Authors: Nicola Claire
I
was
several metres down the road by the time Adam started the Diavel. The urge to win the race this time should have been my only motivation, but that would have been an utter lie. I’d lost myself on that wharf. For that brief moment in time I’d forgotten who I was. Why I was there. What my current assignment entailed.
This attraction was becoming inconvenient and dangerous. But I’d chosen my sub-target, my mark, well. I’d started down this path, turning back now would only delay matters. Or complicate them. And in all reality, who else could I target at ASI to get the job done?
But something was wrong with me. Malfunctioning. Something was out of place. Because for the first time in a long time my mind was whirring but it wasn’t with plans of attack or intrigue and subterfuge. It wasn’t with my next move or play, or even the breakdown of what I was trying to achieve in relation to what I had already uncovered.
There was no lethal assessment of the situation. No cold alignment of facts inside my head. No steely resolve on where to shift the pieces on the chessboard to exact my endgame. None of that was what was on my mind. None of what I had been trained to be was whirling and swirling and flipping and twisting inside my brain.
No. Because I was too hung up on what I was fucking feeling.
I shook my head, saw Adam’s headlights in my wing mirror, and gunned the engine on the Monster down the next dip. I took the bend in the road too fast; the rear wheel threatening to slip out from under me. I smiled to myself and urged the machine faster. Losing sight of Adam at the next turn.
If I could have, I would have outrun my own demons just as recklessly. Instead I was outrunning what this man was making me feel for the very first time.
But even at this speed, my past always catches up with me.
I was recruited by the Department when I was nineteen. Two years into a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Wellington. I'm not sure what they saw in me, other than a penchant for languages. But it was enough for my professor to pass my name on to a group of people you never hear about and don't know exist. It was enough to sign my life away forever.
If they take an interest in you, it's already too late.
My life has not been my own for ten years.
I realise now that my professor was a recruiter, ideally situated to vet potential candidates before they were approached by the Department itself. I was a loner, he’d told them. I belonged to study groups but never stayed for coffee afterwards. I had boyfriends who were fuck-buddies, not partners for life. I lived in a student flat with four other guys, each just as devoted to me, but none of them even a blip on my radar; only a cover for my life.
At nineteen years old I lived the life of a spy. I was already hiding who I was, going through the motions just to survive.
Once my professor handed my name over to the Department the real invasive shit began. My history, my past, was dissected. On my file, labelled top secret and classified, it mentions my father and his political affiliations. My mother and her philanthropic hobbies. It documents their deaths in black and white.
The last line at the bottom of the dossier reads, Charisse Catherine Bryce is Class A qualified. No dependants. No attachments. No life.
Class A. Code for “does not exist.”
It was predicted I would leave university with my degree and disappear into the workforce without a backward glance. My fellow students and flatmates would forget me within months. There was no one else in Wellington, indeed in all of New Zealand, who would care if I vanished from the face of the earth.
I’d made myself that way. It was a choice I don’t regret. At the time a necessity. But as I slowed the Monster down as the edge of the city approached, I wondered just how much of who I am today was me, or the me the Department had moulded. They’d taken a shell and filled it with what they knew would get the job done. Unemotional. Lethal. Alone.
Ten years I’ve been this machine; designed to blend in and not be affected by what I see and do. Ten years I’ve done what they asked without question; I’ve never had reason to query a thing. Ten years I’ve not felt an emotion that wasn’t required to get the job done.
Ten years.
I pulled to a stop at a small suburban roundabout just inside Somerville. The Diavel purred as it slowly rolled up to my side, as though Adam somehow knew instinctively to approach with caution. To give me time to accept his company, his nearness. Him.
No amount of time would allow me to accept the way my heartbeat fluctuated or the way my palms became sweaty or the way I had an urgent desire to look into those deep blue eyes. I was walking in new territory and for the life of me I couldn’t work out why.
“You are one crazy woman,” Adam said almost conversationally, once his visor was lifted so I could hear his raised voice. “Some of those corners were completely suicidal.”
Was I suicidal? It was a question that begged an answer, but I didn’t have one. Before today, I would have said I felt empty. But empty was not the emotion that prevailed tonight.
“I won,” I replied, and a hint of that former emptiness invaded my mind. I forced myself to smile and look him directly in the eyes.
I could do this. I’d done it for ten long years.
“Now
what
are you going to demand as your prize?” Adam asked, all wicked intent and mischievous glint in those soulful eyes.
I couldn’t do it. I wanted to. Fuck, that was an understatement. No one had forced me to go to my knees before this man on a wharf in a sleepy beach suburb. No one. I’d wanted to taste him, touch him. Command him. I’d wanted it and I still did. But I couldn’t do it.
Too many emotions. Too many questions unanswered. Too many years being anything but who I was right in this moment.
I could come to hate him for doing this to me. But one look at the laughter and light -
and attraction
- in his gaze and I knew I could never hate Adam Savill.
I switched the Monster off and kicked the stand in place, throwing a leg over and standing to the side. He picked up on the change in mood immediately; I’d have expected little else from one of Nick Anscombe’s men.
The Diavel fell quiet, the sounds of late night Auckland filtering in through our helmets. TV screens flickering in nearby house windows adding their own noir sheen to the street where we stood. Staring at each other over the seats of two motorbikes. Saying so much in that one look and somehow not quite enough.
“I live in Mount Eden,” he said, one last attempt to salvage the evening.
“I live in Sandringham,” I replied, a concession he didn’t even realise I was giving. I’d already decided my base in Auckland would have to be sold when this assignment was through. It was never a home and now it wasn’t even a bolt-hole, what with the Department and Mal breathing down my neck.
I had a moment of panic; drawing Adam into my problems with that one admission. But I quashed the guilt and worry, well aware he could handle himself in any given situation. But giving him a heads up to be on alert was one step too far, right now.
I hated these frantic and conflicting emotions. I hated losing the emptiness even if I despised the shell I had become.
“Mount Eden’s closer,” he offered, but I could hear the uncertainty in his tone.
I glanced around the intersection we’d stopped at. No other vehicles were parked where they shouldn’t be. Not that that fooled me, even a car in a driveway could be a potential threat. But I couldn’t see one now. We were alone, as we should be. My Diavel was clean.
But was his Monster?
I looked down at the bike and frowned. How far would Mal and the Director have gone? Is that why Caleb was in town?
Then why warn me?
“Mt Eden it is,” I said, before I could stop myself. He was safer if I was with him, than alone and unprepared.
Adam’s smile was blinding in its brilliance. My heart ached in a way it had never done before. I sucked in a breath of air and looked away from the light that shone in his eyes. He was so damn
alive
. And I was one misstep away from death.
“All right,” he said, moving towards his Monster. “But you’ll have to follow me this time. No cheating,” he added with a wink. “And definitely no hair raising antics on Auckland’s inner streets.”
His bike roared to life, but he waited for me to mount mine. I shook my head, offering a wry grin. He had no idea I already knew where he lived.
Just as I reached for the ignition on the Diavel my cellphone began to ring in my helmet speaker. I glanced down at the phone as I pulled it from my jacket, the grin disappearing at the name flashing on the screen.
The timing meant something; it couldn’t not. Right when I was having doubts about this assignment, my emotions, and my sub-target. Right when I questioned the status of Adam’s bike. It meant something; a warning. And when the phone rung off before I could answer it, I knew.
Caleb was watching. Somewhere, somehow, he had eyes on me and Adam.
What to do? Stay and protect Adam or abandon him to his fate?
What did I know about Caleb Hart? He’d saved my life once. Backed me up on an assignment in China that went bad. He’d risked his neck to get me out. Him and Ava, the Department’s sharp shooter. We’d evac’d together. Spent the night in Hong Kong, holed up in a ramshackle hut, halfway up the side of a skyscraper.
It had been one of the best nights of my life. We’d been safe. There’d been three of us to carry the burden. I’d not been alone. We’d even shared a laugh and a bottle of some disgusting local spirits.
Caleb Hart had been my friend that day and here he was when my world was falling apart.
I couldn’t decide what it meant, but I knew it was a message of some sort. Go with Adam and Caleb would do something. Don’t go with Adam and risk putting a target on his back for someone else.
But who was the sharp shooter? Ava again?
I looked up at Adam, who had switched his bike off when I’d pulled my cellphone out to glance at the screen. I lifted a finger, indicating to him in that simple move to wait, and started dialling. I couldn’t trust anyone, but I could send a message of my own.
Ava answered on the third ring. It didn’t mean anything. Even if she was asleep, she’d be prepared.
“This is a surprise,” she said in that soft lilt she had that defied who she was underneath the delicate features and sex kitten look.
“It’s a night for surprises,” I murmured back.
“And to what do I owe this one to?”
I looked around the street we were on, then glanced back down at Adam’s bike. I needed to check it, make sure it was clean. But doing that would expose too much to this man I was feeling emotions for that I’d never felt before now.
“Do your remember Hong Kong?” I said, realising even that little tidbit was enough to raise suspicion in Adam. He watched on silently, but didn’t show anything untoward on his face.
“How could I forget?” Ava said on a soft laugh. “Caleb and you sang kindergarten songs while you toasted each other’s prowess.”
I smiled. It had been a good night. A rare night. Anything but empty.
“Do you know where he is now?” I asked.
She hesitated, just long enough for me to discern she was caught off guard. Asking after another specialist was not common. In fact, it was frowned upon.
“Are you in Guangzhou again?” she asked finally. Code for was I in trouble and needing back-up?
Did I trust Ava as much or as little as I trusted Caleb?
Better to have the chess pieces exposed than not know who you were playing.
“I might be. Are you busy?” Meaning was she on assignment?
“This is unorthodox, Charlie,” she whispered, as if saying the words quietly somehow kept them out of the wrong ears.
She knew better, which led me to believe this was the old Ava I was talking to. Not an Ava that was assigned to test me. Ava Cole was a brilliant sniper, but an empty shell she could never be.
I realised I liked her. I’d always liked her. But then I’d liked Caleb as well before today.
“I’m home,” I said into the helmet mic. Adam watched on unemotionally.
Silence was my only reply over the phone.
Then, “I’ll be there within ten hours.” She was in South-East Asia. South America would take too long.
Or she was allowing herself enough time to coordinate with Caleb and giving me false hope.
“You know where to find me,” I offered, feeling a resolve settle into my frame. Everything was in question right now. Every single thing.
But that didn’t mean I couldn’t contain it. Expose it. Finish this.
I looked at Adam again, thought about what ASI could be tied up in. Wondered just how far this sham of an assignment went. Was I reading too much into this just because I’d experienced an attraction to a target that made me
feel?
Made me
breathe?
“While you fill in the next few hours,” Ava was saying over the phone, “consider where you have been.”
The line went dead and so did my heartbeat. What did Ava know? What was she trying to tell me? Was it just standard specialist advice; trace your steps to see when things got out of hand. Easy then. They’d got out of hand once I’d arrived at ASI. Or had they? Is that what she meant?
This was getting complicated, but at least I’d made a move, shown my hand. If the Department wanted to play with me, I was up to it. But was Adam? ASI?
“I gather Mount Eden is off the cards tonight,” Adam said softly to my side.
I looked over at him, then reached up and unbuckled my helmet, removing it with one hand as the other slipped my cellphone out of sight. I turned and placed it on my bike’s seat and then crossed the short distance to where he stood.
He hadn’t removed his helmet. A defence mechanism if ever I saw one. He’d ridden a roller coaster tonight. Chased me, hunted me, and hadn't quite caught his prey. Sure, we’d had a moment on that wharf and the potential had existed for more, but I was beginning to see that Adam Savill was one switched on guy. That conversation with Ava had set off alarm bells inside his head. He didn’t know why he should be concerned. He couldn’t figure out yet what form that worry should take. But he knew something wasn’t right.