“Would you prefer Boner?” she returned chipperly.
I ignored the name and countered, “Where’s your weapon?” I knew she wouldn’t be without one.
One brown brow came up as she lowered herself onto the chair. “Where do you think it is?”
I grinned, tore my gaze from her body, and sat down on the sand next to her. “Are we only going to talk to each other in questions from now on?”
Scanning the horizon, she asked, “How do you feel about questions?”
I snorted.
“Knife in my purse,” she said, breaking the question streak. “Plastic pistol hidden in the flowers of the hat. Stiletto in the frame of my glasses. You?”
“Blades in both flip-flops. Handgun in my backpack.”
“Good.” She shifted in the chair. “Everything in my quadrant is in place. Bags made it safely to our room. Laila and Ryker are next door. As planned, Olive is on the floor below, so we have access to the stairwell.”
“Have you seen any of your family?”
That was part of the reason she’d been the one to place the cameras. She could move like the wind, melt into shadows, and she knew who to look out for.
“Yes,” she said. “Three cousins. What about you?”
I nodded at a cabana tucked beneath several palm trees. It was draped in a white gauzy material, but even from fifty feet away, we could see the group of men inside. “No Toscalos. But some of the Mikhailova clan are inside. Three bratok”—soliders—“meeting with their brigadier. I didn’t get a clear look at his face, but it appears to be Alexander Ivankov. The bratok are definitely his, and familiar faces—Konstantin, Boris, and Sergei.”
“Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest,” she muttered.
“Yeah, too bad Ivankov isn’t any of those.”
“No, unfortunately he is too fucking smart for his own good.” Swarmy and somehow always able to squirm out of any charges we managed to pin on him.
“But at least he has a dumb name,” I said lightly.
Her gaze slanted to mine. “True, Iceberg isn’t great,” she said referring to the alphabet-based portion of the code we were working based on the information that she’d presented earlier. The correlation between the known associates in both groups and their alphabetic name had been the simplest part, once they knew what to look for. “But it isn’t Boner,” she teased.
“Shut it, Mud.”
The man who’d brought me the drink earlier, came up before she could reply and took Ava’s order.
I didn’t speak Italian, but I knew enough to recognize the order.
It made me smile.
“A peach daiquiri?”
She turned to me, her eyes narrowed, even as flashes of memories from two years ago flared bright in my mind. The tart-sweet of peach juice on her lips, her tongue.
“You got a problem with that?”
“No.” I leaned closer, near enough to smell the coconut of her sunscreen, the soft floral scent of her shampoo. “It’s just a little . . .”
“If you finish that sentence with girly, I’ll reacquaint you with Luna.”
“I love Luna,” I said as the man returned with the slushie peach drink and handed it to her. I noticed that she slipped the server a folded-up bill, exactly as I had earlier.
She took a sip and sighed in pleasure.
Which made my cock twitch. Cute. So glad my teenage boy could make an appearance while on a mission with a woman I wanted almost more than my next breath.
“Sure, you do,” Ava said. “So long as you aren’t looking down her barrel.”
I snorted. “That’s true.”
She pulled out her cell, pretended to be texting, but I could see she was taking several pictures of the trio. “What if this isn’t what we think?”
“You’re right with the code, Ava.” I leaned against the lounge chair, dug my bare feet into the warm sand. “You’re the best agent I know. Hands down. And even if there’s more to this, or it’s not exactly what it seems, all we have to do is look at that cabana and have confirmation that serious shit has gone down.”
“Yeah,” she whispered. “And if he is Iceberg, he showed up a lot in the files.”
I nodded. “Along with Romaine, who you’ve pegged as Romeo,” I said, sympathy spreading through me. I wasn’t surprised she’d survived growing up in a lion’s den. Ava was the strongest woman I knew, and considering I was surrounded by strong women on a daily basis, that was no joke. “Your younger brother. Are you—”
“He’s not my brother.”
A sharp rebuttal that should have brought a chill to the hot Mediterranean climate, it was filled with so much frost, but though I met her eyes, I didn’t say anything to deny it, didn’t argue with her about DNA and family. I was close to my sister, considered her one of my best friends when I was Stateside and could actually see her, but I knew I was one of the lucky ones. Genes, unfortunately, didn’t create love, nor loyalty, nor kindness.
And I didn’t need to be able to understand the finer points of DNA nor every bit of what happened to Ava growing up, to understand that family often carried complications right alongside it.
The shadows were right there in her eyes.
An innocent girl growing up in the mob.
Fuck, how had she survived?
Except . . . I knew how she survived. It was clear as day in the same intensity and spirit that had brought me to the training mat often enough, the same focus that had made her the best shot in the agency, even with her needing to wear glasses.
Speaking of which, if we were sitting on our asses, just watching our targets laugh and drink, I might as well change the subject to something that wouldn’t weigh so heavily on her.
“Why didn’t you ever do Lasik?”
Brown eyes, surrounded by thin black frames, came to mine. “I wasn’t a candidate for it,” she said. “My eyesight isn’t all that bad. I’m fine up close, but at a distance, one eye struggles. My right optic nerve was damaged.”
“I’m guessing it wasn’t damaged during an op.”
“No.” A beat. “And it turns out, I wasn’t receptive to the lesson my father wanted to teach me.”
I read between the lines and felt like the biggest asshole on the planet because I hadn’t changed the subject at all. Instead, I’d ended up drawing her focus right back to her blood relatives, right into the childhood she’d given the briefest overview of back at headquarters. I’d read between the lines the week before, too, understanding that during the briefing, there was a lot more she hadn’t said than she had.
So, me bringing her attention back to her family was right up there with Mud smooth.
Brit mentally smacked me across the head, but I didn’t need it. I already knew that the surefire way to get through those walls, to get Ava to trust me, was to not continue to poke at the open wound that was her family.
Shit.
“Tell me about the cameras,” I said, settling on something safer, even as the still-healing injury on my chest and back ached, reminding me of all the poking Olive had done nearly three weeks ago. I wouldn’t say she was strictly happy that I’d moved from light duty straight into a mission, but the team had needed to move quickly, and we’d made sure to have two other KTS teams on standby nearby, in case Ava’s theory panned out.