Lear Read online

  He growled a sigh. “I was adopted as a teenager, but the folks who adopted me died in a car wreck a few years later. Their parents took over my care until I came of age at eighteen. So, no—unless you knew the name of the people who adopted me, you wouldn’t be able to trace the owners of this house to me. Especially seeing as I don’t even exist as a legal entity anymore, anyway.”

  I blinked at that. “Wait, say what?”

  He smirked. “I worked for the NSA, and did a little…creative deletion of my personal records. Which included breaking into the records office in the county where I was born and removing and destroying both physical and digital copies of my birth certificate. There’s no social security number for me, no credit history, no tax history or employment or service record, nothing.”

  I frowned at that. “Why?”

  A blank look. “Personal reasons.”

  I laughed. “Meaning, you have things to hide.”

  “Don’t we all?” His smirk returned. “But, yes. Although not so much things to hide as a need to hide myself.”

  “Who are you hiding from?”

  “Everyone.” He buried this comment in the mug as he took a long sip.

  “So.” I wiggled my fingers at his bag. “You have my shirt in there, too?”

  He bent down and pulled it out of the bag, along with my socks and tossed them to me. “Here, you’ll need the socks for sure.”

  I finished re-dressing, and once done I felt more fully ready for whatever was coming next. I fingered the holes in my leather jacket, sighing. “This was my favorite jacket.”

  He snorted. “Better that than your favorite skin?”

  “True.” I laughed. “But these fuckers are going to pay dearly for this.” I gestured at him. “So…what’s the deal?”

  “A few years ago, a high-profile Hollywood couple had their daughter kidnapped. My boss was hired to get her back, at all costs. The op went sideways, and we ended up taking out all the bad guys, keeping the money, and getting the girl back.”

  “I remember hearing about this.”

  “Right. It was pretty big news at the time, the kidnapping at least.” He paused to think. “So, the baddie in charge of the kidnapping already had a personal beef with my boss, and that led to him attempting an ambush, but you don’t ambush Harris and get away with it, as Cain learned. Cain got away, but what started as a personal beef led to a very serious vendetta against not just Harris but all of us who work for him. And Cain being Cain meant that he’d go to any lengths necessary to get back at us for embarrassing him. Only, all of his attempts thus far have failed, which just pissed him off even worse. He keeps planning these elaborate hits, they go wrong, we fuck his shit up, and he vanishes in the nick of time.” A laugh. “It’s kind of like the plot from a B action flick, honestly. I mean, the man is the most wanted arms dealer on the planet, so he’s got plenty of cash, but even for him, these ops are not cheap.”

  “So I’m part of Cain’s latest attempt to, what, hurt you?”

  “Basically.” Lear hesitated. “What I don’t like, though, is how fast it all happened.”

  I nodded. “Exactly. That’s where I’m getting hung up. We met, left the bar, went to your hotel room, and then I left again, all within, what, two hours max?” I shook my head. “The timing doesn’t make sense. They couldn’t have known about me. Shit, we don’t even know each other’s real names, or identities, even now.”

  He tapped a fingernail against the side of his mug. “I think you were a target of convenience. He’d been watching me, clearly, and waiting for an opportunity to make his move on me. They saw us leave together and then saw you leave alone.” Lear doesn’t sound pleased, at all. “He has a track record of going after anyone seen with any of us.”

  “And you still slept with me?” I asked, arching an eyebrow.

  A sheepish grin. “He went dark for over a year after his last attempt went very poorly for him. My associate and I have been trying to track him down, but he’s one of the most elusive human beings I’ve ever come across. Even Anselm can’t keep a bead on him, and until this business with Cain, I’d say there’s no one on the planet Anselm can’t hunt down.”

  “So he’s elusive even for you, and he has a vendetta against you and everyone you work with, yet every time he tries to kill or capture you guys he messes it up?”

  Lear laughed. “He underestimates us and overestimates himself.” A shrug. “Plus, the guys I work with are the textbook definition of ‘do not fuck with me or you will reap hell’.”

  I snickered. “Oh, I’m sure they are.”

  He tilted his head. “What’s that mean?”

  I pulled an oh nothing face. “Just that, clearly, you don’t know my squad.”

  “This doesn’t need to turn into a dick-measuring contest.” One corner of his mouth drew up in a sly, arrogant, amused half grin. “Mainly because, having seen it, you know I’d win.”

  I narrowed my eyes, gritted my teeth, held my breath, and hoped the sudden jump in my pulse rate wasn’t noticeable—or the sudden rush of heat between my thighs. When I had something like control over basic motor functions, I flipped him off.

  “Let’s stay on subject, shall we?” I heard an engine from down the street, and we both looked out the window, but it was just an older sedan passing through. “What can I expect, and what’s the plan to deal with it?”

  He sighed. “Well, if the past is anything to go on we can expect to be found, and soon. How he found me in the first place is something I’d like to know. There was that cube van with the SAW, which we never dealt with. He probably has several cells activated and hunting us, with surveillance support. So I guess we’re best off assuming this as an exfiltration through enemy territory, with no backup and no extract on the way. I’ll get hold of my people and see if we can get some help, but I’m wary of involving them too much.”

  I frowned. “Why?”

  A grimace. “This shit has a history of going off the rails. Most of my guys have wives and some of them have kids. He’s gone after us one by one and then eluded our attempts to find him.” He spent a moment in thought. “I hate that you’re involved in this, honestly, and I do apologize.”

  “Well, if anyone is going to get sucked into some vendetta bullshit with you, you could do worse than me.” I snagged the HK off the bench. “So, how do we proceed?”

  He rubbed his stubbled jaw with a knuckle. “I’ve got some gear stowed here. We load up and get moving.”

  “I can call in a hell of a lot of support,” I said. “No dick measuring here, just facts—my squad is top tier. We can handle anything, and my boss will stop at nothing if I call him in for the assist.”

  He shook his head. “Not yet. I don’t want to pull anyone else into this. As far as they know, they just caught the wrong fish in their net, and I’d be willing to bet they didn’t know who you were when they went after you—or they didn’t up until an hour ago. It was a general ambush meant to snare whoever I was with, just to get my attention, rather than something specific to you. Your defensive moves would have attracted their attention. They’re probably making some inquiries right now. But, regardless of that, once your people are on Cain’s radar, they’ll be part of his whole stupid vendetta.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’m hoping I can end this myself. My plan is to get you out of it, and go after Cain. Now that he’s moving again, he’ll be easier to find, I’m hoping. It’s when he goes to ground that he’s impossible to sniff out.”

  I frowned. “So you’re just gonna, what, take me home and hope for the best?”

  He growled in frustration. “They’ll just swarm your place and take you out.”

  “Right. So I’m in it. We may as well just get through this, Lear.”

  He eyed me. “I don’t like it.”

  “Neither do I. This is my downtime, goddammit. I’m supposed to be on vacation for the next two weeks. I’m supposed to be hitting the club and getting dick, not dodging bullets and taking out tangos.”
I waved a hand. “Yet here I am, in your safe house, hiding out from some Euro-trash villain’s goons for hire. It is what it is. Best way out is always through, so let’s gear up and wreck shit.”

  “Danielle—”

  I chopped a hand downward, cutting him off. “No.” I pointed angrily at the door. “What happened between us back there? That’s under wraps. It’s a liability, for both of us. If this is as serious as you make it seem—and the kill squad we took out confirms that—then we have to go into this with a professional mindset, not personal. So belay that mushy shit, Lear. It was good dick, I enjoyed it, but it’s over. Set it aside and be a professional.”

  He nodded, pushing away from the counter. “Very well.” He headed for the basement. “Supplies are down here.”

  I followed him downstairs, and a part of me cringed at the sudden distance in his voice and body language—but that was what we needed. Cold, distant, impersonal professionalism, not emotions.

  The first few steps down seemed normal enough—creaking wooden steps with plastic runners, open ceiling with exposed ductwork, wires, pipes, and joists. Once we reached the bottom and I saw what waited, however, the resemblance to a typical suburban mid-century bungalow basement ended.

  A workbench ran around three walls, and on one wall above the bench in pegboard were racks and racks of firearms, stacked boxes of rounds, extra magazines, various holsters and rigging, tactical armor, shooting gloves, flashbangs, grenades…a combat specialist’s wet dream. On another wall was an array of computer technology—laptops, tablets, cell phones, and a bunch of other gear I wasn’t familiar with. A bank of monitors on a third wall displayed a combined bird’s eye view of the home, garage, backyard, and surrounding area, including direct views both ways down the street, and another wide-angle look at the sky, to keep watch for threats from above.

  “Damn, Lear. You’re ready for some serious shit, aren’t you?”

  “Absolutely.” He indicated a section of the weaponry wall. “HK gear is there. Spare mags, pre-loaded. Take a vest, sidearm, and holster. Suit up—I’m assuming you know the drill.” He pointed to a series of bins under the workbench. “BDUs in basic black, organized in the bins by garment and size. Take your pick. There’re several women on the team, so I’ve got a variety of female sizes and styles as well.”

  I crouched and sorted through the bins until I found suitably sized BDU trousers and a two-pocket shirt. I changed into them without hesitation, and then glanced at Lear, who was watching me with an expression I wasn’t sure I wanted to see in this situation.

  “Lear.”

  He pretended to be busily checking the load on a Beretta. “What?”

  I didn’t want him to close me out, but I also didn’t want to invite him to start pushing the personal shit again. “Don’t get your shorts in a knot, okay?”

  He glanced my way, eyes shuttered. “Yeah, I’m clear on that. Mushy shit is stowed.”

  Well, fuck. I’d hurt his feelings. I couldn’t afford to care, though. My instincts were shrieking—we had to get moving, and quick.

  I sighed. “Where’s your cleaning stuff?”

  He tossed me a kit, and I found a black tactical ruck, tossed in the cleaning kit, a box of 9mm shells, some spare magazines for the HK and the Beretta I took off the wall. I put on a vest and then strapped on webbing, attached a shoulder holster for the pistol, and sorted out the various magazines for sidearm and HK for easy reach. He had a nice selection of tactical survival knives, and I chose one, clipped a few flashbangs and frags on my webbing, shouldered the ruck, and I was ready to go.

  Lear’s eyes took me in, speculative and curious. “Well, you certainly wear the gear like you’re familiar with it.” A smile. “I know you’re what you say you are, just from watching you move, but seeing you in full combat gear makes it real. You seem like a different person than…” He waved a hand vaguely, “who I met at the bar.”

  My hair was still down and loose, which I’d have to do something about. “You have a hat I can wear? I can’t work with my hair down.”

  He blinked at my avoidance of his statement, but rummaged in a plastic tote on the floor under the workbench. He found a plain black snapback and handed it to me. I stuffed my hair up into it, settled the hat on my head, and with my hair up and out of the way, I felt complete.

  Cuddy is in the house, ladies and gentlemen.

  Lear nodded. “Operative, indeed.”

  I feel like, at this point, he deserves to know who he’s dealing with. I extended my hand, and took his, shaking it warily.

  “We already met,” he said, with an amused grin. “Remember?”

  I let the darkness out of its cage deep inside. “No, you met Danielle.” I slipped on a pair of tactical gloves, tightened and adjusted them. “Professionally, I go by another name.”

  He faked a shiver. “Oooh, dramatic.” A grin. “And that name is…?”

  “Cuddy.”

  His eyes narrowed, and his jaw tightened.

  Yeah, that’s right, motherfucker.

  You know the name.

  Chapter Four

  Practiced Lethality

  There weren’t that many female black ops combat specialists, and even fewer in the private security and mercenary business. It was a small world, after all. We knew each other, respected each other, and kept out of each other’s way. They had their clientele, we had ours, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Every rare once in a while, mercenary teams connected for a particularly difficult op, or to share intel. We have bars we go to where we can talk shop, and swap big-dick stories. We get our gear from the same pool of outfitters.

  So, I knew who Cuddy was. I knew the name, rather—and the stories.

  To put this in perspective: to make a name for yourself as a mercenary you had to be very good, very scary, and willing to trade bits of your soul for notoriety. You didn’t become a black ops mercenary because you were a nice, moral, upstanding person who liked to play by the rules of normal law-abiding society. To be good, you had to survive. To survive, you had to do some dark, dirty, horrible shit. To be scary, the average mercenary—who is already by definition at least somewhat frightening—had to hope like hell you were on their team. Fear was the currency we traded in—me not as much as guys like Puck, Duke, Anselm, and Harris. I liked to stay in the shadows with my computers and satellites. To have a name, or should I say, a Name, you’d have gone from very good and very scary into territory where even your comrades in arms were a little afraid of you.

  Cuddy is a Name.

  Her background was shady—she’d come up out of the depths of the government’s shadowy empire of plausible deniability operations: CIA, NSA, all those branches with letters for a name and shady shit to hide. She exited the government’s employ at some point—and not amicably, from what I’d heard—and was hired by Johnny Raze. Together, Cuddy and Johnny Raze turned Raze Mercenary Industries into a security firm feared by all. They made Blackwater look like clumsy, greenhorn, namby-pamby, tea-sipping pussies, and Cuddy was in on it from ground zero. In the mercenary world, Johnny Raze isn’t just a Name, he’s the Name. Movies have been made about him. Books written about him. Stories told, usually in whispers. Cuddy was his right-hand man—sorry, his right-hand woman.

  If you told stories of Johnny Raze in whispers, you didn’t tell stories about Cuddy at all.

  Nonetheless, I’d heard things.

  Like, she went out on an op with fourteen men, and came back alone, bathed in blood, but she got the job done. She preferred blades to bullets. She’d killed at least two of her own teammates for talking the wrong kind of shit. She was secretly worth millions, if not hundreds of millions. She could retire, but her bloodthirstiness wouldn’t let her. She was a lesbian, but if you so much as breathed a word of question about her personal life, she’d cut your throat.

  The truth was, those kinds of whispered-in-the-dark stories were usually based on some kind of fact. Not always, of course, and they were usually exaggerated, bu
t you didn’t dare discount them entirely.

  I thought back to the moment before I’d shown up on my bike—one tango dead, a knife in his throat, another on the ground bleeding out from a severed femoral, a third dead from a GSW to the throat…all within a matter of seconds, and she’d had zero warning.

  Yeah, Cuddy was as good as her reputation.

  And that was Cuddy unarmed, reacting.

  “Cuddy.” I repeated the name.

  “That’s me.” She said it with pride—well deserved.

  “Danielle Cuddy.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Be careful.”

  I arched an eyebrow. “I’ve been inside you, and you’re going to warn me against saying your full name?”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what happened, but I found myself on my back on the floor, with a clanging headache and a knife point pricking the underside of my chin, her gloved hand fisted in my hair, yanking my head up off the concrete.

  “That shit will get you killed, Lear.” Her voice was pure ice. “Do not test me on this. That talkative bitch you met in the bar? The one you got naked? She’s gone. Look into my eyes right now and tell me you see a fucking soul.” I looked, and saw nothing but darkness in her formerly expressive brown eyes. “Everything you’ve ever heard about me is true, and that’s just the shit I let people talk about. So fucking watch yourself. You got me?”

  Well…holy shit.

  I was an adrenaline junkie. I ran toward danger. Thrived on it. I kept off the operations side of things because I was reckless, a liability. The scarier it was, the harder I got off on the rush. It was fucked up, but that was me.

  So, when a woman I’ve had naked and screaming is straddling me with a knife to my throat, threatening me, yeah…I get a hard-on. And I don’t mean a metaphorical one.

  I couldn’t help it—the reaction was instinctive.

  She felt it. “Fucking really right now?”

  I tapped the inside of her thigh with the knife in my hand, drawing her attention. “If this is how you wanted to play, you should’ve just said so.”