain slip down the windowpanes outside his Cornwall estate. The alley had been lit up by the neon signs for girly shows—harsh red light bounced off the still water and made the girl’s face glow.

Veronica had choked when she’d gone down, wrapped her cold fingers around her throat—and he remembered, clearly, the feeling of those fingers in his hand later—gasping for breath. Oliver had hung back, perhaps farther than he should have, enjoying the sound of her gagging and retching on the dirty, wet ground.

The alley smelled like garbage, the scent made worse by the water that ran through the dumpsters before pooling on the street. When he’d crossed the debris and water to handcuff her wrists behind her back, Oliver made the mistake of hunching over her. His collarbone was forfeit when she shattered it with the hands she’d
templed together and snaked, fingers pointed, into him.

Retaliating, he’d kicked her in the face harder than necessary, satisfied when blood burst from her mouth and through the air, dispersing into the water under her slack body. When she’d given up on standing again, when her limbs were limp against the ground, he’d kicked her again, then again.

Satisfied, he’d wrapped her hair around his palm and dragged her to his car, throwing her in the back where she didn’t move once during the entire drive to the lab.

“Good morning, lover.” Oliver reached down and took Veronica’s chin between his fingers when her eyelids fluttered. Once she’d focused on his face, blinking the sleep out of her eyes, he leaned down and kissed her full on the mouth, mashing his lips into hers hard enough to cut the soft insides of her mouth against her teeth.

Unable to rear back, Veronica closed her eyes again and let him finish, let him worm his tongue out and taste the blood on her split lower lip. Finally he stopped, then backhanded her again. She gathered the saliva in her mouth and spit out two teeth, both cracked from his assault in the alley.

“Was it worth it, you stupid whore?” He backhanded her again.

“Aren’t you supposed to ask me questions first?” She didn’t want to cry. Didn’t want to. Might anyway. The pain was so bad that it had actually faded, tucked away to preserve her sanity. The human mind, to Veronica’s way of thinking, was a wonderful thing. Self-protecting.

Oliver stalked in front of her, taking deep breaths to calm himself.

“Was it worth killing my daughter?”

“Yes.” She said it coolly, no regret or sorrow on her face.

“Was it worth leaving a
sixteen-year-old girl choking on her own blood so you could save your own skin?”

“Yes.” The lie came easily.

He hit her again, pulled her out of the chair and shoved her against the wall, used his fists to pound her until she was broken almost to pieces, unable to support herself. He relished the sound of his knuckles on her flesh, got an almost sexual thrill when she whimpered, then pulled herself together. Her jaw had to be broken, he realized, considering the odd slant of her face.

Veronica wasn’t able to speak and he had no more questions.
Oliver took out a knife and went to work on her, leaving her torso and back with short, shallow cuts before he started peeling back the skin.

Two days later she was almost unrecognizable as human, though she’d once been considered a great beauty. He almost couldn’t believe it was her—he’d shorn her long, red hair
, which he now realized was dyed. It lay sticky with blood around the chair where he’d left her limp in her bonds. Now he could see her scalp peeking through the tufts of hair he’d left. There were no cuts there. No, he couldn’t kill her. Wanted to, and not just for Isabella. He wanted to because looking into her eyes when she took her last breath would make him hard enough to cut wood.

But he had people to answer to and they wanted their pound of flesh. As it stood, it was unlikely he’d escape his actions entirely unscathed. He’d been told to interrogate her, yes, but gently. A broken and bleeding Veronica did them no good; how, they’d asked, would they convince her to join
Second Division if he abused her? She had unique talents, he’d been told. Too unique for him to comprehend.

But she’d killed Isabella. He’d never forget the look on his daughter’s face when the bitch had pulled
Izzy in front of her so that the bullet found her neck, not Veronica’s. He’d questioned his superiors when they assigned him to Tokyo, sure he wasn’t the right man for the job, that he couldn’t ignore her actions, but they’d insisted. Coerced. Demanded.

He’d failed. Maybe. When he made his next contact, his boss would make it clear. He dreaded that, now that the haze of excitement had passed, now that two of his workers were bundling her onto a gurney for transport to people he’d
not yet been allowed to meet.

She choked again, gasped on her own pooling blood like
Izzy had, and snapped him back to the present. When they would have carried her out she lifted an arm. In a daze, he stumbled toward her, disbelieving that she could summon even the strength for a single word.

“What?” Oliver leaned in to her until her swollen lips almost brushed his ear. Couldn’t quite make out the words she tried to speak to him.

“Your fault.” Veronica licked her lips. Winced. “You killed Izzy. Not me.”

He jerked back and the two men holding her, chilled by
her haunting laughter, carried her from the room and into the waiting van.

He’d been so sure she wouldn’t make it to her destination. But maybe she had. He cared for Aidan, but Oliver hoped that the woman was Veronica. Tearing her apart again would be a pleasure.

His email, guarded by the most secure connection availab
le on earth, was in front of him, but he had no memory of signing in. Remembering the last time he’d seen Veronica, almost dizzy with excitement when he imagined her walking into his office, he considered his next move.

He’d discussed the possibility that Veronica was still alive with his superiors. Their orders were clear.

They didn’t want her alive anymore. Synthesis was too close to completion to allow for screw-ups and she was a loose cannon. Aidan would be hurt if he found out the bitch was deceiving him. No doubt about that. But it would make him a better agent.

A picture of Isabella sat on Oliver’s desk, smiling at him from a copper frame. He wished briefly that he could see her once more, but deep down he knew Veronica’s parting words were right.
Izzy was the price he paid for his success, the price he paid for Aidan and Caleb and all the other men he’d trained.

He’d pay it again. Willingly. Especially if it meant that he’d see Veronica dead in front of him, collateral damage of the project for which he’d given his life, and his daughter’s.

“Dinner,” Aidan announced, re-entering the hotel room with a tower of white Styrofoam cartons balanced in his arms. The smell hit Sophie hard, traveling directly to her stomach. She was hungry again; no matter how much Aidan fed her, it never seemed to be enough.

She grabbed the containers and arranged them on the dresser that held the television. The first held white rice, so she rolled her eyes and cracked open the second. Fragrant saffron chicken greeted her. The third had spicy Japanese curry that made her mouth water.

“Where did you get all this?” she asked, pointing to the food. Before Aidan could answer, she
twisted her head around to find out what food still lurked undiscovered in his boxes.

He opened one and revealed chicken tapanyaki. Sophie considered proposing to him then and there.

“You’re the best kidnapper ever,” she said instead, keeping the tone light to remove any sting from the words. The next day was uncertain territory, and she wanted to have an evening free of doubts or recriminations.

“If I tell you that there’s a pizza on the way, too, can I get a promotion to the Great and Wonderful Aidan?” Sophie loved the grin that started at his mouth and rose to his eyes.

“Oh, yes,” she exclaimed, twirling in a circle and launching herself at him. The hug lasted only a second, then she pulled away before her body could start craving deeper contact. “I don’t even know if I can eat all this food.”

“You’ll have help,” he said, patting his flat stomach.

Soon china plates he’d snagged from a cart on his way into the room were overflowing with a rainbow of food. As they ate, they sat companionably on the bed, talking instead of watching the television. Hope swelled in her and she realized that soon enough she might be back in Paris, looking back on this last night with him with longing.

Aidan watched her down another mouthful of chicken, chewing daintily and swallowing before she leaned back and set her plate on the bed. If her stomach was as full as his own, they’d have a full pizza to attack in the morning.

Oliver had insisted that he couldn’t make it back to London immediately, for all that Aidan had argued. He wanted the situation resolved and over. Though it meant that he might never see Sophie again, it was best for her to be on her way home. Maybe in five or six years, he’d knock on her door and they could speak like normal people. He could take her to dinner.

He hadn’t planned to make a feast of take away food until he’d left the bathroom, frustrated beyond belief with Oliver. Finding Sophie curled up, a small lump all but lost in the massive bed, he’d been struck by an overwhelming urge to comfort her.

Since she was asleep, he’d turned on the vestibule light so she wouldn’t wake in the dark and left the room, searching for food. When he found himself on a block with Japanese, Thai and Chinese restaurants, he hadn’t been able to choose just one.

Though he’d felt like a fool moving quickly through the rain with armfuls of Styrofoam containers, he didn’t kid himself. He’d have gotten twice as much just to make her smile.

When her eyes lit at the boxes in his arms,
Aidan felt his stomach clench. Never had he been happier to feed someone. Now, full, she was content and settled next to him to talk. It had been years since he’d had so many casual conversations with another adult. He missed it.

Sophie moved her fingers slightly against his, the merest brush of skin on skin.

Odd that such a small, helpless person could inspire such passion in him. The slightest touch and he was ready to sink down into her, to strip her bare.

Part of him wanted to take her and bundle her away, keep her from meeting his boss. He didn’t envy her the interrogation she’d have to go through. But he couldn’t do that.

Aidan trusted Oliver. He’d given him his life back after Aidan had left Delta Force to pursue Bartek. He remembered their first meeting, four years ago.

A fist smashed against his face and Aidan staggered back against the metal cage that closed him in with a monster. For all that Aidan was billed as Rage, this guy really deserved the title. Fists like ham hocks and the kind of aggression that only comes with pure stupidity were not what he’d expected from a guy called Bang.

“Bang,” screamed his opponent as sweat stung Aidan’s eyes. He came at him with fists cutting through the air and Aidan—Rage—sidestepped so his knuckles found the metal walls and not Aidan’s face.

Pressing his advantage, he clipped Bang hard in the neck. The monster screamed, his oxygen cut off for a moment. The crowd
bellowed and Aidan heard them chanting his street name. It swelled over the blood-hungry bodies that packed the seats, egging him on.

As much as he hated himself for leaving Delta Force for this life, he loved the feeling of lowlife bones cracking under his knuckles.

He slammed his fists hard into Bang’s face, forcing him back against the wall. When the guy looked blearily into Aidan’s eyes, he took pity on Bang and knocked him out cold.

A bell rang. The cage opened and two guys dragged his opponent out, handing Aidan a robe and a trophy that didn’t mean shit to him.

He was cleaning the wounds Bang had landed when someone walked through the door. “This is a private room,” Aidan said without looking back. “Get the fuck out.”

“I’ve been looking for you, Aidan.” He turned and saw Oliver for the first time. He was dressed in a dark suit that didn’t disguise the power of his frame.