Page 5

Story: Mr. Nice Spy

I backed away from him, my eyes darting between his gun and Chan, trying to see if Chan was still breathing. That’s when I noticed something odd.

Chan wasn’t bleeding. At all.

He should have been. There should have been enough blood to paint my floors with it. But even though Chan lay unresponsive on my kitchen tile, his eyes closed and his chest slowly breathing in and out, there wasn’t a spot of blood on the floor.

“Relax, love,” the man said, his lips pulling menacingly away from his teeth as he smiled. “It’s just a tranq gun.” He kicked the door closed with his foot.

My brain processed this, wondering why the man from the bar would own a tranq gun, let alone use it on a random person in my apartment. Had he followed me here because I’d rejected him earlier?

I backed into my kitchen, stepping over Chan’s prone body. I reached the block of knives and pulled out the biggest one I could get my hands on.

“Ah,” the man said, lips compressing into a frown. “But I’m afraid this one isn’t.”

At that, he withdrew another gun from behind his back, switching the tranq gun into his left hand. The knife in my hand shook, and my heartbeat thrummed in my ears.

I was used to danger. I dealt with highly flammable materials on a daily basis. But this? This was too much. There was an almost physical pain in my chest, and black spots crept in around my vision. I was used to bullies at work, not people forcing their way into my apartment with a literal firearm. What was I supposed to do? Chan was the CIA agent, and he was out cold on my kitchen floor.

In a matter of hours, everything in my life had turned upside down, and I still hadn’t had a chance to process anything. All I wanted was a quiet night at home binge-watching at least five episodes of bad reality television. But instead, I was struggling to process the ways my life had changed, and now a deranged man was pointing a gun at me. When would it end?

“Put the knife down,” the man said. He cocked the gun, the sound of it loud in the silence between us. Sweat made my shirt cling to my back, and I put the knife on the counter with a shaky hand. But it wasn’t like I had other options. My phone was all the way over on the table, so I couldn’t call 911 or Agent Mendez, and neither of those options could get here faster than a bullet could reach my heart.

“Good girl.” The man waved his gun at me. “Now go sit on your couch and keep your hands where I can see them.”

The couch. That wasn’t a good plan. If he’d come here to take advantage of me, the couch would be the prime place to do it.

The more I thought about it though, the less likely any of that seemed. Would he really follow me home knowing I had a boyfriend to protect me? Did he have a tranquilizer gun in his car this whole time just waiting for an opportunity like this? Had he seen the CIA agents outside and waited for them to leave, all so he could live out his fantasy tonight? It was too far-fetched, which meant there had to be something else going on. Something I was missing.

“Who are you?” I asked. I hadn’t moved from my spot in the kitchen. Sure, the knife was out of my hand, but it was still within reach if I stayed here.

I didn’t expect him to answer, which was why I was so shocked when he actually did.

“My name is Xander,” he replied. He smirked, and I mentally shook myself. I was wasting time and needed to ask better questions.

“What do you want, Xander?” My voice wavered a little on his name, and I swallowed.

He tsked and shook his head. “It’s not me that wants something with you.”

Well, that sounded ominous.

Xander leaned down over Chan, keeping his eyes and gun trained on me the whole time. He tucked his tranq gun back into his belt, using his left hand to root through Chan’s pockets. I would have objected on Chan’s behalf, except then Xander might have insisted I move to the couch, and I didn’t want to remind him I hadn’t obeyed his earlier command. So I stayed silent.

Xander removed something from Chan’s coat, and his whole body stiffened.

“You lied.” Xander’s voice was cold and critical. His eyes cut to mine, and I took a step back from the force of his glare.

“Wh…what?” I stammered.

“You said he was your boyfriend.”

How had he known Chan wasn’t, simply by something in his pocket? My mind scrambled to keep up with the conversation, and I opened my mouth to respond, except no words came out. That lie was the only scrap of protection I had. If I didn’t keep it up, there was no telling what he would do next.

Xander held up the item from Chan’s pocket, staring at me accusingly.

“These are earpieces,” Xander said, practically spitting the words. “This man is with the CIA operatives who were here earlier.”

The room was spinning again. Xander knew the people here earlier worked for the CIA? That was not good. That was so not good. Because that meant he probably worked for some very bad people.

But as my brain was spiraling, my gaze caught on the item in Xander’s grasp.

“Those aren’t earpieces.” I said it without thinking. My shock at identifying the case in Xander’s fingertips outweighed my desire to stay quiet. “Those are hearing aids,” I explained.

I’d been around enough of them to know, both when studying sign language in school and attending the ASL church services on Sundays, though I wasn’t surprised this man had thought they were CIA earpieces. They looked similar.

Xander turned his gaze to me again, and I shivered.

“Your boyfriend is Deaf?”

It was amazing, really, how he could keep his gun so steady for so long. There hadn’t been one moment of weakness where I could run or take him by surprise.

I wrapped my arms around my middle and tried to hold myself together.

“No,” I said. “He’s not Deaf. He’s hard of hearing.”

As if this man would know the difference. Still, even as I said it, I prayed I was right. Judging from Chan’s familiar speech patterns, I didn’t think he was Deaf. Or, at least I didn’t think he’d been born that way, and I couldn’t see a cochlear implant, which was usually fairly obvious, especially in men with shorter hair. But I had no good reason for why Chan was carrying extra hearing aids if he wasn’t hard of hearing.

Xander pushed back the hair covering Chan’s ears. I held my breath and hoped Xander couldn’t pick up the elevated way my heartbeat pulsed through the skin at my wrists.

A tiny clear wire snaked over the top of Chan’s ear, and I hid a sigh of relief that I’d guessed right.

Xander’s shoulders didn’t relax, and I took a small step back toward the kitchen counter with the knife. I didn’t think I could throw it with any sort of accuracy, and it wasn’t like knives were faster than bullets. Still, I’d feel safer with it in my hands. But Xander’s eyes shot up, and he waved me away with the gun.

“I saw the CIA beat me here,” he said. “How do I know this man isn’t one of them?” He stood up and nudged Chan with the toe of his boot. “I should kill him and be done with it.”

Panic clawed its way up my throat.

Before, the lie was my safety net. Now, it was the only thing keeping Chan alive.

“The CIA left,” I said. “Why would Chan stay behind?”

I was grasping at straws, and Xander could probably hear it in my voice, because his gaze was critical.

“To watch you,” he answered. “Because they knew Holt might send someone.”

Well, that answered the biggest question I had. Xander was, for sure, one of Holt’s men. Why else would he even mention Holt’s name? I didn’t believe in coincidences. Not when there were so many I could stack them into a stairway to the moon. All along he’d been sent by my father. Back in the bar he’d tried to get me to leave with him because, like Chan, he’d been tasked with retrieving me. Chan had just been better at it. He’d learned you caught more flies with honey than vinegar, and he’d charmed his way into my life and my phone contacts.

Wait.

“My phone,” I blurted out. “That’ll prove he’s not with the CIA. Because you can see he’s in my phone contacts and he was the last person I called.”

Thank goodness for that, at least. And that he hadn’t rejected my call. Would it have even shown on my end if he had? I couldn’t think clearly to remember. It hadn’t been an especially long conversation, but I was hoping Xander wouldn’t delve deep enough into the call history to check on details like that.

He frowned and walked over to the kitchen table, his gun never wavering as he picked up my phone and brought it back to where we were standing. He used my face to unlock it while I stood there like a mannequin, and then he proceeded to press the phone icon on my home screen to see my call history.

I couldn’t see what he did next, but he pressed a few more buttons and made a disgusted noise.

“The texts between you two are ridiculous.”

I could remember those texts without seeing them. And they weren’t ridiculous. They were perfect. Chan’s “For the record, you’re more than cute” message still lived rent-free in my mind.

I wanted to reach out and swipe my phone, but seeing as the man literally had a gun trained in my direction, I held back. Barely. I daydreamed of shoving a sparkler where the light didn’t shine and watching Xander’s shocked expression when it ignited and sent him to the emergency room with third-degree burns.

Okay, that was a little morbid, and maybe I had some anger management issues. But to be fair, he was the one who’d barged into my apartment and tranquilized my made-up boyfriend and was now threatening me with a firearm.

Xander tossed my phone on the counter. Its clatter was loud in the silence.

“I believe he’s your boyfriend,” he said. “No CIA agent would text you that, or he’d be fired.”

Shows what you know , I thought. I pressed my lips together and stayed silent.

Xander put the hearing aids back into Chan’s pocket and stood up, motioning with the gun for me to head over to the couch. This time, I complied, more to get him away from Chan than anything else. I didn’t like the way he so casually rooted through his pockets and kicked him with the toe of his boot. With actions like that, it was only a matter of time before his finger twitched on the trigger.

“What did the CIA tell you?” Xander asked.

I stood in front of the couch, my eyes catching on Chan’s wallet. The edge of it was barely visible from under the side of the couch, the tan leather peeking out from the corner.

The same wallet that had a badge proving Chan worked for the CIA.

I jerked my eyes away and bit my lower lip.

If Xander shot me with a tranquilizer dart and rooted through my pockets, I could only hope he wouldn’t notice the wallet a few inches away. Using the heel of my shoe, I kicked it farther back, praying he wouldn’t see the subtle motion if I kept him focused on my upper body.

“What do you mean?” I asked, making overly large motions with my hands at the same time as my kick. I looked like a live-action meme. Who, me? Nothing to see here . There was a reason I worked with fireworks and not cameras. I wasn’t cut out to be an actor.

Xander took a menacing step forward, the barrel of the gun hitting my chest as he pushed me so I’d be sitting down. My knees locked, and the couch caught me. My breath came out with a whoosh. I wasn’t sure how long it’d been since he’d burst into my apartment. It felt like hours but seconds at the same time.

“Don’t play games with me.” He raised the gun to level it between my eyes. “I don’t think you understand just how serious I am. When will the CIA be back?”

Oh, I understood the seriousness of the situation, all right. I was simply hoping if I stalled long enough, it would give Chan time to wake up. Then he could deal with this mess. How long did someone remain unconscious when they were hit with a tranquilizer dart?

I licked my lips. “When I call them?” It came out sounding more like a question and I shook my head. “ If I call them. I still don’t know that I will.”

Correction: I was 100 percent sure the CIA was a better bet than this man standing before me with a gun pointed at my head. But I didn’t want Xander to think I had any tricks up my sleeve or was holding anything back.

And while I hadn’t planned on taking the CIA up on their offer, at this point, I didn’t think it was even an option anymore because obviously Holt knew about me. The CIA couldn’t make up some false backstory and plant me in the middle of Europe. Holt was here. Somewhere in the United States. Or his men couldn’t have gotten here as quickly as the CIA.

I hadn’t really stopped to think about it before now, but the ramifications of that started to sink in. Holt, the criminal mastermind, international arms dealer, and wanted fugitive, knew who I was and where I lived. He knew I was his daughter. There was nowhere I could hide that he couldn’t find me. If he’d found me, that meant he knew my name and what I looked like, and he probably had a sample of my DNA.

There was nowhere I could go to get away from him.

I wasn’t sure how he’d done it—that was a question for another day, if I lived to see it—but the reality was staring me in the face just like the barrel of the gun I now tried desperately to ignore.

At my sides, my hands started to shake, and I clenched them into fists. My father knew who I was, and he’d sent this thug to bring me in, just like Agent Mendez had warned me about. Only I didn’t have any tracking devices or CIA agents backing me up. Holt had actually sent a man with a gun to retrieve his daughter. What kind of father did that?

The type of person my mom had given up everything to escape, I realized. The same type of man who sold weapons to the highest bidder and felt no remorse. Obviously he’d feel no qualms about using those same weapons to take something he thought rightfully belonged to him.

“What happens now?” I asked, amazed at how steady my voice came out.

“You can probably guess,” Xander said, lips curling into a smile that was neither pleasant nor comforting.

I swallowed. “Holt wants to see me?” I asked.

Xander switched out the guns he was holding, holstering the real one for the tranq gun that had been behind his back for the duration of our conversation. Some people would have considered that a good sign. But now it felt like someone had punched all the air from my lungs.

My time had officially run out. Xander had gotten the answers he needed from me, and now it was my turn to go night night and have my pockets searched. I should have lied when he’d asked me when the CIA was coming back. I should have told him they’d bugged my apartment and they’d be here any moment. The impossible thing about a situation like this was there was no way to prepare for it, no way to rewind and do things right. How was I supposed to know what he’d do with the information that the CIA wasn’t coming back for me? I’d thought he’d be soothed by it and take his time, maybe even enough time for Chan to wake up and come to my rescue.

I’d thought wrong.

Xander pulled a syringe from his jacket pocket, and I shuddered. So he’d knock me out, search my pockets, and take my blood to test my DNA. This just got better every second. As if that weren’t enough, I was relatively confident that when I woke up, I wouldn’t be in my apartment anymore. Maybe not even Virginia.

“I’m not going anywhere without my boyfriend,” I blurted.

Most people probably wanted to keep their significant others far away from potential danger. They’d be bargaining and saying things like, “ Fine, take me, but leave him out of it. ” However, my chances of survival lowered drastically if Chan stayed behind.

The real question was, was Xander smart enough to put those pieces together? I was betting not. He was dumb enough to be a criminal, after all.

“As if you have a choice,” Xander said, rolling his eyes. “You go where I say.” He waved the gun a little to prove his point.

That was when I really started to panic. Without Chan, I’d have no connection to the people who could help me stay alive.

“Maybe not,” I conceded with a small nod of my head, speaking fast. “But I can fight you every waking hour and every step of the way. I’ll make your life miserable, and Holt’s too.” I tried to embed as much conviction into my tone as I could, but it was hard to do when my knees felt like Jell-O and I was swallowing every ten seconds.

“Or,” I reasoned, “you could leave us both here. Maybe Holt could be the one to make the trip.”

Xander snorted, showing me how likely that was.

It looked like I was going to meet my father whether I wanted to or not. I could only hope that when I woke up, Chan would be there too.

Without warning, Xander pulled the trigger and something hit my neck.

Everything went dark.