“Sorry, Luna,” I apologized to my steadfast companion.
Then I smashed the rifle against my opponent’s temple.
He collapsed to the ground, tipping over and hitting the concrete like a tree dropping to the forest floor, rapidly and with a jarring noise. Sliding my weapon back over my shoulder, I took stock of my surroundings.
Stillness surrounded us, making my near-silent movements seem gunshot loud in the space, but I knew it wouldn’t be quiet for long.
Even now, I could hear the slight buzz of the earpieces the men had worn, their compatriots checking in on their fallen companions. Clearly, they wouldn’t get a response, which meant it was likely Dan and I wouldn’t be alone in the warehouse for long.
If they’d sent a crew to capture the files our source had brought—hell, if they’d cared enough to try (and succeed) in killing the source, they wouldn’t give up easily.
They were coming. And they were coming soon.
So . . . it was time to go.
I picked up my glasses, ran over to where Dan was, jumped over the wall, and opened my mouth—
Click.
“Stop fucking around,” I hissed, glaring at Dan even as I assessed him for injuries. He dropped the gun to his side, fumbled to secure it back in his holster, and I could see that blood had soaked through his shirt, making the black fabric stick to his skin. Just took one? Ha. The man was going to bleed out without help.
“Tie this for me,” he muttered, tearing open a field bandage from the kit we all had stored in our boots while on missions. It was hidden in the tongue of our footwear and coated with a special KTS-patented substance that would help with clotting.
He fumbled, starting to wrap it around the wound.
I grabbed the strip of material around his torso, binding it tightly and ignoring his grunt of pain. One, because it needed to be tight or he was going to bleed out on the floor. Two, we didn’t have time for me to dawdle over tying a delicate bow.
Three, I wasn’t exactly known for my bedside manner.
There wasn’t anything soft or sweet or gentle about me. Dan had witnessed that firsthand, so there was no need to sugarcoat anything.
Hard lines and barbed wire, bullets instead of Band-Aids, sharp words rather than kissed knees.
I’d never had any soft in my life, and at this point I didn’t want it.
Soft was useless. Hard could protect, could strike out before the hurt came. Hard was—
Booted feet on concrete.
Fuck.
I tied off the knot, hitched my shoulder under Dan’s, and started to heave him to his feet. But I’d barely begun to use my strength and he was up, looking far steadier than a man who’d just taken a bullet should.
He grabbed his pack, nodded toward the shadows. “Let’s go.”
Respect curled through me.
Unfortunately, as my gaze drifted to the wounded man’s ass, stayed there for a heartbeat too long, it wasn’t the only thing curling through me.
Bullets, barbed wire, and . . .
A hard on for one Dan Plantain.
One I’d had for too many years to count.
Fuck.
Three
KTS Satellite Headquarters
Munich, Germany
01:33hrs local time
Dan
I hissed at the burn of antiseptic trailing over my skin.
“This’ll be two weeks light duty,” Olive said.
My spine stiffened, an argument on the tip of my tongue.
“At minimum.”
Now, the argument escaped. Or at least one syllable before I was shut down. “I—”
“Nope,” Laila said, glancing up from the computer. “The first rule of KTS is no arguing with the doctor who’s patching up your ass. We only have one doc on the team and don’t want her to abandon us.”
Olive snorted. “You guys are the cool team,” she said. “I could never abandon you.”
“Shh,” Laila replied. “It’s the only way I have to keep this one in check. Or to not get any grand ideas about going off on his own.”
I huffed. “I don’t need the drama of running my own team all the time. It’s bad enough when I have to do it on occasion.”
The vast majority of KTS was broken up into teams of five to ten agents, each usually working as separate units. Sometimes we grouped up, if our missions overlapped, or reorganized briefly if a certain subset of skills was needed for a particular task. But for the most part, we each stayed with our own team, receiving an assignment and seeing it through to the end.
For the past two years, Laila’s team had been focusing on the Russian mob, and more specifically, focusing on one clan, which was heading what our team suspected was one of the largest human trafficking rings in the world.
There was a special place in Hell for people who harmed innocents.
And, one could hope, an even more special place for those who made their living by selling men, women, and children.
“I thought the first rule of KTS was to get the bad guys,” I said, clenching my jaw when a wave of pain washed over me as Olive poked and prodded at the wound on my back.
“Wrong,” Laila said. “That’s, at minimum, rule three.”
“What’s rule two?” I gritted, trying to keep my voice even as white-hot agony radiated through me.
“Rule two is to never argue with your team leader.”
“Sure it—” I broke off, biting back a curse when Olive did something that rained fire down my spine. Sweat beaded on my forehead, and my head went fuzzy. But I still didn’t want to be sidelined for fourteen fucking days. I’d had worse injuries, and the bad guys were still out there.
Starting with the ones who’d killed our source.
“Two weeks light duty,” Olive repeated. “And if you argue, I’ll make it three.”
I made a face, trying to keep my voice even. “You know my mom used to use that same threat with me,” I gritted.
“Did it work?”
Yes. Yes, it had.
But I didn’t admit that aloud. Instead, I focused on keeping still when I was really, really done with all the wound tending. Slap a Band-Aid on. Or hell, just rub some dirt in it and be done.
Fucking doctors.
Wanted to be all sanitary and shit.
But since Olive didn’t appear to intend to stop the doctoring anytime soon, I shut up and held still, my gaze moving from Laila, who was transferring files from the USB onto KTS’s servers, to Ava.
Tiny. Curvy.
Strong as hell. A woman who was a foot shorter than me and still could easily knock me to my ass, and I knew most of her dirty tricks.
But she always seemed to have more dirty tricks.
When I’d asked her about those tricks a week ago, while we’d been preparing for this mission, asked her how she’d become so adept at hand-to-hand combat, her pale brown eyes had filled with pain.
Such pain that I’d actually stepped toward her, wanting to take her into my arms, to hold her close and stroke a hand up and down her spine, promising that everything would be okay. I’d held her once, and it had soothed every ache inside me. But we’d been pretending since then—to only be teammates, that we had not been intimate for a week, that we hadn’t shared all of what we’d shared.
Glorious, physical satisfaction.