Page 56 of Poison Evidence

He’d cry no tears over the men he’d killed—the world was better off without them. But still, without the benefit of judge or jury, he’d acted as executioner, and he had enough of a moral code to know that was wrong.

Would it matter to Ivy that he’d become an assassin to stop his sister from being raped and tortured again? Or was it more worrisome that he’d been so damn good at it? After the first three, a cold mantle had settled over him, and he no longer felt remorse for the act. That should raise Ivy’s alarm bells if she wasn’t already repulsed by his second career.

He’d selected only one victim himself. He’d taken out the man who’d made him into an assassin to begin with. It wasn’t wise to force a man to be a killer, because once stripped of that part of his humanity, it had been so easy to set his sights on his puppet master.

He’d had to wait years for the opportunity. Sophia had contacted him in the usual manner and told him of the rape. But this time, the man was out of favor in the shadow organization. Unprotected. And so Dimitri had taken him out.

It was the only kill he’d…enjoyedwasn’t the right word, but it was on the continuum. There’d been satisfaction.

And now he’d killed for Ivy. There hadn’t been enjoyment in that either. Just necessity. No regrets.

But the underlying fact was, he was a killer who operated outside the conventions of war or rule of law. He didn’t even have a 00 license to make it palatable to American and European audiences.

Ivy MacLeod would be repulsed when she learned the truth, which meant he needed to keep her from that knowledge for as long as possible. They had to work together to find the AUUV so she could get her life back and he could save his family.

And he was wasting time lusting after her and acknowledging that just once in his short life, he wanted something real, to have a soul-deep connection before he left this earth.

“Have you killed people?”

And all he could do was give a chicken-shit answer.“Spy and assassin aren’t the same thing.”

In deflecting her question, he’d made it impossible. There could be no soul-deep connection without her knowing exactly what he was. But she could never give herself over to an assassin.

So instead, he sat next to her as she worked her magic, flying the drone in the dead of night, collecting data. Her cheeks flushed with the thrill of seeing her life’s work performing optimally. His hard-on a perpetual, dull ache as everything she did turned him on.

“Can you isolate other plants?” he asked.

“Yes, as long as I can extract the infrared signature of the flora, as I did with mangroves in this climate and the different grapes in the drought study. The infrared camera captures the temperature and emissivity—the thermal radiation—and other data points that make up the signature. Once I have the infrared signature for a plant in a certain climate and setting, it’s just a matter of training CAM on what to recognize, which is part of the calibration process.”

She clicked a few buttons, and a different layer appeared. He recognized it as the first data she’d collected after launching RON hours before. The screen showed a scale 3D map of the chamber they were in. The lower chamber, with the pool and underwater tunnel, were also shown, but in less detail. “It’s easy to strip off the trees to find the rock,” she said, “and the void, where this chamber is, was easy for the Lidar to spot. It gets harder with the lower chamber, because the limestone is thicker. But this cave can be used calibrate CAM to recognize others like this one—where the rock is thick and the cave drops deep and flows under the water. Once CAM learns this, just like he can learn the thermal radiation of mangroves or grapevines, then when CAM comes across another area that reads like this one, he can extrapolate that he’s identified a cave.”

“He. You slip between ‘it’ and ‘he’ with CAM.”

Her flush deepened. “I can’t help but anthropomorphize him. It. Whatever.”

“To me, CAM would be a woman. Because CAM is you.”

“No. Not me.” She gave a hard laugh. “But maybe, sometimes, who I’d like to be.” She frowned. “I suppose that sounds nutty.”

He shrugged. “Who wouldn’t want to fly and see through walls?”

“Put that way, it sounds like CAM is Superman. I should have named it Kal-El.”

He laughed.

She tapped the power meter for the drone on the computer screen. “Time to bring RON back.”

“In the morning, I’ll set up the solar panels. There’s a place at the top of the island where they’ll catch the sun, but there’s enough cover to disguise them if there’s a flyover searching for us.”

She nodded even as she yawned. “I collected enough tonight to be able to calibrate for our search. Tomorrow, we’ll grid out the areas that are the most promising and start there.”

Our search. He was such a fucking sap to find pleasure in hearing her say that.

If Ivy could forget the events leading up to her current situation, she’d feel like she was living a fantasy. She was stranded on a deserted island in the tropics with a hot man, and the project she’d poured her heart into over the last five years was working better than she’d ever imagined.

CAM and RONworked. Together, her software program and her hardware drone collected and processed data seamlessly. What would have once taken months—or even years—now took only a few hours to produce maps that should be impossible.

If only she had a printer. Then she could hold the end result in her hands and lick it. She cast a glance sideways at Dimitri and considered licking him instead.

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