I was so fucked.
I left Zaq and started down the hill to the main entrance. Pretty soon I was walking fast, and then running like I was being chased by a dozen vampires. But there were no vampires, just my own horrified heart, and that came with me.
I was falling for Zaq Kral. A dhampir.
You have to stop this.
Right. Now.
He’s a job, that’s all.
I entered the women’s room. Fortunately it was empty. I splashed cold water on my face. Too bad I couldn’t take a cold shower, because right now I could’ve used one.
He’d looked so sexy when he first woke up, hair mussed, eyes heavy with sleep. And then he’d licked my wrist…
I stared at my wet face in the mirror. My eyes were wide, my lips red and swollen from his kisses.
You’re not falling for him. You like him, that’s all.
But that was fucked, too. He was my target. I couldn’t like him.
To complete this op, I had to keep my emotions cold and my brain even colder.
After he’d licked my wrist, I’d wanted to pull his mouth to my throat and ask him to lick me there. My skin tingled like he’d actually done it.
I groaned and stuck my head under the running faucet. The cold water didn’t bring clarity, but it did put a brake on my racing thoughts. When I came up for air, I removed my backpack, pulled off my T-shirt and washed more thoroughly. I’d left so quickly, I’d forgotten to put on the wig, so I did my hair in two pigtails.
By the time I left the bathroom, I was calmer.
What was I going to do? One thing was clear—Crow couldn’t know. She’d order me to turn Zaq over to another slayer.
The thought made me a little nauseous. I massaged my breastbone with the heel of my hand.
Another slayer wouldn’t see Zaq Kral as I did. The Zaq who seemed like a decent guy, a man who stood up to a vampire to save a woman he didn’t know, and who genuinely cared about his brothers. The Zaq who wanted his mom when he was sick. Who smelled right even when he was feverish and hadn’t showered for God knows how long.
And that right there was why I should remove myself from Op A.
But I also knew I wouldn’t. I couldn’t.
Okay then. I’d see this through.
And I’d make sure that what had happened back there in my bolt-hole didn’t happen again.
My phone buzzed. I grabbed it, eager for a distraction.
It was Crow.
Meet me at 3 PM. She named a café near the Louvre.
My stomach did a forward roll and landed somewhere in the vicinity of my feet. I’d wanted a distraction, but not this. She was last person I wanted to see right now.
My thumbs hovered over the keyboard. I blew out a breath and texted back.
Will B there.
I hopped on the Metro and made it with five minutes to spare. Before exiting the subway, I ducked behind a partition and glamoured my appearance. When I re-emerged, I was an American teenager: curly black pigtails, light brown skin, dark eyes. I kept the tactical pants but added a silver unicorn to the center of my T-shirt.
The café was tiny, with a half-dozen tables shoehorned into the interior and another half-dozen outside under a striped awning. Despite the heat, four of the outside tables were occupied: a German family, a pair of French businessmen, three young American tourists, and a lone woman.
I took the bistro chair across from the lone woman. Today Crow was a Parisian aristocrat—short brown hair, a chic blue blazer, and a black-and-white striped Oxford shirt over dark-wash jeans. Cat-eye sunglasses hid her deep blue eyes.
She’d already ordered me a noisette, an espresso with a few drops of steamed milk. A small white cup waited on a saucer with two sugar cubes and a diminutive spoon.
I stowed my backpack under my chair. A waiter arrived to ask if I wanted anything with the noisette and I shook my head. I unwrapped a sugar cube, stirred it into my coffee.
Crow still hadn’t spoken.
I set down the spoon. “What’s up?”
She sipped her espresso. She took her coffee black. No milk or sugar.
“Isn’t that what I should be asking you? Where have you been? You took the target and dropped off the radar.”
“Some place safe. Like I told you, he’s in no condition to travel.”
“Mm.” She eyed me through her sunglasses.
Sweat pricked my palms. I took a sip of coffee, pretending a calm I didn’t feel. What if she demanded to know where I’d taken Zaq?
I’d have to lie, and I was already lying too much to her—lies of omission, yes, but still lies—about my relationship with Leo de Froulay, about how I felt about Zaq and how I’d engineered his release.
But I needed that bolt-hole, needed a safe place that no one else knew about. Mom had taught me that. After I turned ten, she wouldn’t even allow me to tell her where my hideout was. The night they came for her, it had saved me. I’d managed to escape through a window.
I had a dhampir’s keen hearing. Even fifty yards away, crouched in a child-sized bunker with only a narrow pipe for air, I heard them smacking her around, demanding to know where I was. She’d been able to answer truthfully that she didn’t know.
“All right.” To my relief, Crow didn’t push to know where I’d been hiding Zaq. “So now what?”
“We go to New York tomorrow night. Or Sunday at the latest. They worked him over pretty good, and the silver poisoning slowed his healing.”
“He’s better?”
“Yeah.” I toyed with the tiny spoon. “They drank from him while he was shackled to the cell wall. Moreau and Étan. Did you know?”
Her response was immediate, and firm. “No, I didn’t know. But does it matter? He’s a Kral, isn’t he?”
My stomach knotted. SI was a paramilitary organization. A soldier-slayer like me followed orders and didn’t question my superiors. But I came close to it right then.
Yes. Yes, it does matter. They fucking tortured the man.
And I would’ve said it straight to her face, except it was too revealing. I couldn’t risk her yanking me off Operation Angel.
So I said, “No. It doesn’t matter.” The words tasted bitter, like I betrayed Zaq by speaking them.
“Mm-hum.” Crow stowed the information away in her computer-like brain. Of course she wanted to know; she might be able to use the information to blackmail Philippe Moreau in the future. “You’ll take a flight from Paris?”
I shook my head. “Another airport. The Paris Syndicate watches Charles de Gaulle. His father might be watching it too.”
“Makes sense. You say the target has agreed to help you?”
“Yes. We told him it was the only way to save his brothers.”
“And that worked?”
“Yeah.” The bitter Judas-like taste in my mouth was back. My research had told me the best way to get Zaq to cooperate was to use his brothers as leverage.
Zaq’s life depended on me being right. If he didn’t cooperate, my orders were to stake him—and his brothers would be staked, too.
My compromise had gotten Zaq out of Moreau’s clutches and given him the opportunity to save both his brothers and himself. So why did I feel like a manipulating piece of shit?
Crow’s phone buzzed. She glanced at it, typed a reply.
“I have to go,” she said to me, “but there’s something you should know. Torch is—” She drew a finger across her throat in the universal signal for dead.
I swallowed sickly. Torch was the slayer assigned to Gabriel Kral. For the past year she’d been undercover as Jessa, a red-headed gym rat who worked as the cook-slash-housekeeper of Gabriel’s Manhattan penthouse. She’d been the source of most of our recent intel on the Kral brothers.
“What happened?”
“P1 staked her.” Crow used the code for Gabriel; as the oldest brother, he was P1, or Prince One, just as Zaq was Prince Two. “She attacked while he was occupied with a human female. I assume she thought he was distracted. She was wrong.”
I stared at my alpha. She seemed more bothered that Torch had failed than that she’d died. How had I not noticed how cold Crow was?
“So they know she was one of us?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s bad.”
Her mouth twisted. “No shit.”
I wrapped my fingers around my coffee cup. I was in shock; I needed something to ground me. Shock at Torch’s death. Shock at the realization that if I’d been assigned to slay Gabriel, it would’ve been me who died.
“Wait.” I frowned. “When did this happen?”
“Wednesday night, New York time.”
My frown deepened. We’d left Moreau’s lair early Tuesday morning, Paris time. There’d been plenty of time for Torch to have been told to stand down between then and Wednesday night.
“But…why did she attack at all? The agreement with P2 was that if he worked with me, his brothers would be safe.”
Crow waved a hand like it didn’t matter. “A communication misfire. Torch didn’t get the message in time.”
I gripped my cup. Hard.
“P2 was half-dead when we left M’s lair. I told you we needed a few days.”
“Are you questioning me?” Behind the sunglasses Crow’s eyes were the chilly blue of a northern sea.
Yes, I am. “Communication misfire” my ass.
I stared back. This was the woman I’d modeled myself after. Like me, she had a vampire primus father. Like me, she’d lost her mother at a young age to the monsters. And like me, she’d dedicated her life to Slayers, Inc.
Up until the last few days, I’d followed her blindly, wholeheartedly.
I looked away first. “No. I’m sorry.”
“Mm.” I felt her gaze. Assessing me and my commitment. Trying to unnerve me.
I smothered a flare of resentment and shifted the conversation back to Torch’s death. “Could someone have tipped P1 off?”
Crow angled her head like the wicked-smart bird from which she’d taken her slayer name. “Why do you ask?”
I moved a shoulder in a small shrug. “This informant you have in the Kral organization. Maybe he told P1 to watch his back.”
“There’s more than one informant, and no, P1 wasn’t tipped off. None of the informants knew about Torch. But you can tell P2 what happened. Make sure he knows that just because Torch is dead, doesn’t mean his brother is safe.”
“You embedded another slayer?”
“We always have a backup plan. You know that.” Which was a nonanswer, but I knew it was all I’d get.
A frightening thought occurred to me. The Krals now knew SI had inserted a slayer into Gabriel’s household.
My mouth dried.
Damn, damn, damn.
Karoly Kral wasn’t supposed to know about SI’s role in his sons’ deaths. The whole point in working with Victorine Tremblay was so she’d take the blame, not us. It was no secret how much she hated Karoly and all the Krals.
Now, Karoly would be doubly on guard. Worse, it gave him ammunition in his fight against SI.
Crow seemed to read my mind. “You’re not getting cold feet, are you?”
I drew myself up. “Of course not. I knew the risks when I signed on for this op.”
“Good.” She finished her espresso. “By the way, Stygian asked me to tell you that the passport you requested for P2 is ready. You can pick it up in an hour at the current drop.” Crow dabbed her mouth with a napkin and got up. “I’ll contact you in a few days for an update. Don’t bother contacting me—you can’t reach me.”
“Understood.”
She put her hands on the table and leaned forward. “It’s up to you and Twilight now. Don’t fail me.” Twilight was Lainey Q, the slayer assigned to Rafael Kral.
I raised my chin, uneasy at how she kept implying I wasn’t capable of doing my job. “I won’t.”
“Good.” She turned and left the café, chin up and shoulders back, the picture of a rich woman whose only worry was whether to wear Chanel or Valentino to the party that night. Except I knew for a fact that Crow had grown up in a small town in Oklahoma.
I fiddled with my cup, chest heavy, stomach a sick tangle.
I had the bad feeling that if I kept going with my part of Operation Angel, I’d spend the rest of my life regretting it.
But that was crazy talk.
I was a slayer. Killing monsters was what I did. I’d sworn a vow of loyalty to Slayers, Inc. That meant I followed orders, even those I disagreed with.
My switchblade was in my hand. I glanced down, blinked. I didn’t even remember taking it out of my pocket. At least I hadn’t released the blade.
I returned it to my pocket, then texted Twilight myself. Just to make sure there weren’t any more “communication misfires.”
Reaper: You know we’re in a holding pattern for now?
Twilight: Roger that.
Reaper: Keep close to the target, but don’t take any further action until you hear from me or C.
Twilight: Everything OK?
I hesitated. Twilight was the closest thing I had to a friend in SI. If only I could talk the situation over with her, ask if she knew why the Krals were being targeted. But that wasn’t the kind of question you could ask in a text message.
I replied with a thumbs up and turned off my phone.
Thunder sounded in the distance. I put a handful of euros on the table to pay for our coffee and left the café. I had some time to kill before picking up Zaq’s passport, so I picked up sandwiches for dinner, then stopped at a touristy-type store to buy him a T-shirt and a two-pack of boxer-briefs. I didn’t have to guess at his size. I knew it, like I knew he liked hamburgers and the color blue, and that unlike his brothers he didn’t have a Kral black wolf tattoo because he’d never officially been “made” in his father’s syndicate.
So Torch was dead. We hadn’t been friends; neither of us was the sort to get cozy with other slayers. But we’d been members of the same squad along with Twilight and a couple of others.
Torch had been a lot like me, actually. Efficient, focused, emotionless.
So why did her death make me feel like I’d been sucker-punched?
I shoved my hands in my pockets, wondering if Twilight knew. But informing her wasn’t my job, and I’d pushed Crow enough for one day.
I came up behind a woman with a teenager girl, their arms linked. They had the same curly dark hair, the same greyhound-lean bodies, and the way they inclined toward each other like matched bookends made me certain they were a mother and daughter.
The woman nodded at the teenager as I hurried past them. “Tu as absolument raison.” You’re absolutely right.
Longing hit me. Longing, and envy.
The woman was so clearly in her daughter’s corner. Right then I’d have done almost anything to have even a few minutes with my own mom.
I needed a mom to talk to about these feelings I had for Zaq. Needed someone to hug me and tell me I was doing the right thing. Needed someone to help me figure out what the right thing was.
The thunder grumbled again, closer now. The breeze picked up, tugging at my pigtails.
I jogged the last few yards to the Metro entrance.