Lifting it up so I could see the small silver package, wrapped in what indeed looked like duct tape, I began working at the seam.
With my teeth.
Probably, I should have been grossed out.
But frankly, I’d had my mouth in worse places, and . . . also I didn’t consider Dan’s cock a worse place.
Glorious, maybe.
Ugh.
Enough.
No decisions in this cell. Even if his words, his lack of disgust had me wrangling with what I’d always thought was the truth about who I was.
Eventually, I got the edge on the package open and was unpeeling the tape. “This is far below Fred’s usual standards.”
Dan buttoned his pants, yanked up the zipper. “He’s trying to figure out the safest mode of blade transport. It’s more difficult than the sole of a shoe, putting it in a waistband or hem of a piece of clothing.”
“You don’t want to stab yourself trying to get it out.”
“Right,” he said. “Or just walking around.”
“But it needs to be small and relatively undetectable, especially during a potential pat-down.” I slanted a glance at him “Is this where you tell me that your junk is so big, and that’s why they didn’t find it?”
A snort. “Not hardly.” His eyes flitted up, a cocky smile curving his mouth. “Although, this could be the point where I say you’ve seen it and . . .”
“It’s tiny?”
He mimed like I wounded him.
“Stop.” I smacked him lightly, kept unwrapping, even as I considered our options. The first thing I’d done when I’d woken up in the back of the van transporting us was to check our supplies. I’d run through our resources, painfully bound my wound in the back of the moving vehicle, checked that Dan was breathing. It hadn’t taken long to discover that all of our weapons had been taken.
Luna.
Poor Luna was probably tossed in the trash or the water somewhere, never to be used again.
I spared a moment for my poor rifle, most certainly discarded like a broken toy in some sad, dark place, and focused on getting out of here. “They knew about the blades in our boots, but not the first aid kits.”
“Or the underwear knives.”
I shuddered. “That’s not the name to call them.”
“Point made,” he said. “And taken.”
“Aside from bad word usage, they knew our room, and I’m guessing they also knew also about the surveillance, otherwise we would have seen them coming on the cameras.”
“Do you think they hacked it?”
I sighed, pulled the tiny knife from the plastic wrapping, and handed it to Dan. “I don’t know. But they would’ve had to, right? Either that, or we have another—” Breaking off, because I didn’t want to finish the sentence, I just shook my head.
He didn’t have that problem. “Traitor.”
“Right.” The question was, “Is this one new or the one we already know about?”
A nod. “Exactly.”
KTS didn’t exist in a vacuum. We’d had traitors before, those who gave in to the temptation of power or money. Daniel—the former agent we’d connected to criminal activity—was one of those. He had betrayed us barely a year before, and the memory was fresh enough that it seemed like the most likely scenario.
“Do you think Daniel”—it was a cruel twist that Dan shared a name with the bastard—“was a part of this?” I asked.
Laila had come face-to-face with Daniel on a mission not long ago—just months after the former agent had betrayed KTS and their team for the money and power offered by the Mikhailova clan. That betrayal had been a particular blow because Daniel had been previously fired by the agency, and Laila had vouched for her childhood friend to come back as a member of her team on a probational basis. He’d abused that trust then attempted to steal the drives KTS had recovered, putting two civilians’ lives at risk.
It was a fucked-up move, from a fucked-up person.
A person who—if he was somehow alive—was out there now with information about KTS.
Information he was potentially—and in all likelihood—sharing with their enemies.
We all understood why the Mikhailova—and as a consequence, Daniel—wanted the drives. They had contained information linking the Russians with many powerful people around the world, and the trail of money had given KTS rare insight into the inner workings of the Mikhailova. In fact, a whole team at KTS was currently working on cutting off those monetary channels to make their criminal activities more difficult.
But in the aftermath of that most recent interaction with Laila, Daniel had been presumed dead by her hand. Except . . . KTS trained their people to be strong, to never give up, and gave them numerous techniques to get out of a variety of sticky situations.
I wasn’t at all certain that a knife wound and subsequent explosion could take him down permanently.
I was still kicking.
Though the jury was out for how long.
Adrenaline was getting me through, but I knew that was a limited resource. At some point, my body would either succumb to infection or lose too much blood and be unable to function. Add in the ankle and Dan’s multitude of injuries and . . .
Yeah, I was still kicking.
And the question still was: for how long?
“Frankly,” I said, “this whole situation—our mission being hijacked, my father’s people knowing exactly where to find us and when to take us down, along with the previous meet with our source going FUBAR—suggests that Daniel might very much be alive.”
“Seems likely he survived the incident at the warehouse with Laila and that he’s behind this,” Dan agreed. “He knew how to get to us. And he knew about our old tech, but not the newly issued stuff.”
My ankle and side had both been slowly ratcheting up with pain, a steady throb-throb-throb that was building as time went on.
Adrenaline fading.
Ignoring that, I lay back, trying to pretend the pain wasn’t there. “Right. The first aid kits have only been common in the last few months, and the knife is new even to me.” I closed my eyes, attempted to breathe through the hurt. “But this mission hasn’t been on the books anywhere Daniel could have known about it. We planned it in a week.”
“If he’s alive and working with them,” Dan pointed out, “he could have spotted our setup.”
“That’s true.” I opened my eyes.
“Either way, we’ll have to change tactics in the future,” he said.
“Agreed.” A beat as I tilted my head, staring up at him. “Could he have known about our source in Munich?”
Dan nodded. “That’s possible, especially since he’d been reinstated to Laila’s team for a time. That source had been around for a while.”
The puzzle pieces were fitting together, and I didn’t like one bit where this was leading. But we would have time to talk after we got out of this cell. And step one of that was ensuring our trackers were able to be picked up by KTS’s servers.
I lifted my arm. “Take it out.”
Instead of listening to me, Dan lifted his own arm and sliced the spot just on the inside of his elbow. He hissed in pain, and I glared as blood dripped out of the open wound.