Page 13 of Sherwood
Joshua made a noise that I could easily interpret as a SIGINT fan wanting to explain to me that HUMINT was too slow, too risky, and never as useful, but blessedly, he seemed more ready to leave than to sermonize.
He straightened up and tapped me on the shoulder with the map. “Secure lines will be in place at the safehouse by tonight, so next time, let’s skip the mist and mushrooms and do a call?”
A call…
“Do you think it’s possible Lox can hack the safehouse’s comms?” I asked. I understood enough about cryptography and cybersecurity to be good at my job, but my job was patently not cryptography and cybersecurity. It was doing dangerous things in dangerous places while not getting killed by dangerous people. When it came to what exactly Lox could do and how, Joshua was the expert.
He pushed up his glasses, looking not at the valley, but at some point just beyond it, his mouth in an uncharacteristically serious line. “I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “It’s possible. The best hope we have is moving fast. Before she can figure out where we are and what we have, protocol-wise.”
I nodded.
“But until then, let’s hope for the best, eh?”
I gave him a dubious look. “Are you in intelligence or what?” I asked. “We only exist to plan for the worst.”
“I thought you only existed to kill people and look good while doing it.”
“You’re thinking of Mark Trevena. I haven’t killed anyone.” That Joshua knew of, at least.
“Right,” Joshua said with a roll of his eyes, already turning to leave. “I’m still making sure I never end up on your bad side, not matter how broodily handsome it is. Talk to you soon—and emphasis ontalk, Rafe. No more hikes through vampire territory.”
I waved him away and then turned back toward the valley after he’d disappeared into the fog. I stared down through the haze at the stream trilling its way down the hills and considered everything that needed to be done.
Aerial surveys, visual and thermal. Foot surveys of the forest and the town. Building enough rapport with members of The Knot to start asking about Lox, if she’d been there, if she’d been seen in Sherwood recently. Building enough rapport with Marian to do the same…
Marian.
I let out a long breath.
She was supposed to be the easiest part of this—the part that I could do in my sleep. But I hadn’t planned on her being so goddamn tempting, so wonderfully, sweetly pliant. Probably because I hadn’t planned on the right version of Marian to begin with.
After I’d learned from Mark that I might be able to find her at The Knot, the plan had been to lie in wait, and then offer her a drink and chat dominant to dominant. Slowly loosen her up until I could start picking at the edges of what she knew about Lox.
But then it turned out that the woman who’d managed to fuck with Robin Loxley’s head—when even death and bloody combat could barely do that—wasn’t a dominant at all.
And when I walked into the club and saw her sitting alone at the bar, looking somehow vulnerable and poised at the same time, I found myself feeling something I hadn’t felt since Lox left me a year ago.
Need. Not the mindless biology of flesh seeking release, not the idle fantasies and arousals that drifted through the mind over the course of an ordinary day, but the kind of need which could bleed the world dry, which whetted my appetite even as it scorched my bones.
I myself hadn’t even been sure what I planned on doing when Marian followed me to that private room. Perhaps I really had meant to talk to her—and only talk. Perhaps I’d thought that I could somehow thread the needle between a kink-infused interaction and kink in truth.
Whatever I’d thought, it had died away the moment she’d stepped into the room.
I’m not sure what to do next, she’d admitted shyly.If I should stand or sit or kneel…
I’d forgotten, hadn’t I, that rush of power and that roll of lust. That burn of satisfaction. The way it felt like nothing else, nothing else at all.
And with Marian, there’d been something else alongside the burn, thrumming through me tender and raw as I’d pressed my lips to her wrist and as I’d praised her obedience. It had curled in my chest as I’d fallen asleep last night and unfurled behind my ribs the moment I’d opened my eyes this morning.
The CEO with lips so full that the lower one creased right in the middle. A will of iron, a spine of steel, and eyes softer than a spring morning sky.
Marian Fitzwalter, the girl who’d haunted the unhauntable Lox.
I was dangerously close to becoming obsessed myself.
I gave Joshua plenty of time to leave the forest, and then I followed the trail out, feeling my phone shiver in my pocket once I reached the parking lot and decent reception again. I pulled it out to see a text message from my new asset, my new fascination.
Marian: I have my list ready. May I send it?
