Pretty Little Lion by Suleikha Snyder
26
Leaving New York City’s limits, whether by car or by air, was always a bit fiddly. So many passes to check and permissions to clear. Elijah hated it, but such was life in the wake of the Darkest Day. In the wake of the Sanctuary Cities becoming true sanctuaries—or open-air prisons, depending on how you looked at it. There was a lot of shite that Third Shift could skip, given their various connections, but one wrong move could change all of that. Red tape was something you never escaped.
“Get on with it,” he growled at his tablet, which didn’t answer back. Meghna was still asleep beside him—not for long, knowing her. She slept uneasily. With the proverbial one eye open. He wondered how long it had been since she’d truly let herself rest.
They were heading up to the Finger Lakes soon. Surprise guests at Mirko Aston’s big to-do. Finishing what they’d started. It didn’t make much sense when you looked at it from the outside. Why Elijah and Meghna? Why Finn and Grace on B team to retrieve Chase Saunders instead of a whole squad? But since when did black ops make sense? This was efficient. A simple, two-pronged assault didn’t waste extra resources, extra manpower. They knew the target. They knew the product. They knew the hostage. Elijah dispatching Sasha Nichols had sped up the whole sodding thing’s timetable. “Clean up your own mess, Teacha,” he could hear his mum say. He’d never forgotten that lesson. Any of her lessons, really.
Past girlfriends said that having a strong mum and sisters had made him a better man, a better boyfriend. He couldn’t speak to that. Because Meghna was an only child and she was pretty damn amazing, even if she didn’t want to see it beyond what she projected to the world. She’d worked so hard to isolate herself. To be exactly what people saw in the tabloid news, all those papers he’d gorged on before meeting her. But the woman curled into the sheets beside him, her hand on his hip as if she didn’t want to let him go, was so much more. Layered and rich like a chocolate cake. Just as decadent and dangerous.
He was loath to wake her, but he climbed out of bed and went about doing his pre-mission morning routine. Quick shower. Shave of the head. All those beautiful locs that she’d gripped in passion falling away. He’d grow them back after. Right now, he needed the illusion of camouflage. The fiction that the shifter at Safe House 13 was someone else. Like a spy donning a wig. Sometimes it was just about maintaining plausible deniability.
By the time he emerged in the bedroom, Meghna was gone. Not far, fortunately. Just sitting on a stool at the kitchen counter, sipping coffee. One of the few things he remembered to keep stocked in his cabinets. She’d cleaned up in the guest bath. She wore the same trousers from the day before and one of his black T-shirts. Her hair was pulled back from her face in a severe bun—needles jabbed through it crosswise in a decorative but deadly X. Just as beautiful as she’d been that night at the hotel. As she’d been two hours ago in his arms. He’d never stop finding her beautiful. No matter what she wore or what she did.
Elijah poured himself a cup of coffee—a good, strong Jamaican blend that one of his aunties sent him every few months without fail—and perched on the stool next to Meghna. “Ready to go?”
“We have to go whether we’re ready or not. That’s the mission, isn’t it?” A cynical smile tugged at her gorgeous lips. “That’s always the mission.”
No. It wasn’t always the mission. But it was her mission. He understood that. He didn’t judge her for it. He admired her. The strength and skill she’d cultivated to do everything she needed to do. Always moving forward, always moving on. He just needed to convince her that she could stand still. That she could stay.
* * *
Meghna’s coffee had long since grown cold, though she’d mimed drinking it for Elijah’s sake as he dropped down next to her at the counter. She was too busy staring down at her business phone to remember she needed caffeine. God, she was sick of her cache of devices. The Apple products. The burners. The tablet. In the past two days, the oh-so-necessary tech had brought her nothing but bad news. Those photos of Chase. The demands from Mirko. She was glad to be leaving them behind at Third Shift HQ. But she wouldn’t be leaving everything behind. Fuck.
To the untrained eye, the newest email at the top of her inbox looked like garden-variety spam. Something the filter on her official influencer account hadn’t caught. It was a string of Devanagari characters for the subject line and another string in the body. And a suspicious link. The latter went nowhere, she knew without even clicking, but the strings? Oh, they were tied to something, someone, very real.
We need to meet,the letters said when she mentally unscrambled the anagrams and translated them into English. Urgent. I will find you in the lakes. The message was short. Cryptic. Unsigned. And yet she knew exactly who’d sent it. The General. Her mother. Purva Saxena—the surname was a formality leftover from a marriage that had meant nothing to her. A convenient formality. It kept people from digging deeper. From discovering that her entire legal identity had been manufactured by the Vidrohi. Such was the case for many of their supernatural operatives. And then there were those like Meghna, born in human hospitals, raised in “regular” society, told of their birthright, their powers, whenever a parent or guardian felt it was time. Like fifteen years after divorcing Daddy and fucking off to Sikkim.
And now Purva wanted to meet. In the middle of an op. How the fuck was she going to make that happen? How did she even know they were headed up toward the Finger Lakes? Meghna’s arm tingled, more with a sense memory than actual pain. The men at the safe house. That black-clad hit squad who’d put a slug in her. They hadn’t been Mirko Aston’s crew. Was her mother involved somehow? Was this “urgent” meeting related? The tingles moved from her arm to her spine. And across her skin. She looked up at Elijah, found his gaze patient but questioning.
“What is it, Meg?” he asked gently. “Another message from Mirko?”
To tell him or not to tell him. He’d drawn so much honesty from her in such a short time. More than any other man. She trusted him and his team as much as she was capable of trusting anyone. But to speak of the General was to speak of the Vidrohi. And that would betray everything she’d worked for over the past two decades. The network counted on secrecy, on shadows, and it wasn’t just her truth to share. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of active Vidrohi agents around the world. All embedded in deep cover. In big business. In government. In science. Committed to rooting out evil in every realm. There was no reason for Elijah to know that…was there?
“No messages,” she told him before she could second-guess it. “Unless you count Waheed Ali and Honey Morgan arguing about duvet covers versus top sheets.” Bless the text chain. It could, and would, go on without her.
“The Washington Post bloke and the lady who won the Best Actress Emmy last year?” Elijah whistled, the sound a blatant tease. “That’s some company you keep.”
“Kept,” she corrected, taking a sip of her tepid coffee. “I don’t imagine I’ll be in those circles much longer. It’s too dangerous for them. And that’s if I live through the next day.”
“You’ll live,” he assured her almost immediately, eyes blazing yellow-gold as they frequently did with the change of his moods. “We’re going to finish this, Meghna. We’re going to stop whatever that son of a bitch has planned. And we’re going to win.”
It was the kind of rousing dialogue Chase spouted in his action movies. All Elijah needed was the swell of orchestral music in the background. She couldn’t give him that. But she could give him a big-screen-worthy kiss. She leaned forward, placing one palm against his newly smooth cheek, and brushed her lips over his. Softly at first. Delighting in his warmth. And then parting his mouth, increasing the pressure and mating their tongues. He tasted like minty toothpaste and the same coffee she’d just been drinking, but it was richer on him. A true jolt to her system. She’d lied to him about the General, but she wouldn’t lie about this. About how good it felt to kiss him. About how easy it was to slip from her barstool and move between his knees.
Just like last night, she clung to him, to this one bit of joy before they faced uncertainty once more. And he drew her in, against the broad bulk of his chest and into the shelter of his arms. “You’ll live,” he said again, making it a promise before he dragged his mouth along her jawline and they kissed again. And again.
Her frustration with tech reared its head anew when his wrist comm vibrated, pulling them apart. He checked the screen and cursed quietly in Patwah. “We’ve got to head out. The helo’s waiting for us at Teterboro. Jack wants to check in again before we go.”