AllFreeNovel
Share Us
ELEVEN
Decima
Julius reached forwardand tightened the strap of my bulletproof vest. I sucked in a breath. “This isn’t supposed to be a high-risk mission,” I reminded him, rolling my shoulders to give myself some more breathing room.
“Anything that involves a high-profile target comes with a greater risk,” Julius said.
“But Malik isn’t a target.”
“Malik is the target. We might not be killing him, but we are collecting information from him. With any luck, this operation will go smoothly, but we have to be prepared if it doesn’t.”
I nodded, glancing around the posh hotel room three hours from our usual stomping grounds. Julius had been the crew’s leader for years, and his strategies had never led the guys astray. I could trust him on this.
He was the one who’d found out about our current opportunity. Damien Malik had been invited to speak at a political convention being held in the convention center next door to the hotel. Malik and all the other participants were staying here, which gave us the perfect opportunity to dig for information more directly than we’d had the chance to before.
Garrison had sweet-talked the front desk staff until he’d wrangled us the room right over Malik’s. Now it was just a matter of making a quick trip down.
“Stay alert, and I’m sure it’ll all go fine,” Julius said, giving me one last onceover. “Talon and I will be keeping an eye on the convention—we’ll let you know if there’s anything to be concerned about.”
“Right,” I said. We’d determined that Malik and his team should be busy until well into the evening, no time to stop back at his room unless there was a sudden deviation from schedule.
I turned toward Blaze, who was already strapped into his harness beyond the open doors to the balcony. “Let’s do this.”
He grinned at me, the breeze ruffling his hair. “Ready when you are.”
As I walked over to fit my own harness around me, Julius and Talon headed out. Garrison watched them go with a subtle frown and poked at something on his phone. He tipped his head toward us, focusing on Blaze rather than me. “Everything still looks good from my vantage point.”
The cool air raised goosebumps on my arms, but the adrenaline starting to thrum through my veins drowned out any discomfort. I grasped the rappelling line, gave it a testing tug, and motioned to Blaze.
We lowered ourselves toward the balcony below in tandem. I knew from experience that my stomach would accept the trip a lot better if I avoided looking at the fifteen-story drop below my feet. I could have made the drop in a few seconds, but I restrained myself to Blaze’s less swift pace in case he ran into any trouble. He handled the descent with the obvious skill of someone who’d done it before, but clearly he hadn’t made as much a habit of it in past jobs as I had.
“That’s better,” he said with a rush of an exhalation when his feet touched the balcony railing.
I laughed softly under my breath and sank down in front of the balcony doors. It only took a little prodding and a few twists of my picks to deal with the simple lock. No one expected intruders to be coming from this direction, especially not fourteen floors up.
Leaving our gear attached so we were prepared for a hasty getaway, we slipped into the dark hotel room, our ropes trailing behind us like massive tails. Blaze immediately spotted the laptop on the desk. He opened it, his eyes darting across the screen as it blinked to life.
I took my position by the front door of the hotel room, listening for any sounds of unexpected arrivals while watching Blaze work his magic. He was the one handling most of this mission. I was just here to keep the hacker safe.
Even though technically all he was doing was typing, he was something to look at. He maneuvered that keyboard like I might have a knife or a gun, his gloved fingers flying with brutal efficiency, his gaze fixed on the screen with total intentness. When he broke past the security, he let out a muted cheer of victory before diving farther in with a sharp grin.
He rarely came across as vicious in his everyday life—not like Julius and Talon, who exuded physical menace with every move they made, or Garrison, who could take a weaker person’s head off with a verbal barb. But Blaze clearly had the same killer instinct. How could he not, as part of the Chaos Crew?
He knew what he did well, and he accomplished it with feral intensity.
As I watched him in the partial darkness, the stream of sunlight from the displaced curtains catching on his pale red hair and determined expression, a tendril of wanting unfurled low in my belly. When he wasn’t being flirty—when he didn’t remind me of that time that I longed more than anything to forget—I couldn’t help wondering what it’d be like to have his attention focused on me with the same intensity. To have those fingers moving over my body with all that energy and passion…
I shook myself mentally. This wasn’t a good moment to be dreaming about hooking up with another member of the crew. If that was something he ended up wanting too, we’d figure it out some other time.
Maybe it was understandable that my sexual urges were going into overdrive when I’d gone so long without the opportunity to fully satisfy them, but I hadn’t lost my sense of self-control.
I was being careful not to break Blaze’s concentration, but when he leaned back for a moment with a cock of his head, I let myself speak. “Have you found anything?”
“Nothing that would connect him to you so far.” He clicked open a few more documents and scanned them. “Malik has his fingers in a lot of pies, but I’m not seeing what would have drawn your trainer’s interest to him or anything that ties him to the household.”
“And no hints of anything criminal either?”
“There’ve been occasional murmurs about misconduct in the past, but either they weren’t true or he’s very good at hushing people up. I haven’t come across anything on here that’d point to wrongdoing right now.” He glanced over at me. “Honestly, it wouldn’t be surprising for the guy to have had a few unstable moments where he got in a bit of political trouble earlier in his career, but I wouldn’t read much into that.”
