It didn’t take Katie very long to shield everyone who was leaving.Donovan and Madison were acting as driver and bodyguard today and couldn’t escape having Katie muck around in their minds.The experience left Jamie with a faint headache that went away a lot quicker than everyone else’s save for Kyle’s.Jamie’s durability helped with that.
“Go eat your fancy lunch,” Katie said as she walked them out to the SUV parked on the front drive.“If they have any tiny jam jars, steal some for me.”
Jamie laughed, giving her a brief sideways hug that she returned without hesitation.“All right.Jam it is.”
They would be okay.The mission might drive them all crazy by the time it finished and they headed back to DC, but hopefully, they’d get through it whole.The sooner Jamie could shake off the ghost of who he used to be, the better he would feel.
* * *
Alexei, as a rule, didn’t like spies.
Growing up in a refugee city in a contested area, where getting ahead in the queue was tied to who you knew and who you could bribe, spies were everywhere, and their allegiances varied.Everyone from the European Alliance’s Security Intelligence Service to the CIA to both Russia’s domestic intelligence arm, the Federal Security Service, and its military one, the Main Intelligence Directorate, and many others, all had their sticky fingers in the disrupted areas of the world.
When he was with Strike Force, Alexei had held deep reservations about being seconded to the CIA during some of their missions.He’d worked with the agency because he wasn’t one to disobey orders, but after Geneva and Cora Everly’s betrayal, Alexei only had severe distrust for anyone with ties to any intelligence agency—and that included the MDF.
He knew the MDF had its own arm of intelligence operatives, people whose jobs were to focus their attention on the shadows in the world that concerned metahumans and the Splice chemical that killed too many, leaving far too few survivors.Last summer had proven to Alexei, once again, that spies couldn’t be trusted.
Which was why he was drinking his coffee across the dining room table from Sean, watching the other man work.Alexei was only thirteen months younger than Sean, but he liked to believe he was wiser.He hadn’t made a career out of lying to people the way spies did, after all.
“Are you going to sit there and watch me work all day?”Sean asked, not looking up from his laptop.
The computer had been separated into its functional parts, with the screen lying flat in the middle of the table to project multiple windows of information into the air while Sean tapped away at the lit-up outline of a keyboard on the opaque surface of the control pad.Alexei eyed Sean through the multiple holoscreens situated between them and took a sip of coffee.
Real coffee, Alexei had come to discover, wasamazing.Alexei was going to make Kyle sneak some beans out of the condo his brother shared with Jamie so that he could hoard them at his own apartment.He’d gotten over his need to hoard food after joining the Army, but old habits were hard to break in certain circumstances.Alexei would gladly unearth it again if it meant he got more of this drink after the mission was over.
“Maybe,” Alexei finally said.“What you care?”
“I don’t,” Sean said calmly.“It’s just going to be boring for you.I’m reviewing what the UMG gave us last night on the Reborn IRA, and it’s going to take hours.Only place I’d be other than right here would be the bathroom.”
“Fine.”
Sean looked through the holoscreens rather than at them, meeting Alexei’s gaze with exasperated brown eyes.“You’re not seriously thinking about watching me take a piss, are you?”
Alexei shrugged.“Have nothing I not see before.”
Sean didn’t immediately yell at Alexei for that comment or tell him to fuck off.Kyle would’ve, but then, his little brother had been guiding Alexei through the cultural nuances of America for years, telling him what was acceptable and what wasn’t when it came to social interaction.Even now, there were words or phrases or actions Alexei didn’t understand because he hadn’t grown up with the context, hadn’t been raised to consider it a normal turn of phrase or response.
English came easier to his sisters than for him because they’d been so much younger than he was when they’d immigrated.Valentina had barely been twelve months old when their asylum request was granted.Her English was better than her Russian now, but their parents had still raised her to speak both languages.Tatyana had arrived in Boston young enough that she soaked up English more easily than Alexei, who, at eleven years old, experienced a hefty dose of what he knew now was culture shock.He’d been an American for almost twenty years now.Long enough that Alexei couldn’t use the excuse of not knowing any better and get away with it.
He still tried.
“What?”Alexei asked, putting a little bit of confusion into his voice.“Jamie say team not go anywhere alone.”
Sean stared at him.“Does that honestly work for you?The whole dumb foreigner act?”
“Not know what you mean.”Sean’s look of pure disbelief made Alexei shrug unrepentantly.“Be surprised.”
“Look, Dvorkin.I’m not your enemy.”
“You handler.”Unspoken wasspy, but Alexei was pretty damn certain the other man would know what he meant.“Have own agenda.”
“The only agenda I have is the MDF’s.I’m not going to do anything to jeopardize it.I’m certainly not going to get in contact with the Reborn IRA if that’s what you’re worried about.”
Alexei took a sip of his coffee to hide the fact that he was worried about Sean doing exactly that.Kyle used to laugh at Alexei for worrying about everything that could go wrong.Jamie’s penchant for having a backup plan for his backup plan was one of the first things Alexei had learned and liked about his captain.
“You complicate mission.”
“I honestly didn’t know Tomas would be there,” Sean said, sounding tired and a little frustrated.“I did what I had to do to keep our cover intact.It makes things a little more complicated going forward, if only because the MDF needs to get in contact with the CIA about my cover for this mission.”
