Page 54 of Agency

Halfway across the area rug, though, my boot snagged on something and drew me up short.

Swearing, I tried to yank myself free. My leg didn’t budge.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Thomas said from on the floor, his voice a low growl. “You’re staying right the fuck here.”

Grunting, I kicked back at him. “Let me go! I didn’t hurt her!”

“But you were going to!” he said, grabbing hold of my leg with both hands and pulling hard. “And you sure as shit hurt me!” My boot slipped on the carpet, and immediately I was going down.

I would have yelped in surprise as I landed on my back, but the wind went out of me in a rush. Startled, and still reeling from my revelation, I managed to hold onto my weapon. And now I pointed it down at him.

“Let go!” I gasped out. “Let go, or I’ll–”

“You’ll what?” growled yet another familiar voice as a flashlight popped on and trained on me.

No, not a flashlight. Two flashlights. My eyes went to the hallway opening, to a pair of forms standing there, both with pistols and bright beams trained on me.

“Drop it,” the also familiar voice said. “Drop it, or we will fire. Don’t fuck with us.”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I said through gritted teeth, my chest still heaving for breath as a raised a hand in a futile attempt to block the beam of light blinding me.

The bulkier of the two forms lowered the barrel of his gun for a fraction of a second. “Candice?”

“Candice?” asked the other shape. “What the fuck are you doing here?”

“Candice?” Morgan asked, cradling his head as he went to sit up. “Who the fuck is fucking Candice? That’s Carmen.”

I dropped my gun. Groaning, I laid my head back onto the carpet as Andrew and Jericho advanced with weapons raised. Becauseof coursethey’d be Andrew and Jericho.

“Fucking great,” I muttered to myself. “Just. Fucking. Great.”

Chapter Fifteen

Morgan

My head throbbed with an insistent, dulling pain every time I tried to move, and the ice pack pressed against my temple wasn’t doing shit. Maybe I had a concussion, maybe I didn’t. But, right now, making sure Stella was safe was our priority.

Thankfully, the lights hadn’t come back up, which meant I didn’t have any glares to make my headache worse.

“So, you two know her as Candice,” Thomas said in a low voice, readjusting his own bag of ice in the darkness. “And you know her as Carmen.”

“Yeah,” I said, “I know her as Carmen. Met her night before last down at the Bothersome Beaver. Wednesday night? Yeah. Wednesday night. Went back to her room, fucked each other’s brains out, and then said our goodbyes the next morning.”

“And you two?” Ice shifted against ice as Thomas turned his attention to my boss and colleague, to my two best friends. “How do you know ‘Candice?’”

“Um, well, the Bothersome Beaver,” Andrew began, looking like he was struggling to keep his body from slipping into “at ease.” After all, that was the position we normally took when we were getting chewed out by a CO. Thomas might not have been our commander, but he sure was doing some ass chewing.

“Yeah,” Jericho said. “Met her last night.”

“And that was the last time you saw her?” Thomas asked.

Andrew looked to Jericho, but Jericho didn’t look back to him. Both men were hiding something, but not well. They didn’t want to outright lie, of course, but they definitely didn’t want to come right out with everything.

And I had a suspicion of what precisely that everything might entail.

“Not exactly,” Andrew said, glancing back to the spare bedroom where we were keeping Carmen/Candice.

She hadn’t even put up a fight after Andrew and Jericho arrived, and now we had her tied to a chair. Currently, we couldn’t spare the manpower to keep a dedicated eye on her, but any of us could turn our head and look in at her like I did now.