“Where’s Kent?” Julian Esguerra asks when Peter Sokolov—our former team leader and the reason for our current predicament—walks in, joining me, my brother, and our teammate, Anton Rezov, in Esguerra’s office.
“How should I know?” Peter retorts, taking a seat next to me at the oval table. I’m only peripherally aware of his presence, or that Ilya is crunching on a cookie Esguerra’s housekeeper brought in earlier. All my attention is on my inbox, where a message from our hackers has just landed.
“Isn’t he staying in the house with you?” Peter continues as I open the email.
“He was making the rounds with the guards this morning,” Esguerra says. “Looks like we’ll have to fill him in later. I have a call coming up.” A beat, then: “Any word from Henderson?”
“No, and I wouldn’t expect to hear from him anytime soon. We’re still”—Peter pauses, as if to check the time—“about an hour from the start of the deadline. I’m guessing we’ll have to make good on our threat with at least a few bodies before he realizes we’re serious.”
“All right,” Esguerra says as I skim the message. “I’ve already given our men the instructions on which hostages are to be killed first. Any word from your hackers?”
I look up from my phone. “Actually, yes. They’ve just tracked down the sniper for us—the one who shot the agent during Peter’s arrest.”
Peter visibly tenses. “Who is he?”
“He is apparently a she,” I say, reading more of the email. “Goes by the name of Mink and is from the Czech Republic. Hold on—the picture is loading now.”
“What about our doppelgängers?” Anton asks. “Any word on those fuckers?”
His words reach me as if through a wall of water, the roar of my heartbeat thunderously loud in my ears as shock and fury twist my guts. I’ve always prided myself on maintaining a cool head, the tight leash I keep on my emotions often fooling people into believing I don’t have any. But there’s no reining in the volcanic rage building inside me.
On my phone is a face I never thought I’d see again—a pale, pretty face framed by short, spiky white-blond hair. The photographer caught it in partial profile, and if there were any doubts in my mind about the woman’s identity, the tattoo of the hummingbird on the side of her neck and the piercings studding her delicate ear would’ve dispelled them.
The sniper who shot a SWAT agent during Peter’s arrest, setting off the firefight that resulted in the deaths of his in-laws, is none other than Mina, my pretty waitress from Budapest.
The girl for whom I’d obsessively searched for days after she ran off.
“What is it?” Ilya demands, and I tear my gaze from the screen to find my twin frowning at me.
If I try to speak, I’ll explode. So I just hand the phone to him, letting him see.
His harsh face freezes. “Her?” He looks up, jaw flexing. “She is Mink?”
Peter grabs the phone from Ilya and examines the picture with a confused frown. Of course, he doesn’t see what Ilya and I see.
He’s never met the deceitful little bitch, nor come dozens of times to the memory of fucking her.
“Who is she?” he asks, looking up at me and my brother. “How do you know her?”
I force the words past the knot of rage in my throat. “It doesn’t matter.” I snatch the phone back from Peter, fighting the urge to break his fingers in the process. “I’m sending men to capture her. She may know where Henderson is.”
“It does matter,” Esguerra says as I furiously type an email to those of our men who are in Europe, scouring it for traces of Henderson, the former US general who’s Peter’s—and now our—greatest enemy. I send them the hacker’s file on Mink/Mina and direct them to capture her alive.
We not only need to question her about Henderson, who’s apparently her employer, but I have an interrogation of my own to conduct.
“Who the fuck is she?” Esguerra demands when no one replies to Peter.
“We met her in Budapest,” my brother explains grimly as I send off the email and look up. “She works as a waitress in a bar.”
Anton, the fucker, is staring at me with dawning recognition. “Did you sleep with her a while back?” he blurts out. “Is she the one Ilya was pouting about when we were in Poland?”
I almost plant my fist into his bearded face. Only a lifetime of self-discipline keeps me still, my fingers squeezing the phone so hard it’s bound to leave bruises on my palm.
My brother can’t control himself nearly as well. “I wasn’t pouting,” he growls back, murder in his eyes. “But yes, he”—he jerks his thumb at me—“fucked her.”
My vision speckles with red, the rage inside me boiling out of control. Pivoting to face Ilya, I slam the phone on the table. “Shut your fucking mouth.”
Face reddening with fury, he jumps to his feet, sending his chair crashing to the floor, and I follow his example, ready to pound his thick skull into the table. Fuck self-control. Bloodlust sings in my veins, dark and toxic, spurred by anger and the harsh sting of betrayal.
Mina is Mink.
She lied to me, played me for a fool.
And my brother, ublyudok that he is, is still mad I didn’t fucking share.
My fist is already balling up, about to fly toward his face, when Lucas Kent bursts in, his square-jawed face tense and his T-shirt drenched with sweat.
“It’s Sara,” he says, panting like he’s sprinted all the way across the compound. “Peter, you need to come with me right away.”
Sokolov is already moving, the mere mention of his wife enough to make him forget everything under the sun. A moment later, he and Kent are gone, and with them, some of the fury that had blinded me.
Taking a breath to calm myself, I sit back down, and Ilya does the same, even as Anton and Esguerra eye us like we’re a pipe bomb ready to explode. But they don’t have to worry. I’m back to being in control.
My brother is not the enemy here.
She is.
And when I get my hands on her pretty little neck, she’ll pay for every bit of her deception.
7
Mina
I wake up to a splitting pain in my skull and a dull ache in my ribs. My mouth tastes like stale copper, and my arms are numb, my wrists painfully restrained above my head as I lie stretched out on some hard surface. It’s hot and humid, and I can smell my own sweat mixed with old wood and mustiness. For a moment, I can’t make sense of any of it, but then my memory returns, flooding my body with adrenaline. It takes all my training to remain still, with my eyes closed and my breathing unchanged, as images of what happened invade my mind.
Attacked.
Captured.
I was heading to a bartending gig in Budapest when four men surrounded me in a dark alley, their eyes as cold as the weapons in their hands. I managed to disarm one and injure another, but there were too many of them.
Even strong and healthy, I was no match for all of them.
My memories after that are a blur. They either drugged me or knocked me out. I vaguely recall a sense of motion—a car, most likely—followed by a loud roar that reminded me of a plane’s engines. Did they fly me somewhere?