Page 11 of The Truths that Deceive

Feeling her up isn’t my job, either, yet here I fucking am. I hold my ground. She’s unarmed, but I don’t know her skill set. And she looks too young, way too young, even though she’s more than of age to do serious damage.

Her lips are red, parted, and I recognize the rush of color in her cheeks from excitement, from the right buttons pushed, the right switches flicked.

I throb with need.

Calista Price wants to gut me, fuck me, and she looks as confused by that as I feel. My gaze flickers to her window, the thunder outside a low rumble.

Three cars pull up to the curb.

No lights.

Fuck.

“How ready are you to go?”

“I’m not?—”

“How ready?”

“Before or after I kill you?” Her eyes narrow but I’ve shoved my libido back in its box.

I can’t hear the car doors close or footsteps along the pavement, which means it’s not a raid. No, these people aren’t cops, they’re intelligence.

Or worse, hired killers.

“Kill me later,” I say as I step away from her and head back out to where her computer is in the backpack.

“Shit.” Calista doesn’t look out the window, doesn’t make a move to it, but she’s watching me, reading me like I’m code. “Pull the flower patch off the front of the backpack.”

She doesn’t wait. In the soft half-light she moves quickly, unscrewing an air duct and pulling out a waterproof sealed envelope that I’m betting contains cash, papers, and her passport. Then she grabs some hardware from the stove and under the sink. She’s about to open the freezer when I sling the pack over my shoulder, flick off the safety, and say, “I’ve got your gun.”

“Fucking government grunt.”

“The same government you work for.”

“Bringing it down from the inside,” she snarls.

I can hear the sarcasm lacing her words, but if I were an actual grunt, she’d be slapped so hard with treason she wouldn’t see the sun or freedom again until well after her three-hundredth birthday.

“Watch your fucking tongue.”

“Why? You’ve already judged me.”

“Move it. Now.” I gesture to the door with the gun. “If you don’t, you’ll have much bigger problems than me judging you. Problems that will make you wish you were dead… long before you’re actually killed.”

Getting away from Mitte,the center of Berlin, was anticlimactic. By the time we slid out through the basement where the trash and recycling go, we were in the next building.

From there, darting through the streets was easy. A hot-wired car and a short drive later, we’re at a building that I own in Charlottenburg.

She sits in the kitchen of my apartment, quiet and brooding, her glass of scotch untouched.

Calista’s drowned rat demeanor should be a total dick deflator, but it’s not. I take a swallow of scotch and turn the glass in my hands. We’re both dripping wet, but there’s no way I’m getting changed until I’m sure she’s not going to try to make a run for it.

She’s soaked to the bone, but rats are smart. They fight. And they have a nasty bite.

What’s her bite like?

But honestly, there’s nothing rattish about her; it just makes me feel more in control thinking that way.

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