Page 24 of Jacob

Even now, planning a dangerous mission, with her mad at him, he felt his chest inflate with happiness, a feeling so unusual he didn’t even recognize it at first.

It was fucking dangerous.

Terrifying. Happiness could get him killed.

He was going on a dangerous mission with the one person in the world he wanted—needed—to protect and he was doing it in an altered state of mind. It was as if he’d taken a drug, some kind of upper. Mind-altering drugs were absolutely forbidden at Black Inc. The only thing allowed was alcohol and, like pilots, not within 48 hours of going on mission. The one thing combat was, it was fuckingreal.You had to see whatwas, in real life, not what your heart wanted there to be.

He practically was seeing unicorns and smelling roses.

Time to get back into the real world, stat.

“Ok.” Jacob stood up suddenly and Alex tilted her head back. Oh, God. That neck. Long, pale, perfect.

Jacob had recently come back from a recon in a country where all the men were bearded and the women weren’t allowed on the streets so he’d spent ten days looking at bearded male throats.

God, this was something else.

He glanced away for a second to distract himself and put on his expressionless face when he turned back to Alex. It was his default face, what his face muscles did without him thinking about it. He’d been told it was scary, which suited him. Now he had to think about putting on a face that wasn’t scary but was also serious. Because what he wanted to do was smile at Alex. Take her hand, smile in her face, bring her hand to his lips…

No.

“I think we should be leaving tonight, get there fast and do recon. I’ll take you up to my place, show you where you can shower. Then you order clothes and whatever you need. Like I said, order anything you want, in quantity because we have no idea what we’re walking into. I don’t know what kind of shops there will be where we’re going, so make sure you have a supply of everything. At this point, send all your orders to my assistant, Catherine. She’ll make sure everything is delivered within the hour. I’ll have some food sent up, too. We’re leaving in three hours.”

Reflexively, Alex glanced at her watch. “It’s 7 pm now, so… 10? Is that possible?”

“Yeah. The plane’s on the tarmac, waiting for us.”

“Okay, I…” She stared up at him. Swallowed, that long pale neck bobbing.

Jacob was keeping himself still by sheer will power, though stillness was a gift he had. One of many. A sniper was born with the ability to stay still for long periods of time. Snipers were never agitated. But here he was, looking at her, fists clenched, wanting with everything in him to hold out his arms and have her walk into them.

“Go,” he said.

She went.

ChapterFive

FEDERAL SECURITY BUREAU, LUBYANKA SQUARE, MOSCOW

Colonel Ilya Topolev had never accepted the fall of the Soviet Union, and never would. He remembered very clearly the day it happened. He’d been a brand-new recruit, two days into his dream job as an officer of the KGB. His lifelong dream. He’d graduated top of his class from the Red Banner Institute north of Chelebityevo.

At the time, the school trained over 300 students in espionage, the best and brightest of the empire, eager to defend the empire. Two years later, there were only 50 students studying how to protect the rump state known as the Russian Federation and the Soviet Union was no more.

That traitor Gorbachev should never have allowed the Berlin wall to fall. Just a little show of balls,chert poberi, and history would have gone differently. The Soviet Union would still exist, protected by the officers of the KGB.

Topolev had been a brand-new recruit to the KGB then and now he was a senior member of its successor, the FSB. He’d watched his beloved country humiliated over and over since the fall of the USSR.

For years, he’d watched Russia grapple with its new identity, watched mobsters rise and corrupt everything, watched as a grotesque form of slavish imitations of Western culture permeated the country. Oligarchs stripped his country of its resources while ordinary citizens were left in the dust.

His once-proud nation, a colossus feared and respected, staggered and stumbled instead of standing tall on the global stage. This was not the Russia he knew. This was absolutely not the Russia he’d sworn as a new cadet of the KGB to serve and protect.

The disintegration of the mighty Soviet Empire into crappy little statelets still burned. It had been a disastrous collapse.

It still stung.

And yet, Topolev was convinced that the United States and the West were weaker than when they toppled the Soviet Union.

The humiliation he felt for his country was personal, too. He’d dedicated his life to the Soviet cause, pouring his heart and soul into his training at the Red Banner Institute. Working hard to serve a nation that no longer existed by the time he’d begun his service. And he was forced to adapt to a new system which was incredibly inferior. Many of his colleagues saw him as a relic of the past, beholden to a Soviet Union that was no more, in a country that had moved on.

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