Suddenly, he cut the lights. Blackness swallowed the room. Long fingers bit into her arm. Panic seized her lungs, but only for a single heartbeat before her training kicked in.
Deathly calm came over her.
She whipped her free hand under her skirt and yanked her knife from the sheath fastened around her thigh.
Even though it was pitch-black in the office, she knew where every single stack of paper was and the location of every piece of furniture.
Her attacker wrenched her arm hard enough to make someone weaker shriek in pain, but she compartmentalized the pain like Smith taught her. She twisted her wrist and shoved her elbow back to break the grip even as she raised the knife with her free hand.
In a lethal downward jerk, she buried the blade deep in the muscle of his thigh.
He issued a scream that echoed off the walls.
Opal bolted for the door. Before he even stumbled a step, she’d launched out of the warehouse and hit the streets at a dead sprint.
In her mind, she heard Smith’s voice.You gotta be faster, little girl. Those short legs can’t be your downfall. Faster, girl!
She pushed harder, turned one corner and then another, throwing out her senses into the night because she only had her own back out here.
By the time she reached her car in the office parking lot, she was breathing hard and had a stitch in her ribcage like someone twisted a knife in it. When she got behind the wheel, she wasn’t shaking, at least not on the outside.
She’d blown her cover and failed—again. The FBI was going to throw her to the curb. If that happened, she’d have no choicebut to disappear again. Find a place she could work for pay under the table. Go underground. Deep underground.
As soon as she rolled into the parking lot of the extended-stay hotel, Sinner met her at the car. When he ripped the door open and pulled her out, he caged her against the car with his big body.
“What the hell was that?” he growled.
“That was—”
“Not here.” His whisper was hushed, barely leashed.
He grabbed her by the hand and hauled her across the cracked concrete to the stairs leading to their room.
Inside and alone with Sinner, she fixed her stare on him.
She knew the moment he saw the blood.
He curled his big, rough fingers around her wrist with so much tenderness that it made her eyes sting even as he yanked her hand up to his face.
“It’s not my blood.” Her voice wavered halfway through the sentence, and she steeled herself to stop the sound.
“Opal, what the fuck happened?” His eyes were wild, dark with a brutality directed at whoever’s blood was on her hands.
“Call Con. We have to call Con.” Even though it would mean losing her job and the only identity she had. Losing the only thing she was good at. Losing the man who’d become so much more than just a partner.
Sinner didn’t argue.
He didn’t question her.
He had her back.
And Opal realized—with a clarity that almost hurt—that he might be the only person on earth who ever had.
FOURTEEN
Sinner grabbed his phone and dialed the secure line, all of his focus on Opal.
She was shaken but not shaking. For a woman who buried all her feelings so deep that her body quit responding, he didn’t trust that she wasn’t silently losing her shit.
