The woman had Isabelle backed up against a wall, standing underneath the soft glow of a pink heart-shaped neon light. Her kisses were urgent and deep. She smelled of tobacco and beer.
Isabelle turned her face away. She didn’t want to be kissed. She wanted release, anything to calm the raging monster inside her. She opened her legs, guided the woman’s eager right hand to the slit in her dress. The hand slipped in underneath the thin, silk-like material. She folded her palm around Isabelle’s sex, then ran one finger teasingly along the edge of her underwear.
Isabelle closed her eyes, arching her back, urging the woman to enter her. Could someone just please understand the need in her? Andy was just as stubborn…
Andy.
She froze, recoiling from the woman. Then she opened her eyes in surprise as the weight of the body against her disappeared.
“Hey, what the fuck?” the woman shouted, Andy holding her by the scruff of her shirt. She turned and kicked at Andy but missed as Andy held her at arm’s length.
Andy pulled her closer, wrestling her into a wrist lock. She made her kneel in submission. “Not your night. Not your girl. Sorry.”
“You can’t just barge in here!” Isabelle shouted, pulling her dress down. She walked up to Andy and slapped her against the arm. In the face.
Andy stood still, blinking rapidly, exhaling an angry puff of air. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “And this…sex like this. It’s not you.”
“How would you know?”
“You’re twenty, for fuck’s sake.”
Isabelle looked at her watch. “Twenty-one.”
Andy frowned and let the squirming woman on the floor go. She looked at her own watch. It was three minutes past midnight.
“It’s your birthday?”
“Yes,” Isabelle hissed. “What? You all looked at my file like I’m some valuable commodity and nobody noticed that little detail?”
The woman with the short black hair looked from Andy to Isabelle. She seemed to measure Andy’s size and the glare on her face and then scrambled down the hall, back to the music.
Good decision.
Isabelle stared at the disappearing woman, then turned back to Andy. “Looks like I’ve just become your problem. And this time you better deliver.”
* * *
Andy pulled Isabelle through the throng of people, back to the bar. René’s seat was empty. Her phone rang. It was Jam. No one was wearing their earpieces, in an effort to give Isabelle some privacy tonight.
“Your pulse is through the roof. It’s like you want to murder someone. Are you okay? And Isabelle? Kate’s going to kill me if something goes wrong tonight.”
“Yeah, yeah, don’t worry. We’re all fine.”
“Okay then, bu—”
Andy stepped around a woman in a wedding dress. “What about Isabelle’s?”
“Isabelle’s what?”
“Heart rate.”
“Let me see.” A moment’s silence. “Steady as the dead.”
“And earlier?”
“Bit higher. Nothing spectacular, though.”
“Okay.”
Andy terminated the call without thinking why she’d wanted that particular bit of information. She paid the bartender, who looked sad to see her go. She left her a generous tip and shoved the rest of the bills back into her wallet.
She froze as she looked to her left. Two people had just walked in. Young and heady with love, they were clinging to each other, the shorter one’s head buried in her partner’s neck. There was snow on their coats. Heavy flakes, enough to have survived the twenty yards or so from the front door to the bar counter.
She looked at her watch. Quarter past one. Couldn’t be. The time was wrong. The snow. The date.
Unless…unless they fucked up by taking the Russian hostage earlier today. Did something to mess up the timeline.
“What’s wrong?” Isabelle asked as she hurriedly put on her coat.
“Snow. It’s snowing.” Andy looked at Isabelle. At the dress, the heels. There was no time to drop her off first. “We need to go. And we need to be quick.”
* * *
Andy raced the midnight blue SUV to Arlene Hampton’s building. Isabelle sat with her phone on her lap, speakerphone on, waiting for Jam to report back on Hampton’s whereabouts.
“Nothing. There’s nothing,” Jam said. “Iona and David say they haven’t noticed anyone out of the ordinary entering or leaving the building, but there has been a delivery truck obscuring their view for about four minutes. We’ve got eyes on the back, front, and the basement. Hampton’s phone says she’s inside the building, at home. Probably asleep, like we should all be.”
Iona and David were in their early thirties. Iona was a petite flax-blond former British triple jump Olympian with a lean physique and David a grumpy bearded German surveillance specialist, a bulky and hairy alpha man, like a teddy bear with attitude. They were an excellent team, their trust implicit and unquestioning.
“Did you try calling her?” Andy asked.
“Yes, even though we risk revealing ourselves, as you know, but there was no answer.” Jam took a deep breath. “Maybe you’re overreacting. So, the snow is early. Big deal. It doesn’t have to mean anything.”
“I don’t like it.” Andy glanced in the mirror. René’s black truck was keeping pace behind them.
“You’re not the one who’s not supposed to ‘like’ it,” Jam said testily. “If you’d allowed Isabelle to dream we could have had something concrete to work with tonight.”
“It was my idea to go out,” Isabelle interrupted her.
“It doesn’t matter,” Andy declared. “It happened. All that matters right now is that I have a really bad feeling about this.”
“Okay,” Jam agreed reluctantly. “As long as you know Kate is going to eat us for breakfast. Better wear your big girl pants when you see her.”
The call ended abruptly. Andy turned left, right, jumping a yellow light as she accelerated. Isabelle rested her hand on Andy’s leg, the anger and frustration from earlier forgotten. “Tell me why you’re worried.”
“The snow. It’s a small thing, but it’s enough.” And the last time she didn’t listen to her gut, the dragon ended up devouring everything she’d held dear.
It was as if Isabelle could sense she was holding back, but then let it go. “Okay. Let’s go see if Arlene Hampton is okay.”