Page 8 of Toxic Vengeance

They’d spent a magical three days together that time, mostly staying in that room because they couldn’t keep their hands off each other. The following morning, he’d woken up confused and alone, with nothing but a pounding headache and a few hastily scrawled lines of apology lying on the table.

He set the laptop aside, trying to reconcile the woman he’d thought he’d known with this new evidence. A Valkyrie?

She’d never once done anything to put him in danger, or threaten him in any way. And based on what he knew now, she could have. Easily. Especially since he wouldn’t have been ready for it.

It bothered him that the CIA was searching for her and any others, and the extra heat on her was partly his fault for reporting her. His internal radar was pinging, certain she was in danger. He’d heard things, rumors and whispers over the past few months since the Valkyrie Program had been exposed in the media spotlight. The CIA was no doubt scrambling to cover its ass, and that meant trying to erase anything and everything that might implicate the agency in matters it would rather keep secret, by whatever means necessary.

He sat back up, frustration and anger eating at his insides. After searching for her so long and finding nothing under the fake cover she’d fed him, he’d actually found her—by accident—and had been as close to getting answers from her as he’d been since the day she’d walked out on him. And that awful goddamn note. He’d burned it, but the words were carved into his memory forever.

I’m sorry, I had no choice. I wish things could be different. I’ll never forget you.

She’d left him a flower, too. A single, bubblegum-pink flower floating in a glass, with a bunch of dead leaves around the base. Whatever that meant.

He’d been gutted, had felt guilty as hell on top of it because he’d wanted more than a few days at a time together, and the whole time he’d lied to her about who he truly was and what he did for a living. Things between them had been so good, she’d mattered to him enough that he’d made up his mind to tell her the truth. He’d meant to tell her that morning, then she was gone.

Except it turned out she’d been lying to him too. Big time. Had he knownanythingreal about her?

Zack didn’t know, but imagining her being targeted by a CIA hitter chilled his blood. They’d both lied to each other, and no matter what the truth about her was, heknewshe’d cared about him to some extent. That not everything between them had been a lie, and it wasn’t just his bruised—okay, battered—ego talking.

Whatever she’d done, including kill that piece of shit Terzi, she didn’t deserve to die for it. So what the hell was he supposed to do now?

The answer came swift and sure, straight from his gut.

I have to find her.

Find her and learn the truth. All of it. Then warn her. Help her, if she’d let him.

He’d been halfway in love with her when she’d walked out. If any part of their time together had been real for her too, then he was prepared to do whatever it took to protect her. Including putting his loyalty to her above that to the agency he’d served and bled for.

Resolved, Zack got up and began packing his stuff. He needed to head for Odesa immediately and try to pick up her trail, without alerting anyone watching him what was really going on.

She might not want to ever lay eyes on him again, but too bad. He was going to find her. Like it or not, considering the growing threat closing in on her, it looked as if he might be the only thing standing between her and certain death.

****

Glenn Bennett zipped up his jacket to his chin and hunched against the rain as he ran down the front steps of his contact’s house to his waiting car. But even with the heater going full blast a minute later, the warmth couldn’t chase away the ice that had formed in his bones.

For all the care he’d taken to insulate and protect himself from this threat, it seemed his past sins had finally caught up with him.

Everyone sinned. Everyone had secrets they wanted to take to the grave. But not everyone’s sins or secrets put them in their grave before their time.

Ever since the Program had been exposed in the media, he’d put as much distance between it and himself as possible. He’d kept careful watch as the Valkyrie body count climbed. Professionals were out there hunting the survivors right now. So why hadn’t there been any more intel about the remaining Valkyries’ deaths? Either within the intelligence community, or in the media?

There were only a small number of operatives left unaccounted for. Less than a dozen. Surely with all the intelligence resources being used to track them, they should all have been dealt with by now.

Christ. He’d come to this meeting because of recent chatter he’d heard about another Valkyrie surfacing in the Crimea last night, who was apparently still alive. The contact he’d just met with—an insider from the Valkyrie Program’s second phase—had confirmed that this same female operative had been in Sevastopol last night to kill an HVT during a dinner at a private estate.

Eden Foster. Trained to use whatever toxin was available to incapacitate or kill her target, with anything from insect and reptile venom, to deadly plants and synthetic chemicals. She could kill by tainting food and drink, by vaporizing the lethal substance into the air, or even by having the victim ingest it through their skin.

Unease threaded up his spine like the brush of cold fingers. The Valkyrie operatives were without a doubt the most incredible project he’d been involved in in all his time with the CIA. He’d helped spearhead the initiative, and had a hand in creating them. Now those same women posed the single greatest threat to him and the others.

To make matters worse, as of this moment, Eden Foster was once again in the wind. On the loose, and likely being helped by the other Valkyries who were unaccounted for and, he feared, still alive. He wasn’t accustomed to feeling fear, but this was unlike any threat he’d ever faced before.

His contact had just confirmed what he’d long suspected, that someone had managed to hack into the Agency’s Top Secret files containing all kinds of damning information about the Valkyrie Program. Including how it functioned, the female operatives involved, operations…

And a shitload of incriminating evidence on the people responsible for creating the program in the first place.

No one was sure how much the hacker had gotten, but anything posed a serious problem because it meant he and other high-level officials within the CIA—and the illegal things they’d done—might be exposed.

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