I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN BETTER than to rebandage my wounds with the bathroom door even slightly open. I didn’t think the minor scrapes and cuts were anything to fuss about, but after I’d peeled off my shirt and paused to study the marks in the mirror over my shoulder, Dess peeked in.
“Do you need some help with those?” she asked, nodding to the ones on my back. “You’ll have trouble reaching them on your own.”
Blaze tsked his tongue from the room behind her. “Don’t be shy,” he teased. “You’re just looking for excuses to grope all those muscles.”
“Oh, hush,” Dess said, rolling her eyes. I had a feeling she’d have had a harsher retort if it’d been Garrison who’d made the comment. Our hacker tended to bring out the softer side in all of us… just like our chameleon tended to do the opposite.
I looked down at myself and decided that patching myself up would go a lot faster with help, even if I didn’t like to ask for it. She’d volunteered, after all. And I didn’t particularly mind the idea of her hands on my muscles, whether Blaze had only been teasing or not.
“Come on in,” I said. “I’ve already disinfected the ones I can reach.”
She slipped into the bathroom with me and positioned herself next to the stone basin that served as a sink, where I’d set out my supplies. I applied fresh bandages to the minor cuts on my shoulder and my chest while she dabbed antiseptic cream on the marks down my back. They stung more now than they had when I’d gotten them yesterday—I’d barely noticed the swipes of the enemy knife in the midst of the surge of adrenaline that’d gotten me through the fight—but Dess kept her fingers light.
“You have almost as many scars as I do,” she murmured.
I gave a faint hum. “And you’ve had about half as much time to build your collection.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that. When did you start this kind of training?”
The words came out before I’d thought them through. “The earliest ones aren’t from any kind of training.”
I hadn’t meant to bring up my past. It wasn’t something I liked to discuss with anyone, and I sure as hell didn’t need to drum up sympathy from Dess of all people. But she’d clearly caught my insinuation even from that brief statement.
Her hands paused over my broken flesh. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”
“Of course you didn’t,” I said. “How could you have? It isn’t important now anyway. And even with that, you’ve still got me beat.”
I wasn’t any kind of jokester, but I must have managed to work enough dryness into my voice that Dess’s mouth twitched with a hint of a smile. To my relief, she laid the subject to rest. Instead, she patted the polished stone of the sink as she reached for the bandages. “This house is… interesting, isn’t it?”
“You mean the way it’s practically a cave?”
She snorted. “Yeah, that part. It’s a little closer to nature than I’d generally prefer to live. I swear I saw a centipede as long as my hand run across my bedroom floor last night.”
“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of bugs?” The thought of Dess, the famous Ghost assassin, being scared of anything that small and weak amused me.
“I wouldn’t say afraid,” Dess said. “More like disgusted. No living creature has any business growing that many legs.”
Her fingers brushed against my skin as she fixed the bandages into place, so careful to avoid putting any pressure on the wounds themselves. Even Julius with his medical training didn’t offer this light a touch. Maybe the real contradiction was how such a skilled and ruthless killer could be so gentle when the situation called for it.
“I guess I can agree with you on that,” I said. If I saw a centipede in my room, it’d be mashed into the floor in two seconds flat.
“There. I knew there was a reason I liked you. We can hate on bugs together.”
Dess’s tone was playful, but her touch stayed soft and careful. Something about the tenderness of her attentions brought an unfamiliar warmth into my chest. It unfurled further with each graze of her hands. I found myself closing my eyes, wanting to focus on nothing but her soothing presence behind me.
I’d never had a woman look after me like this. Never had a woman who cared enough and understood my kind of life enough to want to. In that moment, I’d have killed anyone who so much as looked at her wrong.
She was my woman. The rest of the guys’ too, but still mine. I wasn’t used to this possessive sensation either, but it felt right somehow.
Some part of me wanted to bundle her up with all the same tenderness she’d shown me and hide her away until all the danger that lurked in this city had passed. Be a shield between her and the rest of the big bad world.
But Dess didn’t need that, didn’t want it—and I wasn’t sure I could be tender anyway.
“There. All patched up.” Dess stepped back, and I turned to face her. Her brightly affectionate smile provoked a flutter amid the warmth that had filled my chest. A fucking flutter.
What the hell was I supposed to do with that or all these other emotions I wasn’t used to feeling? My heart had been as much of a cave as this building was before she’d come along—an empty cave. And suddenly it was buzzing with way too much feeling that I had no idea how to adjust to.
One impulse rang through all the rest—one thing I did know how to do. I was going to defend her every way I knew how, every way she’d let me. And that included figuring out how much danger she was in from the man she’d accepted as her father.
“I’d better see if Blaze is ready to head out,” I said.
Her smile dimmed a little. I didn’t know whether she was more concerned that we’d find something damning about Damien Malik or that we wouldn’t and it’d turn out we’d violated her family’s trust unnecessarily. I guessed both made sense. Neither were impressions I associated with my own family one bit.
“Right,” she said, putting on her determined face. “You’re ready to go.”
I didn’t really have a clue how anything Blaze was planning to do at the Malik home worked. It was all buttons and wires as far as I was concerned. But I didn’t need to know. That was his job, and mine was keeping watch and being ready to leap into action if he ran into trouble.
Sneaking around a large house with two people inside wasn’t particularly difficult. But the Maliks didn’t give us a problem even when they came outside. Iris Malik walked along the porch collecting old beach towels without even glancing toward the garden shed we were using for shelter. Her son—Dess’s teenager brother—sauntered around the pool and then back into the house with equal inattention.
I grimaced to myself. One thing was obvious: Dess didn’t have a lick of protection from the people living here. No wonder Damien needed professional bodyguards.
When Iris had left for work, leaving just the boy in the house, we slunk across the lawn to the back wall. Blaze stalked along the perimeter, holding a device that beeped faintly, while I peeked through the windows. Dess had told us where her brother’s bedroom was, and we were heading in the opposite direction, but we wouldn’t want to be spotted from the common rooms.
Blaze paused partway down the east side of the house, where the device had started beeping faster. He spoke under his breath. “The router’s around here.” He glanced up. “Probably on the second floor.”
I cocked my head as he pawed through his satchel for some other electronic box that looked almost the same as the other one to me. “And this is going to let you tap into their internet?” I murmured.
He nodded. “I didn’t have the equipment to manage it before—and even now, I need to get this thing very close. Give me a lift?”
I moved without hesitation, bending down and offering my interlaced hands for a boost up. My muscles only strained slightly hefting the slim man’s weight. I raised him to the level of the second-floor window above us.
Blaze gripped the ledge for balance. Peering inside, he let out a soft whistle. “Holy cow. They’ve got a whole games room—this kid has everything. Systems, special controllers, fancy sound system, the works.”
A whole room just for playing around? I wondered if the teenager who lived here had ever known a hardship in his entire life. I’d enlisted in the military the second I was old enough, and he had what were likely the most expensive consoles piled recklessly in a room.
It wasn’t anger that I felt, and it wasn’t jealousy, but when I considered Dess being surrounded by this spoiled family, it just seemed… wrong.
“Bingo,” Blaze said. “There’s the modem and the router. No wonder I couldn’t get into this thing without being closer. It’s state of the art.”
I held him steady, keeping my ears pricked. Blaze got to work attaching his device, which was about the size of his palm, to the siding next to the window. He’d painted it the same color as the siding ahead of time, and it was so small it’d blend in easily, especially tucked against the protruding frame. I barely noticed it when I looked up, and I knew it was there.
Would we find anything useful from his efforts? I wasn’t sure I believed that the Maliks would say anything incriminating even in the privacy of their own internet network. They might not have been great at physical surveillance, but they struck me as awfully cautious about appearances, even with each other.
But this wasn’t my wheelhouse anyway. Blaze thought the attempt was worthwhile, and he’d had plenty of brilliant brainstorms to earn the right to experiment.
The hacker was twisting another screw into place when he froze above me. I tensed too.
“Shit,” he whispered. “The kid just walked into the room.”
He flattened himself against the outer wall. I eased closer too, my pulse speeding up just slightly. I’d have yanked Blaze down, but the thump of his landing seemed like more of a risk for drawing the boy’s attention than the chance that he’d crane his neck around looking out the window.
What exactly would we do if he did spot us? Two strange men forming a tower against the side of his house… There was no way it wouldn’t be suspicious. I’d been prepared to eliminate any guards who came at us, but Dess’s brother himself?
My stomach twisted. The seconds slipped by, both of us waiting in rigid silence. Then Blaze exhaled in a rush.
“He went back out again. I’d better finish this quick. Are you holding up all right down there, Talon?”
“I’ve carried guns that were harder on my arms than you are,” I muttered at the slender man, and he chuckled lightly.
“Just have to get this last screw deep enough in so it stays in place… There.” He tapped a few buttons on the outside of the device and nudged my hand with the toe of his sneakers for me to lower him. As he hopped out of my grasp, he aimed one of his broad grins at me, his brown eyes sparkling.
“We’re in.”
