Page 53 of Shattered Empire (Shattered World)

Hell, the bitch probably bathed in it.

“She’ll get over it.” Kenzi sighed softly, her light tone dipping slightly before she pulled it back in place like nothing had happened. “Especially once she finds out I didn’t, in fact, kill you.”

“Still shot me, though,” I muttered a bit petulantly, the pain in my abdomen flaring at the memory. I could still hear Ava screaming my name. Her wail haunted my dreams.

“You told me to make it look real.”

“And you did.” My lips curled in distaste. “By blowing up the ambulance. You could have shot me in the shoulder.”

The woman fell silent for a brief pause before she snorted the thought away. “Nah.” She scrunched up her nose at the thought. “Needed to make it believable. No one would have panicked as much if you had been shot in the shoulder.”

“That was what we agreed to.”

“And I altered our agreement,” she pressed on. “Stop being such a big Russian baby about it. It’s not attractive.”

We lapsed into silence, which wasn’t all that uncomfortable, seeing as how we were two predators standing side by side. Two people who had violence thrust upon us without our consent. We were kindred souls in that aspect.

Compared to her sister, Kenzi was an enigma. I wondered if she’d had the same knack for lying before she had been sold to the Chameleon Agency, or if it was the result of her training. I’d talked to her several times, and her ability to switch her emotions on and off at the drop of a hat was something both awe-inspiring and concerning. She was obviously trained to fit into any situation she could, flipping from one personality to the next like she was turning the pages of her favorite book.

Little was known about the secret underground agency, but from the intel I managed to gather, they were a mediator of sorts.

Who had given themselves a horrible name.

The Chameleon Agency.

Pfft.

There were rumors floating around the underground about a group that had been buying up women left and right before they ever hit the sex auction. Whispers ladened the streets these days, hushed conversations on missing girls of all ages. Ones no one would care about and the police would never search for.

It all led back to one place.

The Dollhouse.

Kenzi mentioned the name a time or two, but beyond that, she refused to give up any information. Not out of any sorted twisted loyalty that I could glean from her, but from the one thing that motivated people the most to keep their mouths shut.

Fear.

Kenzi, the serial-killing sociopath, was afraid.

And rightly so. Since learning their name, I’d connected the Dollhouse to more than a dozen high-target assassination in the last ten years. Congressmen, presidents, Al-Qaeda leaders. The list went on, and those were only the ones I could find. Who knew how many more people they had murdered or how many events they had controlled?

“You don’t have to go back, you know,” I whispered. The receiving line was dying down, and it wouldn’t be long before I was noticed. Maksim scratched his nose. Another signal.

It was time to go.

With a heavy heart, I turned from my wife and walked away. She was the woman I had once called my weakness and the chink in my armor, but I had been wrong. Ava made me stronger without even knowing it. I was blind to it for so long.

Slowly, I made my way toward the modest-sized SUV parked at the far end of the cemetery.

“They’re already suspicious,” Kenzi admitted with a bite to her lip. She followed just behind me, her body angled mildly toward me. It was a smart move. If I or one of my men made to incapacitate her, she could easily knife me between the ribs as she made her escape.

I had no plans to betray her.

Not that she knew that.

Like me, Kenzi dabbled in the art of paranoia and knew what it meant to let her guard down. It was a matter of life or death. I could understand her reticence. Without having to look at her, I already knew that her gaze was sweeping the cemetery for threats. Her eyes were counting the shadows, judging the distance of the people behind her by how close their shadows loomed.

“If Christian doubts that I believe him, you’ll have another host of problems on your hands that you can’t afford,” Kenzi pointed out. “Plus, I wanted to kill him the night of the gala, remember? You’re the one who was adamant about letting him live.”

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