Page 37 of How Much For a Life of Lies?

Instead, I stared out of a gap in the blinds. Cedar Ridge was in the Rainy River District. Remote and surrounded by dense forests and numerous lakes, there wasn’t much of a view unless you were a big fan of trees and rain. Beyond the trees, way into the wild, was the illegal operation that went unnoticed and was what we were here to gather intel on.

No shooting or knifing, apparently, but they were searching for pilots, and with Viper out of the way, I was up next.

Zach paced from one end of the room to another, glancing at his watch. We were ten minutes from check-in, and that was a long space of time to fill with him all worked up and me feeling right and then guilty all at the same time. I knew Bulldog and Viper, crossed paths with them in the two weeks we’d been in town, me in a shitty 1950s hotel room in desperate need of an update, and Zach in this house. He wasn’t on the ground with these assholes, didn’t know some of the disrespectful and criminal shit I’d witnessed.

Bulldog was a follower, Viper, the cocky pilot with a grudge against the world and a need to take everyone on. Together, they were in town, running their mouths and acting like the big I-am, which was dangerous. They had the backing of a crooked Russian billionaire and acted as if consequences couldn’t touch them. They were right—the town was scared of the big bads out in the forest and the rumors of murder. It had only gotten worse since that guy Lucas had been dumped outside the mayor’s office, sprawled in the street, as a warning.

The mayor had put it down to a bear attack, the sheriff backed him up, the people locked their doors and stopped leaving garbage bins outside, and went on with its life. Still, a man had died—horrifically—and although our plan had been simple, a fight where Viper got hurt, it wasn’t supposed to have gone bad and put Zach in danger.

My skin prickled with the fear of him dying on my watch.

Of his body, torn and lifeless, dumped in the middle of Main Street, Cedar Ridge.

As he paced, my thoughts drifted back to the moment I'd crossed the line, pretending he and I were together, outing myself to the two idiots whose resulting shock made me want to laugh. It had been a risky move, one I knew Zach wouldn’t approve of, but it’d felt like the only one we had. Imagining Zach taken down with a bullet to the brain was all too real in my head, even if I knew he’d take them down first.

But in doing so, he’d break his cover.

The kiss was a dangerous play, putting him in the spotlight, outing me, and having serious repercussions. But at that moment, all I could think about was how much I wanted to kiss Zach again.

“Zach?”

He stopped by the window, his back to me, his shoulders tight. “Not now.”

“Come on, you know it was the only way.”

“I can handle myself,” he said, sounding more tired than angry.

“Former-SEAL Zach can handle himself. Glasses-wearing, researcher-nerd Zach wouldn’t be expected to have the skills to take them down if things went south. You coming at them would?—”

“I wouldn’t have been coming at them, I was defending myself?—”

“—they would have known something was wrong.”

He cursed again, but at least his shoulders dropped a little. As much as I longed to explore all these feelings about who did what and why, I knew now wasn’t the time with lives on the line and no room for distractions.

Feelings continued to simmer beneath the surface, threatening to boil over at any moment, and I almost said something, almost lost control, when he turned to me.

“Okay,” he offered in a soft voice. “I get it. I’m not stupid, and I would have done the same thing. But we said… we promised we’d never do that again.”

“It was the mission.” I was a lying liar who lied. We couldn’t ignore these feelings forever, and eventually we might break, and it would be our place as a Shadow Team unit that suffered, or it would be our weird friendship.

I couldn’t face either option.

“We need to explain to ops,” he summarized in a flat tone as he flicked open his laptop, setting it on the desk, connecting, then sitting on the edge of the bed.

“I know.”

“Sierra Base,” a voice crackled over the line and then Ethan, aka Sierra 1, manning ops, moved in front of the camera.

“Sierra Two,” Zach identified. “Plans have changed.”

There was a brief pause on the other end of the line, the faint sound of static filling the silence. “Go ahead.”

He took a deep breath. “My cover is now an environmental researcher with a side order of me and Sierra Three being fuck buddies.” He threw a glance at me, and I returned his accusing gaze steadily. Seemed as if he’d said he was okay with the change in cover, but I could tell he wasn’t one hundred percent there.

“You’re what now?” Ethan said.

We’d had to pivot on missions before, so this couldn’t shock him too badly, right? Given he himself had completed several skin jobs where he ended up sleeping with the mark—before he’d gotten together with Josh, of course—he knew what it was like to use sex as a tool to take down a bad guy.

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