Page 28 of Countdown to Murder
“So I should keep my back touching the wall?”
“Seems like a good policy.”
“Okay then. I’m going to be thinking of who I can blackmail, so we have permission to speak to each other at will. This is ridiculous, but I think we’ve worked our way around it.”
“We really haven’t, but I’ll talk to the geeks and see if I can slide a few defensive pieces in without anyone noticing.”
“I’ll tell them orders from you are the same as orders from me.”
“I won’t abuse that. Thank you.” She looked up at me and touched my cheek. “It feels like I’m special somehow, because I know I can touch you and it’ll be okay. Does that mean we’re breaking protocol?”
“No. Not yet, anyway. When this op is over, we’ll figure out where this is going. If it goes somewhere, we’ll level with Aaron and Nathan. It’ll mean we probably won’t be assigned to missions together anymore, though I’m not certain that’s still company policy. Nathan and Kirsten are a thing, and while she doesn’t go on ops a lot with us, she and Nathan frequently work together when she does.”
“I showered before I went to sleep, so I only need to brush my hair and teeth, and get suited up.”
She moved my arm and sat up with her feet on the floor, her back to me. Her arms stretched towards the ceiling, and I rolled to my back and willed my dick not to get hard.
“I’m going to run a few miles on a treadmill and then spend ten minutes stretching,” she said. “I haven’t had any serious exercise in two days. I assume I can take twenty minutes to get my blood pumping?”
“Yeah. I’ll stop off in the control room and see what’s happened in the two hours I slept, talk to them about moisture sensors, and then meet you in the kitchen. I’m going to want steak and eggs, and I think I want waffles, too. Do you know what you’ll want?”
“I’ll do a steak and a fried egg. Maybe a piece of toast, but I’ll figure that out after my workout.”
She ate so little, and it bothered me. In the wild, king cobras eat a couple of times a month when they get large meals, more often if only small meals are available. Still, other snake shapeshifters seem to eat a lot, so why wasn’t Mira? It felt as if something wasoff.
I was dressed and loading my gear when Mira came out of the bathroom with her tactical pants and shirt on. She fastened the vest and belt over her clothes and started loading her weapons and gear.
“Most people are either a knife person or a gun person, but you seem equally adept at both,” I noted.
“I’ve trained with both. They each have their pros and cons. Depending on the situation, I prefer either a knife or my bare hands for close-work. No noise, and you never run out of ammo.”
I spent twenty minutes in the control room, talking to the tech guys about where to set up the moisture sensors, and the change in humidity necessary to set them off. Before I left, I told them Mira would probably want a few more installed, and that her word was the same as mine in this. They had five unused sensors after my orders, and wherever she wanted those five, they weren’t to question her or argue with her.
Chapter Fifteen
Mira
A four-mile run wasn’t enough, but it helped. When I finished, I found an open spot on the floor, stretched my arms towards the ceiling until I felt blood flow into stretched muscles I’d just worked, and then folded myself in half, with my face against the fronts of my legs. I held this pose about twenty seconds, unwrapped my arms from around my legs, put my hands on the floor, and slid my legs out so I was in the splits. I pointed and flexed my toes, bent my torso right, left, and forward, lifted up a few inches in the splits, faced toward my right side, and dropped back down, so the back of my right leg was stretched and the top of my left leg. I leaned forward a while, backward a while, lifted myself, turned to face the other direction, and did it all again.
Finally, I slid both legs together, pressed myself into a backbend, kicked my legs up so I was in a handstand, and then did a few dozen handstand pushups before deciding it was probably time to eat and then get to work.
Panda was cooking our food when I showed up, and I jumped in to help where I could.
“Three people have stopped in to tell me about the splits. Two more came in to tell me about the handstand presses. All five wondered if you were taken. Your quick workout made quite an impression.”
“I ran, I stretched, and then it felt as if my upper body needed to engage, but I didn’t have much time.”
“No need to explain, Darlin’. For the record, I told them all you’re out of bounds.”
“Thanks. The last thing I need is to have a bunch of men hitting on me.”
“If you were in charge of where to put people tonight and tomorrow, what would you do?”
“Ember and me inside. You and Sloan outside the suite, with some of Jones’s men close. According to the blueprints, the saferoom suite’s HVAC is safe from NBC – nuclear, biological, and chemical attacks. The mansion’s HVAC may be a weak point, but the saferoom doesn’t have that issue. We only need to protect the way in.”
I shook my head. It was more complicated than that. “If I was building a saferoom suite in this mansion, there’d be another exit. A tunnel no one knew about. Not on ablueprint. I’d verbally tell the new owner after closing, to make sure there wasn’t a paper trail. And if I was the owner of said mansion, I’d probably not tell my security people, thinking it was best to keep it secret. However, if I didn’t know there was a vampire out there who could read my mind, then I wouldn’t know just how big of a security hole this created.”
He put his fork down and stared at me a good fifteen seconds. Annoyance, anger, and finally fear flashed across his face.
