Page 22 of Secret Weapon

“Not that I remember.How do you know her name?”

“She was carrying a credit card belonging to Leona Curran, but it’s entirely possible she nicked it.Could you do me a favour?”

“A favour?Uh, sure.”

“Take Bradley out for lunch at the café next door, and bring back coffee and some kind of sugar-based product when you’re done.”

“Lunch?You want us to eatlunch?Shouldn’t you go get your nose X-rayed?”

“Maybe later.”She turned to me.“Any idea how long the deputy’ll be?”

“A while.”

She flashed the other blonde a smile.“Give us half an hour, okay?”

Clearly, she was used to being obeyed.There was a certainty in her voice, the words phrased as a question but definitely an order.The skinny blonde backed away, then left us to what promised to be an uncomfortable discussion.

“So…” Emmy began.“That was fun.Have you got any ice?”

I wanted to push her out the door, not give her ice, but thanks to Luca, that wasn’t an option.And if her nose got smaller, perhaps it would invite fewer questions?Paulo liked ice cubes in his Kool-Aid, so he always kept a trayful in the little freezer, along with his ice cream and his microwaveable fries.Because Paulo was Paulo, the ice cubes were bunny-shaped, but Emmy didn’t strike me as a woman who’d care about that.I emptied the bunnies into a ziplock bag and wrapped the whole lot in a dish towel.

“Here.”

“Thanks.”

“Help yourselves to coffee.I need to fix my arm.”

I didn’t have a fancy jump kit like Emmy and Nastya—Ana, I should probably call her Ana—did, not here at the store anyway, but the first aid box was well-stocked.I’d end up with a scar, but what did that matter?I had plenty of those already, which was another reason for my fashion choices.

“You want me to stitch it?”Ana asked.

In Siberia, I wouldn’t have hesitated to accept, but so much had changed since those days.Now, an inbuilt survival mechanism made me view every act of kindness with suspicion.Hell, the first time Brooke had brought home-made cupcakes to work, I’d thanked her politely, then tossed mine into the trash when she wasn’t looking.Years had passed before I’d begun to trust a handful of close acquaintances here, only for Nico Belinsky to show up and shatter my fragile equilibrium.

And now my old roomie had arrived in Baldwin’s Shore too, which meant all those suspicions came rushing back.Emmy called it paranoia, but I preferred the term “healthy vigilance.”

“I’ll use glue.”

“Wait a second…” Emmy went back to rummaging.“We’ve got these stick-on stitches.BandGrip.They’re meant to be good for knife wounds, so the doc assured me.”

She threw me a package, and I caught it out of habit.Stick-on stitches?Maybe they’d work as claimed, or maybe they contained a slow-acting poison that would lead to a painful death.

“Dasha?”Ana patted the seat beside her.“I know this isn’t easy.When I left Base 13, I found it hard to trust people too.”

Emmy snorted, then winced because snorting wasn’t a great idea with a broken nose.“Left Base 13?That makes it sound like you handed in a resignation letter.”

“Okay, fine.When I killed a guard and snuck into your vehicle.”

Ana had snuck into Emmy’s vehicle?Was that how they’d met?WhowasEmmy?Getting to Base 13 wasn’t a straightforward exercise, and if you were one of Zacharov’s many adversaries, leaving alive was even more difficult.

But Ana hadn’t been an adversary.She’d been his favourite, the only one of us to have a room in his private residence.

“Why did you have to sneak away?”

“Because I couldn’t leave otherwise, not with my daughter.”

The surprises just kept coming, didn’t they?What daughter?How the hell did Ana have a child?The general once told me that if I made the mistake of getting pregnant too soon, he’d have the baby scraped out of me with no anaesthetic.Pregnanttoo soon.At first, I’d wondered why he didn’t simply have us sterilised, but later, I’d come to realise his plan.The general thought long-term.Once we were too old to work effectively but still young enough to breed, we’d have been expected to churn out a new generation.Ana had broken the rules.She’d fucked with his timetable.But her daughter would have been Zacharov’s granddaughter, so I had to assume he was too egotistical to murder one of his own.

“I didn’t realise you had a child.”

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