Page 27 of Guarded By the Krampus

And…I was hard.

Again.

Goddammit.

I put my hands behind my head, hopefully cushioning some of her pillows from the worst of my horns, and sighed. “If you feel him in the night, ignore him. He’s just curious.”

Satin gave me a sleepy smile, and rested her free hand on the center of my chest. “Goodnight, Ace.”

“G’night, Satin.”

CHAPTER TWENTY

I woke to the sound of Satin shrieking from the room in the plane where the fridge was. I leapt out of her bed, likely shredding her sheets, barreling in, ready to grab her and protect her with my body if we were going down.

But the plane still seemed like it was flying—and she was curled up into one of the chairs, looking at the phone in her hand, before throwing it away.

“What happened?” I asked, running to her side.

She didn’t answer me, she just pointed in the direction her phone had flown. I picked it up, and saw the screen—it was a story about how a bank manager in Moscow had unexpectedly died.

“This is bad, isn’t it,” I asked her.

“Yes,” she answered, before using her fingers to press her lower lip in to chew. She didn’t have any make-up on now, but she was still beautiful—and I knew I had to fix things for her. “That’s two drops compromised, Ace. That means there’s only the third, and who knows if the United States will even report it? It could get swept off the news by some silly holiday shopping news!”

I spied the time and date on the corner of her phone. After all of our jet-setting, we only had a day left.

“Does your information have to compete with the holidays?” I wanted to go on and say I’d rather take her to the moon than let her place herself in danger again, then thought better of it.

This washermission, after all.

She frowned and bowed her head before quietly saying, “The timing is meaningful to me.”

If it meant something to her, it meant something to me, too.

“Okay then—how can I help?” I asked, kneeling down in the aisle, and placing a hand atop her armrest.

I watched her swallow and felt her thinking. “It’s clear my team’s been compromised. My enemies might’ve gotten lucky in Morocco, what with the paparazzi taking photos, but not in Russia, not without an inside man. So I can’t go to DC anymore—it’d be a death sentence for anyone I met.”

“What’d you need to do there?”

“Hand off a chip for its data to be announced on Ambitron’s channels.”

I recognized the name, they were a well known news corporation.

“I take it we can’t just drop you off at their front door?”

“Not unless I want to get their building bombed.”

I rocked my head back, slightly. “Hmm.”

She waited, one eyebrow cocked above her blindfold. “Hmm?” she asked.

“What if I knew a bombproof building with a direct line to every satellite over North America? Would you even need a news connection, if you could just get your information out, all over the internet?”

She pensively bit her lips. “People would be more likely to discount it as a prank, without the weight of an official news organization behind it.”

“I understand.” She wasn’t wrong—and there wasn’t much I could do about that part. “But would it lend some gravity to the situation if every MSA branch in the world shared your list at the same time?”

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