Pretty Little Lion by Suleikha Snyder
20
Meghna was out cold for nearly a day after Gracie took out the bullets. Elijah barely left her side. He watched her body erase her once wounds with a vigilance like his mum’s watchful eyes over him and his sisters. It was unsettling. Seeing the supernatural power enact upon her while she slept. Not so different from his own transformations but also completely different. Hers made her the beauty. His made him the beast.
There was a metaphor in that. He didn’t want to unpack it. Meghna’s pale-brown skin was her ticket to so many things that his darker skin didn’t allow him access to. She counted on being fetishized for how she looked…and then struck, a weapon who was afraid to show remorse. Meanwhile, he was assumed violent at first glance. She’d been raised to be a killer. He’d been taught by Mum and Dad to present as anything but. And then the service had made one of him anyway.
By all rights, he and Meghna should’ve been enemies. Both the UK and the U.S. had been stirring that pot of hatred for decades. India too. Her lot despised his because it made them feel better, whiter. But the last thing he felt for her was hate. Or disgust for how she’d chosen to fight the injustices in the world. No. The emotions churning inside him, within the beast who lived at his core, were so much softer. As soft as the hair at her temple. As the curve of her mouth under his fingertips.
“Meg,” he said because he couldn’t stay silent at arse o’clock in the morning. “Meg, come back to me. We’re not finished yet. Not with Aston. Not with each other.”
She didn’t stir. He hadn’t expected her to. Not just because he’d said something passably romantic. That wasn’t the sort of woman she was. No flowers. No movie dates. Not for this one. A beautiful badass who’d met him in a closet minutes after their first words were exchanged. Meghna needed explosions. Intrigue. A good blade. And a plan.
Elijah pulled his hand back from the fall of her hair on the pillow. His wrist comm vibrated with a message. Briefing and debriefing @ 0600.
“We’ll get him,” he said aloud. “Meghna, Estrada will cough up the auction details. Aston’s not won yet.”
Her eyes flashed open. Cold. Assessing. Clinical. He knew what that meant even before she spoke. Before she sat up stiffly, ripping the bandages from her arm and her bared upper thigh and tossing them aside. She was all in for the game…and nothing else. Walls up. Shields activated. Near death, or even just a hell of a lot of pain, had a way of doing that to a person. To a career operative. “How do you know that for sure? When do we move out?” she demanded as if she hadn’t just slept the day away after multiple GSWs and major surgery.
“Easy does it, love.” Elijah put his hands out, as if that alone could urge her back into the hospital bed. “Aston doesn’t have to be your first priority. You just woke up.”
“It’s my only priority,” she assured fiercely. “Anything else is a waste of precious time.”
“Is it?” He arched an eyebrow. Then, when she didn’t rise to the bait, he arched them both. Finn would be so proud. “Come on now, Meghna. Do you remember anything before you took those hits?” he prompted. “Because I do. I remember tasting every inch of you. And you doing the same to me. Putting that tongue of yours places no one’s ever been.”
She didn’t even react to the gloriously lurid memory, her expression as flat as though he’d recited a laundry list. It would’ve hurt had he not anticipated it. “Do you know how many men I’ve fucked, Elijah?” she asked, her tone that of a bored socialite sneering down at someone not worth her time. “You’re too old, too long in this business, to be this naive. That was nothing.” She hurled these words with precision, like throwing stars. “You are nothing to me.”
Their aim and trajectory were flawless. He still knew they were lies. He and Meghna had shared more than just some hard fucks these past several days. No matter how determined she was to pretend otherwise. He’d caught a glimpse of her soft underbelly. His beautiful, deadly assassin queen. A lioness in every way but blood.
“If I were nothing, baby girl, you wouldn’t have to say it.” The endearment with the pull of Patwah did exactly what he expected it to: infuriate her. Her cheeks flushed. Her eyes blazed. She was fucking stunning as she launched at him with a growl. Like she’d never been wounded, never faced death.
And he welcomed it, welcomed her. He half shifted, meeting her as what he truly was: a man and a king. As she landed a punch to his broadened shoulder, he lowered his fanged mouth to hers, taking infinite care to only nibble with his lips.
“Fuck you!” she cried, twisting in his grip and leaning into it at the same time, heedless of her newly healed arm, uncaring of her reknitted thigh.
It was everything, not nothing. This battle. This dance. This ritual. He was already a little bit in love with her. Maybe he had been from the very start. Meghna cursed and moaned in turns. Her legs went from kicking at him to winding around his hips. She wrapped his locs around one fist and tugged until the pleasure-pain coursed through him. He nipped at her throat just hard enough to bruise. It wasn’t the calculated sex in a closet or her hotel suite or the frantic adrenaline rush in the car. Or even the idyllic interlude at the safe house, where they’d laid themselves bare. It was…a claiming. Flesh and spirit belying and overriding her defenses. His too.
Because this was what Meghna didn’t understand. She wasn’t the only one floundering in new territory. She wasn’t the only one feeling flayed wide open by more than bullets. Lije was sodding terrified by wanting someone this much, needing someone this intensely. And the only way to quell the terror was to have her.
Clothing was hardly a barrier. A bed? Unnecessary. Did it even matter that the med bay was under surveillance? No. In just a few reckless moments, he was inside her. Clutching her with clawed hands as she took and took his cock. “That’s it, baby girl,” he panted as he stroked the shell of her ear with his tongue, rocked into her warmth, let her feel the truth of him. Know the truth of him.
And it only spurred her on. She fucked him violently, angrily, in a way that only proved how much more than fucking it was. They crashed into the wall. His pants around his knees, shirt torn to shreds. She punished him with her pelvis even as her sweet cunt rewarded him again and again.
“I’m. Not. Your. Baby. Girl.” She punctuated each clash of their bodies with a harsh syllable.
“But you are mine, Meghna. Just like I’m yours.”
Call it a mate bond. Call it fate. Call it seren-fucking-dipity. But Elijah was tied to this remarkable woman now. For better or worse. So he stole every last second of ecstasy he could. Until they were weary and worn and their limbs no longer supported their combined weight. When they’d gone to the floor and she’d wrung every last drop of come from him and she had no voice left to swear at him.
“You’ve got me, Meg,” he gasped out, hoarse and sweat-slick. “I will always be here for you. Always.” She turned her face into his neck and simply shuddered. But she didn’t let him go. “Briefing’s at oh-six-hundred,” he told her softly. “We’ll roll out after that.”
* * *
“This is bullshit!” Jackson exploded, his face even whiter than normal with rage. “The academy was secure. They shouldn’t have been able to track us there, but they did. And I need to know how.”
The hit squad hadn’t breached his private suite. Or the secret room in the tack house. But Safe House 13 was still compromised. Their cofounder had managed to keep his temper under wraps for those tense hours when the reinforcements had gone in and after when Grace had been operating on Meghna and the cleaning crew had taken care of the bodies. But now? Now, there was no leash on his emotions. He pivoted on one foot, pinning each and every one of them in the conference room with his cold glare. Every inch the privileged, upper-class, society man he’d been raised to be. Staring condescendingly at those he deemed less worthy.
Grace hated this side of Jackson Tate. They all did. Even while knowing that it was this side of him that funded most of their operations. He’d been born into money, into prestige and power. An old New England family, an Ivy League legacy. While most of the men of his ilk and his age group had been radicalized to the right wing in Reddit forums and Facebook groups, he’d gone the opposite route…leaning more and more left the more actual war he saw. But he was still your basic angry white man at heart. And he still expected every single thing to go his way.
She was too exhausted for his bullshit. After pulling two slugs out of Meghna Saxena. After the verbal fencing with Tavi Estrada. All Grace wanted to do was clock out and take the R or the N train home to Queens. She wanted to put aside the dark distraction in Finn’s eyes as he looked off in the direction of the med bay. She wanted to ignore how Elijah, their strength and their foundation, looked as though he’d been hit by a wrecking ball. She wanted to fight. She wanted to hurt someone. That, above all, was why she needed to get the hell out of here.
She pushed away from the conference table, startling Finn on her left and Joaquin on her right and causing Jack’s gaze to snap to hers with alarm. “We’ve been working our asses off, and I understand your frustration, but you don’t need to take it out on us,” she said to him in her Dr. Freeze voice. “Security breaches on your property are a you problem. Third Shift has kept a safe house there banking on your word that it would stay secure.”
“Fuck.” He winced, rocking back on the heels of his overpriced loafers. “You’re right, Grace. I’m sorry.”
And there again was that benefit to being the Wendy among the Lost Boys. As much as she hated it, it defused tension and solved entirely too many intra-team squabbles. Neha’s recent addition to the group was bound to shift the balance, taking some of the pressure off her shoulders, but for now Grace was still the one person who could regularly hold her bosses and her coworkers accountable for their shitty behavior. “Tell us how to fix this,” she said, shoving all of the accountability and responsibility back where it belonged. “What do we do now?”
“You go to the auction.” It wasn’t Jackson who answered. Or Elijah. The voice belonged to the man in the doorway—a refreshed and revitalized Latinx vampire with a wary lawyer standing just behind him. “Meet Mirko on his turf,” said Tavi Estrada, his copper eyes hot and intense. “Make him pay for what he did on yours.”
“And what about you, Tav?” Finn spoke now. So uncharacteristically quiet when the team had returned from Brooklyn and during the debrief but not in this moment. Not as his eyes flicked from Estrada to Nate to her and back again. Oh, what a tangled web they’d woven. “What do you reckon we should do with you?” he demanded.
Grace wasn’t the least bit surprised when Estrada crossed the threshold into Command and helped himself to an empty chair. “Let me go,” he said, spreading his hands wide in a theatrical gesture. “I won’t get in your way if you don’t get in mine.”
He was still dressed in the clothes Finn had brought him in wearing. Dark jeans. A maroon button-down shirt. A tan scarf and a tailored black wool coat, both more for fashion than for any concession toward the weather. She hadn’t seen any point in undressing him while prepping him for transfusion. Maybe she should have. Perhaps it would dull the impact somewhat of this dynamic creature in a room full of dynamic creatures. But then again, Meghna was here. Recovered from her wounds. Sitting at the foot of the table in an oversized T-shirt and sweatpants. And she outshone them all. An apsara, Elijah had explained while Grace bent over the hole in her thigh. Some sort of unearthly Indian nymph. “She’ll heal as soon as you get the lead out, she says. Like nothing was ever even there.”
Estrada, too, looked as though he’d never been knocked out. A man in his prime. A vampire in his prime. But he had a weakness. Someone he’d kept a promise to. Her, he’d said. Grace slowly rolled her chair back toward the table. She reached for Finn’s hand and interlaced their fingers. The cool sensation of his skin flush against hers was calming, centering, and suddenly she didn’t want to go home nearly as much as she wanted to stay.
“You never got in my way before,” Meghna said from her seat, pitching her voice across the room like a trained actress. “But you never interceded on my behalf either. Or on anyone’s behalf. Is that what you’re proposing now, Tavi? More of the same?”
“It better not be,” Finn put in before his ex could reply. “Because we damn well expect more from one another than that, and you’re among us now whether you want to be or not. That counts for something, Tav. Maybe you don’t want to tell us what sort of game you’re playing, but I’ll be damned if you leave us to swing.”
He was conveniently leaving out that he’d forcibly deposited Estrada among them. But Grace didn’t disagree with Finn’s point. Third Shift wasn’t the best or the biggest black ops and security outfit in the country. They didn’t get all of the big-money government contracts or the glory. They more often blundered into success than they strode deliberately. But what they had down, where they excelled, was in the trust they’d built with each other. She knew, without a doubt, that most of the people in this room—and Nate hanging back just on the other side of the doorway—would lay down their lives for her. The unknown quantities, Tavi Estrada and Meghna Saxena-Saunders, needed to sign on or shove off.
0600. That was when they were slated to break and roll out for their respective downtimes or departures. It was 5:56 a.m., according to Grace’s phone. The remaining four minutes ticked down in tense silences and hushed whispers. In Elijah and Meghna trading smoldering, too-intimate looks and Finn squeezing her thigh beneath the table as he tried to maintain his composure. In Joaquin pulling out their tablet and Neha calling JP over to look at hers.
“Okay,” Tavi said as 5:59 a.m. rolled to six. “You’ve got a deal.” As if one had been put on the table. “I’ll help in any way that I can.”
“I know how you can start.” Elijah rose from his chair, cracking his neck and rolling his shoulders. His locs seemed to grow several inches before their very eyes. “Tell us all about Mirko’s little auction. And his big, bloody shape-shifter serum.”