Page 1 of Honor's Revenge

Prologue

Jane Dell loved her family, the Masters’ Admiralty, and her country, in that order. And while technically her family came first, that didn’t mean she wouldn’t use her weekly phone calls with her grandson Marek to pump him for information. Her husbands had known better than to be anything but wholly supportive when she’d announced that she would also be reporting any intelligence she got out of Marek. It had taken her nearly forty years of trinity marriage, but she’d finally gotten them trained. And they understood. They understood how hard it had been for her to lose Marek. They understood that she always had plans inside plans, contingencies for everything, and all of it started with information.

She finished cleaning her gun—not that she’d had much occasion to shoot anything lately, but it was good to keep in practice. It took far too long, due to the arthritis in her fingers, especially the three on the left hand that had been broken during some light torture.

Getting old was bollocks.

She’d been an agent in her majesty’s secret service all of her adult life, but hadn’t been one of those useless shoot-people-and-make-a-mess agents. Not that she hadn’t shot and killed a few who needed to be dead. Killing was easy work. The hard work, the real work, was information.

Her butler William brought her the house phone on a silver tray.

“Finish it up.” Jane slid the cloth across the table to William and picked up the phone.

“Please,” her grandson, Marek, prompted. “You forgot to say please.”

“I was there the day you were born, child. Don’t lecture me about manners.”

“Of course not, Grandmother.” Marek’s tone was both slightly apologetic and amused.

She sighed noisily. “Please, William.”

“Of course, Dame Dell.”

William set about tidying away her cleaning kit and the illegal firearm. Jane pushed up from the table, hating the way her body creaked and protested, and walked to her favorite chair in the front parlor. From here she could look out over the grounds of the home she’d built with her husbands, the home where her sprawling, complicated family gathered for the holidays. Everyone except Marek.

She’d lost him to the Trinity Masters.

“How are you today, Grandmother?”

“Still an old lady.”

“You may be chronologically aged, but you will never be an ‘old lady’.”

That made her smile. Marek was good, truly good, like a fairytale knight who took on righteous quests. It was one of the many reasons it rankled that she’d lost him to those idiot Americans. “You’re too damn right. Now tell me what you’re doing in the colonies.”

“Language, Grandmother. And I think they prefer not to be called the colonies these days.”

She thumped her cane on the floor. “And I don’t want you living in squalor.”

“I assure you, Boston is perfectly civilized.”

“Doubtful. That entire country is a coal mine fire.”

Marek’s sigh was just barely audible. “How are Grandfather and Tadcu?”

“Masoor is off making money. Caradoc is grubbing in the dirt. Meanwhile, I just sit here, a lonely old lady.” More like the spider in the center of a far-reaching web, but playing the put-upon old lady had been working for her for several years now.

“I’m very sorry if you’re lonely, Grandmother.”

“If you were, you wouldn’t have run off with the Americans.”

“By run off, I assume you mean fallen in love, gotten married, and settled down. By the way, Rose and Wes are fine. Thank you for asking.”

Jane sniffed. She’d taken to calling Marek’s spouses the husband and the wife, refusing to use their actual names.

“At least you had a proper marriage,” she conceded. Marek’s mother had been a legacy to the Trinity Masters—the redheaded American stepchild organization of the Masters’ Admiralty—but she’d turned down her membership when she’d fallen in love with Marek’s father.

As such, Marek was one of the only people, if not the only person, in the world who was a legacy to both secret societies.

And the Americans had snapped him up. The grand master of the Trinity Masters deserved a tip of the hat for that, but it was a single victory.

Jane intended to win the war.

Caradoc had asked her what war, and she’d told him to stop butting his Welsh nose in and asking annoying questions.

“Tell me you’re at least working. I can’t stand a layabout.”

“I’m working,” Marek assured her.

“Who are you rescuing now?” Marek was a freelance kidnapping and ransom specialist.

“I’m actually not taking many jobs where I have to travel right—”

“I knew it, you’re trapped. Sigh if you need extraction.”

Marek started to sigh, then stopped himself, which resulted in a coughing fit.

“I can have you in international waters in two hours,” Jane said.

Marek cleared his throat. “Grandmother. I don’t need to be rescued. I’m actually doing some work for the Grand Master.”

Alone in her sunny parlor, retired MI6 officer Jane Dell smiled. This conversation was going exactly as planned.

“Probably nothing important. Wasting your talents.”

“Recruitment, actually. I thought you’d appreciate that.”

“Asset recruitment is the backbone of good intelligence,” she agreed.

“Not asset recruitment. New member recruitment. With everything that’s been going on within the Trinity Masters, it’s been almost a year since new members were brought in.”

Now here was the potential for some good information. “Probably a bunch of soldiers and hooligans.”

“You know I can’t tell you anything,” Marek chided softly.

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