Pretty Little Lion by Suleikha Snyder
6
Sasha Nichols was dead. Very dead. Still warm, but not for long. The man made as ugly a picture in death as he had in life. Meghna could muster only two dovetailing emotions: anger and annoyance. This was not the plan. This, in fact, ruined her plans. “What exactly am I supposed to do with this?” She gestured as she came around the bed. There was no point in checking for a pulse. Elijah’s slash had been swift and true. No doubt he had a great amount of experience dispatching problems in that manner. It wasn’t neat. It wasn’t precise. But it was certainly permanent. “This is going to require some explaining to Mirko, don’t you think? I doubt he’ll buy that Sasha tripped on a garden rake.”
The gold sheen of the lion shifter’s eyes melted back into deep brown. His grim determination changed to bewilderment. “Pardon?” he sputtered, bloodstained hand dropping to his side.
There was no point in keeping up her charade. Playing the hysterical bystander. Meghna knew better than that. It was a waste of time. Unnecessary theatrics. Besides, everyone knew that the best defense was a good offense. She needed to keep Richter off-balance in order to maintain her ground. “You killed my target’s closest henchman,” she pointed out coolly. “He’s going to notice. That is more than six months of work down the drain.”
Just as she’d hoped he would be, Elijah was still scrambling to process what she’d revealed. “Your target?” He looked at Nichols’s body and then back at her, brows drawing together with confusion.
Meghna didn’t bother with an answer. She just set about recovering her bra and underwear from the corners of the room, quickly buttoning up the cashmere sweater dress that Elijah had stripped from her without preamble at the beginning of their latest encounter. She probably shouldn’t have bothered getting dressed when he went out for a bodega egg and cheese, but now having a dress within close reach proved useful. She would leave everything else behind, of course. The few personal items she’d kept in the suite weren’t of value—clothes and accessories easily discarded—and packing them up would just waste the time she’d already run out of.
Aston would not take kindly to this development. He’d come after her for the murder, not so much the cheating. But it boiled down to the same conclusion: all her work, all her effort had been for nothing. Her mission was blown. So she needed to go before suspicion fell on her. Somewhere public. Somewhere where she couldn’t be touched without causing a media shitstorm.
Elijah was making his own preparations. Scrubbing his hands in the en suite bathroom. Returning to tug on his clothes. A comm emerged from a hidden pocket, and he slid the device behind his ear. But he hadn’t let go of what she’d said. Of course not. He would be a terrible operative if he let such things slide. “What do you mean your target? Who do you work for?” he demanded once they were both as presentable as they could be under the circumstances.
“No one you’ve ever heard of,” she assured, crossing out of the bedroom and into the short hallway that connected to the suite’s sitting room. “No one you need to concern yourself with.” He stalked after her. Foolish lion. Thinking she was prey. “You don’t seem worried about shifting in front of me,” she said over her shoulder. “Why is that?”
“You don’t seem worried about me killing in front of you, now do you?” he countered easily. “Besides which, you’re a supe. I can smell it on you. But I can’t make heads or tails of it.”
“Because I don’t have a tail,” she quipped. “I doubt you could even guess what I am, Elijah. Have you even heard of my kind?”
He shook his head, brows knitting together. “Siren?” he guessed.
“I’ve lured a few men to their deaths in my day, but no. I am an apsara. They say we were court dancers for Indra, the king of the heavens. Celestial beauties, nymphs, often sent down among humans to tempt sages away from attaining power through prayer. That’s just the Hindu origin story, though.” It was the story she’d heard from the woman who’d given birth to her. One she’d listened to with a healthy dose of skepticism. She’d done her own research afterward. “You’ll find tales of us all over South and Southeast Asia. Cambodia…Bali. Always beautiful. Always accomplished in the arts. Somewhere in the past two thousand years, we became accomplished at more.” They’d formed the Vidrohi with other supernatural women from around the region. Left behind the heavens to help those on earth. They’d weaponized for themselves what cisgender men had used for millennia.
“Not so much tempting the sages as taking them out?” This wasn’t a guess but a cool statement of fact as Elijah glanced from her to Sasha Nichols’s body and back again. As if he were piecing her nonreaction to the man’s gruesome demise together with the story she now told.
“We have many skills,” she evaded deftly. “I speak eight languages. Play the guitar and the piano. I know Bharatnatyam, flamenco, and the Argentine tango. I have an MBA. And this isn’t the first time I’ve seen someone die. It probably won’t be the last.”
“Well, it’s the last bloody time today,” he growled. “I’ll call a crew. Get the body cleaned up and the scene sanitized, and then you’re coming with me. We’ll get this all sorted.”
“I think the fuck not.” She drew herself up, cold fury cloaking her more thoroughly than the cowl-neck sweaterdress she’d donned. Funny how his abrupt turn—from lusty supernatural security guard to efficient killer with tech—wasn’t to be questioned. She was supposed to just fall in line, like a good little girl, and do whatever he demanded. “You’re not taking me anywhere, Elijah Richter. In fact, I’d like to see you try.”
He stopped short. Statue-still, like she was Medusa turning him to stone. “You know my real name.” His already-granite jaw hardened even further. He was still impossibly handsome for it. The facial hair that shadowed his cheeks and chin had a bit more salt and pepper now than in the ID photos Vidrohi’s contacts had included in his file. He’d bulked up some from the weight on his New York State driver’s license, too. She had no complaints whatsoever, at least not when it came to using the resource that was his well-hewn body.
“I know your real name,” she affirmed. “I know what you do. I know what you are. And I have no need for any of it.”
“Any of it?” One of his brows went up. Along with his back. “You sure needed a piece of me not twenty minutes ago, love,” he reminded. “Or was I a target, too?”
That was rich coming from the man who’d infiltrated Mirko’s VIP party and immediately set his sights on her. Meghna stared at him without flinching. “You don’t get to ask me that. Unless you have an active fetish for fucking women in closets, and any connection I had to Mirko was purely coincidental. Go ahead and call your team,” she added. “Explain to them how you’ve messed up this operation because of that ‘piece of you’ that you had no problem offering up. I’m sure they’ll be thrilled.”
Elijah made a low, rumbling sound. A reminder that no matter what he seemed to be, he was no mere mortal man. It rippled across her skin like a warning. But it didn’t faze her. Meghna, after all, was no mere mortal woman.
“Don’t move,” he bit out before turning away to activate his comm and contact whoever he needed to.
She didn’t have to listen. It would be the perfect time to make her exit. To burn this mission and never look back. She could return to the bosom of social media and red carpets and dressing up on theme for the Met Gala. Back to Chase’s beach house in Malibu or her father’s compound in Great Falls. The Vidrohi wouldn’t begrudge her failure. They’d value that she got out alive. Because there would always be other operations. Their work was never done.
Meghna stayed right where she was. Later, she would blame curiosity. Wanting to know what Richter was planning. And efficiency too. Because anything his people had learned about Mirko’s upcoming deals could be passed along to the Vidrohi. Those were better excuses than the broad expanse of Elijah’s back under his T-shirt. Or the all-too-fresh memory of how those taut muscles felt under her hands.
* * *
The SUV crawled uptown from the swanky hotel where Meghna had her paid-for crash pad. They hit every possible red light. If Elijah hadn’t known better, he’d say Wyatt was doing it on purpose. Making this painful ride even more excruciating. But no, generally the drivers on the Third Shift motor pool weren’t sadists. There was only one person to blame for this. Maybe two. Definitely himself at any rate.
Meghna wasn’t speaking to him. Not anything but strictly necessary words since they’d evacked from the hotel and climbed into the transport vehicle. Her back was straight, her shapely legs neatly crossed, her profile smooth… There wasn’t a single sign that she was displeased with him, but she smelled like anger, like a fellow predator braced for an attack. It was a mess of gorgeous contradictions, just like her. She was laser-focused on her mobile, thumbs flying across the screen as she Instagrammed and tweeted about her skin-care routine and the club she hit last night. “Plausible deniability,” she’d said when she caught him looking. That had been six blocks and fifteen minutes ago.
He knew all about plausible deniability. It was why he and Jackson had masked Third Shift as a private security and investigation firm. Why they’d recruited supes and humans who had other “first shift” gigs. Lawyers, cops fed up with the system, doctors like Gracie Leung. They’d been hiding in plain sight for more than a decade. Just like supernaturals had been doing since the beginning of time. Long before the world plummeted straight into the fascist shitter and they’d had to step up to balance a few of the scales. Congress. Parliament. The United Nations. NATO. There were admitted supes everywhere now—some trying in vain to yank their countries back to where they ought to be, while still others aligned with the rich and the corrupt to make them even richer and even more corrupt.
The United States was barely that anymore. The Sanctuary Cities like New York and Los Angeles and Chicago were basically city-states, forming a Sanctuary Alliance with other territories and rebelling against the new Patriot Acts. By early 2018, they’d declared total control within their jurisdictions, pushing back against ICE and the Supernatural Regulation Bureau. But that defiance hadn’t really changed shite nationally. Detainment camps for asylum seekers and migrants were still active along the northern and southern borders. Only now they were outfitted for supes, too. The cages migrant children had finally been freed from… They were full of shifters and other things that went bump in the night. DC was still a cesspool of left versus right—supposedly progressive versus entirely too conservative—with none of it doing much in the long run. There were committees and subcommittees, of course. Proposed bills about supernatural personhood and citizenship. It’d all been tied up in political red tape for years.
Third Shift wasn’t tied up at all. They did what needed to be done. Locally, globally. Wherever they could be of service. Off the books. Under no one’s orders…but maybe a few suggestions from a committee at the Department of Defense. It was almost a laugh, because when Elijah and Jack had dreamed it up, buried in dirt and sand and a war neither of them had a personal stake in, they hadn’t reckoned what was coming. How the dominoes would fall one after the other. Just how badly they’d be needed. The world had always been on fire, after all. You didn’t notice how deep the burns were after a while. But 2016 had made the flames taller, brighter, hotter. And then 2017 and 2018, too. And so on.
Jack had an inside line to the firefighting efforts, courtesy of a spotless military service record and friends in the DoD. Former Lieutenant Tate had been introduced to a very exclusive, very secret group embedded within the U.S. government and dedicated to combating fascism. Missions frequently came to 3S through that pipeline. Aston was one such mission. Elijah couldn’t afford to fuck it up now. Not when they were so close to figuring out what the man was up to. Who his secret group included and what their ultimate aims were.
The cleaning crew was supposed to be done with the first phase of suite sanitization by now—disposing of Sasha Nichols’s corpse via a laundry cart and a service elevator, cleaning the carpet, tossing the trash, wiping the hotel security cameras of any damning footage. Then the second phase of work would begin. Making sure no DNA was left behind. Painting over the bloodstains on the wall. Removing any fingerprints and footprints. All in all, it wouldn’t take that long. At the rate traffic was moving, they’d probably be done before Elijah got to the Third Shift HQ in Hell’s Kitchen.
Jack had been running the show solo for the past few days. Tying up the last loose ends of everything that had happened with Aleksei Vasiliev and Joe Peluso, making arrangements for Peluso to go toes up in prison and resurface with a new identity. Jack Tate was the sort of white man who’d never known suffering—at least not until he saw it firsthand in Afghanistan and Iraq, experienced it in blood and bullets and broken bones. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and a silver stick up his arse besides. His family could trace itself back to the Mayflower and the Salem witch trials, had memberships in all the high-society social clubs and a box at every major opera house in the country. That he owned property all over Manhattan and Brooklyn was a given—and a bonus for Third Shift. His wealth and status and skin color allowed him entry to rooms Elijah could never, even in the twenty-first century, gain access to. He could rub elbows with the Senate majority leader and the president without them ever knowing he opposed everything they stood for. Again, hiding in plain sight.
Jack was Elijah’s polar opposite as far as most people were concerned. Polished. Lean. Fashionable. White. Sometimes, when high-profile clients came in for meetings, Elijah was mistaken for his bodyguard instead of rightfully assumed to be the cofounder of 3S. But it was more than just the obvious differences. Jack was a sorcerer. Elijah was a shifter. Jack was American. Elijah had dual citizenship with Britain and loads of uncles and cousins and aunties who still lived in Jamaica. Jack was U.S. Army. Elijah was British SRR—Special Reconnaissance. But they were of like minds where it mattered: Third Shift. Getting things done. Keeping collateral damage to a minimum.
Was Meghna Saunders collateral damage? That remained to be seen. Elijah shook his head of all the thoughts swirling ’round in it, glancing out the window to gauge their progress north. Miracle of miracles, they were actually up to numbered streets and avenues. He touched the comm at his ear, switching to B Channel. “Report?”
“Just finishing up now, sir!” the tech in charge of the cleanup assured. “ETA to incineration is eight minutes.” They’d burn the body. Burn the cart. Burn the van they used for transport. Not particularly great for the environment, but that was the least of Third Shift’s worries. “The suite is clean. The occupant can return at their leisure.”
Good. Very good.Lije repeated the words aloud for positive reinforcement. But he had no intention of letting Meghna return at her leisure or anybody else’s. Whoever she worked for, whatever she was after, she was about to become Third Shift’s latest asset. Whether she liked it or not.