Blacklisted: Blacklist Operations Book #1 Read online

  Sophie was sobbing in great, gasping gulps, trying to pull her hand away from him. The bed shifted under her desperate movements, but not enough. She couldn’t speak. He waited.

  When she didn’t answer, Aidan sighed and moved his left hand until his thumb and middle finger made a tight vise around the base of her pointer finger. He squeezed hard, pausing for a moment when her sobbing gave way to a scream, and then her knuckle popped and her finger rested askew against the rough fabric of his trousers.

  He took in her red, swollen face. Then he did the same thing to her middle finger. Regret flashed across his face so quickly she wasn’t sure she’d seen it. Sophie’s sobs became wheezes. She felt thick mucus build in her throat and swallowed convulsively, trying to breathe.

  As she struggled for breath, he let go of her wrist and she pulled it against her body. Looking at him with wounded eyes, she pressed it tight against her to quell the pain.

  Aidan couldn’t look at her. As much as he hated the toxic bitch, there wasn’t a single part of him that liked what he’d done. It was fucking terrible to hear her scream.

  She was too young.

  He’d tortured men without a hint of regret many times before. Women gave in before the torture started, scared at the prospect. Veronica—Sophie, he thought bitterly—wouldn’t be like that. No, her operative training would have taught her to stand up to pain like this. He’d have to dislocate the entire damn hand, maybe a shoulder too. Hell, she might not tell him anything unless he used the knife.

  “You know,” he said, wanting to try a different tactic, “I really admired you in the beginning Veronica.” He reached out and gently took the woman’s hand in his own, bringing her abused limb back to rest in his lap. “I followed your career. I think my boss even considered trying to recruit you at one point.”

  “Glad to know you like,” Sophie coughed and took a deep breath, “art history lecturers.”

  Aidan shook his head, then pressed down on the place where her finger was pulled out of the joint. She shook for a moment, then her head slumped. He realized that her hair was still wet from the shower.

  “I can’t tell you what I don’t know,” she finally said, raising those glowing blue eyes to pierce him. “Why are you doing this to me? My name isn’t Veronica. It’s Sophie. Sophie. Sophie. Sophie.” She chanted her name quietly as he stared at her. “Please don’t hurt me again. Please. I’ll never tell anyone. I swear to God, I’ll never say anything about this if you just stop hurting me.”

  Watching her small frame shake with renewed sobs, Aidan experienced the first moment of doubt he’d had since he was recruited by Delta Force 12 years ago. In an attempt to brush it off, he tore his gaze from her and looked around the room. The stereo system was still playing easy listening music and he tried to focus on that instead of the sounds she made.

  Letting go of her hand, he turned to watch her try to curl her fingers. She couldn’t.

  “Why are you doing this to me?” she asked.

  “Stop fucking around,” he said, anger coloring his voice. “We have less than a month before the deadline is up on the Synthesis Agenda. If I can’t find what you stole by then, millions of people are going to die. Maybe more. All because you’re a selfish cunt who only cares about money.”

  “I’m not—.”

  “Stop talking. Maybe you don’t care about those people. That’s fine. What you should care about is what I’m going to do after I’m done with your fingers. Your wrists. Elbows. Shoulders. Knees. I hear they hurt the worst, but I’m not sure. I’d bet hips are actually more painful, but who’s to say you’ll be conscious after the knees?” He thought about it for a moment. “I’m not sure you’ll even be conscious after the shoulders.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about. Won’t you even consider that I don’t know?” He admired the deep breaths she took to try to regain her focus. “I’m sorry if I got in the way of something. I don’t want people to die. I’m really, really sorry. But I. Can’t. Help you.”

  Aidan stood up and stalked to the window, staring out at the restless sea. It was darker now and he could no longer see people walking on the sand. They were probably all out dancing, dining and enjoying the nightlife that had spent the last decade leeching any real culture from the city.

  He thought about that because he couldn’t consider her words. And yet…she’d sounded truthful.

  But she couldn’t be telling the truth. Because that would mean that Aidan had tortured an innocent girl. That he’d dislocated the fingers of a teacher who was on a summer vacation.

  “If you aren’t Veronica, then why are you in Dubai? Most teachers don’t make enough money for a suite like this. Most don’t have a passport full of stamps from all over the world.”

  “I’m not a primary school teacher,” she said. “I’m a traveling lecturer. I go from one school to another. Oh god, I travel and look at paintings. Cave art, even. Cathedrals. Anything that means I’ll have a job the next year. My best friend and I have been planning this trip for two years.”

  “I think you’re lying. I saw your emergency contact information and I know where you grew up.”

  “In Washington, DC?”

  “Yes. With Lyle Wells III.”

  He saw fear skate over her face at the mention of her foster father. “He raised me after my parents died. Did you do something to him?”

  Aidan scoffed. “As if I could get close enough. He’s a clever fucker,” he hesitated, then continued, “Sophie.” He shook his head at his own gullibility. “I never knew you were his daughter though. That’s more fucked up than…almost anything. Who uses their daughter like this?”

  “He isn’t using me.” Even in severe pain, her indignation was something to see. Aidan liked the way fire flashed in her eyes.

  “Wells takes you in, trains you and then sends you into the kind of life where men with knives pop your bones from your sockets and you think he isn’t using you?” Aidan shook his head more deliberately, not looking away from her. Her crying had stopped and her body was no longer heaving. Sitting back against the shining cherry headboard, she almost looked like a young sophisticate instead of a captured terrorist.

  He could see small shivers run down her body, but Sophie bit her lip until the skin turned white and they stopped as he watched. But the tears still welled in her eyes, even if they didn’t spill. Her control made Aidan admire her, in a strange way. She said something, but he was too focused on her eyes to hear it.

  She cried.

  The women he worked with didn’t cry.

  “He works for a plastics company, you son of a bitch.” Her self-righteous tone pricked his nerves. Sophie’s chest rose and fell with her deep breaths, but she didn’t begin to hyperventilate. Aidan could tell it was close. “You have the wrong family. The wrong fucking family.”

  “I don’t.’

  “You do.” She looked at her hands, at the swelling purple bruises that seemed to float on her pale skin. “My hands. Oh god, you’re a monster. You’re a fucking monster.”

  With self-righteous purpose, he’d pushed aside the glass and entered her room. When he slammed Sophie to the slick tile floor of her bathroom, he’d felt justified. Now he felt like the monster she named him.

  Aidan’s problem was that he’d pictured this all differently. He remembered watching Veronica in a red wig in Beijing, how she chain-smoked, how she was so thin that she was almost transparent. The woman in front of him was all roses and cream, flush with health. No tobacco stains clung to her perfect teeth.

  He’d imagined questioning a hardened criminal. Not this woman-child who bit back her tears and swore that she wasn’t who Aidan knew she had to be.

  She’d killed Dima, though, he reminded himself. The game they’d played for years as they thwarted each other ended when she dragged her knife over his throat and took the only thing that could prevent the horror he knew was to come.

  If it hadn’t been for that, he’d have been conte
nt to spend ten more years chasing her across the world. Veronica had been a kind of Xanadu for him, either two steps ahead or one behind, but endlessly fascinating. She’d been a challenge to Aidan. Someone to beat. Even when she almost killed him, he’d still admired her—until two years ago when she’d caused the death of someone he cared for. And now, when she killed the chubby, pale medical researcher with a shock of dark hair who probably hadn’t had a chance to defend himself. She’d managed to kill Aidan’s vendetta in the process, too.

  But he had respected her once. Three years before, in Cairo, Aidan had gotten to a man that Veronica was scheduled to meet with ten minutes before she arrived. While the obese, sweating man had reclined in a chair and glanced at the closet where Aidan was crouched, he waited for Veronica to walk in. She finally did, a cloud of lemon and tobacco following her, her hair a dark cap that kissed her cheeks. They were too thin, then, he remembered.

  Aidan had listened to the conversation, hoping for information before he sprang from his hiding spot. That was the easy way. But the Egyptian man had looked at the closet one time too many. Her bloodshot eyes darted over to the door and in the next motion the man was missing half his head. Blood and brain matter decorated the closet door.

  As a little fuck you to Aidan, Veronica had followed the murder with a chair jammed under the doorknob. She left the room with raspy laughter on her lips. It had taken him twenty minutes to get out and by then she was long gone.

  Aidan didn’t mourn the dead man. He was a piece of shit with enough access that Oliver had required him alive. If Veronica hadn’t killed him, Aidan had made up his mind too—there were too many rumors about little girls disappearing from the marketplace, and that was something he couldn’t let go, even for his boss. If the dead fucker hadn’t looked at the closet…it was the closest he’d ever come to capturing Veronica.

  Of course, that little endeavor had spurred her to try to take him out of the game when they met up in Beijing two months later.

  It wasn’t his fault, though, he reasoned. Veronica regularly dropped out of sight for months at a time and Oliver usually had him tasked in parts of the world where she never traveled. Still, she’d eluded him for years, across continents and time zones. He had to know if this was the woman, or if Veronica had fooled him again.

  If he had an innocent woman tied to a chair with bruises on her face and hands.

  “I might be a monster,” he admitted, “but you saying it really puts us in a pot-kettle situation.”

  “I’m not a monster,” she said. Angry color rose on her cheeks. “But I’ll kill you if I ever get out of these ties.” She ruined any effect her weak threat may have had by looking away when she made it.

  “You were the one who stopped me from disabling the bomb in Ottowa. Just found out about that on my way here, by the way.”

  “Not me.” Sophie bit her lip again and Aidan learned what it meant to be aroused at the worst possible time. “I’ve never even seen a bomb. I’m not a monster. I’m not. I’m not. I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t. Wouldn’t. You’re the one—.” She broke into sobs again and he felt his stomach clench.

  “What about Isabella?”

  “I don’t know who that is.”

  “Right.” The reminder of the doe-eyed 16-year old, his boss’s daughter, lit a fire in his gut that eased the muscles. If she was Veronica, then she deserved whatever he did to her.

  But if she wasn’t, the Aidan might be the monster she claimed.

  He needed to find out whether his mind was playing tricks on him. Whether she was Veronica or just some hapless orphan who’d gotten in his way at the wrong time. Oliver had ordered him to kill her, but from the beginning Aidan had already doubted his ability to do so, no matter how much she deserved it.

  Then, he’d been intrigued by the rail-thin, chain-smoking women who executed potential pedophiles and spoke flawless Chinese. Thing was, this woman wasn’t rail-thin and if she smoked, he saw no evidence of it. His brain flashed to her in the bar earlier, learning over her drink. A nearby patron was smoking, and she waved away the smoke with her hand.

  So if he accepted for a moment that it wasn’t Veronica, then what were his options? Did he kill her? It was probably for the best. Sophie had seem him up close enough that she might have an idea what he looked like under his makeup and fake hair. He’d killed for less—especially when he was younger, weaker with disguises and clumsy in his footsteps.

  “If you just tell me, this can all go away.” He sat down and looked at her, wanting her to admit that he’d been right all along. “My boss has kill orders on you, but I’ll just let you go. Just tell me where it is.”

  “I can’t,” Sophie whispered brokenly. “I don’t even know what it is.” Her lips quivered and it was like a bolt of lightning to his chest. He believed her.

  A woman cold enough to kill a man like Dima didn’t regurgitate clichéd threats, her eyes bright with unshed tears, while her lips quivered.

  She couldn’t be Veronica.

  The girl was too young. Too fresh. For days he’d watched her with single-minded rage clouding his brain, but now it was gone and Aidan’s thoughts were clear. Sophie lacked the rigid control he knew Veronica had in spades.

  He pulled his mobile phone from his pocket and snapped a quick photo of her, then uploaded it to Oliver.

  After the phone was in his pocket again, Aidan’s hand slipped to the butt of his gun and relaxed against it. Better to simply draw, aim and end her immediately. Oliver would probably agree, and he was almost always right. But he couldn’t be sure. If she was Veronica, killing her would sever their best chance of stopping the Synthesis Agenda.

  If she wasn’t, then he would have executed a young woman whose only crime was being adopted by a madman and then deciding to take a vacation.

  Turning away from her wide eyes, Aidan walked into the bathroom. He dialed a secure number from the phone he kept in his pocket. “Oliver,” he said after punching in his access code. Oliver’s secretary transferred the call immediately without even asking if he was staying safe. Just another sign that things were seriously bad.

  “What?”

  “Did you get my message?”

  “The picture of the girl.”

  “Is it Veronica? You’ve had more contact with her than I have. She looks…different. Younger. I can’t tell.”

  “It looks like her,” Oliver said, his deep voice slow over the words. “But you’re right about her looking younger. I can’t tell. She’s excellent with disguises.”

  “You think I didn’t check for that?”

  “Calm down, Aidan. What’s her current status?”

  “Tied to the bed and mad as hell. She’s Lyle Wells’ stepdaughter by the way.” The offhand comment made Oliver draw in a deep breath.

  “Can you contain her?”

  “She’s weaker than the bastard I took down in Moscow last week,” he said.

  Oliver sighed. “I wish you’d cut out those fucking cage matches.”

  “I can’t. He’s still alive.”

  He signed again. “Fine, Aidan. Bring her back here. I’ll inspect her myself. If she is Veronica, I’ll get the package out of her. If she’s not, then we’ll have to make other arrangements. She’s Wells’ daughter, so she could be useful.”

  The man came out of the bathroom and paced to the window for the third time, then stood silently, looking out at the surf. Sophie didn’t want to attract his attention again. Her pain tolerance was high—something she attributed to regular bikini waxing—but the bright shard of agony that lanced her brain each time he dislocated a finger was enough to convince her to stay silent.

  He didn’t fit into the room. His muscles were thick and ropey, like someone who’d spent more time in the gym than in a library. Next to him, she was dwarfed. But intelligence gleamed in his mossy eyes; Sophie didn’t think Aidan a man who’d traded brains for brawn. Before he made a choice, she saw his mind calculating the outcomes.

  Sophie mig
ht have found him attractive if the situation was different. His large body looked so indelicate in the elaborate room. It was full of flounces and draperies, all golden shimmer and purple softness. He was stark white walls, leather couches and unadorned windows.

  “How much do you want to live?” The words slipped from his mouth so quietly that she almost didn’t hear them. He braced an elbow against one of the window panels and rested his forehead against the back of his hand. He was the most erratic man she’d ever met; one moment he was separating her bones from their sockets and the next he was staring at the ocean with a wistful tone, almost like he regretted it.

  But he wasn’t the kind of man to regret things. Sophie already knew that.

  His cold treatment of her in the few minutes after she’d woken up was telling. Aidan had no qualms about his actions. Men who worried about regrets didn’t sneak into hotel rooms or beat helpless women. They wore suits to work, paid their taxes on time, and vacationed in Santa Monica or Miami. They were the kind of men she wanted. Not this man, with his brutal strength and caged anger.

  Minutes passed while she considered what Aidan had said. Living wasn’t her top priority, but it was high on the list. Sophie couldn’t think of many things she’d rather do than live.

  When he turned to look at her, his pupils were dilated and looked even darker than before. Shark eyes, she thought. “So?”

  “So what?”

  “How much do you want to live?”

  “A lot,” she admitted. “I don’t want to die yet.”

  “Then you’re coming with me.” As soon as the words were out, he blanched. It was like he didn’t quite believe them himself. They both waited in silence until he’d finished sorting through whatever thoughts were tumbling around in his brain. Then he walked to the closet and pulled out her suitcase.

  “Get dressed,” he said, the words clipped.

  “I would, but you might have noticed that I’m tied up.”