The Deeper Game (Taken Hostage by Hunky Bank Robbers Book 3)

Q: Who would stalk Isis?

A: Somebody with a deathwish.

Isis always knew her bank robbers were ruthless, dangerous, and brilliant. After all, they take their names from gods. They’ve eluded law enforcement agencies across the globe. And with just the crook of a little finger they’re able to bend her to their every kinky desire.

But it isn’t until the threatening letter arrives for her that she realizes just how ruthless, dangerous and brilliant her three men are.

The stalker’s threats unleash the robbers’ most primal and possessive instincts as they blaze a path of destruction through the criminal underground. The culprit lands in a prison hospital before the outlaws can get their hands on him, but at least Isis is safe. Or is she? Can the robbers let go of their obsession with banks long enough to recognize the danger swirling around her?

Copyright ©2014 by Annika Martin

All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author. This copy is intended for the purchaser of this ebook only, or sharing as permitted by your ebook vendor.

Cover art: Bookbeautiful

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or business establishments, organizations or locales is completely coincidental. All the characters in this book are adults.

Thor and Odin and I were nestled like three peas in a pod in the front seat of our souped-up Lincoln Navigator. Make that three peas in a pod up to no good.

While the SUV’s giant size and dark-tinted windows made it the perfect vehicle for engaging in a little ménage sex, that’s unfortunately
not
what we were doing. Instead, we were staking out the Prime Royale Bank of Beverly Hills, the crown jewel of insanely difficult banks to rob.

I rested my head on Thor’s shoulder, enjoying the feel of his longish blond curls against my forehead. His muscular shoulder flexed under my cheek as he played WhatWord on his iPad. Kind of a dorky game, but then, he had a dork buried deep inside him somewhere; he hadn’t always been part of an armed-to-the-teeth, bank robbing squad whose members all took their names from gods.

Playing the game was a time-out from stake-out duty. Odin had binoculars on the bank’s second-level offices. I was watching the street and monitoring the grand entrance.

Saying the Prime Royale was an elegant bank would definitely be the understatement of the year. With its gleaming white marble entrance and soaring columns, this was a bank that seemed to have taken its architectural inspiration from an opium dream of an ancient pleasure palace. The entrance was flanked by two palm trees that were so perfectly shaped they looked fake, and the peaked roof shot up into the blue, blue sky, glowing in the sunshine as though lit from inside.

In addition to money, the Prime Royale held some of the most priceless jewels in the world. This wouldn’t be the biggest prize financially, but it was a high-profile bank. The bank had doormen dressed up in black suits and top hats, and they were standing at the ready to pull the doors open for the fabulous patrons, which only added to the fairytale feel of the whole thing. Inside, the vaults had vibration sensors and the ceilings were fully wired. There were motion detectors in hidden areas. Kick alarm buttons, state-of-the-art laser trips, and more.

Needless to say, my hunky bank robbers were obsessed with hitting the place.

Zeus was the only one who’d wanted to do it at first, but then Odin had gotten on board, and when they’d found two rips in the security fabric of the bank, suddenly it was full steam ahead.

This wouldn’t be an old school takeover robbery, my guys’ usual specialty; it would be an out-and-out infiltration, another of my guys’ specialties.

Odin took a break from his binoculars to give me a look that said he was thinking about another kind of infiltration. His hand went to my thigh and my belly tightened. We didn’t usually fool around on stakeout, but then, my guys had never met a rule they didn’t want to break.

“You have a count on the west office?” Thor asked.

“Still three,” Odin said, raising the binoculars back up and getting back to business.

The first security fabric rip was that the Prime Royale was getting a central air upgrade. This meant a portion of the ceiling security was off at any one time due to the upgrade work. The HVAC crew doing the work had recently taken on a hot member with nut-brown hair and a body like a tank.

Zeus.

Just getting him on the crew as a last minute replacement for the real guy had taken more planning than the storming of Normandy, but it had worked. Naturally, Zeus knew everything about engineering from his time working for a very secret branch of U.S. intelligence. He was probably giving the Prime excellent value for their maintenance dollar, if you didn’t count the fact that we’d be ripping them off.

The second rip was that my guys’ criminal friend Matteo had acquired something called the tertiary codes, which he’d gotten off a drug-addicted guard. Between Zeus inside, the ceiling sensor compromise, and Matteo’s code, the opportunity was just too big for them to pass up.

For twelve days we’d been outside the bank. Different vehicles, different stake-out points, but yes, twelve long, boring days. We all had accounts, and each of us went inside, making frequent deposits.

You got to know a lot about a place in twelve days.

I’d already identified the softest time security-wise—it was fifteen minutes every day, starting at eleven. That was when the manager went out for bagels. At that point, the guards relaxed. One of them liked to flirt with one of the desk clerks. So far, it had happened each and every day.

I grabbed the iPad from Thor. “My turn for an awareness break.”

Instead of taking my turn at my favorite online game, Dazzle Dipper, I had something to show them. A hotel on the Tunisian island of Jerba.

We had made some great scores in the past few months, and I’d insisted on socking away the money in an offshore account. We could retire as is, but if we got half the money for this job they thought we’d get, we could retire in disgusting luxury. And Tunisia doesn’t have an extradition treaty, always a plus.

I got to the page and showed it to Odin first.

He gazed at it, all amber eyes under lush, dark lashes, moppy dark hair, and all of that crazy hotness. The scar over his deeply bronzed right cheekbone moved as he twisted his lips in disapproval. I was there when he’d gotten that scar—and when he’d refused to let Thor stitch it up. Poor Odin. He’s always looked far more like a model than a hardened criminal, much to his own disgust. He’d obviously thought that a big, nasty scar would change all that, but no. The scar only made him hotter.

“Yes, I know Jerba,” Odin said. “
Fucking-g
paradisiacal spot.” He always pronounced certain g’s hard. Which made him delightfully easy to mimic.

“Yes, exactly,” I said.

I handed it to Thor. He nodded. “Nice.” He started scrolling through the images of the rooms.

“You see they have hot tubs? A hot tub on the balcony overlooking the sea,” I said.

“Nice,” Thor said. “But we’re not the vacationing type.”

“It’s not for a vacation. It’s where we should live,” I said.

They both looked at me as if I’d sprung springy boing-eyes from Charlie Chaplin glasses.

“We can’t live there,” Odin said.

“Why the hell not?” I asked.

Thor snorted. “Because.”

“Oh, thanks for clearing that up,” I said.

“We’re visiting vengeance on those who
fucking-g
betrayed us,” Odin said.

“Haven’t you heard?” I asked. “The best revenge is living well.”

Odin rolled his eyes. “The best revenge is for their skin to melt slowly and painfully in the
fucking-g
fire of our wrath.”

I didn’t have much of a reply to that, so I continued on. “There’s a free clinic Thor could volunteer at. You could do your art, Odin. Zeus can amuse himself. I’m sure I could find a way to amuse myself. With you guys.”

Thor raised an eyebrow. “Correction.
We
amuse ourselves with
you
.”

I gave him a look.

He touched my cheek. “Do you need a demonstration? Of us amusing ourselves with you? Sating ourselves on your body?”

Desire shot down clear through my core. “Be serious.” I took the iPad from Thor and shoved it at Odin, who was again peering through the binoculars. “Look at it. Imagine yourself there.”

“I know what Jerba looks like.” Tunisia wasn’t where he was from originally, but surely he was homesick for the Middle East. The call to prayer. The specific kind of heat. The music. The desert. He would speak a different version of Arabic than what they spoke there, but still. It wasn’t the Western world.

“Imagine yourself sitting on that balcony,” I said. “We could retire here.”

“We don’t retire,” Odin said.

“Why?” I asked. “Why can’t we retire? We have so much money. We have just
so
much.”

“We haven’t delivered enough pain,” Odin said.

“When will we have delivered enough pain?” I asked.

Odin lowered his voice to a snarl. “When ZOX screams like a little girl.”

A.k.a. never.

My heart sank.

Their vengeance was righteous, and it was driven by a burning fire, ever since the secret agency they’d devoted their lives to had betrayed them. Taking down banks, the most public of crimes, was the best
fuck you
two secret agents and a doctor could devise. Their extreme attitude and their driven-ness was why I loved them, even though we’d never said the words to each other. But as the weeks had turned into months, I’d become uncomfortable with running on pure vengeance. It had seemed beautiful once, but it wasn’t beautiful anymore.

I wanted better for them. Because I loved them.

Loving them was scary because my bank robbers were beautiful and doomed. I usually enjoyed scary things, but the constant threat of losing them was not the type of scary thing I liked.

“Teller two on her way to a smoke break,” Thor said.

I checked my wig in the mirror. This was my lucky bank robbing wig: long blonde hair with awesome beachy curls—ideal for fitting in with the Beverly Hills clientele. In real life, I’d cut my hair short and dyed it platinum blonde. Before that, on the sheep farm, it was long and red.

Satisfied with my wig, I straightened my necklace. One of the good things about casing this place were the extremely fabulous outfits required to look the part. Today I wore a pink silky shirt dress with gold heels. “One thing’s for sure; living in a vacation paradise would be a hell of a lot more exciting than sitting in this stupid truck doing the most boring thing on the planet.”

“This is boring to you, Isis?” Odin lowered his binoculars. He had a certain gleam in his eye that spelled trouble. “Do we need to make it un-boring? In a perhaps excruciatingly pleasurable manner?”

“Are you going to tell me you wouldn’t rather be lounging in the sun on a tropical island?” I countered.

I had timed my impudence perfectly—I had to be inside the bank in a few minutes. They wouldn’t be able to start anything sexy.

Thor looked sadly over at me. He and Odin were dressed in silky shirts and nice slacks, also disguised as patrons of the Prime. They were going in later. “This is boring you, Isis? Oh, no,” he said. Thor always acted a little sad when I’d made an infraction for which I’d have to be erotically punished, though I happened to know he was feeling quite the opposite.

I swallowed, feeling a thrill directly between my legs. “You can’t start something. It’s almost eleven. I have to make my deposit and check things out.” My job was to go in there every day at eleven and make sure things were still soft and observe the different ways in which they were soft.

I knew a lot about banks, having worked at one. These two men—Thor and Odin—along with their leader, Zeus, had taken me away from that life three months back.

As their hostage.

Being held hostage by three hunky bank robbers had turned out to be wonderful in many, many ways.

“We can’t start something?” Thor lowered his voice into a sexy rumble. “How is it that we can’t start something? Let me ask you—”

“Stop,” I laughed, knowing what he’d ask.

He rested a commanding hand on the side of my neck. “Let me ask you who in this vehicle must let us use her body for our pleasure whenever we see fit? Who was that?”

“B-but…” I looked at the bank clock. It was nearly time.

“Who in this vehicle is ours to command?” he continued. “Whatever and wherever we want you?” He placed a hand on my thigh and started moving it up just to demonstrate. “Who?”

“But…”

He moved his hand higher. “We will take you wherever and however we please.”