But tonight, when her beautiful, intelligent green eyes meet mine, there is something stormy and turbulent in their depths that I have not seen in months. Something that takes me back to the first night on the plane, and gives me pause. I don’t go to her, but rather lean on the doorway, and she doesn’t come to me. She stays where she is, pressing her hands on the railing behind her. “Do you remember me telling you that sometimes I get bad feelings?”
I have no idea why, which is not a sensation I enjoy, but I am relieved at the question that is obviously related to this assignment. “Yes,” I say. “I remember. And you have one about tonight?”
“I do.” Her reply is direct and exact, as I find every thought and opinion she gives to me, and yet gut feelings are never those things.
I push off the doorway and straighten and walk toward her. She straightens as well and we stand there, the mood serious, the air thick with the implication of what she’s just said. “You’re a scientist,” I remind her. “Feelings are not facts, but nerves are human.”
“Nerves don’t affect me unless I get one of these feelings. And I’m smart enough to know that facts alone do not keep an agent alive.”
She’s right. They don’t. My phone buzzes with a message and I remove it from my jacket, glancing at the screen. “Danny has surveillance online and our car is waiting. What do you want to do?”
“My job, and well. We have proof Ming betrayed his best friend, who will assassinate him and everyone he knows if he finds out. He has someone we want, and we can trade. And no good agent lets the chance to get someone like Ming on a leash pass them by.”
And so we repeat the past, and make our way downstairs to a black sedan where Danny sits in the driver’s seat. But this time when Amanda enters the car, there is no friendly greeting. “Crickets,” Danny says, after pulling us onto the road for the short eight-block drive. “What’s up with the crickets?”
“Amanda’s uneasy about tonight,” I inform him, my hand settling on her leg.
“Something feels off,” she confirms.
He eyes her in the mirror. “A feeling.”
“Yes,” she says. “Just a feeling.”
“There’s no such thing as ‘just a feeling’ in this life we lead,” he says. “I can assure you the team of five watching the digital feed are the best of the best.”
“You’ve had a digital team watching the Davenports,” Amanda reminds him. “Do we have eyes on Ming? Are we sure he’s in the city?”
“He arrived this morning,” Danny confirms. “And he’s staying in the hotel that is in the same building as the club.”
“Do we have him online?” Amanda asks.
“Negative,” Danny says. “He swept his room and removed everything we had in place. Twice. ”
“So he knows he’s being watched,” I say. “That makes me uneasy.”
“He has no idea you’re involved in the surveillance,” Danny argues. “No one gets close to this man.”
“But we are,” Amanda says. “We have to do this.”
She’s right. We do. “Then let’s talk through as many things that could go wrong as we can in the next ten minutes,” I say, and that’s exactly how we spend the short drive.
But Amanda is still tense when we stop in front of the door. “I’ve got your back,” Danny says just before we exit.
Amanda and I exit the car and walk to the door of the private club, the doorman greeting us. “You’re expected, Mr. and Mrs. Jones.” He waves us inside.
We enter the dimly lit room, fancy bowl-like lights hanging from the ceiling, leather high-back booths around the room. I scan the crowd, finding no familiar faces, and actually very few faces. “It’s very . . . empty,” Amanda says.
“Yes,” I say tightly. “It is. Almost as if it’s a private party for us.” I motion to the end of a bar to our right that will place us in a corner and facing the door.
Once we’re there, we both stand and order drinks. We sip those for a full thirty minutes, with no greeting from anyone we know, when my phone buzzes with a message. At the same moment, Amanda gets a message as well. Both of us reach for our cellphones, and I glance at mine and then her. “I have an urgent coded message.”
“My mother sent me an urgent message to call her. There’s no way the two aren’t connected.”
“Bathroom,” I say, motioning to the sign indicating a hallway.
She nods and I wave to the bartender, a stout fifty-something man I’m fairly certain is packing a gun under his jacket. “Another round,” I say. “We’re just going to the bathroom.”
“You got it, man,” he says, reaching for a bottle.
Amanda and I turn away, crossing to that hallway and the side-by-side bathrooms. We each stop at our respective doors and glance at each other, our stares lingering a moment, before we both move again. I enter the one-stall bathroom, lock the door, and dial into the agency.
“Code 11,” I hear, and as I listen to the rest of the message that has everything to do with Amanda and nothing to do with this assignment, someone might as well be slicing me with a knife. The message ends. I shove my phone into my pocket and press a hand to the wall. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I give myself those three fucks to process what I’ve just been told and no more. There isn’t time for more. I walk to the door, unlock it, and open it to find myself staring at the bartender with a gun pointed at me. “Welcome to the club. Mr. Ming would like to see you.”
I don’t ask why the gun is pointed at me. Obviously, something has gone wrong and the more words spoken, the more trouble a man can get into. And since no one will ever touch Amanda but me, I damn sure don’t bring attention to her presence in the other bathroom. The bartender backs up and motions me down the hallway, away from the bar. That path leads me down a set of stairs and directly into a library with chairs. Danny is sitting tied to one of those chairs, his mouth gagged, an apology in his eyes, with about a half-dozen armed men surrounding him and now me.
Ming steps beside him. “He was following me and then he became your driver. You can see how bad that looks, now can’t you?”
“I don’t screen my drivers,” I say.
“Search him,” he orders, pointing at one of his men, and as if he knows I’m about to shoot the fuck out of all of them, he points a gun at Danny’s head. “Don’t even think about it.”
I still think about it, and in graphic detail, but I let the man search me, which he does poorly. They miss a knife. And I can do a hell of a lot of damage with a knife. What they don’t miss is a piece of paper meant to be used, with caution, and planning. The man takes it to Ming who glances down at it and me and I know what it says: Shanghai. November 8th.
He looks up at me and in an instant he’s standing in front of me. His suit is pressed, expensive and while he’s short, he carries himself tall. While he’s old, sixty, to be exact, he’s fit enough to be forty. “What do you know of this?” he demands, his tone soft, too soft for comfort. The kind of soft a controlled killer uses. I know. I’m a controlled killer.
“Everything,” I say. “And I’ll give you everything you need to make that night go away. In exchange for—”
“No exchange.”
A man speaks in Chinese behind me, telling Ming Amanda is missing. “Where is your wife?”
“Taking a long pee,” I say dryly. “She does that.”
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he says. “You call your woman. She brings me what you have on me within one hour, or your man gets a bullet between the eyes.” He motions to his man, who hands me my phone. “Call her.”
“A trade,” I say. “Chen Benyu for the file.”
“No trade. Dial her now or he dies.” One of his men points a gun at Danny.
I do know dirty. I know people who need to die and Ming is one of them. Danny is not. I have to go at this with a new angle and that means buying time.
I dial Amanda and the line goes to voice mail. “Ming has Danny. Bring the file within an hour
or he will be killed.” I end the call, but after the agency alert I just got a few minutes ago, I have zero confidence Amanda will show up. The outcome of this night is on me. Danny’s life is in my hands. And then, so is Amanda’s.
Chapter Eight
Present day . . .
For the first fifteen minutes after we pull away from Amanda’s neighborhood, I replay that last day with her. And when I come back to the present, I can almost hear her thinking, feel the heaviness between us. Questions that need answers. Betrayal that needs understanding. A past that won’t be ignored.
It’s only after we clear the city limits, and Amanda notes the road signs, that she breaks the silence. “Sonoma?” she asks.
“Sonoma,” I confirm. “Which means we’ll be on a plane within the hour.”
“Your arm can’t wait that long. We have to find a hole-in-the-wall gas station with a rear bathroom and running water.”
Considering the current state of my arm, and the need to be back to one hundred percent now, not later, I don’t argue. In fact, I eye the mirrors, confirm we have no one in sight, and take the country road’s next exit, sure to lead to a hick town and a gas station. “This is a good choice,” she approves, while my cellphone buzzes in my pocket with a message.
I turn us down a road and follow the sign leading to some small town a mile up the road, pulling out my phone to glance at the message: Divert. Airport compromised.
Damn it, I think, handing my phone to Amanda to show her the message. Her reaction is that of the agent I’ve always known her to be: unaffected and logical. “What’s the backup plan?”
“Just outside of Vegas, where airstrips are like gas stations, and we’ll be hard to find.”
“And nine hours on the road,” she says, glancing at her watch. “It’s two now. We’ll be lucky if we make it by midnight by the time we get you stitched up.”
We enter the town and just as expected, we’re immediately greeted by an off-brand gas station. I pull into the driveway and around to the back, and predictably discover a rear, outdoor bathroom. I park in front of the door, leaving Amanda just enough room to exit. “Is that cat going to be okay in here?”
She glances over her shoulder. “She’s asleep and as you can tell, not a problem.”
“Yet,” I say, opening my door.
“Ever,” she calls out, meeting me at the bathroom door with her medical bag.
I open the bathroom door, inspect the tiny, dirty hole-in-the-wall, and motion her inside.
She crinkles her nose. “Oh the joy this is going to be,” she says, walking inside.
I follow, shutting us inside the tiny box of a bathroom with an old toilet and sink, and not much more.
Amanda drops her bag on the ground. “Get undressed,” she orders, squatting down to unzip it.
“Never have I been able to refuse your order to undress,” I say, shrugging out of my jacket, while Amanda rolls out a small piece of plastic on the floor and sets up a medical station, complete with scissors, needle and thread, and a few small bottles of some sort.
I toss the jacket over the top of a trashcan, the stickiness of blood clinging to my chest and arm, watching her work. “How old were you when you became a doctor again?” I ask, removing my shoulder holsters. “Twenty-two?”
“Twenty,” she says, threading a needle. “Your shirt is soaked but you don’t seem to be bleeding much anymore. Take off the shirt but keep the belt in place.”
“Twenty is young,” I say, pulling the shirt over my head, and not without pain, before tossing it on top of my jacket. “How high is your IQ?”
“High enough to stitch you up in this crappy bathroom,” she says, pointing. “Sit.”
I lower the toilet lid and get as comfortable as a man can get when he’s about to have a needle rammed through his skin. Amanda sets the needle down, pulls on gloves, and stands in front of me to inspect my wound. I resist the urge to settle my hands on her hips, firmly pressing them to my knees. “The good news,” she says, after a moment, her fingers pressing on the edges of the wound, “is that the bullet didn’t go straight through your arm. It went down the side of your arm and it didn’t hit muscle.”
“The bad news?”
“It left a deep, long gash. It’s going to need a lot of stitches and it’s not going to feel good now or later. But”—she squats down and stands again, a syringe with a needle in her hand—“I’m prepared. This will numb you up.”
She moves toward my arm and I catch her wrist. “You aren’t sticking that in me.”
“It’s to numb it up. I promise you. You want me to numb it.”
“You aren’t sticking me with that, Amanda.”
Her eyes darken and narrow. “Because you think I’m going to poison you.”
“You are the Poison Princess,” I say, suddenly back in time, remembering more than a few people I saw her poison. Remembering that I’m her enemy.
She shuts her eyes, the lines of her face tightening. “Fine.” She drops the syringe on the ground. “Suffer.”
She pulls away from me and squats back down, returning this time with a threaded needle. “Leave the belt on until I’m done.”
“You’re going to make this hurt, aren’t you?”
“It’s a needle and you aren’t numbed up. I don’t care what kind of tough guy you think you are, it’s going to hurt like a bitch.” She moves toward me. “I suggest you prepare yourself,” she warns. “On three. One. Two—” She sticks the needle in me, and pain radiates down my arm. I’ve only just recovered when she repeats the process and I grab her hips, holding onto her, my head lowering to her side.
“How many stitches?” I ask.
“Twenty at least,” she says.
“Fuck.”
“I can still—”
“Just finish.”
And she does. She jabs that damn needle in me over and over, until finally she releases the belt, but I don’t release her. I’m still fighting the pain radiating all the way down my spine. “I was always the Poison Princess to you, wasn’t I?”
I look up at her, and the firestorm of past and present that passes between us in that moment overrides the pain. I stand up, the fingers of my good hand tunneling into her hair, our lips close, breath mingling together. “You were my kind of poison.”
“Don’t kiss me,” she whispers a moment before I would do just that. “It changes nothing.”
My mouth closes down on hers and it’s not just me kissing her. We’re crazy-hot kissing, and her fingers are in my hair, that firestorm of moments before exploding between us. “Do you taste how much I hate you?” she demands. “Do you taste it?”
“I don’t taste hate,” I tell her. “I taste you and it’s been too damn long since I tasted you.”
“Then try again,” she hisses, our lips colliding, and the eruption between us repeats all over again. I press her against the wall, my hand sliding under her shirt, molding her closer, but suddenly she is pushing me back, tearing her mouth from mine. “Stop. Stop, Seth.” Her breathing rasps heavily. “I cannot be this confused again. I can’t do it.”
“Confused,” I repeat. “Again.”
“Yes. Confused again.”
“You want to kill me or you don’t,” I say. “It’s not that difficult of a decision.”
“Spoken like the true Assassin.” She shoves at my chest. “Clean your arm up in the sink.” She twists away from me and I press my hands to the wall, fighting the urge to grab her, pull her back, and demand every fucking answer I don’t have. But where fucking can be fast, those questions and answers will not.
I straighten and walk to the sink, turning on the water and scrubbing up, aware of Amanda packing up her bag. By the time I’m drying off, she’s standing next to me, and without saying a word, she shoves a bandage on my arm and then tapes it up. Almost as if she wants me to live and not die. And I almost want her to live and not die.
She backs away from me and reaches into her bag, pulling out a T-shir
t. “I grabbed this for you back in my condo. An extra-large 49ers shirt.” She tosses it at me and I catch it, disliking the grind of possessiveness stirring inside me for a woman I hunted with the intent to kill.
And still I ask, “Who does it belong to?”
“Me and my vibrator,” she says, sliding her bag onto her shoulder. “It’s my sleep shirt.” She reaches into her bag again and sets a bottle of water on the sink, and two pill bottles. “Pain killer and antibiotic. If you were smart, and you really want to be fresh to get Franklin, you’d take both and let me drive for a few hours. But since you won’t be smart, I’ll be in the passenger seat of the SUV waiting on you.” And on that note, she exits the bathroom.
Grinding my teeth, I make fast work of pulling on that shirt and my weapons, and because I need a way to conceal them, my leather jacket. By the time I’m done, the adrenaline and high of wanting Amanda is gone, and the throbbing in my arm is not only back, it’s more like hammering. I glance at the bottles on the sink and Amanda’s words replay in my mind. I was always the Poison Princess to you, wasn’t I?
She was, but she was my Poison Princess. Right now, I don’t know what she is but right. I pick up the bottles, take one of each of the pills, and then exit the bathroom.
Stopping at the passenger door, I open it. “You drive an hour and I’ll take over.” I hand her the key.
She doesn’t say a word. She just takes the key and scoots over into the driver’s seat. I climb into the passenger seat and shut the door. And by the time Amanda has the engine started, Julie is already on her lap. “Is that safe?” I ask as she pulls us onto the road. “Riding with her like that?
“This from a man who’s watched me hang out of a moving car and fire a gun?” She laughs. “I think you’re afraid a little kitty will make you human.”
My mind goes back to the past. To a time when we were Mr. and Mrs. Jones no more than two weeks at that time. We’d just exited a restaurant after enduring dinner with Laura and Brad Davenport, deciding to walk to our apartment, when it had begun to rain lightly. Halfway to our destination, the drizzle became a downpour, but when Amanda ran for shelter, I held her in the rain and kissed her, rain dripping down our faces, into our mouths. And what stood out to me was her genuine and spontaneous laughter as we finished the run home, something I had not heard from her before that moment. Laughter that was just for me, because of me and who we were becoming together. It was also the moment that she, not a cat, made me human again. And for three long years, I’ve wondered what I might have seen differently if that storm, and that moment, had never happened.