Bargains and Betrayals (6 page)

Cruel woman
.

“I get the feeling things aren’t what they seem at my job.”

“Do you refer to the cover job you hold as a research librarian or your actual job?”

“Actual.”

“And you thought the CIA would be honest with its employees—an organization that deals regularly with liars of all nationalities?”

“You wonder why your phone is tapped.”

“
Nyet
. I do not.”

“What if the CIA branch I work for…” She paused, staring into her coffee cup. “What if…”

“The very best fiction starts with a simple ‘what if.’”

“What if it’s not the CIA at all, but something else entirely?”

I set down my mug. “That would be a fascinating bit of—”

“Don’t say fiction,” she warned, her tone dangerously flat. “I’m starting to think it’s fact.”

“Why?” I slugged back a swallow of coffee, needing the acrid heat to sharpen my senses. “And why tell
me
this?”

“I don’t know who else to tell. I need to work it all out. Puzzle the pieces together. Hearing it out loud might help.”

“Is there not a mirror in your flat? Say it there.” I licked my lips. Mentally I measured the angle of her eyebrows, the dimension of her eyes, the set of her mouth, the width of her nostrils, trying to find the truth in the mathematics of expression. Either she believed what she was saying or she was an actor of the finest caliber. “So tell me. How is the CIA not like the CIA?”

“When I was transferred out here, it wasn’t a promotion.”

“But Junction’s such a thriving metropolis,” I scoffed.

She ignored me and plowed forward. “There had been problems with my boss.… We had been…”

“… in a situation that made you appear to be a woman of loose morals? Of easy virtue?” I interjected. I was beginning to enjoy my morning after all.

“His wife objected to the intimacy of our relationship.”

I blinked. Wanda seemed the stoic type. The never-break-a-law-or-moral-code type.

“So I
can
make you shut up.” She was not proud of the realization. “He transferred me out here. I figured I’d be digging through bogus Cold War paperwork at the warehouse forever.”

I raised my hand. “Why do we have a warehouse of important government-type files in this region?”

“Cheaper real estate. Our government makes cuts in strange areas. So I was excited to get out of there—even on a wild-goose chase—well, a wild-werewolf chase. Even if I—who never understood the Dewey decimal system—was sentenced to spend time as a research librarian. I took a pay cut, another transfer, but other agents were losing their jobs back at headquarters. I couldn’t imagine
that
.”

“You didn’t ask questions.”

“No. I even felt lucky.” She looked up from the cup. “But with all this—me having to tell my superiors so often we couldn’t bust down your door and drag your asses out—”

“Thank you for that. What may at first appear a ballsy, self-confident move often equates with shortsightedness and stupidity. And Cat seems to like the door attached and the upholstery not so bloodstained.”

But she rambled on, “And with Kent gunning for Jessie at the pistol range—”

I opened my mouth to ask after Kent. His sudden disappearance had not slipped my mind completely.

But she ignored me. “And the way I’m being told I need to keep you away from Mother right now…”

“What? Why?” Kent, and the very real possibility the woman sitting across the table from me had left his body in a shallow grave, was not nearly as important.

“Things are ugly, Alexi.”

“Is Mother—well?”

“She’s still aging rapidly. I don’t think they really know what to expect. How long she’s got.”

“You need to get us in there.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Actions speak louder than words.”

She nodded. She knew. “So all that and the royally weird beat-down Pietr took when they crated Jessie away…”

“That was the doing of Pecan Place.”

“What if they’re fingers on the same hand? One organization manipulating different things?”

“For a CIA agent—”

“Maybe I’m not.”

“You’re quite a conspiracy theorist.” I shrugged and tipped my chair back. “Why does this matter to me? From my perspective, my family has a few specific goals and they appear to contradict yours. We want Mother out. We want Jessie out. We want our family healthy, whole, and sane. I want to be done with all of this.”

“I want to be done with all this, too.”

It sounded like a confession.

“Until I met Leon, I couldn’t imagine life outside the CIA—or whatever organization it is I really work for.”

“Tired of playing at being a cloak-and-dagger knight?”

“Tired of running the risk that lies are going to screw up something that could be really great.”

“You’re in love,” I accused her, kicking my legs up to rest my feet on the table’s edge. “I could ruin you with Leon.”

“You won’t. You know exactly what I’m dealing with. Lies.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“There’s been some chatter.”

“Terrorist chatter?” I suddenly felt off balance.

“It’s
all
terrorist chatter if it might screw up my country. Someone’s looking for you. A woman, from what we’ve gathered.”

I slid my feet back off the table and set the coffee mug down to make it less obvious my hand trembled. “Does this woman have a name?”

“Just a handle. The White Crow.”

I blinked, my most frequent tell, and the reason I was no longer allowed to bet at poker. White Crow was certainly a name Nadezhda would choose for herself. Part of a flock, but set apart. Different in more than plumage.

“You know her.”

My throat tightened until words only squeezed out in a whisper. “What intelligence do you have on her?”

“Very little, but the chatter’s intensifying. She’s planning a visit. She seems anxious to be reunited with you.”

I glared at the table.

“So. Love and lies.” She stood. “Maybe we could each do a favor for the other. I’m looking for answers. And the best folks at speculating and researching the supposedly dastardly dealings of the U.S. have traditionally been our old Cold War rivals. You get me info from your contacts and I’ll keep you in the loop about the White Crow.”

“
Nyet
. The only favor I want from you relates to my mother.”

“From what intel’s passing on to me, your mother—a
Mrs. Hazel Feldman
—is quite available for visits at the Golden Oaks Adult Day Care and Retirement Home. She’ll gladly read your future with some weird sort of tarot cards, too.” She smirked and, taking a sip of coffee, made a face. “Though it seems her memory about all things oborot is faulty.” She looked at me for confirmation.

I kept my face free of expression. So the old woman was clever even if she’d been heartless, giving me—her only child—away as a baby to grow up living a life full of lies. I doubted she wondered why I’d never yet visited. I raised and lowered one shoulder.

“And her lockbox is empty.”

Because she’d handed over the thirteenth journal to Pietr. “The only favor I want relates to
our
Mother. Tatiana Rusakova.” The woman who gave us all her last name because Father’s came with a more high-profile and dangerous history. And how many other Americans would know enough to ask about boys and a girl with Russian heritage and the same exact last name? It had been enough to keep our Russian hunters off our trail until I sought them out personally. “I want Mother healthy and
out
.”

“You know that’s beyond my control.”

“Then get us in. Soon.”

“That, I think I can do.” She dumped the remaining coffee into the sink. Barely touched.

Such a cruel woman
.

She strode from the room and I heard the door open and close.

And open again.

“You really should lock your door,” Wanda advised. “‘What may at first appear a ballsy, self-confident move often equates with short-sightedness and stupidity,’” she quoted me.

Da
, it definitely felt like Monday.

Alexi

“Why are you still here?” I asked when I spotted him curled on the love seat, alone. Cat had taken the evening to go to the mall with Amy and one of Jessie’s stranger friends, Sophia—maintaining the illusion of normalcy, she claimed. As if it was quite the sacrifice. I, however, had noticed the advertisement for the season’s hottest new sweaters and suspected she was window shopping—or more.

Max was running—hunting—like Pietr should have been.

Pietr shrugged.

“When was the last time you hunted?” I asked, realizing I could not recall. Was it the night before our raid on the CIA bunker, when we first tried to free Mother? That was … I ran the tally through my head—weeks ago.

Again, he shrugged.

“How are you keeping your calorie count up?”

“I’m fine.”

“
Nyet
. If you don’t hunt and—I’ve seen how little you eat … Your system’s stressed already. When was the last time you turned?”

He looked straight at me, the alpha in his nature sparking for a moment. But his eyes were dull and narrow with disinterest. “Do you realize that if I’d been …
normal
”—he tore the word away from the rest of the sentence—“there would be no reason for Jess to be locked away?”

“If you’d been
normal
”—I quoted with my fingers, the way I’d seen Amy and Jess do before—“Jess would have never connected with you in the first place.”

“Wrong. Even when I didn’t wear my chain she showed remarkable self-control.”

“She said you acted like an arrogant prick that first day. Her not throwing herself at you wasn’t a demonstration of remarkable self-control. It simply proves she exhibits an occasional bout of common sense.”

His eyes narrowed further, becoming small blue marbles. “The point is: I acted normal around her. We bonded. If I’d just been able to do more than
act
normal—if I could have
been
normal…”

I wanted a cigarette. Wasn’t
I,
as the family’s Judas Iscariot, destined to be the king of self-loathing? Did he need to take that title from me, too? “You
are
normal, considering your genetic makeup.”

He looked away.

“Pietr,” I urged, “you need to accept who you are. Embrace it. Jessie would approve of nothing less.”

He examined the design of the love seat’s recently repaired upholstery. “I doubt that,” he murmured. “She has this need to have me
cured
so I live longer. Would that be normal for me, Alexi—
given my genetic makeup?
” He whispered the words, but they still snapped out and stung. “Would it be a cure, or the destruction of my self?”

I hesitated.

“That’s the problem. You can’t have it both ways. I can’t cure—
remove—
the very part of me that makes me unique, the part you want me to
embrace
. What would it mean, living longer but not as myself?” He shook his head. “It can’t work that way.”

My fingers twitched and my heart sped just enough that the call of the cigarettes grew louder in my ears. “Go. Hunt,” I insisted. “War with me about this once you have a full belly and a clear mind.” Turning, I stalked out of the house, leaving him.

I had to agree with his logic, though I’d never say so out loud. He could not have it both ways, unless I could admit that the oboroten’s abbreviated lifespan was truly a mistake.

And admitting yet another way my biological family had made a mistake—bringing more shame to my grandfather and myself? I wasn’t sure I was selfless enough to do that.

CHAPTER FOUR

Jessie

“What about a chess set?” I asked the nurse in the common room when she delivered my daily meds and again drew my blood. I recognized the tranquilizers that had been added to my numbered cup.

Following my second day off sedation, Dr. Jones confessed a worry I was too anxious—already asking questions. Asking questions wasn’t
my
job, it was hers, she said. So she prescribed meds to “take the edge off.”

After being totally out of it one day and missing Pietr’s regular nightly visit, I figured out how to cheek my pills. I wasn’t slick at it, but I was competent. Besides, how did it help me deal with my myriad issues if I was too tired to think?

“No, Jessica,” she said. “We’ve found issues associated with the societal differences between kings, queens, and pawns frustrate our patients. And knights and bishops raise subliminal concerns about violence and a lack of acceptance by religious authorities.”

“Wow. So what can I do? Are there books? What about schoolwork?” I was bound to be falling further behind in all my classes.

“It’s Thanksgiving break. Didn’t you notice the cranberry gelatin and turkey gravy yesterday?”

“Not so much.”
Crap
. Thanksgiving break already? Well, it wasn’t like I had much to be thankful for at the moment, anyhow.

She tilted her head, speculating. “Are you journaling?”

“I journal all the time. But it’s tough to find stuff to write when there’s nothing to do. It’s pretty dull: Woke up. Ate. Won bingo. Went to sleep.” I didn’t tell her about the other things I wrote.

About Pietr. My outrageously hot boyfriend.

She nodded. “Could your father bring a book you’d like? Nothing taxing. Not too stimulating.”

Well, there went all my YA paranormal novels. And the few romances I’d squirreled away, that I’d
never
ask Dad to touch. “Maybe.”

“I’ll put a request in. Dr. Jones and parents respond well to things like that.”

There was a commotion in the hallway just beyond the common room’s open doors and the nurse grabbed her cart, heading toward the trouble. I rose and followed her at a distance, Thing One and Thing Two flanking me.

“Really, it’s important you don’t get too worked up.…”

Recognizing the voice, I tried to look around the nurse blocking my view. Was it really Ms. Harnek, my old middle-school counselor who’d come to my defense and taken over my case after I’d kicked two cheerleaders’ butts?