Pretty Little Lion by Suleikha Snyder

21

Tavi couldn’t remember the last time he’d been amid so many do-gooders—the virtue rolling off of them in waves, their eyes full of expectation as he made an untraceable call to Mirko. The would-be emperor of the western world barked a sharp “yes” into his mobile before launching into a barrage of insults at Tavi’s parentage and his future spawn. Never mind that, as a vampire, the latter were implausible. The man didn’t waste thought on such details. He did, however, waste a surplus of breath on things any supervillain worth his salt ought to keep to himself.

“These American mobsters are such fools. Aleksei’s successor is of no use to me. His shipments have been seized twice in the last three weeks. Idiot!” Aston vented, as though he were talking to his therapist and not someone who’d sooner rip out his throat than listen to such prattle.

Half the room had cleared, clocking out, going off to separate operations, but Tavi was still very aware of his audience. Finian, the delicious and dangerous Ms. Grace, the silver-haired lawyer, the man who’d introduced himself simply as “Tate.” Meghna and Elijah Richter—whose survival was giving Mirko fits.

He was on his third or fourth paragraph of a rant about how they’d evaded capture after the clinic when Tavi decided to take pity on everyone listening in on the call and interrupt. “What do you mean they evaded capture? I was under the impression they’d been handled. Otherwise I would have offered my expertise.”

Mirko spat a curse in Slovak. “They disappeared after crossing the border into New York. What am I paying my people for? Not this incompetence!”

Tavi saw the moment that the realization struck the Third Shift operatives. So many narrowed eyes and huffed exhalations. If Mirko’s men hadn’t been behind the assault on their safe house…who had? This was not a question he asked. No. “I trust those you are paying to arrange the auction are more trustworthy?” he prompted instead.

“I’m paying you to arrange the auction,” Mirko snarled like the shape-shifter he wished he could be.

Technically, Tavi had been paid to facilitate the transfer of the serum. Which he’d done. But again, Aston was not a man interested in accuracy. Only the broad strokes. “Then you have nothing to worry about,” he assured Mirko. “It will all play out as you require.” And as he required. Every beat of this play was designed to move him closer to his goal.

He wrapped up the call soon after the dose of ass-kissing, handing the burner phone back to Tate. “Satisfied?”

“Far from,” the man said, eyeing the device like it was a live snake. And then he gave voice to his most pressing concern. “If your boss didn’t order the hit squad on the riding school, then who the hell did?”

“Particularly vengeful paparazzi?” Meghna suggested, arching one beautifully sculpted eyebrow. “I felt certain that I was the target. Chalk that one up to a celebrity ego.”

One could almost believe she meant it. Except that Tavi recognized the detachment in her voice, the coldness in her dark eyes. She was like him. She wore many masks. One for every day of the week, two on Saturdays. He’d seen that the first time she’d been allowed entry into Aston’s inner circle. Upgraded from party-scene arm candy to someone who could circulate among the criminal element. A woman of her caliber would not choose such company without an agenda. He still didn’t know what it was. And he had no desire to share his own. No matter how hard these operatives tried to break him.

You couldn’t break someone who’d shattered into pieces more than a century ago. Finian had tried, in his way. And he was far from the only one. She would hate what you’ve become…and she would understand it. Tavi scowled at the errant thought. He’d spent a long time tucking such things away. Scrubbing any trace of her from his mind, as though a psychic might scrape his brain at any second. Why was it leaking out now? In this nest of heroes? What had been in that needle Finian jabbed him with in the FiDi? Liquid vulnerability? Superman’s Kryptonite?

The operatives were still arguing potential new threats when he broke from his ruminations and came back to the present. Tavi did not envy them the task of ferreting out the threat. When you’d lived as long as he had, you made a lot of enemies. But their enemies weren’t his problem. None of this was his problem. His only conundrum in this moment was getting the hell out of this office building and back to the bosom of Mirko Aston’s organization.

So Tavi smiled. The kind of smile Meghna Saunders would appreciate. Full of sex and secrets. “Are we done here yet?” he asked lightly. “I’ve got things to do.”

Things to do, people to betray. No matter how good these operatives were, no matter how much good they wanted to do, Tavi couldn’t let them reel him in. They were Third Shift. He had a first priority. A vow to keep. A promise to see through.

* * *

Meghna hated mirrors. For all that she’d made her name through her beauty, she loathed being reminded of who she was and the image she presented. Sitting across from Octavio Estrada was like sitting across from a pane of reflective glass. Perhaps it was the same for him. And perhaps that was why he made his exit swiftly. So that he, too, wouldn’t have to sit face-to-face with his own sins.

“We’ll tail him, of course,” Jackson assured her mere seconds after the vampire’s departure. “He’ll know it, but that’s not the point.”

What was the point? She was still trying to figure that out. Why was she here? Why had she come this far with Elijah Richter? All she’d done up to this moment was deviate from her path. She’d endangered her simple goal of finding Ayesha and ending Aston’s plans, whatever they might be. And for what? No. You mean “for who?” All of this had been for him. There was no obscuring the facts. Meghna had blundered into the middle of a romance novel when her entire life thus far had been a spy thriller.

The echo of fucking Elijah just an hour ago was still on every inch of her skin. That beautiful violence. How he’d met her blows with kisses and caresses, shifted to match her anger and master it. He’d known he couldn’t placate her with sweetness. So he’d given her the bitter. The dark. Her thighs still ached with it. Not the remnant of the bullet she’d taken. Just the remnant of the sex she’d had. That they’d had. She had no doubt that there were half-healed scratches under Elijah’s T-shirt. Furrows from her nails. Marks of her weakness. She’d never left them on a man before. Never let herself go so wild. Even flying high on X in her midtwenties. Not with the man whose last name she’d kept…who was in the ICU, fighting for his life, because of her.

But Elijah? All he’d had to do was look at her to take down her walls. What kind of operative did that make her? Not a very good one. Probably a worse operative than she’d been a wife—which was saying something. She almost hated Elijah a little for how he’d burrowed to the core of her. Not just with his cock but with his steady, honest heart. Decades of constructing her barriers, of reinforcing her defenses, and he’d torn them down like tissue paper. Easily. And yet she couldn’t regret the sex, even though it had been an epically bad decision. He was a fantastic lover. An even more fantastic person. Someone who, like Chase, deserved far better than to be entangled with her.

Meghna shuddered, rising from the cushy leather seat and following Joaquin and the other operatives out of the room. She didn’t spare a glance for the big, beautiful man who occupied so many of her thoughts. He was under her skin already. In her blood. Looking at him wouldn’t change any of that. But it might just make it a little worse.

Focus, Meghna.Her old mental mantra had proven useless, hadn’t it? But there it was, whispering through her mind anyway as she stalked up the aisle of the open office floor. An exercise in futility. Because the chatter of Third Shift was rising around her, a reminder of what the Vidrohi lacked out of necessity. Camaraderie. Connection. Joy. She’d blocked so much out. Pushed so many people away. High-school friends. Dance mates in the Indian Students Association and FOGANA—where she’d been a non-Gujarati ringer helping win raas and garba competitions. Business-school classmates. Influencers, models, makeup artists she’d met through her professional endeavors. Even Em, her supposedly trusted personal assistant, only assisted her with a curated list of personal things. She was the woman everybody wanted to be and the woman nobody knew. Until now. Until Elijah. He’d learned more about her in just a few days than even her own father had discovered in three decades.

She wanted to wrap her arms around herself, to ward off the feeling of being stripped naked. But Meghna let her hands hang casually at her sides as Joaquin stopped her and apologized for the Instagram photos they’d mocked up not being a sufficient cover. “It’s fine,” she said with a lightness she didn’t feel. “Your work was impeccable. It’s not your fault that Mirko didn’t believe I’d flown off to Ibiza without him.” No, the fault was solely hers. Pictures of an impulsive jaunt to a party hot spot meant nothing when she’d blown her own cover by getting caught on-camera at Dr. Schoenlein’s facility. Like an amateur. One of the girls fresh from the training camp nestled in the mountains. The girl she’d once been and never would be again.

“Why me? Why now?” The questions tear from her throat like bandages ripped off wounds. “I didn’t ask for this.”

“Nobody asks for this.” Her mother, her trainer, her cool-eyed jailer, tucks the contraband mobile phone into the pocket of her puffy down jacket. “It’s what we are given by virtue of who we were born.”

“I didn’t ask to be born either!” she points out. “You planned that. You can’t even call it an act of love, because you and Dad sure as hell didn’t love each other.” Being raised by divorced parents, by people who can barely tolerate each other and speak only through lawyers, is common in her friend group back home, but being the daughter of a celestial being who basically gave her up at birth definitely is not.

The dark eyes that look so much like her own—it’s like looking at a mirror image—are equal parts pitying and oddly warm. The General, as they call her behind her back, reaches out and tucks a strand of hair back under Meghna’s toque. “This is my act of love, Meghna. I’m preparing you for a world that has always hated us and always will.”

Her mother had prepared her to face it alone. Something that Meghna had thought necessary. She’d bought the rhetoric. Leaned in to those old mythological stories of the apsara as a decoration and a tool of the mercurial gods. Signed on to the Vidrohi bylaws, as it were. And here she was now, thirty-five years old, wishing she were part of a team. A family. Was that irony? Stupidity? Or hope?

Maybe it was even more than that. Maybe it was her own act of love.