This wasn’t the plan. She’s so smart. I thought she’d take the deal. I don’t know how to be around her every day and resist this magnetic pull toward her, to care more about her past, age, and mission than about how she’d feel, writhing beneath me.
For more than a minute, we’re suspended in this gridlock of lust and longing until I finally find the strength to move us forward.
“If you return to La Lune Noire, you answer to me. Anything less will get you killed.”
She arches one bratty eyebrow until the sharpness of it kisses the delicate softness of mahogany wisps. “And you would do the honors yourself?”
“Yes,” I tell her honestly, despite how ugly that truth is. A stark awareness that it would decimate me to fulfill that vow sears me, and yet I know she might force my hand—or my affiliation with KORT will. Sweeping my thumb over her thrashing pulse point, I release her throat, step back, and nod my acquiescence. “Whatever you came for, I hope it’s worth it.”
Her eyes widen with the recognition of what she’s done. I take my seat in the limo, waiting to see if she’ll come to her senses and flee. I should slam the door and make the decision for her. It’s best for all of us. But I can’t. No fucking idea why.
This girl has me in some sort of chokehold. As I stare out the front windshield, my lungs are empty, scorching with an unfamiliar ache of loneliness. This whole encounter has an eerie resemblance to the day that shaped me most as a man. No matter what route I take, there’s no winning. Her absence and her presence will wreck me.
A minute later, she slides in beside me, her shoulders stiff and her hands clenched in her lap as she echoes my doubt, “I hope it’s worth it too.”
ZARA
Some seasons in life are simply doomed to be our glimpse of Hades. The flames lick at our soul, and we know the only way out is through the inferno. It’s then that we taste the demon hunting us. We sense it. We might be in a room full of people, but we’re utterly alone. Beneath a bright blue sun-kissed canopy, but chained to the darkness. Surrounded by vast open space, but backed into a corner.
My first taste was twenty years ago.
I’m perched in a hammock, staring up at the clouds. That one looks like a lion, roaring into the gloomy drizzle. My mom would like that. Power found in the simple.
In the summer, she spends all day with my brother and me. We lie in the grass and make wishes on dandelions. It’s marshmallows and kayaks and movies in homemade tents. We climb trees and have three-legged races with the neighbors and swim in the lake behind our house. There’s a rope that hangs from a thick branch, and she swings and flips better than any of us. We have picnics by the sunflower field, andshe always makes us cherry lemonade and cheesecake squares. Pure magic.
Dad joins our adventures when he can, but he travels for work. Mom has a way of making him forget all the stress. He tells us she’s still a kid at heart. That must be why she wishes she could freeze me in time and keep me nine forever. She says that about every age.
Today, the sky is divided. It isn’t the shapes that are captivating. It’s the speed. The clouds are moving faster than what seems natural. A golden glow outlines puffs of white, chased by angry poofs of gray. I think the light will lose this round.
Maybe the clouds are moving faster because they miss her too. Mom went away for the weekend, but hasn’t come back. It’s not like her. Daddy doesn’t seem to know where she is either, but he insists he’s not worried. I don’t believe him. Neither does my brother.
While he reads in the tree house, I jump off the hammock and wander, picking weeds by the house. My mom would say my spirit is stirring. She’s convinced I have a keen sixth sense, but I think I just get restless.
“You did this!” my father hollers from inside the house.
His booming accusation rattles the window, so I sneak up to peer at him just above the sill. He’s holding pictures. It takes a minute for me to grasp what they are, but then I see her. Mom. Bruised and battered. Her eyes are open but vacant, and her neck is red. I don’t understand.
“You strangled her.” His voice is eerily calm, chilling, nothing like my playful father.
Mom was strangled?
“I will have every one of my colleagues on you within the hour,” my dad goes on, his face steel determination. “I don’t care who you are. You will pay.”
Tears soak my cheeks as droplets from the sky dot my arms. My chest heaves, my heart jackhammering against my rib cage, and the contents of my stomach clamber to my throat.
She’s gone.
Whatever the person on the other end of the phone responds, it terrifies my father. His ruddy complexion turns ashen. And just as the sky opens up with sheets of anguish and a clap of thunder, his eyes find mine, and he drops the phone.
Within a year, everything that was my childhood was stripped away from me—my mother, our home, my friends and neighbors and school, even my name. We ran, leaving it all behind, but I knew it was stolen.
Two decades later, my tongue is once again heavy with the flavor of ash.
“I’m compromised,” I announce into my burner in Portuguese, and I silently applaud the lack of hysteria ushering it because, inside, I’m screaming. My mind has been screaming for days.
I’m speaking Portuguese because I can’t be sure the CIA or NSA don’t have intelligence scanning devices for certain languages here, and I don’t trust that someone from La Lune Noire—the owners, staff, or guests—wouldn’t read my lips or listen in. My paranoia is at an all-time high.
“Fuck,” Tripp hisses, jumping into protocol. “Location?”
