Eva exercised in her new room, sometimes afraid to leave it for fear of Hrwang sneaking in and bugging it, like they’d done to her old room. She had picked the room in Casa del Mar for its view of the ocean and its much easier escape route out the window, should that become necessary.
When she did leave to go to the gym or to the beach or to the kitchen to stock up on food Noah provided her, food he held back so it wasn’t swimming in the potent Hrwang spices, she marked her room, placing hairs and other items everywhere that an intruder couldn’t help but disturb. So far, she’d been left alone.
This evening she wore pajama shorts and a black spaghetti strap tank top, moving through the steps of lian quan jiao, a martial arts form designed to train both fists and feet, building power, flexibility, and coordination.
She tried to avoid thoughts about the Lieutenant Grenadier.
Tomes.
His name was Tomes and she thought about the kiss he gave her after they exchanged names. The Hrwang considered their names sacred and exchanging names tantamount to a marriage proposal. She hadn’t seen him since they’d returned from the beach.
The sometimes shy lieutenant intrigued her. When she had first met him, she had toyed with his attraction to her, which was her modus operandi. She’d even used him to make the Lord Admiral jealous enough to turn a blind eye to any accidentally suspicious behavior.
It had all worked perfectly.
Flirting with men was her mission. Getting them to fill out applications to join the Agency her strength. Convincing them to do what she wanted her weakness.
She used it too much. She’d become too cold. Too hard. Too untouchable. Even Mark, who’d made a pass at every woman he ever met, only half-heartedly tried with her and that only after they were both hammered at their graduation party.
Juan called her a robot and maybe she was.
She missed the first round of tapping on her door.
She moved through her forms mechanically, not noticing the passage of time, that it had become dark, or that sweat drenched her tank top.
The second round of tapping jarred her out of the zone.
Quickly turning to where she normally would have kept a gun, she sighed and moved silently to the door. No gun. No weapon at all. And no peephole in the door.
“Yes?” she asked softly in English through the closed door.
“It’s me,” a familiar voice replied in Est.
She opened the door a little, half expecting him to burst in, armed to the hilt, with several soldiers behind him, prepared to execute her for espionage.
He stood there alone, wearing the singlet the Hrwang often wore when they worked out.
“I waited for you in the gym,” he whispered by way of explanation.
She opened the door wider and Tomes, the Lieutenant Grenadier, slipped through. She closed the door behind him, locking it as she put her arms around him and kissed him. His hand found the strap of her tank top and pushed it down over her shoulder.
Eva wished she and Tomes lay together on the beach, or at least closer to the beach, where they could hear the never ending rhythm of the waves. Instead, they huddled together under a blanket on her balcony, staring at the vast expanse of darkness in the distance that was the ocean, and the equally vast darkness of the sky on the starless, cloudy night.
“The ocean can be beautiful when the moon shines a long path over the waves,” she whispered wistfully. “It would be nice to see the moon.”
“I apologize. I haven’t spent much time enjoying nature.”
His earnestness amused her and she laughed.
“Am I funny?” he asked.
“Your English is sometimes.”
“Your Est is like a child’s,” he rejoined.
She giggled.
She leaned her head on his bare chest. The man truly was a grenadier, his upper body sculpted and powerful, built for throwing grenades long distances and for being the perfect bodyguard. She wondered how he matched up with Juan in the throwing department.
He pulled her closer to him, his hand on her bare back, moving and finding other places and they made love again, this time tangled in blankets on the balcony. If any Hrwang soldiers watched them on this dark night, she didn’t care.
The Lieutenant Grenadier left as stealthily as he’d arrived, and Eva sat tangled up in a blanket on her bed in her castle, wondering how many other queens were unfaithful to their kings while those kings rode to battle or conducted royal business elsewhere.
She didn’t even know the Lord Admiral’s name.
She and Tomes had talked for a while after they had made love, developing fantastical plans of running away together, hiding in caves or on islands, the ubiquitous combat craft of the Hrwang never finding them. She had even suggested, half in jest, that she assassinate the Lord Admiral, but his chief of security had bristled at that notion. To get on his good side again, she had almost said she wouldn’t do that because it wasn’t her mission. The words had caught in her mouth just in time, and she had said she was only kidding. She could never kill anyone, she had told him.
Alone, she pondered their discussion.
What was her mission?
To pretend to fall in love with the chief of security so that his commander could have him flayed alive? She didn’t doubt that the Lord Admiral was capable of such a thing. He didn’t seem like a forgiving man.
To be an assassin?
She’d thought more than once about killing the Lord Admiral. Perhaps with Tomes’ help, she could get away with it. No human would ever be able to infiltrate the Hrwang again though, not like she had. Another would step into the Lord Admiral’s place and that other would keep his libido in check.
Killing the Lord Admiral wouldn’t help Earth.
She was a mole. That was her mission.
But no one trained people to be moles. They just existed, finding themselves in that sort of a role through some chain of events that probably weren’t even within their control. Things could have gone a lot differently for Eva had the Lord Admiral not had so large an ego or had he not wanted to have a beautiful blonde by his side.
What if he’d preferred red heads instead?
She laughed.
Humor was all she had left. That, and the forbidden love of the chief of security who probably knew by now that she was a spy, but who was too in love with her to do anything about it.
She walked a dangerous tightrope and she knew it.
The Lord Admiral returned the next morning.
He wanted to see her immediately, expressed his surprise that she had changed bedrooms, and immediately kicked his chief of security out so he could be alone with his lady.
Tomes looked at Eva as he left and she couldn’t read his thoughts. Anger, knowing what was about to happen? Understanding, knowing he was the second man and she had duties to her Lord? Frustration, knowing they should have run away together before the man returned?
He probably wished they had done that, although Eva wouldn’t have gone with him.
It wouldn’t have served Earth’s purposes.
“I missed you, my dear,” the Lord Admiral whispered in her ear and Eva went through the motions for the next thirty minutes, responding mechanically to what was expected of her. She felt guilt for the role she played. She felt what she did was wrong. Even a sin, as she had been taught when she was little.
But she did it anyway. She was a mole. She had to fulfill her mission.
“Our lives are so entangled, aren’t they?”
The Lord Admiral used the word ‘entangled’ like he had just learned it and wanted to try it out on her. She panicked momentarily, keeping her poker faced exterior, but frightened inside that he had somehow discovered her and Tomes and referred to the entangled web of lies that trapped her.
“Just like our bodies. We are so entangled. Not knowing where
one ends and the other begins.”
She remembered that line from a movie. It must have shown up on the Lord Admiral’s tablet and he thought it amusing.
“I want to tell you something,” he continued, “but it’s a secret. I can’t tell anyone. I used to be able to share secrets like this with one person, but he’s gone missing.”
“Who?”
“My adjutant.”
“I don’t know him.”
“He hasn’t been planetside until recently. No one’s heard from him.”
“Oh.”
“I wish I could tell you, but I can’t.” The Lord Admiral quivered with excitement. “Maybe later. I do have a another surprise for you, though.”
Time to act the girlfriend.
“Really?” she said, as if a surprise from him was the most important thing in the world that could happen to her.
He quivered again. “Oh, it’s too much. We must go right away.”
“Go where?”
“It’s a surprise.”
96