Behind the Mask (Undercover Associates Book 4) (18 page)

Bargaining chip
. A euphemism for giving Hugo up to be tortured and killed.
What had she done?
“It’s very likely not him.”

“What name is he using? I’ll work it from here. We’ll take him down and get the proof.”

“No,” she said. “I’m telling you, the guard will flip. Sal. Sal will flip. I know the sound of a man ready to flip. Check it out. This guy may not be Kabakas—a really smart agent witnessed Kabakas’s death nine years ago. I just need to rule him out for myself. It’s a personal thing.”

“What’s his name?”

Her words came low and slow. “Hands off. This is my personal thing.”

The silence on the line was loud as hell now because of the question that hung in the air—if Dax moved in on Hugo, would she stand in the way? Would she work against a team?

“Sal is the better angle,” she said. “You have people in place down there.”

“Both angles are the better angle.”

“This is my thing, my call.”

“Question,” Dax said after a silence. “What does the Bigfoot hunter hunt?”

Heat rode up her neck. “Dax—” she warned.

“Do you know?”

“I’m not playing this with you.” She’d heard Dax turn people inside out. He’d never done it to her.

“Most Bigfoot hunters, Loch Ness Monster hunters, they’re not hunting a monster at all,” he said. “They don’t give a fuck about a monster. They’re hunting for something
more
. Something more than
this
. Something magical, special. They need to see that there’s something more than this body that wrinkles and dies. Something more than poor, starving jamokes in some war-town country. Something more than suffering assholes tied up in basements getting their flesh cut up until they give up a name. A passageway out of the shame, the guilt—”

“How dare you,” she hissed. “How dare you, Dax.”

“Is he powerful enough to blot out the pain?”

“Don’t—”

“Tell me how you feel when you imagine it might be him. How do you feel inside?”

She took a breath, collecting herself, forcing a casual tone. The worst thing you could do with Dax was to react. “So let me get this straight. Are you suggesting I’m protecting him? Or are you questioning my objectivity in general? Or do I just have some big fucking death wish?”

“I don’t know.”

She sighed, loudly. “Look, I have a mountain to climb before I sleep, so if we’re done here—”

“Do you still have the Friar Hovde nightmares? You try and try to kill him, but you can’t.”

“How about you jack off on your own time?” she said coolly. “Bottom line, you will not send in a team. Bottom line, we don’t commit Associates until I’m convinced of his identity. You’re going to give me a week to do this right. More if I need it. You will lay off until then. You will work on Sal. Sal is the hot option.” She let the
or else
go unspoken.

“Five days,” he said.

“A week. This is social engineering, Dax.”

“Fine.”

“I need to get back.”

“Zelda—”

“Work on Sal. I’ll get back to you.” She yanked out the wire and sat in the dark, listening to the night animals. It was so like Dax to hook up Kabakas and Friar Hovde. Throw in the pirates and Mickey Mouse, and they’d have a party.

It stung that he’d question her objectivity like that.
Blind spots,
she told herself. And the closer to home, the larger Dax’s blind spots were. Still, it stung.

She stood and picked through the debris of the little shop. She’d seen mouthwash near an overturned rack; contact solution was too much to hope for, but she did find saline solution. She took it and left, jogging slowly upward, wishing to hell that she hadn’t told him about Kabakas or the Friar Hovde nightmares. But Dax was her partner, her best friend.

God, she’d always been content to let him run the show. It was part of their vision of cells and secrecy—destroy part of the Association, and other parts would still stand.

She was starting to regret that. Allowing herself to be the silent partner. As if she wasn’t worthy to be seen as a leader. Dax had never moved against her, but it wasn’t out of the question. Nothing was out of the question for Dax. Dax did the hard things that nobody else would do. He was ruthless—ruthless for good causes, yes—but ruthless all the same.

Well, she could be ruthless, too.

She kept on, huffing and puffing, a little bleary. And fuck, she was so tired of all the problems.

She was actually looking forward to sleeping in that barren little room in that simple, austere home in the middle of nowhere. No phones, no buzzers. No need, even, to choose what to wear, because she had four gray uniforms. Just the gray uniform and the
thwup-thwup
of an arrow. A troubled kid and a dark warrior who could very well be Kabakas.

The mountainside was rich with scent, more so going back up, because her progress was slow. She could smell every layer of soil and decomposition. Decomposition had been a specialty, of course, as a forensic botanist.

At one point, she thought she heard a light crank and flap overhead—something mechanical—a glider. She looked up and saw nothing. Probably nothing. Overtired, overwrought people often fell into sensory hallucinations. It had been a fuck of a day…or two.

Tell me how you feel when you imagine it might be Kabakas. How do you feel inside?

Better—that’s how she felt when she thought he might be Kabakas. She felt better in a strange way.

S
he reached the
house sweaty and out of breath. She slipped in her bedroom window, stripped off the smelly jumpsuit, and collapsed on her bed. She didn’t even get under the covers; she just lay there. This was all she wanted. Just to close her eyes. Just to stop.

Just to sleep.

But like so many times she was overtired, sleep didn’t come. She gazed out at the night sky, thinking about Hugo. She needed to find proof that he wasn’t Kabakas, and then she needed to get the hell out. She could quiz Paolo. Interview the villagers. Hugo himself could tell her. She could coldfuck it out of him. She’d done it to dozens of targets over the years; why not Hugo? He already thought she was a prostitute.

But coldfucking Hugo…it might not be so easy. The point of coldfucking was that you had to stay cold and remote. Hugo, had her nearly in tears just putting a few stitches in her arm—and it hadn’t been about the pain.

Never mind. She was in the man’s home. Evidence was everywhere in a man’s home—if you opened your eyes. There would be something—receipts, records. Her mind went back to the cabinet. That was her best bet.

She sat up. Screw sleep. She had to know.

She splashed water over her face and body, toweled off, and pulled on the crisp maid’s uniform. Moments later, she was prowling through the darkness, bare feet on cool tiles, flashlight and picking tools in her apron pockets. She slipped through the main rooms, feeling her way along at times—slowly, so as not to knock into anything. Not that there was much to knock into, being that the place was so barren.

She made it to the living room and stopped.

The light from a fire beyond flashed on the fanciful ironwork covering the far windows. A fire—not surprising on a cool night such as this. It smelled good. But then another scent came to her; something slightly flowery, there then gone, so faint that she wondered if she’d imagined it. She crept farther.

One door was closed, but another was open. The origin of the fire—and the flowery smell.

Lavender, but not just lavender. Opium.

She stilled. She hadn’t had to drug him after all—he’d done it for her.

It was then that she heard it—a soft grunt of effort. Very male, very distressed. She crept nearer. Foolish, maybe, but she had to see. She slipped nearer and kept going until she stood in the doorway.

And froze.

There he was—Hugo with his shirt off, bent forward in a chair, elbows on his knees, looking almost defeated. His thick, muscular form was lit by the ambient glow of the flames.

But it wasn’t his posture or his mountainous physique that froze her.

It was his burns—deep, extensive burns up and down his side and his back, from hip to shoulder. Mottled, disfiguring wounds of a man who’d gone through fire. Scar tissue pulled tight around what looked like skin grafts.

She swallowed.

He sucked in a ragged breath. She couldn’t hear it, but she could see it. His pain was very nearly visible. All day he’d seemed the ultimate opponent, aware of her every mood, but he’d lost himself fully to his pain now. She’d seen it in agents before—you hold out, then you collapse. God, the way he’d been moving today—twisting, rolling, fighting—it had to have stretched and torn that fragile skin. He was in agony, this man. The agony you cut with opium.

She eyed a small glass jar—that would be the source of the lavender scent. Some sort of concoction; the Valencians were great ones for concoctions. Some parts of his side and back were shiny, but some weren’t. He hadn’t reached all of the spots. Had that been the grunt of distress? Was he trying to reach all of the painful spots, and couldn’t?

She remembered the way his eyes had looked after dinner—flat—and it came to her now that this was the look of pain. Yet he’d still been out there doing archery with Paolo and overseeing his lessons. Because he loved that kid in his fucked-up way.

He couldn’t call him by name, but he loved him.

His voice boomed. “I told you to stay in your room.”

She jumped. “I-I needed to get a glass of water.”

The fire crackled as Hugo’s massive shoulders rose and fell. An injured bull, wall-to-wall muscle, and wall-to-wall agony. Her gaze fell to the belt around the waist of his khakis, which seemed to expand fitfully with his labored breaths.

“Sorry,” she said.

“Come here.”

She hesitated, then went, heart pounding. Because it was the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere. Because she’d been up for days. Because nothing was neutral between them. Because the sight of this frightening, maddening man in distress did something to her.

Because Kabakas had supposedly perished in a fire nine years ago.

She stopped a few feet away from him, just beyond the sphere of light cast by the flames.

He stared into the hearth as he spoke. “What are you doing?” He was deeply affected by the drug—she could tell by the roughness of his words. She fought the impulse to move closer, to rest her hand on his hair, to comfort him. “Answer! What are you doing?”

She had the crazy sensation that he was speaking from a primitive part of himself, as though the question was meant existentially. Here they were in the middle of nowhere, everything so strange, almost like a dream.

“I don’t know,” she said, speaking from deep inside herself. “I don’t know what I’m doing.” It was the truth. She’d been so lost since Friar Hovde.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he whispered thickly.

“You’re burned,” she said.

He turned his head and raised his eyes to hers, those eyes that crackled with intensity. He looked wild. He
was
wild, this man tried to shape the world around him through brute force—forcing Paolo to his lessons. Sewing her up whether she liked it or not. Putting down a guerrilla contingent. Pulling a village back from the dead.
They will come back, they will rebuild.

He looked at the world as a dark god, bending it to his will. He’d even tried to walk through fire.

But it was his humanity that struck her now. The brutal level of pain he had to be enduring.

“You missed a spot.” She stepped softly to his side and took up the little jar of salve.

He watched her every movement with pinprick pupils, a wild animal in the night.

“You’re okay,” she whispered, dipping two fingers into the cool salve. Gently she slicked it onto the pinkest, most inflamed-looking skin.

Much to her surprise, he allowed it. Maybe the pain outweighed everything else. He turned back to the fire, breath ragged, as she stroked the salve across his tormented flesh.

She’d thought of Kabakas as many things over the years, but never as a suffering being. Never as an old friend. So human, so compelling.

So fucking beautiful.