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Chapter Twenty-Six
Aziza
It was a good thing Coop had prep work off-ship to do this morning, because my addiction to his body consumed each and every one of my senses. My past sexual experiences had never left me like this—raw, yet healed. Full, yet craving. Consumed, yet worshipped. I drew in the smell of his skin on mine. My kus hummed and pulsed if I so much as thought about how gloriously he filled me. In fact, thinking about sex with Coop had so thoroughly distracted me while I checked Zaki’s correspondence, I’d sent the prime minster of Canada an order for stallion semen. Thankfully, he had a good sense of humor and simply responded with, “My price is twice that and I prefer the term stud.”
“Morning, Zee.”
I jotted down some notes while my focus was momentarily sharp. Beryl had three ops going that I needed sitreps on, the Alvarez Cartel had been in a heavy recruitment phase so I wanted to beef up security at the emerald mine, and there was something going on in Kenya that I was forgetting. I drummed my fingers on the table, trying to remember.
“Zee?”
I blinked at Titan licking my leg, and realized he and Thea had been standing in front of me.
“Morning.” She flashed me a sheepish smile.
“Oh, sorry, I was lost in thought.” I closed the Toughbook, to give her my attention. “Good morning.”
I started to ask if she’d slept well, but was too worried Coop and I had kept everyone up. So much for keeping our relationship secret!
Thea gripped the back of the chair across from me. “I just wanted to apologize for last night.”
At first I had no clue what she had to apologize about, because all I could recall about last night was how freaking amazing it had been. Then I remembered the dinner fiasco. “No need. Sit. Cait’s bringing breakfast now.”
“I’m starving.” Thea grimaced as she pulled a chair out and sat. “I can’t believe I passed up such an amazing dinner.”
“We had a great time, didn’t we, boy?” I leaned over and patted Titan’s head. Then I met Thea’s worried eyes with empathy. “I should be the one to apologize. I just assumed you’d want all that information in the dossier, and didn’t even realize I’d been insensitive. I spend ninety percent of my day sifting through bits of data on people. I tend to forget the information isn’t an accurate indicator of a soul.”
I started to explain how I’d grown up with someone whose social patterns were so black and white that my own responses often came off robotic and without empathy. I knew Thea’s father had been on the spectrum, or rainbow, as Zanji had preferred. But if Thea hadn’t read her dossier, then she probably didn’t know that yet. Still I knew it shaped her, in ways she would come to understand and hopefully appreciate.
“It wasn’t just the information. I’ve been struggling with who I was versus who I am now,” Thea said as she tucked a wavy blonde strand of hair behind her ear. The rest continued to be tousled by the light breeze off the sea. “I thought I had control over it.”
“Yeah,” I murmured, understanding the feeling. I so wanted to tell her all the ways we were similar. But I hadn’t even told half of those things to Coop. Or Vivi, who’d I known and trusted forever. “Control is a funny thing, especially when it comes to our brains, our bodies.”
“Exactly. In the plane, after we landed, I had this weird moment where I was actually scared of Nik. I flinched from his touch. I’m really worried about resurrecting old fears and not having any control over them.”
“What does Nik think?”
She let loose a smile. “He doesn’t want me to die from peanut butter.”
“Oh, you’re not allergic to pean—sorry. Doing it again.”
Thankfully, Cait had started bringing out family-style breakfast platters and Thea dove head-first into the bacon pile.
“If it’s any consolation, we vet everyone who comes to the island. We know things about people they don’t know about themselves all the time.” Though given Thea’s history, and frankly my own interest in her, I’d delved deeper than I typically would’ve. Still, I smirked. “You’re hardly special where that’s concerned, at least.”
“Why? Why do you do it?”
I grimaced and lifted a shoulder. “We don’t want to accidently kill someone with a crustacean?”
From the look on her face, I guessed she wasn’t ready to laugh about this. I actually wanted to bring Thea and Nik into Beryl Enterprises, so I stopped trying to sugarcoat it. “Typically, I throw Zaki under the bus and say it’s because OZ is so paranoid. But in reality, Intel is a lucrative commodity—HUMINT, SIGINT, CYBINT, FININT, U-NAME-INT. We track so much information because we supply several governments with the software to do the same. For one, we have to test it. And two, our products and services wouldn’t be worth much if we couldn’t protect one man or one little island.”
“What exactly are your services?”
“We’re quite diversified. We strive to meet whatever our clients need. Some needs are bigger than others. Some are humanitarian in nature. Some are for profit, while others are pro bono. Few are simple. Many are straight-up miracles.”
“What if a client needed to get her memories back? Would that be the kind of miracle you could make happen?”
I considered what I knew about Ibogaine and weighed it with Thea’s memory dynamics. While the tornado had been the inciting event physically, she’d also had emotional trauma. I wasn’t a brain doctor, but I suspected she could recover her memories, given there was no actual damage done to her brain. Plus, Coop wasn’t a throw-spaghetti-on-the-wall-to-see-if-it-stuck kind of person. He wouldn’t have brought it up if he didn’t think it would help. “If you’re wanting to try the Ibogaine, we could arrange it.”
