Taking Sides (ARC Operatives Book 2) (5 page)

“Don’t give me the daddy-talk. I don’t need it.” Daria popped the last of her bread in her mouth and chewed. Fine, Nico was going to be a dick and maybe-maybe-not dump her in a spectacularly ambiguous way? Fine, she could handle that. When she next saw him in the training gym he best hope they didn’t get paired up together. She had no intention of pulling her punches.

Daria let her gaze wander through the room before it landed on Russi, who was sitting back in his chair, muscled forearms taut as they were folded over his chest. A spark of need blossomed in her lower belly and she blinked slowly to quell it. The absolute last thing she needed was a terrible rebound one-night-stand with her partner. So far the whole screwing your fellow agent thing hadn’t exactly worked out well for her.

Still… she met his eyes with hers and saw a hint of intrigue, interest, and heat there. He shifted in his seat, leaning forward just a bit and then stood. She got to her feet a second later, and he was around the dinner table in a heartbeat, his hands coming out to wrap around her shoulders and pull her into him.

This is such a bad idea
… she thought as she went up on her tip-toes, he was taller than Nico and broader. His mouth found hers, searingly hot over her lips as he kissed her hard. Need fluttered up her stomach and she reached for his shirt, fisting her fingers in the back of it while his hands slipped down over her spine to rest in the curve just above her ass.

Russi made a noise and she felt wanted by him, maybe feeling needed for the first time in days because Nico sure as hell hadn’t been showing her anywhere near this kind of attention especially limited as he was by technology and distance. Russi slid his hands down over her ass, over her leggings, his broad palms hot through the thin jersey. Her breath skipped and stuttered in her lungs as his tongue teased between her parted lips.
Such a bad idea…

He pulled away with a dirty sounding sigh, letting her go and leaving her wanting. He wouldn’t even meet her eyes, and she felt a sort of hysterical anger coursing through her blood.

“Seriously? You’re just going to kiss me and then… stop?” She looked at him, incredulity at the situation, he’d been the one to kiss her, dammit, and now he was looking anywhere but her.

“I shouldn’t have done that,” he simply said, and then stepped away.

“Oh like you weren’t waiting this whole damn time, playing nice guy, trying to get me to talk about my boyfriend and my guy problems,” she snapped, not able to rein her rebellious emotions in any longer. Nicolai wasn’t there for her to rail against, but Russi certainly was. She opened her mouth to start shouting at him when he looked at her, brown eyes so cold they went right through her and her mouth snapped shut.

“Don’t mistake me for any kind of nice guy,” his voice was a deep growl and he moved around her to sit at the monitoring station. “Go to sleep. I’ll wake you for your shift.”

Her stomach flip-flopped around in her gut like a fish out of water and she took a moment to gather the ragged ends of her pride before she stalked towards the ladder.

It had barely felt like her head had hit the pillow, a dreamless unhappy sleep stealing over her, when a sound woke her. Daria rolled over, shifting through the fog of exhaustion, when she heard it again, the noise that had dragged her into wakefulness.

“Daria,” Russi’s voice was a low hiss from just underneath the wood bar that crossed the loft and kept her from rolling out into empty air. She popped upright and almost banged her head before she stopped herself at that last moment. Reaching out to find her cellphone and cast a bit of light, she froze when a red beam passed through one of the windows below, the dot from a laser sight tracing along the wall.

What the fuck
, was all she could think, her pulse beating fast in her chest. She reached for the gun she kept stashed under her pillow and clicked the safety off.

“Where do you want me?” She kept her voice soft, just loud enough to carry down to him. He tapped on the ladder twice, indicating she should hold her position and cover his back. Her sleep clothes scraped on the plywood flooring of the loft as she squirmed over to the edge of it, keeping an eye on the door, moving her gaze to the windows every few moments. Her whole body was on a knife’s edge.

Russi would have called for backup already, would have notified the recon team that monitoring cabin’s position had been compromised. No matter who was waiting for them outside, they’d have people coming to help them. The thought of ARC backup coming didn’t help the shiver of nerves running down her spine. More red dots of light traced through the windows, she counted five in all, and hoped that was the lot of them. The two agents in the cabin could maybe take on five enemy operatives, especially if those enemy ops were reluctant to shoot in close quarters due to the possibility of friendly fire. Anymore and their bodies would be lining caskets by morning.

She could hear the creek of floorboards outside the door, whoever was out there was casing the porch, obviously thinking that the cabin inhabitants were dead asleep. Their attackers were about to have a very rude welcome if that was the case.

At the first crack of a body against the door, time slowed down and all Daria could hear was her breathing and the pounding of her blood in her ears. Russi’s words were muffled, distant as he crossed the room to the front door.

It bent open, and a body came tumbling through it. Russi yelled, bringing his arm up and smashing his elbow into the intruder’s face. Daria’s vision narrowed to the door only as the first man went down, and a second surged in to tangle with Russi. He had it handled, the cool part of her brain noted, but a third man was coming up behind him, his steps lumbering and slow to her in her adrenaline-fueled haze.

Before she could blink she’d pulled the trigger, blood blossoming on the third man’s shoulder, and then his chest as she pulled it again. He went down with a choked noise, slithering to the floor.

Three
, her brain ticked them off,
three down, at least two more
. Russi pressed himself up against the wall next to the door when no more intruders stumbled in, his gun up by his face. She could see his chest heaving in the dark of the cabin, and then the wall around him exploded with noise as whoever was outside shot directly at the building’s side.

What their attackers didn’t know was that the cabin was reinforced, as bullet proof as they could make it. At least the walls were. The windows, not so much. They shattered in a haze of glass shards and Daria fought against the urge to drop her gun so she could cover her ears and cower. Russi snarled and reached around, risking exposure to shoot outside the cabin. There was a cry, he’d hit his target, and he was back behind the shelter of the wall.

Silence descending on them, the only thing that broke it was the odd groan from the three men on the ground, and the steady tattoo of her heart. She could feel it pulsing all over her body. Minutes stretched out, but still she remained vigilant, gun and gaze trained hard on the openings that could expose them to more bullets or worse.

There was a low cracking outside and Russi stiffened before he reached around the wall and yanked someone in, a man in black that matched the other three grunts on the floor.

The man garbled, Russi’s hand wrapped around his throat, and Daria looked away as she heard the sick-inducing crack as Russi twisted the man’s neck. There was a tumble of what sounded like books on carpet, and she finally looked back. Russi was standing over what was hopefully their last attacker, breathing hard. He tapped his comm unit on the side of his head.

“Russi. Five assailants. Both agents accounted for. I am about to do a perimeter sweep while Griffin stays here. We’ll need medical for the ops we put down, not all of them are dead.” He tapped out and then looked over to where she was, half-hanging out of the loft. He made the hand signal for her to stay exactly where she was, his eyes glinting with rage. She knew it wasn’t directed at her, but she swallowed hard and nodded, hunkering down so as to make less of a target of herself if anyone else came into the cabin while he was out doing a sweep.

He disappeared into the night, and she counted her heartbeats to pass the time. His footsteps went quiet as he got further away from the cabin. Her whole body was one big itch, a tense shiver in her muscles as she kept her gun on the doorway.

Daria lost count of her heart after three hundred and some odd beats, and it might have been double, or triple the time before she heard Russi calling out to her to stand down, but that he had another assailant. She could hear him speaking, calling for immediate backup and extraction.

She scrambled down the ladder, feeling better now that it was all clear, and stepped over the three men piled up like rag dolls in the entry way of the cabin. Russi was just outside in the clearing, the bright of the moon shining down on him and the man in a heap at his feet.

The earth felt like it was upending on her as she saw the face, bruised and cut, recognized it. Her hand went to her mouth as Russi looked at her solemnly and then toed the man’s body over.

He groaned and it went straight to her heart.

The sixth assailant was Nicolai.

CHAPTER SIX

“You couldn’t have seen it coming, kid,” Russi was watching her as he spoke. She couldn’t believe it, didn’t believe it, but Nico was right in front of her. He was unconscious but breathing, his vitals normal for someone who was under. That didn’t do much to get rid of the sour feeling in her gut when she stared at the man she loved, and the implication that he’d come to try and attack them both. “One of them is in our booklet, the other four aren’t known to us. Nico must have tipped them off during recon and they headed out here to take us both out.”

He worked as he spoke, binding each of the attackers up with zap-strap cuffs. When he moved to tie up Nico, Daria felt a hiccup of grief in her stomach.

“He can get out of those,” she said when he reached for another plastic set of cuffs. “He did in training, just… he was able to rub his hands together so fast the plastic would melt away.” She felt like she was betraying Nicolai, his hair falling in his face as he lay on the ground unaware of how his (ex)girlfriend was giving up his secrets to an operative who would be turning him over to ARC’s interrogation unit.

Daria felt sick to her stomach, and she tried not to sag or sway. She didn’t want Russi to think she was weak, or that she couldn’t handle the betrayal. She could handle it, stow away her grief until she was in the privacy of her own apartment. Then she’d let herself fall apart.

“Thanks,” Russi said, and unhooked two pairs of metal cuffs from his belt and went to secure Nicolai’s hands and ankles. “Good thing I packed this. Speaking of packing, start putting together the gear. We won’t haul it out, they’ll have a team drop in to clear this station but we may as well get our personal stuff wrapped up and have the gear ready for them when they arrive.” He checked his watch and she clambered up to her loft to pull her things together. She did her best to ignore the shake in her hands, the way her fingers trembled as she shoved her close haphazardly into her duffel bag. She tossed everything down onto the floor below the bunk and jumped down with a light thud, then moved over to their equipment to begin packing.

Every so often she’d glance over at Nico, see the slope of his relaxed shoulders, the even rise and fall of his breathing. She wanted to press her ear to his chest, listen to his heartbeat, reassure herself that he was there. Even if it was true, that he’d been a part of a terrorist environmental group this entire time, it didn’t erase her feelings for him. In fact it made her long for him even more. She wanted him to wake up, wrap her in his arms and reassure her that everything was fine.

Her heart was a hollow orb inside of her, aching and restless. Finally after long minutes, he stirred. His dark eyelashes fluttered against his cheeks and he shifted from his stomach, curling up on his side. She was on her feet in an instant, Russi was outside waiting for the extraction team and she didn’t call to him. She wanted a few moments with Nico alone, before ARC came and took him away from her, possibly forever. augmented humans convicted of crimes were sentenced to serve there their usually harsh terms in a special prison built to withstand their powers. Visitation rights were rarely granted. Still, she didn’t get within reaching distance of him. Her training and desire to stay alive trumped even the most urgent need to be close to him.

“Nic,” she whispered when he let out a low groan, his face wrinkling up. Then he blinked up at her in confusion, and then panic, squirming in his bonds hard. His shirt was half torn off of him, the tanned skin underneath tensing and tight over his muscles as he fought with the cuffs that held him fast.

“Daria,” he breathed out, rolling himself onto his back and then sitting up with a grunt. “You must help he out of these before Russi comes back.” He squirmed his arms, trying to vibrate them to no avail. The metal his cuffs were made out of had an extremely high melting point. It would take at least ten minutes for him to melt them when he could destroy the plastic ties in seconds. She’d have him tranquillized before he could even make a single melt-mark on the metal restraints.

“Don’t do that,” she bit the words out, pulling her gun from her hip holster and pointing it directly at him. “Russi is right outside, and he’ll catch you even… even if I wanted to let you go. Which I don’t.” There was a tremble in her words that she hated, even as he looked at her like his heart was breaking. She cast a glance at the other men, still unconscious around him, and then looked back at him. “What were you even thinking?” There was a million things she wanted to ask him. Was anything they shared even real? What part had he played in the terrorist group? Had he knowingly led Rykov and Balfour into danger? Had he tried to expose them but they’d somehow gotten away, or maybe he just hadn’t had the chance?