Leo holds up his bandage-wrapped hands and flashes me another wide, sharky grin.
“For the pure, fucking notoriety.”
I do not laugh. I don’t. I refuse to laugh at anything this maniac says.
“For being the worst double agent in history?” I nod to the left, puzzling it over. “Not a crown many people would strive for.”
“Dare to be different,” Leo intones. Then he brightens out of nowhere like he does sometimes as if some has just shot him up with a sudden dosage of positivity. It’s unnerving.
“Do you want to go out?” he asks me.
For one tenth of a second, I think the madman is asking me out on a date or something equally as galling. But I quickly realise he means “go out” as in “leave the base.”
“Not sure I’m allowed unless it’s for a mission,” I say hollowly, unwilling to hope for any small modicum of freedom from this place.
Leo waves a hand dismissively, his hand gestures as big and expressive as his face. Someone should really have taught him how to conceal his emotions. I would have thought a man who grew up on the upper side of Danger City would know better how to appear stolid, to protect himself against people who might use the knowledge of his emotions against him.
We’ve already established how FISA has failed to train him to the appropriate standard. It seems his family is similarly lax in their support of Leo’s continued survival. He needs a bodyguard, not a partner.
“It’ll be fine,” Leo says, sounding far too sure of something he can’t possibly know for certain. “Just don’t go on any random murder rampages.”
“I will attempt to contain my abundant and varied murder urges,” I drawl acerbically.
“Excellent,” Leo says, giving me two thumbs-up, managing to somehow make the action come across as sarcastic.
Before I can dredge up an equally quelling response, Leo is on the move. He’s careful not to randomly swerve in my direction, an act which would likely have set off automatic alarm bells inside my head. He does, however, give his back to me when he heads towards the exit. A show of trust I cannot possibly have earned by any rational person’s standards.
I pause for a moment, watching Leo walk away with marked interest, feeling oddly drawn to the impressive figure he cuts. His body is well honed, arms and thighs thick with muscle but not overly so. He fills out the tight black training T-shirt distractingly, biceps and broad chest straining the fabric. His neck is long and elegant, perfect for biting into and leaving teeth marks behind. He has a nice arse too, full enough to grab onto and pull apart.
Something bizarre and completely unexpected flares to life inside my gut in response to my ruminations on Leo’s attractiveness. Heat pools and rises, like water from a hot spring filling a previously empty cavern in the earth.
Unhappy about these sudden, unwanted feelings, I throw them off, refusing to entertain the idea I might be physically attracted to my new partner. It would be a terrible idea to become even surface-level attached to this man. I don’t want to need or desire anything from him, to become vulnerable in any other way than I already am.
As an agent for OI, the only experience I’ve had with sex has been either for the sake of a mission or a few stolen moments with someone I met during an assignment. Even those encounters were few and far between. They were, however, uncomplicated for the most part.
Getting involved with Leo would be messy at best, a complete disaster at worst. Besides which, someone like Leo—a person who struggles with the violence of his job and went out of his way to help a total stranger for seemingly no other reason than he thought it was the right thing to do—isn’t for the likes of me, a person with so much blood on their hands you’d be scrubbing for weeks before you saw a patch of clear skin again.
Shaking those thoughts away because any other choice would be pure madness on my part, I follow after Leo, allowing myself to anticipate, for the first time, the brief sense of freedom that getting out of this base will bring.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
JACK
“How do I look in this hat?” Leo asks from behind me.
I turn around to find him wearing a ginormous gold monstrosity on top of his head. It’s chiffon. And there are feathers on it. I really, really, resent Leo right now for making me look at this horrific amalgamation of headgear.
“You look,” I tell him honestly, “like a stuck-up mum at a posh wedding, who doesn’t like the girl her son is marrying and is in competition with the other mother-in-law, who also doesn’t approve of the boy her daughter is marrying, for which one of them can wear the ugliest hat as a sign of their disapproval of the union which has just taken place.”
Leo and I left the base with surprising ease. Part of me thought the helicopters and black vans would be sent out within five minutes of us escaping the underground confines of the base. At the very least, I thought Leo would need to get special permission from either Snow herself or our handler.
But Leo changed into his civilian clothes and strutted up to the exit without a single care in the world. He jabbed his security details into the pad waiting beside the lift and then we rode it up to the surface and walked out of the building disguised as an insurance office above.
No one tried to stop us. It shows a complete lack of competency on behalf of the security measures FISA has in place. I’m shocked they’ve never been infiltrated.
Leo asked me if I wanted to change into my civilian clothing. When I told him I didn’t have any, he immediately dictated that we would go shopping for some. I was initially resistant to it. What do I need with civilian clothes? I have my FISA uniforms and gym wear. The only reason I would need to look like a civilian is if it was part of a mission, and I haven’t been sent on any undercover jobs yet. I assumed I would be provided with the appropriate clothing if and when it was required.
When I said this to Leo, he gave me a look like I was a sad donkey, trudging up and down the beach at Weston-super-Mare.
