Shivers crept up her arms, and she hugged herself
tight to ward them off.
Get a grip!
She was a professional on an assignment, an elite,
trained operative from a clandestine agency that handled operations for
governments and international forces as a stealthy left hand. Her agency
entrusted her with the most important missions—nothing should faze her.
Before today, she would've said that nothing could
affect her when she had her eyes on a goal.
But she wasn't sure anymore. She'd never had her past
collide with her present like a few moments ago, in the form of her childhood
best friend.
Ashford Gilfoy, better known as Ash. The boy who had
been there to catch her when, at six, she had slipped while climbing the
chestnut tree that sat right on the border between their two houses in
Hastings, two days after her family moved there from Salisbury. The boy who had
taught her how to ride a bicycle without the training wheels on the long and
winding, gravel-covered lane leading to her parents' mansion. The teenager who
had smashed the nose of the first lad who had broken her heart, at thirteen,
during recess in the schoolyard. The young man she had left seventeen years ago
on a platform at London Waterloo, on the day she bid her old life goodbye.
For the first time since that day, she was back on
British soil, and kismet decided Ash should cross her path.
Why then, of all times? She was a hair's breadth away
from closing the contract on this mission. Seven months of intensive
infiltration work and she was ready to achieve her aim—neutralize Nikolai
Grigorievskiy's criminal operations before she took out the man. The Corpus always sent her for the kill, but
the trick was that she had to make her target's death appear self-inflicted, at
the bare minimum, or an accident, in the direst of cases. Measles, as such
operations were known in their clandestine world—a planned assassination that didn't
leave any indication of the cause of death. She would then have to sanitize
everything—leave no evidence, no witness, nothing that could lead back to her.
Unlike her other agency counterparts, she wasn't an out-and-out black ops
assassin, but a different level of highly implicated agent provocateur.
In other words, a consummate actress who got to her
ends by manipulating people and circumstances. All those years of drama school,
at her mother’s insistence when, obviously, she'd be too tall to become a
ballerina, came in handy. In fact, her portrayal of Lady Macbeth in the drama
school's end of year play had caught the eye of the people who had recruited
her into the Corpus. Seventeen years into
the agency, fifteen of them as Kali, her operative name, a sociopath with no
apparent conscience who followed her orders with diligence. Never had any one
of her targets come close to figuring she was an undercover agent. Her track
record was flawless—each assignment undertaken with one hundred percent success
rate and a marginal body count.
Until today, when she'd almost gotten burned.
Ash had recognized her down there. For a second, she'd
thought her cover was blown. Then, she'd taken a deep breath and forced herself
to remain in character. Never panic, always stay in control, breathe and gather
your wits—the first lesson drilled inside the mind of any secret agent. Pulling
on a blank face was one of her fortes, and Ash had bought the act. He thought
she was Irina, clueless twenty-year-old from the dirt-poor suburbs of Moscow
who didn't speak any other language but Russian.
She'd had a few close encounters in the past, but
never like that. Rayne and Kali had two separate, compartmentalized lives that
ran parallel. The two should never have touched, because that would end up
making a mess of her. She could keep each persona separate, as long as she
could push Rayne to some dark corner of her mind. Her job taxed her, and she
walked the tight line of paranoia every single second while undercover.
But if Rayne came to the front during a mission . . .
.
Damn it, she wasn't a rookie agent on her first
mission. Cherries, as the CIA called them. Hell, even during her first
undercover operation, she'd had no qualms and no trouble achieving her aim.
Why today, when everything was smooth sailing toward a
much-desired goal?
She closed her eyes and rested her forehead against
the windowpane. The glass was warm against her clammy skin.
She was sweating?
That will not do. I
have to take control again.
She had to forget about Ash, about Rayne, and focus on
being Irina, the one who would bring down a notorious criminal. Her agency and
the whole world counted on her to take out the piece of scum. She was their
last hope, sent in as the trump card after good cops got killed when trying to
bring Nikolai to justice.
Someone knocked on the door, and she pulled away from
the window. Damn it, she still had a job to do.
Willing confidence to steel her spine on a deep
breath, she turned around. She blinked a few times, called forth tears. She was
supposed to be a young wife who'd just been hit by her husband, a man she'd
left downstairs at the party with a leggy blonde draped all over his side.
The moisture trickled onto her cheek, and she swiped
her eyes to smear the kohl and mascara.
There—she should present the desired picture of
despair.
"Da?"
she answered as she stepped toward the door.
The panel opened quietly. "Zdrastuyte, Gaspazha Grigorievskaya."
Hello, Mrs.
Grigorievskaya. Such formality. Only one man addressed her with such
deference and respect—Boris Petrov, Nikolai's right-hand man.
"Zdrastuyte,
Boris Ivanovich." She replied him with the same formal greeting, using
his patronymic name to further show her respect, as was customary in the
Russian culture.
Boris was the least disposable target in the whole
operation—the keystone. She had to bring him down, or at least create a rift
between the two men. Everything would crumble afterward. Nikolai wouldn't have
his main pillar of support, and would thus crash down through the pyramidal
structure of his operations.
"Are you okay?" he asked as he stepped into
the room and closed the door behind him.
She shrugged, forced a small, tremulous smile. Russian
wives, she'd learned, tolerated a lot of their husbands' outbursts. "It's
nothing."
"You shouldn't listen to what Mikhail said. He is
just jealous that Kolya's attention is not wholly directed onto him any
longer."
"It does not bother me," she said in a small
voice.
Make a move, she silently
urged him. For her plan to work, Boris had to capitalize on the simmering
embers of passion that flared between him and his boss' wife, and that he
denied all the time. She'd already lost too much time, and had to start the
measles process.
I have to take
matters in my hands. There's no other way.
She trained her eyes on him. Boris was a big, burly
man in his mid-forties. Anyone could imagine him knocking out a person with
just a flick of his thick wrist. Toying with him was like playing with fire—she
could get burnt. But she had no other choice. The time had come. Five months to
gain Nikolai's trust and compliance; two months to insidiously plant the seeds
of discord within the criminal's entourage. She didn't have much leeway to work
at influencing outcomes anymore. No—she had to provoke.
Rayne inhaled, felt the oxygen fill her lungs and
clear her brain. She forced herself into her character. What would Irina do?
She gasped, and brought her hands to cover her mouth. With
rapid steps, she rushed to Boris' side. She reached out with one hand and
trailed the tips of her fingers along one of his eyes, swollen nearly shut from
a blow.
"You shouldn't have," she said in a soft
whisper, letting tears streak down her cheeks. "Not for me."
Boris' swift intake of air was the only sound that hissed
between them. He closed his eyes under her touch.
Do it, she urged.
"I am so"—she paused and sobbed—"so
sorry." Her voice was small and breathless, heavy with sadness.
Boris settled a heavy, meaty palm on her hand, to keep
her fingers unfurled on his cheek. "Forgive me, Irina. I couldn't let him
say those ugly lies about you."
He is caving.
"Boris, please." She pleaded with him.
"I will do anything for you."
"I am a married woman."
"Why don't you leave him?"
She gasped. "I cannot. I pledged myself to him."
"But look how he treats you!"
"Borya," she said, using the nickname for
Boris, "back in Russia, for every one like me, there are ten other girls,
more beautiful, waiting to take my place."
"There isn't any woman more beautiful than you in
all of Russia."
She smiled, making sure she displayed sadness and
resolution on her features.
"You are such a sweet man." When he wasn't
forcing underage girls into the cargo holds of boats docking out of most major
European ports, plying them with drugs before supplying them like meat to
brothels and sex perverts.
"Leave him," Boris said, the words a subtle
urge.
"I can't. Where would I go?" She gently
tugged her hand from under his and took a step closer to him. "I can't go
back to that life, Borya."
"Irina, please—"
The sound of the door opening startled them. Nikolai
stood on the threshold, his tall, dark form an intimidating silhouette in the
dim doorway.
Kali threw one look at Boris, shook her head softly,
and took a few steps away. The back of her knees hit the edge of the window
seat. She stumbled backward into a sitting position on the upholstered ledge.
Nikolai's narrowed gaze went from Boris to her, and
back to his right-hand man.
"Leave us," he said softly, the words
obviously an order.
Boris nodded and exited the room.
Good—she’d sown the seeds of doubt. Her
"husband" would wonder what went on between her and Boris, and Boris
would try to get closer to her. She would play on this nearness between them,
subtly make people wonder if something was happening behind Nikolai's back.
At that point, she would move her final chess
piece—Nikolai would die at the same time as Boris. For the world, things would
look like an altercation gone wrong between a spurned husband and a forbidden
lover, with her caught in the crossfire. That's how she'd ensure her exit from
the operation.
Yes, all the pieces of the game were falling into
place. She just had to play along.
Nikolai closed the door behind Boris, the click of the
latch falling into place sounding louder than it should have.
He turned toward her, pressed his shoulder against the
doorframe, and pushed his hands into the pockets of his Gieves and Hawkes
champagne-coloured, tailor-made linen trousers.
Her "husband" focused his steely grey eyes
on her.
The stare burned into her skull. Still, she refused to
look up. Not yet.
Stories about love, life, relationships... in a melting-pot of culture
Zee is an author who grew up on a fence - on one side there was modernity and the global world, on the other there was culture and traditions. Putting up with the culture for half of her life, one day she decided she'd stand tall on her wall and dip toes every now and then into both sides of her non-conventional upbringing.
From this resolution spanned a world of adaptation and learning to live on said wall. The realization also came that many other young women of the world were on their own fence.
This particular position became her favorite when she decided to pursue her lifelong dream of writing - her heroines all sit 'on a fence', whether cultural or societal, in today's world or in times past, and face dilemmas about life and love.
Hailing from the multicultural island of Mauritius, Zee is a degree holder in Communications Science. She is married,mum to a tween son, & stepmum to a teenage lad.
Before The Morning: An action/adventure, romantic suspense tale on the backdrop of a clandestine espionage agency - come read the story of Rayne, a spy who leaves that life in the name of love, & Ash, the man who changes her world!
FREE for this week: WALKING THE EDGE (Corpus Brides: Book 1): A romantic suspense novel, wherein an amnesiac woman is on the quest for her forgotten memory... Escape from London all the way to Marseille, France, and discover the secrets, deceit, danger, & the powerful love, she uncovers during her search!
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