“Yes, you do. You’re smarter than you think you are, Kori.”
“How the hell would you know that?”
“Because I’m smarter than you think I am, too.” I glanced at the crowd gathered around us, waiting for the light, then nodded toward the coffee shop and was relieved when she actually followed me to a rectangle of shade beneath its awning. “Why do you like the truth? Dig deeper.”
She crossed her arms over her chest and thought about it, and for a moment, I was sure she would refuse to answer. But then she met my gaze with a shrug, understating how carefully she’d obviously considered the question. “Because it’s right there for the taking. A lie, you have to think about, but the truth is… The truth is easy.”
“No, it isn’t. In my experience the truth is usually the hardest thing in the world to say. Or to hear.” Or to see, lying on a bed, unmoving, staring at the ceiling with no sign of life.
Her mouth thinned into an angry line. “You don’t want an answer, you want a fight. You’re going to come up with an argument for anything I say, aren’t you? Why does it even matter why I like the truth?”
“It doesn’t matter to me,” I said, my lie as steady as her anger. And I should have left it at that, but I couldn’t help myself. Her steel spine and the occasional glimpse of vulnerability reminded me of Steven, and the bitter truth surged through me, scorching a trail through my veins. The memories. The loss. The rage still burning inside me.
Remembering should have made it easier for me to do what had to be done. But it didn’t. Kori’s mouth and her fiery grit—so different from Steven’s quiet determination—made her real. They made it harder to picture myself destroying Kenley Daniels, if that meant destroying Kori in the process.
“Why you like the truth doesn’t matter to me, but it should matter to you,” I insisted, still trying to sort through it all in my head. “You can’t recruit a man you don’t know, and how are you supposed to get to know me in a matter of days when you don’t even know yourself, after a lifetime in your own skin?”
“I know myself,” she snapped. “And I’m starting to get a pretty damn clear picture of you, too.”
“That first part, maybe.” But she didn’t know me. She couldn’t. And if I was wrong about that, I was as good as dead. “So tell me why you like the truth. The real answer.” I looked right into her eyes, practically daring her.
Kori glared at me, and I watched her, obviously pissing her off with nothing more than the fact that I wasn’t pissed off. “The truth is real, even when nothing else is,” she said at last, whispering so no one else would hear, dragging the words out like she didn’t want to let them go. “It’s steady. It doesn’t change depending on the circumstances. It never changes. The truth will look the same in the dark as it does in broad daylight, and it quacks like the duck it is. That’s a relief—knowing what you’re getting. I like it.”
I smiled. I couldn’t help it. She was fascinating, and she obviously had no idea. Not that it mattered. I couldn’t let myself want her, and I certainly couldn’t have her; she’d want to kill me once I’d killed her sister. And even if by some miracle she could forgive that—though she wouldn’t—she liked the truth, and my entire existence was one big lie. The reasons she had to hate me were too numerous to count and too huge to see around.
“Syndicate life must be hard for someone like you,” I said, trying to drag my thoughts back on target, which proved almost as difficult as dragging my gaze away from her eyes. From her lips, half open, like she’d forgotten what she wanted to say. I wanted to taste her, right there on the sidewalk. Just once. Just for a second. And for one terrifying moment I was suddenly certain I wouldn’t be able to concentrate on anything else until I’d done exactly that.
Then her frown grew skeptical, like she thought I was baiting her again. “Life is hard, period. Dying when there’s another option is easy, even when it hurts, but that’s the coward’s way out. Sometimes it takes guts to live, and that’s the fucking truth.”
“So it is.” I dropped my soiled napkin into the trash can a few feet away, and her brown-eyed gaze followed me. “Show me something true, Kori. Show me something real about the syndicate, even if it hurts to see.”
Something horrible. I needed to see or hear something so terrible it would drive all other thought from my head and purge the sudden need tugging on my fingers like strings on a puppet. The need to touch her.
“You sure? I could show you lots of pretty lies,” she offered, her voice delicate. Brittle. “You’d know they were lies, but they’d make you smile.” I just watched her, denying myself what I had no right to want, and finally she nodded. “The awful truth it is. Let’s go.”
I followed her into the coffee shop without a word, and Kori pulled me into the ladies’ restroom, then flipped the light switch by the door. Darkness descended and I exhaled slowly, enjoying the sudden calm it brought, like the start of an evening, after a glass of good wine. Everything seemed a little easier in the dark. Even with a strip of light shining from under the door and an emergency light flashing in the far corner.
Something touched my chest, and the breath I sucked in was loud in the silence. Her hand slid along my stomach, slowly, lightly, and I held my breath, wishing for more. I hated myself for that, but denying it would be pointless. I wanted greater pressure from her fingers. Longer contact.
I wanted to pull my shirt off so her hand would trail over my skin and I would know, just once, what her touch felt like.
Her hand kept moving until it reached my arm, then it trailed lower and her fingers intertwined with mine. Her skin was warm and dry, her fingers soft but strong. I wondered if the rest of her could possibly feel so smooth.
“When I squeeze your hand, take three steps forward, then stop. That part’s important, unless you want to walk into a wall.”
I nodded, then realized she couldn’t hear my brain rattle. “Okay.”
“Aren’t you going to ask where we’re going?”
“No. I trust you.” I had no other choice, because I was helpless in that moment, in spite of years spent fighting, training for the inevitable. I was more vulnerable to her touch than I’d ever been to a gun, or a knife, or a fist.
“Don’t,” she whispered, and the words sounded like they hurt. “Don’t trust anyone, Ian. Least of all, me.”
Before I could respond, she squeezed my hand and tugged me forward, farther into the dark restroom. As my foot hit the ground on my third step, the air around us changed. It felt colder and dryer, and more sterile. And everything was dark. Truly dark. There were no shadows, because there was no light to cast them. There was no infrared grid, nor any glow from any kind of power indicator or exit sign. This was real darkness. My kind of dark.
“Darkroom?” I whispered, and the echo of my own voice told me the room was small, the walls not far beyond our shoulders, with us standing side by side.
“Yeah. Hang on, it’s about to get bright.” Her fingers left mine, and my hand felt cold and empty in her absence. Kori took a small step forward, then something clicked and light blazed to life all around us, violent and jarring, like we’d stepped into the middle of a roaring bonfire. There was no actual pain, but after such peaceful darkness, my eyes ached beneath the glare, and the sudden sense of exposure—of vulnerability—was more than enough to set me on edge.
Static hummed in front of me and I squinted into the light to make out a small monitor next to a door with no knob or handle. A moment later, the static on the monitor gave way to a man’s face, scowling at us. “State your name and business,” he ordered, eyes narrowed in irritation, as if he resented having actual work to do at work.
“It’s me, Harkins. Open the door.”
“Kori?” The man’s eyes widened as he studied her face. “Tower said you wouldn’t be making any more deliveries, so just turn off the light and slink back into the shadows before we both get in trouble.”
“I’m not delivering. I’m tour guiding. This is Ian Holt.” She
stepped back so Harkins could get a better look at me, and I nodded in greeting. “Jake told me to show him around, so open the fuckin’ door so I can do my job.”
“Tower sent you? Then you won’t mind if I verify that.” He picked up a telephone receiver and held it in front of the camera.
Kori shrugged and crossed her arms over her chest. “He should be sitting down to lunch right about now, so you can probably catch him at the house. With his family.”
Harkins scowled again and lowered the phone. “If there’s trouble to be had from this, I’m aiming it all your way.”
“What else is new?” she mumbled, as he made a show of pressing a button somewhere on the desk in front of him. The door to the darkroom popped open into the hall with the soft whoosh of a seal being broken.
“Stop by the front desk for visitor’s tags,” Harkins ordered, and then the screen went blank again.
“Was that an air lock?” I asked, as she stepped into the hall.
“Yup. So they can gas you without killing anybody else.” She leaned back into the darkroom and pointed up, where two vents were nestled flush with the ceiling, side by side.
“You’re serious?” I said, trying not to imagine why Tower might want to gas someone in his darkroom.
“Serious as gasping your last breath in a pool of your own vomit.”
I frowned and followed her into the hall. “You know, you really have a way with words.”
“I have a way with guns, too,” she said, pushing the door closed behind us. “Let’s hope I don’t need one, because I am drastically under-armed today.”
“Are you expecting another ambush in one of Tower’s own buildings?”
She hesitated, then met my gaze briefly. “I don’t have permission for us to be here, technically.”
“Then why are we here?”
Another shrug as she led the way down the hall. “You wanted to see something true.”
“Should I have specified that I want to survive seeing it?” She wasn’t the only one drastically under-armed. For authenticity in the role of a systems analyst, I’d foregone even my bare essentials for the second day in a row.
Kori twisted to grin at me over her shoulder. “If you wanted boring, you picked the wrong tour guide.”
“I didn’t—” I stopped before I could admit I hadn’t picked her. “I didn’t say I wanted boring. Just nonlethal.” For me, for her, and for whomever I’d have to kill to get my hands on a decent weapon if it came to that.
“Don’t worry. You’re too valuable to shoot.” With that she headed down the long white hallway, and I had no choice but to follow, wondering what Tower was protecting with restricted-access darkrooms and gas vents.
We turned a corner to the left and Kori stopped at a rounded reception desk, where a woman with two green chain links on her exposed left arm handed us a sign-in sheet and slid two visitor’s passes into plastic cases attached to lanyards.
UnSkilled service, I thought, staring at her arm.
Kori handed me a badge and I slid the lanyard over my head, then held the badge up so I could read it.
Heartland Pharmaceuticals
“You wanted to show me a pharmaceutical company?”
Her teasing smile lit a fire low in my gut, where it continued to smolder as long as her gaze held mine. “You got something against pharmaceuticals? You know, they may have a system you could analyze.”
Before I could reply, she turned and crossed the lobby, then led me down another hallway and past several offices to a door with a keypad above the handle. “Wouldn’t they have changed the code, if you’re not supposed to be in here anymore?” I asked, as she started punching buttons.
“Why bother, when I wouldn’t be able to get past the darkroom anyway?” She grinned and when a green light appeared on the keypad, she pressed on the lever and pushed the door open. We stepped into another hallway, identical to the first, as far as I could tell. More white doors with no windows. More featureless white tile floor. Security cameras on both ends, near the ceiling.
“Where are we?” I asked, as our footsteps echoed down the hall. I felt like I should whisper, but she hadn’t, so it seemed stupid for me to.
“I thought you trusted me.”
“I thought you said not to.”
She stopped in front of the last door on the left and turned to look at me. “I don’t know if I can actually get us in here. This one takes an employee-specific security code, and chances are good that they’ve stripped my clearance. Either way, I’m taking a big risk bringing you here.”
“Why?” I said, more worried by what I saw in her eyes than by anything she’d told me so far. “Why would you break into a building you no longer have clearance for, just to show me something Tower obviously doesn’t want me to see?”
Kori glanced at her feet for a second before meeting my gaze again, and again I was astounded by how much I saw in her eyes, and how little of it I understood. “Because I can’t truly balance the scales.”
“I don’t understand.” I felt like a broken record, spouting that same sentence over and over again, but I couldn’t help it. I’d never felt so unsure of anything as I felt when I was with Kori. I didn’t understand her thought process and I couldn’t interpret her body language, because it seemed to constantly broadcast contradictory signals. Her silence seemed louder than her voice, and even when she did speak, I felt like the parts she left out were more important than the things she actually said.
“Now that the syndicates all know about you, you’re going to have to sign with someone, and it’s my job to make sure that someone is Jake Tower. But no matter how badly he wants—or even needs—your services, he’ll still have the upper hand in negotiations. He’ll still have all the power.”
“And you don’t think that’s fair?”
“I think it’s unacceptable. But it’s also inevitable. I can’t give you even footing. The best I can do is arm you with information I haven’t been explicitly forbidden to give you. That way, at least you’ll know what you’re up against. And what you’re in for.”
I studied her, trying to see what lay behind her eyes and hear what hid between her words. “You don’t think I should sign with him, do you?”
She blinked, and her armor slid into place, as easy as if she’d just lifted an actual shield. “I think you have to,” Kori said. “When there are no good choices, you pick—”
“The lesser of all evils?” I said, and she shook her head slowly.
“The evil willing to pay the most for you. You look that evil in the face, and you take it for all it’s worth.”
Was that what she’d done? Had she sacrificed liberty for the almighty dollar? Or was the money merely compensation for work she would have been forced to do, no matter who she signed with?
“But you shouldn’t sign anything until you know exactly what you’re signing on for,” she said, before I could voice my questions. “Even if you can’t change the terms.”
“And what’s behind this door will tell me that? What I’m signing on for?”
Another nod. “This is his most promising new business venture. Top secret. It’s still on the ground floor, but Jake believes it has penthouse potential.”
But she made the word penthouse sound more like a deep, dark dungeon, which made me both tense and incredibly curious. Intel wasn’t my primary mission, but I had no objection to being handed information that could damage Jake Tower even beyond the blow I’d be delivering by killing Kenley Daniels.
“How bad will it be if we get caught?”
“For you? He’ll make you sign a sealed oath swearing you haven’t yet and never will reveal what you learned here.”
“And if I don’t want to sign an oath?”
Her brows rose. “You will want to, because the alternative won’t be as simple or as pleasant.”
I didn’t bother asking what the alternative was. “What about you? What will happen to you?”
Kori’s jaw tightened f
or just a moment. “Nothing. Because we’re not going to get caught, unless you don’t shut up so I can get us out of this hallway.”
And there it was again—that fear I’d glimpsed earlier. It wasn’t there when she talked about people dying in their own blood and vomit, or when she bluffed her way into a secure building, or when she took down armed men with her bare hands. I couldn’t find any pattern to the things that Kori feared, and I was almost as worried by that as I was fascinated by it.
Kori started punching buttons on the number pad, but I only caught the first five of them. When she was done, the light flashed red. She groaned and let her forehead thump against the door. “Well, that was a lot of buildup for nothing, huh?” Her smile looked forced, but her relief—just a fleeting glimpse of it—was real. But before I could decide what to say, something clicked behind the locked door and it swung open.