Page 7 of Taming Achilles

“What?”

“The difficulties cannot be great,” he corrected. “You said the challenges cannot be great. If you’re going to quote him, then you might as well get it right.”

Well, that backfired. And his rebuke stung, as it always did. The one man who I wanted to give me praise never would. Here I was in my thirties, still aching for that approval that would never come.

“Don’t disappoint me.” He said, then the line cut, the static vanished, and I was plunged into darkness.

That was a veiled threat. I felt it down to my gut. I was about to become irrelevant to my masters. And while we had declared ourselves the good guys, the people fighting for King and country ‌, if we stopped being useful, we were blotted out.

The man who died in Poe’s “Cask of Amontillado” died in a space as big as this hiding space. That was a fun thought to have. Dying alone. Buried alive. Your screams unheard. With nothing but the red glow of my closet.

I had to make myself useful if I was to survive. I was too high-profile. A whiff of a scandal, and the threat of things leading to Vauxhall Cross was a risk my handler would never accept.

Funny how this wasn’t part of their sales pitch when they recruited me twenty-five years ago.

Red lights had been chosen not as an aesthetic choice, but because a red light doesn’t cause a beam. It’s more subtle, and wouldn’t be seen from the outside, should there be any gapping in the door. But now, it looked ominous.

Maybe I should bring a bottle of gin in here and drink my cares away. The urge to slam my head into the wall overtook me. The need for pain, to halt the aching that pulsed through my blood.

My hand was on the latch to open the door when I heard a crash outside. It was small. Subtle. A boot on the concrete floor. I held my breath. There was another, and another. Footsteps. A single set. The closet door opened, and I swear I could hear someone breathing on the other side of the wall. Shit.

I reached up to the wall where a loaded Rugger hung on a nail. I slowly took it off its perch and held it in front of me.

There was a click. The closet door closed. Distant footfalls faded away.

I waited. And waited. But I didn’t hear any more steps. I didn’t hear any more doors opening or closing. Not the ding of the elevator. But I could feel someone breathing in my apartment. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

My phone was in the purse on the foyer table. But there was a secure line in here. I could call someone. I couldn’t go out there. That was out of the question.

What would happen? I shoot the intruder? Then there’d be police, an inquiry, and my handler would pop a lid. I couldn’t trust him not to have me eliminated, and I’d be another socialite, killed by depression and too much access to pills.

That also meant I couldn’t call the police to report an intruder. Not a 9-1-1 call, at least. Those got leaked to the tabloids too often. I could call the non-emergency line later to report a break in. Detectives could be discrete. Cops and dispatchers can’t.

But for now, I had to call someone. There are three phone numbers I had memorised. One was on a humanitarian mission in Africa. Another wouldn’t help me. But the third …

I dialled it, and held the wired receiver to my ear, twirling my finger along the curled, rubber-covered line. It clicked. He was rambling, and probably drunk. He was at a wedding, after all. A Joyous occasion that I would never experience.

“Geo?” I interrupted his blathering.

He had promised to always be there for me. No matter what. Did he still mean it?

Chapter 3

Geordie

The familiar drive to her Los Angeles penthouse wracked me with guilt. The turns and twists into the parking garage of her building came back like I was making my way home. I knew the code to get into her elevator. Fuck. I still had the key fob to her home after five years. It dangled from my car keys because I was a masochistic bastard that never gave up, never thought it was over, and never let go of the past.

Never let go of her. Never let go of here. We could be together here, far away from London with its prying eyes.

Just like the fucking ring that weighed down my pocket as if it were a lead weight.

I grabbed the Glock, checked the magazine, and charged the weapon. I put it into my belt under my tuxedo jacket.

The elevator even smelled like her. Like lilies and freesia. Sweet, and rich like an angel.

It was like her ghost walked through the space as I watched the numbers light from one to seventy-seven. Her favourite number. That was why she had chosen this building, despite the modernity that she abhorred. She said it would bring her luck.

We had christened every room of her apartment, including the space that I was in now. The elevator had been the first to experience our passions when she first bought the place over a decade ago.

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