CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

 

 

Kiera

There was a knock on my hotel room door.

I went over and opened the door. I was in my robe, because I was getting ready to take a hot shower and wash away any trace of Nikolai. I figured it was probably Cass, checking to see if I was okay.

It wasn’t Cass.

It was Demetrius.

“Can I come in?” he said.

I started to say no, but he pushed past me before I had the chance.

“I’m getting ready to take a shower,” I said.

“I just…” He scratched his stubble. “I need to make sure that you’re okay.”

“I’ll be fine. Stop treating me like I’m delicate or something.”

“Look, if something happened to you, I couldn’t stand it.”

“Why are you even here?” I glared at him.

“I’m trying to…” He folded his arms over his chest. “You know, when we were alone, you weren’t yelling at me about treating you like a kid, and then everyone comes in, and you’re suddenly siding with Blaze—”

“Is that what this is about?” I raised my eyebrows. “You’re upset with me for making you look bad in front of everyone else?”

“No, I didn’t say that. And you didn’t make me look bad. I did what I had to do back there. If it had been Cass, I would have done the same thing. There’s no way that Ambrose would have been upset with me for doing it.”

“But you wouldn’t have been there if Cass had done it. No one would have been with her at all,” I said. “So, maybe it really was a bad plan.”

He was quiet for a minute. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe all of my plans have been kind of crap. It’s not as if I have a lot of practice with this kind of thing. It’s not my typical line of work to rescue girls from mobsters. Generally, I just kill people.”

I looked down at my feet. I expected him to argue with me more, not cave like that. I didn’t know what to say.

“I’m sorry I let you go in there,” he said. “I was against it, and I should have followed my instincts—”

“No,” I said, “see that’s why I’m pissed at you. Because here it comes again. You think that I’m incapable of doing anything. You always have to sail in and save me.”

“He was going to hurt you.”

“So what?”

“So, he’s bigger and stronger than you, so it was perfectly logical that you were scared.”

“I wasn’t scared.”

“What? Yes, you were.”

God, he made me so angry. “Look, why don’t you just leave? I need to take a shower—”

“Hell, Kiera, I was scared. It’s okay to admit that you were scared.”

“Well, I wasn’t, though.” I didn’t know why I was lying to him. I was just sick of all of it. Sick of the way he treated me. “You’re never going to respect me, are you?”

“I respect you fine. I think you’re amazing at what you do. Which, by the way, is not going toe-to-toe with men like Nikolai.”

“But until the end, I was doing fine, wasn’t I?”

“That’s not the point.”

“You know, I thought maybe you’d stop thinking of me like your kid sister if we had sex, but you turned off immediately afterward. The next morning, you were cold and closed off, and now it’s like you never even saw me naked.”

“Oh, trust me, Kiera, it is not like that at all.” He took several steps toward me.

I backed up. The hotel room was not that big, and I hit the wall. I couldn’t go backwards any further.

He closed the distance between us. Now, he towered over me, all of his hulking body closing me in.

I stuck out my chin. “I thought you would finally get the message that I was an adult woman, but you didn’t.”

“I don’t think of you as a kid,” he said in his rumbly voice. “I definitely don’t think of you as my sister.”

Damned if I didn’t get shivers, just like always. In my robe, I felt especially exposed. I yanked it tighter against my body, as if I was cold. “So, why can’t you ever just trust me to do a job?”

“Why can’t you accept some fucking help?” His hand slid behind my neck, cupping the back of my head. He held me in place, and then he kissed me.

I put my hands on his shoulders to push him away. But I ended up surrendering to the kiss and letting my fingers run over the hard swell of his biceps instead.

He claimed my mouth, exploring it with his tongue.

Bursts of sweetness traveled through me.

He pulled back, gazing into my eyes. “You can’t really be upset with me for stopping Nikolai.”

I dragged my hands over his chest.“You never even gave me a chance to try to stop him myself.”

He trailed kisses over my jaw, my neck. His voice was ragged. “Oh yeah? What exactly is it that you were going to do?”

I gasped. It felt amazing. “I would have figured out something,” I managed. “I know I would have.”

He planted a kiss on my clavicle. “You don’t even have any idea what you could have done. You needed me. Admit it.”

I stroked his facial hair. I closed my eyes. “No.”

He parted my robe. “You need me now.” He reached both hands inside to cup my breasts. “You want me,” he rasped.

“No.” But I yanked the robe over my shoulders, baring my body to him. “I don’t. At all.”

He slammed me into the wall, kissing me hard. “I am exactly what you need.”

“No.” I wrapped my legs around him. “No,” I said again, my hands going under his shirt, touching the hard warmth of his flat stomach. “You need to leave me alone.”

“Really?” He tugged his shirt over his head.

I kissed his chest, running my hands over his pecks, licking the soft, dark hair that trailed down his stomach. “Get away from me,” I murmured into his skin.

He groaned.

My hands went further down. I found the button to his jeans. I unbuttoned it.

“You do want me,” he said in a gravelly voice.

I shook my head. “I don’t. I don’t want anything to do with you.” I unzipped his pants and found his cock, hard and thick against my palm. I stroked him. “You ruin everything. You make me crazy. Every time I see you, I just wish that you were…”

His breath was unsteady. “That I was what?”

“Inside me,” I said in a tiny voice.

He let out a strangled sound.

“And I hate it,” I said, stroking him. “I hate it, because I don’t want to want that. I want to be strong. I don’t want to be the stupid, idiotic chick who thinks that just because we slept together, it means something, because you still think I’m twelve—”

“Don’t say that out loud again.” He was holding me against the wall with one hand and with his body. His other hand was fumbling in his back pocket. “You’re not twelve.” He yanked out a condom with a triumphant grin.

“I don’t think you’re supposed to keep those in your pocket,” I said.

“Do you have any?”

“Well, no.”

He handed me the package. “Open it.”

I ripped it open and took out the condom, letting the package flutter to the floor.

He snatched it away from me and began sliding it over his shaft. “Every time I see you, I want to be inside you too,” he said in a tattered voice.

I kissed him.

He lifted my hips and speared me with his cock, lowering me onto him.

Immediately, I felt gloriously filled by him. The sensation was warm and tingling and overwhelming. But I didn’t start spasming right away, not like last time.

He thrust.

I cried out. Oh, hell, that felt good.

He slid his hand between our bodies, finding my clit with one finger.

I dug my fingers into his back, moaning. There it was. I was going to lose it.

He slammed into me, over and over, quick and fast, his fingers working at my clit at the same time.

And I felt the ecstasy coming for me, spilling through my body like the dawn overtaking the sky, stabbing through me in reds and purples and pinks, an inch at a time, every stroke better than the one before, every minute bring me closer.

And closer.

And closer.

Until I was overflowing with bright white hot goodness, until I was riding a crest of exquisite perfection, climaxing around him again and again and again.

* * *

 

Demetrius

She was sprawled out on the couch in her hotel room, completely bared to me, not even attempting to cover herself. “I think you could make me come by looking at me,” she said.

I felt sleepy and warm and loose. Her leg was in my lap, her heel nestled against my soft dick. I was running my finger lazily over her toes. “No, I don’t think so, because I’ve been trying lately, and it doesn’t seem to be working.”

“Seriously, though,” she told the ceiling. “It’s not supposed to be like this. I know. I’ve heard women talking, and it’s supposed to be really hard for women to have orgasms during sex. I mean, I guess that it’s never been hard for me to give myself an orgasm, so maybe that’s why it’s so easy. I mean, maybe I’m just lucky—”

“Hold up,” I said. “Go back to the part where you were giving yourself an orgasm.”

She kicked me in the belly. “Shut up.”

“Ow,” I said, even though it hadn’t hurt.

“Oh fuck.” She straightened. “Did I get your… you know, balls?”

I laughed. “No, I’m fine, actually. But you really should be careful. There’s no worse way to emasculate a man than a kick in the balls.”

She lay back, settling down and giggling. “I’ll be careful.”

I rubbed my hands over her calf. “You’re perfect.”

“What?” She arched an eyebrow at me. “I’m really not.”

I let my fingertips dance over her knee. “You are. Perfect. I think you were created in a lab by evil scientists to be my downfall.”

She guffawed. “Oh, don’t be stupid. If I were a robot, I would have smaller thighs.”

“No way,” I said. “I would absolutely create my personal sexbot to look exactly like you.”

She was blushing. “Shut up.”

“That’s why you come so easily for me,” I mused. “Because I like it that way, and everything you do is what I like.”

“Now, that’s bullshit,” she said. “Because I’m pretty sure I make you crazy mad hourly.”

I smiled wryly. “Well, that’s true. Maybe you’re not a sexbot after all.”

She laughed again.

I trailed my fingers higher, under her knee, up her thigh.

She shivered, laughter fading. She sat up. “Seriously, Demetrius. What are we doing?”

I pulled her down onto my chest and kissed her. “Let’s not do that yet.”

“Not do what?” she murmured.

I stroked one of her nipples, softly, and was rewarded when it tightened under my touch. “Mmm,” I sighed. “Have I told you how much I like your tits?”

She made a small noise of pleasure. “Not do what?”

“They fit nicely in my hands, and they’re so round and firm, and your nipples are just… exactly… perfect.” I lowered my head and sucked the small bit of flesh into my mouth.

She shut her eyes and moaned, her body going to jelly in my arms.

I sucked.

She sighed.

I moved my mouth to her other breast, putting my mouth on that nipple. My cock was starting to stir. I was getting worked up again.

“Demetrius,” she said, sounding vaguely annoyed, but mostly turned on. “What are you doing?”

“I want you again,” I said. “I want you here, on the couch, nice and slow. I want you to sit on top of me, and I want your perfect tits bouncing up and down while I make you come again.”

She writhed against me.

“And then,” I said, running my hand over her smooth skin and down between her legs, “I want to carry you to the shower, where we’ll rub soapy lather all over each other’s bodies, which will get us all hot and bothered again, so I’ll bend you over and take you from behind while the hot water rushes over us and—”

She pulled away. “And then you’ll ignore me tomorrow?”

I shut my eyes. “Can we worry about tomorrow when it comes?”

“I don’t know,” she whispered. “I don’t know if I can do that.” She got up off the couch, wandered over to where her robe was lying, and pulled it over her shoulders.

By this time, I had a raging hard-on. “Come back here,” I said. “I can’t think when I’m this horny, Kiera. Come over here and take that robe back off, and we’ll talk afterward.”

She turned back to look at me. She licked her lips. “I want to.”

“Then do it.”

I felt at a disadvantage. She was covered, and I wasn’t, but I was resisting the urge to put on clothes. Putting on clothes meant that it was all over, and that I wasn’t going to be able to convince her to do what I wanted to do.

She shook her head. “We shouldn’t have done this. It’s only that when I’m around you, I can’t think straight.”

“That makes two of us,” I said, getting off the couch. I approached her, and I used my nakedness as a weapon.

She took me in, swallowing as her gaze settled on my erection.

“Come closer,” I told her in a throaty voice.

She shook her head, still staring at me.

So, I came closer.

She reached out and ran the tip of her finger over the head of my cock.

I let out a shuddering breath. I had her. “Stroke me, Kiera,” I ordered softly.

She shut her eyes, and she complied.

I parted her robe, running my hand over her breast, over her belly, all the way down to part the lips of her slit.

She gasped. “I don’t even understand how you do this to me. Why am I doing this?”

“You want to do this,” I said, brushing her clit.

“But…” She let out a breathy moan. Her hand moved faster on my shaft. “Why?”

“Because you’re mine,” I said, and I kissed her. Damn it, had I said that out loud?

She pulled away, searching my eyes with her own. “Am I?”

Fuck. I let go of her.

“Demetrius?” she said in a tiny voice.

I wasn’t looking at her. I was looking for my pants, which should be here somewhere… There. I fished them up off the floor and began yanking them on. I didn’t care that I was hopping around like an idiot, or that I was going commando. My boxers were somewhere too, but I didn’t need them.

I just needed to get away right now. I’d ruined everything.

She pulled her robe tight over her body. “Are you like… afraid of commitment or something?”

“No,” I said, zipping my pants carefully so as to avoid any of my sensitive bits. “I just… you were right. We shouldn’t have done this.”

“Because you don’t want me to be yours?”

I rubbed my chin. “It doesn’t matter what I want. You can’t be.”

Her lower lip trembled. “Why not?”

Was she going to cry? If she started crying—

But she swallowed hard and seemed to pull herself together. “You know what? Don’t answer that. Because I don’t want to belong to you. I can’t be yours. I’m a person, not a slave.”

I gaped at her. That stung. I had never meant it like that, and she must know that. But, hell, maybe it was better if she was mad at me. I started for the door. “That’s right. Look, this was all only ever about sex, and now that we’ve done it, I’ve got you out of my system, and—”

“That might have worked before,” she said. “I might have believed you if you hadn’t come back for more.”

I dragged my hand over my face. “It’s better if we stay away from each other.”

She wedged herself between me and the door. “Why? If you’re going to treat me like this, you’re going to give me an answer.”

“It’s… it’s too dangerous for you.”

“What?” Her mouth dropped open. “Excuse me, but what is so dangerous about your penis? I mean, it’s big, but it’s not that big.”

“You’re just… you’re very young and innocent—”

“I am not.”

“And small and weak and soft and vulnerable.”

“Stop it.” Her nostrils flared. “I am none of those things.”

“You’re all of those things. And the fact that you won’t admit it to yourself makes everything more dangerous for you. And I thought that I could protect you, but being near me makes everything worse for you—”

“Because I took this job?”

“Tonight, you were practically mauled by Nikolai Mikailhov.”

“I didn’t take this job to be near you. Get over yourself.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

She shoved me.

I absorbed the impact. “Hey. There’s no reason to get physically violent.”

She shoved me again. “You didn’t even feel that, you dick.”

I grabbed her hands. “Just stop.”

“I can do this job,” she said. “I can do any job. I always do them well. Always.”

“Kiera, this isn’t about your skill—”

“Once,” she said, “once, I fucked up. And it was a big fuck up, but it was only once, and I don’t fuck up anymore.” And her eyes were filling with tears again.

I let go of her hands.

“I don’t fuck up anymore. Not after I lost him.”

“Lost who?” I said.

“My dad,” she said.

I took a step back.

She looked down at her fingernails. “He had cancer, and it was before the new legislation went through, and the insurance company denied his claim as a pre-existing condition. And I knew that I could hack in, and I could change it, and they would have to help him, and the hospital would start treating him like a person again, and that he’d get better, but I couldn’t. I kept trying to hack in, and I couldn’t get in, and no matter how many times I tried, I couldn’t. And eventually, it was just… too late.”

“Kiera—”

“But that’s the only time that I ever fucked up. And I was young. I was only fifteen, and ever since then—ever since—I have always done whatever job I was given, and—”

I wrapped my arms around her to stop the flow of words. “Shh,” I whispered. “Shh.”

She started to sob, but she was fighting me, trying to get away.

I held her tighter. “You were young and inexperienced. Even if you’d hacked in, you might have gotten caught. You could have gone to jail.”

She struggled in my arms. “I can do this stupid job, Danger. Failure is not an option for me.”

“You don’t even know if hacking the insurance company would have made a difference. You don’t know if the treatment would have saved him. If it was really cancer—”

“Failure is not an option.” She looked up at me, her expression fierce.

I took a deep breath. And then I had a thought. A horrible sort of thought, because it wasn’t really playing fair. But, for whatever reason, Kiera had just rolled over and showed me her belly. She’d given me her biggest vulnerability on a platter. It all clicked for me, why she was so intent on doing stupid, dangerous things. She was trying to save her dad. Over and over again, she was trying to do the impossible.

If I pushed the right buttons, I could crush her.

It would be for her own good. She was being irrational, and she was going to get herself killed. And if I did this, it would keep her away from this job, keep her away from me, keep her away from all the danger.

And so, I said it. “You know, Kiera,” I said in a quiet voice, “failure doesn’t matter. Because no matter what you do, your father is still going to be dead.”

She backed away from me in a flurry, arms flailing. She banged into the door, gaping at me. Her jaw worked, and I could tell she was trying to say something, but she was too devastated.

“You can’t fix that,” I said. “It’s done.” I took her by the shoulders and gently moved her away from the door.

She didn’t fight me. She was looking at me like a hurt puppy who was used to being patted but had just been kicked.

I felt guilt forming a tight ball in my gut, but I shoved it aside. “This job is fucked anyway. But if I need another hacker to help kill Nikolai, I’ll hire someone else.” I pulled the door open and stepped through it.

She just stood there, stunned.

I hesitated. “I’m sorry,” I muttered. And then I left.

* * *

 

Kiera

He was right.

That was the hell of it.

I’d been spending so much time trying to save my dad’s life, thinking that every hacking job I did was going to be the one. This time, if I did it right, he wouldn’t die.

How much of an idiot could I be?

My father was dead, and he wasn’t coming back.

It didn’t matter how many stupid jobs I did.

And it didn’t matter if Danger did think that I was weak and vulnerable. Truth was, I was both of those things.

There didn’t seem to be any reason to stay in the hotel, not anymore. I packed up my stuff and went back to my apartment. On the way, I stopped and got a six pack of hard cider.

When I got home, I took one cider out and put the others in the refrigerator. I took that cider into the shower with me. And I scrubbed myself clean.

I wanted to wash away every stupid trace of Demetrius Gallo.

The hot water poured over me, and I chugged the cider. I started to cry.

I guessed this was par for the course. Back in college, all my friends had already gone through the heartbreak of losing their virginities. To be fair, not everyone was heartbroken over it, but enough of them were. I knew that it was generally not a pleasant experience. It was a rite of passage, however. One that I’d skipped out on to live in a fantasy world.

Water was getting in my cider, diluting it and making it warm.

I didn’t care. I drank it anyway.

All that time telling myself that I was establishing myself, that I couldn’t allow anything to stop my focus on my job?

All that time, I’d been trying to resurrect my father’s ghost.

It wasn’t even what he would have wanted for me.

My dad was always worried that I spent too much time inside on the computer and not enough time outside playing with other kids. He would limit my screen time, force me to go to the park even when I whined and raged at him. He would have wanted me to have a full life. He would have wanted me to experience everything that I could.

I wasn’t doing him any favors living this way.

I finished the cider, got out of the shower, swathed myself in towels, and went out to my living room. There, I drank two more ciders and cried a lot.

I was starting to feel pretty drunk, but it wasn’t making me feel better. Instead, it was just making me feel worse.

By the time I started my fourth hard cider, I was hiccuping and talking to myself.

Well.

I was actually talking to my dad, but he wasn’t there, and I didn’t really believe in ghosts or the afterlife or anything like that, so I didn’t think he was looking down on me from heaven or something stupid. If you wanted to get super technical about it, I guessed I couldn’t deny the possibility, so maybe the essence of my father was hanging around. After all, all matter is energy, and energy can be neither created nor destroyed, so nothing really dies anyway, it just changes form. Still. I was talking to myself.

“I’m sorry, Daddy,” I slurred, hugging one of the pillows on my couch. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.”

I imagined that my father’s spirit-thing patted me on the head and told me that it was okay. That I was the kid, and he was the parent, and it was his job to save me. That was the kind of thing that he would have said.

I broke out into fresh sobs.

There was a knock on my door.

I sat up straight. “Daddy?” I whispered. Christ on a cracker, was that him? Were ghosts real after all?

“Kiera, you in there?” called a voice from the hallway. A female voice.

I got up and opened the door. “Cass?”

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” she said. “Why’d you leave the hotel?”

“What are you doing here?” I said.

“Can I come in?”

I stepped away from the door.

“Are you wearing a towel?” she said.

I looked down at myself. “Um, let me get dressed.” I went into my bedroom and threw on a pair of jeans and a t-shirt.

Cass was standing in the middle of the living room, inspecting all my empty hard cider bottles.

“You want some cider?” I hiccuped.

“Are you drunk?”

I shrugged. “Maybe.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” I said, and went and sat down on the couch.

“Did you make a move on Demetrius and he shut you down, because I think if you’re just patient, he’ll come around. He really does like you.”

I rolled my eyes, snagging my cider and taking a big drink. “Let’s not talk about Demetrius. Or his penis.”

“Okay,” she said, sitting down on the couch.

I sat down too. “He has a stupid penis, anyway. I mean, it’s freakishly big. There’s something wrong with it, I’m almost sure of that.”

“So… what exactly did happen between you two?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all.”

“Nothing involves his penis?”

“Why are you here again?”

She took a deep breath. “Should I make you some coffee?”

“I don’t need coffee.”

“You sure?”

I drank some more cider. “Positive.”

“Ambrose and I were talking about Natasha. And the other girls. The whole reason we took this job—well, not the whole reason, but a big reason—was that we were going to save those girls. And now Danger’s talking like it’s impossible, and we were thinking that maybe we just… well, is it possible that we could make the plan work without him? Maybe without Blaze. Just you, me, and Ambrose? And we don’t care about money. Ambrose and I are set. We just… I don’t think I can live with myself knowing we left those girls there.”

I sat up straight. Shit. Here I was, wallowing in my own crap, when whatever pain I was feeling was nothing compared to what those girls were going through. “He doesn’t want me on the job.”

“Who? Demetrius?”

“Yeah. He said that if he did find some way to kill Nikolai and he needed a hacker, he’d hire someone else.”

“But we don’t care about killing Nikolai. We just care about the girls.”

I nodded slowly. “Right.” I got up and started to pace. The room swam. I sat back down. “Did you say something about coffee?”

She laughed and went into my kitchen.

“Look, I’m not good at the planning stuff,” I said. “Maybe Ambrose could figure something out, though. He used to plan long cons. If he works something up, then I’ll help.”

She rattled around. “Where’s your coffee?”

“It’s next to the coffee maker.”

“Found it,” she said. “I don’t know about Ambrose doing it. He says that he’s never done anything of this kind of scope. And he needs to know what you can do for us with your computer skills.”

“Well, I can do what Demetrius wanted me to do already.”

She came back into the living room, and the smell of coffee was already starting to permeate the apartment. It made me feel a little more alert. She sat down. “Well, I guess what I’m saying, then, is can we make it work without Demetrius and without the explosives?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “The biggest problem is that we don’t know where Natasha’s been moved to.”

“Yes we do,” she said. “Ambrose and I were looking at the building schematics, and it’s labeled. High security is those cells that we thought she would be in at first.”

“That’s labeled?”

She nodded.

“Huh,” I said. “No wonder they didn’t put those schematics online.” I rubbed my chin. “So, how do we get her out of there?”

“I don’t know. I hoped you could figure it out.”

I blew out a noisy breath. “I can try. But I don’t know.”

“You’re in, though? You want to save the girls?”

“Of course I do.” I nodded. “Yeah, I’m in.” And I felt different, somehow. Before, whenever I’d taken a job, there was a desperation in my subconscious. It drove me to be perfect, to be focused, but it also made me panicky and crazy, because I always felt like my father’s life was on the line.

Now, for the first time ever, I felt peace about that. That was the past. I couldn’t change it.

But doing this job to save these women? That was a better motivation than anything I could cook up in my twisted, personal pain.

“Good,” she said, smiling.

I smiled back.

* * *

 

Kiera

But no matter how I tried to make it work with the three of us, I couldn’t. I kept coming up with ideas that involved Danger, that involved Blaze. It seemed to me that the job was impossible with three people. It was only doable with five.

I thought about calling some of the other men who worked for the organization.

But I didn’t know them well, and they were contract killers. That meant that I didn’t exactly trust them with something like this. I might have been able to keep them in line. I wasn’t sure. I knew that they all subscribed to the code of our organization, and most of them had been nothing but polite to me. However, that didn’t mean that I wanted to be buddy-buddy with them either.

In the end, the only thing that I could think was that I was going to have to go back and try to get Demetrius back on board. Actually, I thought he might have a few ideas for smoothing over the rough spots in my plan.

But.

The thing was, I basically never wanted to speak to him ever again.

So, I didn’t go talk to him for a while. Maybe it was a couple of days. I went back to work at the office, as usual. The only unusual thing was that Danger wasn’t there, following my every move.

I realized that I’d gotten used to seeing him.

Even though I didn’t want to see him, it was weird that he wasn’t there. I was relieved. I was also disappointed.

Overall, it was better that he wasn’t around, I decided.

Until Cass came to see me and told me that Matteo had come by to tell them to leave the hotel. He was dejected, she said, and she had promised him that they were still going to get Natasha out. That had cheered him up, and he told them to stay in the hotel as long as it took.

However, Cass said she wanted to get moving on this thing, so I needed to tell them how to proceed.

That was when I realized that I was going to have to talk to Demetrius, no matter how badly I didn’t want to.

Part of the problem was that I had no idea where he lived.

But I had skills, and I knew how to find information when I needed it. Getting Danger’s address really wasn’t that hard.

He lived out in Bethesda, in the suburbs. I had to drive all the way out there, which took forever. I really hated driving in the D.C. area. Whoever designed this city was seriously smoking crack or something, and even though I’d lived here for two years, I still routinely got lost.

But thanks to the help of Google maps, I made it to Demetrius’s house.

All things considered, it wasn’t where I would have expected him to live. He was on a crowded street in a planned community. His two-story house looked exactly like the other two-story houses on the street, except they all had different color siding. Of course the colors were complementary. He had a well-manicured square of a lawn in front, and a deck hanging off the back, and the whole thing was very disturbing. Why the hell did he live here? Soccer moms lived here. Not ex-mafia hitmen.

I banged on the door.

Maybe I’d gotten it wrong?

No, I was pretty damned sure this was his address.

I waited.

I knocked again.

The door opened. Demetrius was standing there in a pair of sweatpants. He wasn’t wearing a shirt, and he was all sweaty.

Damn it. He looked gorgeous. And he smelled all rough and manly. My heart did flips in my chest, and the muscles between my thighs clenched. This wasn’t going to be easy.

“Kiera? What the hell?”

“We need to talk.” I pushed past him into the house.

“I’m in the middle of lifting weights right now,” he said.

I looked him over. “Oh? I would never have guessed.”

“We’ll talk another time.”

I made my way into his living room and sat down on his couch. The place was sparsely decorated. It was serviceable, but bland. I sat down. “We’ll talk now.”

He scratched his jaw. The muscles in his arms gleamed with sweat. “Let me get a shirt.”

“Please,” I said.

He ducked up the steps and reappeared a few minutes later. The shirt was white, and it was clinging to his chest. Not really much help there.

I decided I would talk to his couch, and not even look at his body. I didn’t care how sinfully delicious he looked. I’d had enough whiplash there to last me my whole life. No more touching Demetrius.

“Look, if this is about what I said to you, I’ve been feeling bad about it ever since I said it, and—”

“It’s about Natasha,” I said. “It’s about how we can get her out.”

“We don’t even know where she is.”

I passed on the information about how the cells were labeled high security.

He nodded slowly. “No wonder those schematics weren’t online.”

“That’s what I said.” I looked up at him, grinning. Big mistake. I snapped my gaze away. He was just too hot. It should be illegal or something. I cleared my throat. “Anyway, I think that your original plan could still work. We’d just need to make some adjustments.”

“Nikolai’s gunning for us now, though,” he said.

“Well, but that’s the beauty of it,” I said. “He thinks he shut us down. He thinks we’re down for the count. He won’t expect us to try it now.”

Danger considered. “Maybe not.”

“The bottom line is,” I said, “there are women in there who don’t deserve what’s happening to them, and we can’t leave them there. One of them is your cousin’s girlfriend.”

He rolled his eyes. “Look, I don’t know about all that, huh? That woman is just a picture he’s been emailing. For all we know, some other person is answering those emails.”

“Who cares?” I said. “Whoever she is, we can’t leave her in there.”

He sighed, running a hand through his hair. “Yeah, okay, you’re right. I guess not. So, what were you thinking we’d do, then?”

“Well,” I said, “everything would stay the same, except we’d need to get to Natasha’s cell.”

* * *

 

Demetrius

I banged on the door to Blaze’s apartment.

He opened it. “What the fuck? What are you doing here? How do you even know where I live?”

“Kiera figured it out,” I said. “She tracked you down.”

“You think about calling?”

“Only left you ten messages,” I said. I peered around him. “Can I come in?”

“No,” he said. “I have company right now.”

“Is it the Chinese?” called a female voice from within.

Blaze made a face, stepped into the hallway, and shut the door behind him. “What do you want?”

“The explosives? The charges you set on Nikolai’s office building? Will they still go off?”

“Yeah, if I detonate them,” he said. “Which I been thinking about doing on my own and collecting the money.”

I gave him a sour look. “You would.”

“Someone’s gonna kill him. Might as well be me.”

“Look, we’re back on. Going to do the job after all. You in or not?”

He surveyed me. “We’re back on?”

“Yeah, back on. Kiera’s even managed to hack into some security cams, and she’s figured out exactly where Natasha’s locked up. We’ve got a plan, and we’re going to do it. Are you in?”

He was quiet a moment. And then he smiled and nodded. “Yeah, I’m in.”

“Good man.” I offered him my hand.

We shook.