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"What's the plan? Because I don't know what to do."
"Well, we have to find out why he doesn't remember you."
"Um, yeah, I want to just ask him, 'Hey, so we shagged that one time. You don't remember me. You made me feel like you saw straight into my soul, but somehow you forgot me?' It was a game, Tabs. Had to be. You know guys like this. I was a game."
Tabs squared her shoulders then. “I'm going to kill him."
“Don't bother. We can't have a trainee dying on our watch."
“Fine. I'm going to kill him quietly."
“I appreciate the sentiment, but Gabe apparently wants him alive."
She shot me a bothered look then. Every bit my bestie. "Well, we're going to leave him alive, but we're going to make him rue the day. I still think maybe it's a misunderstanding and not the same guy. But in case it's not a misunderstanding, I'm going to help you torture him."
“I appreciate it, but right now the problem is me, because I have to completely forget everything that happened. Or at least shove it down."
“You know, I still really have that conceal-don't-feel notion on lockdown."
I had to laugh at that as I pushed over her mug of hot cocoa. “I love you."
“Yeah, I know you do. As for your brother, I intend to make him pay for punishing us because you wanted a little freedom. I have to figure out a way to make Gabe realize that's not the right course."
“Good luck, because as you already know, Gabe listens to no one but himself."
“You let me worry about Gabe. You worry about your trainee."
It felt so unfair that I was being punished for a small indiscretion, and the punishment hardly fit the crime. I was being forced to train my one-night stand from three months ago. It really couldn't get much worse than that.
* * *
Lachlan
Nothing saysI hate you quite like an arm bar around the neck.
I attempted to remove my would-be assailant. Sidestep, strike to the groin, another sidestep, twisting and angling the body, pulling the arm right where I needed it. Left arm up over my head, finger under the chin, push up with the hips, and assailant down. Strike to the chest.
Except when it came to the strike to the chest portion, I was slightly distracted by the chest I was about to strike. Saffron Abott, the most stunningly beautiful assailant I had ever seen in my life. So I hesitated. Which was my bad, because Saffron Abott was also one of the most skilled fighters here. And for such a little thing.
Okay fine, she wasn't little. She was tall. Lithe. Athletic. But still curved in all the right places plenty enough to distract. When she swiped out and twisted her body on my own, hooking my leg, I missed it. And then I was careening face-first toward the ground.
She wasted no time. She lunged on my back, using one of our plastic sparring knives and placing it against my neck so that the plastic would leave some of the ink that was on the edge to show that it was a strike.
And then she was off. Probably because mounting me for her last strike was too much touching for her. With a grunt, I shoved myself to my feet and frowned. In our training room there were mirrors everywhere, so I could see the clean slice across my neck. I was dead.
Motherfucker.What are you going to do in the field, asshole?
I'd like to think that in the field I wouldn't be distracted, but fuck, if I couldn't manage this, knowing it was a test and that I was being evaluated, that wasn’t a good sign.
I'd arrived at Rogues Division three months ago, my life completely turned upside down. One moment I was living a carefree lifestyle. Sure, there had been some scandals. But then the next thing I knew, I’d been black-bagged in my flat and turned up here. And I was given the Rogues rundown.
The Rogues started a hundred years ago to do the work governments were too strung up to perform, blah, blah. Training would be six months, blah, blah. If I had the skill set, I’d become a Rogues agent, blah, blah. If I didn't, I'd be spat back out into my life exactly where I'd been taken from it.
That was what I wanted. At least it was what I thought I wanted, to return to normal. I'd gone through the motions, done the training, learned to fight, learned strategy, learned tactical maneuvers. I'd been in decent shape before I got here, but the kind of shape I was in now didn't come from the gym and a trainer shouting at you five times a week. These muscles were survival muscles.
The problem was that the life I'd had before seemed so far away. Another whistle dragged me out of my reverie, and I knew what that meant. It meant Saffron Abott had taken another victim. I studied her across the way as she stood with her arms behind her back, gaze on her next victim. We called him Rook, Westin Rourke, and he was a kid. At twenty-five, I was young, but he looked barely nineteen, maybe twenty.
He'd only been here two weeks, but he'd already progressed so quickly that he was training with me now. His hand-to-hand wasn't as smooth or as good, but he was scrappy. He knew how to fight, and he was a survivor. He'd made his way through a three- year study course at Cambridge in a year and a half and only missed graduation by two weeks because someone had finally caught on to his con.
