When I hadn’t been occupied with Lyra.
This is a dangerous game you’re playing.
I knew the game was dangerous, but I couldn’t stay away from her. Not now that I knew what it could be like with us.
I wanted more. More of her, more time, but I’d never, ever once come close to blowing a mission.
Everything was going to shit in my comm unit. I could hear everything going wrong but couldn’t respond until Lyra excused herself to the ladies’ room.
“What the fuck is going on?”
When he responded, Rhodes sounded like he was running. “Stannis is a no-show. I repeat he’s a no-show. Mads had a private auction meeting with someone else. A woman. He handed her something and then took off. I repeat, Mads has left the premises.”
“Fuck. Do we know who she was?”
Becker’s voice was clear and direct. “I’m running the facial recognition software now. It’ll still take a second. But we have bigger problems.”
My heart hammered as I searched the crowd for Lyra. “What do you mean?”
“We have confirmed agents from The Firm onsite. Sniper on the roof. They are likely also trying to grab Mads and Stannis.”
“What’s the call? What are we doing?” I scanned the crowd, looking for Lyra. She’d been gone just a little too long.
Rhodes was silent for a moment. “Instructions are to return to headquarters. If Mads is in the wind and Stannis is a no-show, we need to regroup. We are not to engage with Firm agents.”
The hell we wouldn’t.
It was almost as if Rhodes could hear me disobeying a direct order. His voice was very clear and suddenly very British. “Let it go, Marcus. Follow the mission command.”
I didn’t want to listen to reason. Didn’t want to follow orders. The only thing that kept me from doing something stupid was worrying about Lyra. I glanced around, looking for any potential Firm agents. If they started shooting at someone they thought was a target, she could get caught in the crossfire, and they wouldn’t care who died.
I had the simplest egress route. Just go out the way I’d come in. My only job tonight had been to tag Mads and Stannis. But things hadn’t gone that way. I kept wondering what would have happened if I’d hadn’t had my fingers inside of Lyra. Would I have seen them?
Maybe. But the point was that the meet had started earlier than it was supposed to and hadn’t gone as planned if Stannis was a no-show. Where the fuck was Mads McLean going?
Rhodes was right. We needed to regroup and figure out what the fuck went wrong. But first, I had to get Lyra to safety and then walk through what in the world had happened tonight with my team. I started to get nervous about Lyra when it had been ten minutes since she’d walked away. And we still didn’t have any confirmation on how many Firm agents there were.
When I went after her, I couldn’t believe what the hell I was seeing.
Lyra
I turned my back on Marcus, trying to stroll as nonchalantly as I could while also hustling. Addie’s voice came in clear. “Yup, Lyra, she’s up ahead, about fifty meters.”
My voice was croaky as I said, “On it.”
Jesus, what had made me think this was a good idea?
Get your shit together. Do this. Get the card from Sasha White, find out what happened to Prochenko and where Mads McLean went, and then maybe you can go out with Marcus for real.
I hoped I could fucking go out with Marcus for real, because I really did like him.
I looked in the women’s restroom, but I didn’t see anyone. What had gone wrong and why were they meeting early? “Are you sure she’s here?”
Addie said, “No, she’s in the alley behind the bathroom.”
I ran out to the darkened alley and found it to be a dead end.
What was I missing? I looked for a door that led into some other building, but I couldn’t see one. Maybe it was further down. “Ad—”
I never even heard the metal pipe until it sliced through the air with a whoosh. I jumped out of the way just in time. Sasha had overshot her mark. Before she could even whirl around to swing at me again, I kicked her in the kidney. With a grunt, she dropped the pipe, and it made a clanging sound.
“We don’t have to do this. I just want a little information.”
“You won’t get it out of me,” she spat as she came at me again. This time, she tried to grab me around the midsection to pick me up.
She could have too, since she had three inches and several pounds on me. But as she wrapped her arms around me, I brought down my elbow and tackled her back. She grunted, but she didn’t release me. A couple more well-placed elbows, and her hold finally loosened. As soon as it did, I reached my arms out wide and then clapped my palms hard over her ears.
She swung at me again, and I blocked it with my left arm, bringing my elbow in and then dragging it up as far as I could, right next to my head to block her. I delivered a punch, which she blocked easily.
It was then that I heard footsteps. “Lyra?”
At that single moment of distraction, my attention was split.
I could hear it, the twang of metal, and I called out to him to keep him from coming toward danger. “Marcus, no, I—” I blocked the knife, hit her again, and then tried to turn around to stop him from entering the alley.
But he headed toward me surprisingly fast as he yelled, “Lyra, what in the—”
I never even saw her fist coming. Sasha got me right in the jaw. I instantly fell to the ground, dizzy. It made my eyes sting and my jaws clang together.
Oh fuck, that was going to bruise.
“Oh my God, Lyra.”
Marcus. I had to think of something fast. I
