LITMIR.BIZ

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background, still faint and far away. “You knew my background, whether you believed it or not. You lied to your trainees. You left me out of the loop. Me? I’m just a CIA officer on my private time who reacted exactly as I should have. I know who I’d rather be when it comes to facing the DDA over this.”

      “Damned cold bitch, aren’t you?” His sullen anger told her she’d scored a point.

      “No,” Selena told him. “I’m smoking hot. Too bad you’re only now beginning to figure it out.”

      The DDA—Deputy Director of Administration, the ultimate boss of the Farm—didn’t actually put in an appearance for the chewing-out phase. The Director of Training and Education handled the job just fine on his own. Equally scathing on both their counts, troweling the blame thick. Selena thought she imagined frustration when he looked at Dobry and concern when he looked at her.

      On the other hand it could have just been a twitch.

      But unlike Dobry, the DDA knew her background. He knew the CIA had offered her a spot high in the counterterrorist hierarchy, but that as she had healed physically from those several intense days in Berzhaan, as she had debriefed and reported and followed through on the incident, the need for an extended period of lower stress had made itself clear as well.

      Selena hated it. She saw it as weakness. Yes, she’d spent two days fighting for her life—and yes, during that time just about everyone she’d seen had been trying to hurt or kill her. She’d saved the lives of the prime minister and most of the hostages. Outgunned and outmanned, even on the brink of what seemed like certain death, she’d managed to convey information to lurking rescue forces. She’d won, dammit.

      These days, she felt like maybe they’d won, too. Instead of surging forth into her new life, she’d ended up here, instructing. De-stressing. There’d been that one clandestine meeting with Oracle shortly after her return from Berzhaan, but she wasn’t of any great use to that supersecret fledgling intelligence agency as long as she was here. Recovering.

      Not that the teaching position was a bad thing in and of itself. She was good at it; she enjoyed it. She just wanted more.

      She wasn’t likely to get it as long as she was doing things like turning clueless newbies into broken bits of student. At least the injured trainee would be allowed back for the next session. Small consolation, but one that Selena held on to.

      So she didn’t make excuses to the DDA—he knew exactly why she’d reacted with force, and he knew she’d pulled her punches or the injured trainee would be a dead trainee. She limited her responses to acknowledgments and she glared at Dobry’s back on the way out of the Farm’s administration building, holding her anger tightly inside. When she would have walked away, heading through the dark night and the newly falling mist, he hesitated.

      “Selena—”

      The anger snapped. She pivoted, glaring at him with such force that he fell silent. She said, “Don’t, Dobry. Don’t even try to pretend what happened tonight was my responsibility. I’ll take it like a good soldier for the director, but you haven’t earned that from me. If you hadn’t disrespected me and used your students to prove the point you thought you had, none of this would have happened.” She took one step toward him, lowering her voice into the dangerous range. “And it better not happen again. Not this, not anything like it.”

      He paused, that sullen expression lurking and an overlay of his own anger on top of it. Finally he said, “You don’t belong here. Maybe not for the reason I first thought, but you don’t belong here. The CIA doesn’t take on FBI castoffs. They broke you…let them fix you. The rest of us here don’t need your problems.”

      Selena let the words sit there until he seemed to give up on a response at all. What she felt underneath—half-believing the validity of his words, half-believing she couldn’t be fixed at all—stayed private. Hers only. She kept her voice matter-of-fact, devoid of the intensity that had startled him a moment earlier. “Too bad that’s not your decision to make.”

      And this time she did turn and walk away, heading for the sophisticated gym inside what looked like a perfectly picturesque barn. She hit the locker room to strip away her leather duster, the navy cargos and black trail sneakers, and replaced them with black spandex. Shorts and sports bra and attitude, all of which she took to the gym. She put on a pair of lightly padded gloves and tackled the workout bag, pounding the dust from it with fist and foot alike. She pounded out what was left of the adrenaline, chasing the unfinished feeling left from the alley encounter. Unfinished, because she’d pulled her punches even after the trainee had grabbed her from behind, invoking body memories of life and death in the hands of the rebels-turned-terrorists. Tafiq Ashurbeyli, with his gun jammed to the back of her head. With his body pressing her against the wall. With his men ambushing her when she’d thought herself as of yet undiscovered, unknown.

      She wished the punching bag was Dobry, or the dead Kemeni leader, or any one of the men she’d been forced to kill.

      She wished it hadn’t been that poor stupid trainee.

      Don’t be so hard on yourself. That was Cole’s voice, popping up in her head. Cole, who’d dropped everything to sneak inside Berzhaan when the terrorists struck. Who’d put up with her in the months since, just happy enough she was still alive. A rededicated marriage, and he’d meant it. And now a ghost of his voice said, If you were as bad as you think you are, you wouldn’t care so much.

      Cole.

      She glanced at the wire-covered clock, eyes bleary with sweat. Eleven o’clock. He’d be waiting. He’d had a meeting this evening—something to do with his security consulting job. It was a position he’d once called laughably easy, by which she knew he’d soon be bored. But he’d taken it so they could stay together—so for once they could both be at work in the same country. In the same city. Even in the same temporary housing. Talking about children and family life and not particularly getting anywhere with either.

      Selena cursed and thudded her fist into the workout bag—this time without any force behind it, and she used the motion to push herself away and head for the locker room. She pulled on the sweat suit she had stored there, transferring her badge, her knife, and her ID to the kangaroo pockets of the hoodie. She slammed the locker closed on the remainder of her things, twisting the token lock in place. The students might ply their newly learned skills on the neat row of locks, but they knew better than to actually take anything. Another time, she might have left a booby trap for them. Something involving a paint ball.

      But not this time. This time she hesitated at the barn’s big sliding door, squinting into precipitation now too hard to call mist. Moderate rain. Not enough to deter her.

      She felt someone’s eyes on her and turned to discover a figure by the corner of the barn. He stood in the shelter from the rain, just close enough to identify as the male trainee from earlier in the evening—the one who’d been lucky, and come away intact. He stood hunched, his hands in his pockets, his posture straightening as he realized she’d seen him. But he hesitated, his mouth just barely open—on apology rather than accusation, Selena thought, but she was in a mood to hear neither.

      She turned away and ran into the dark rain.

      Cole Jones dropped for a few push-ups, just enough to get his blood moving. Then he returned to the paperwork spread over the kitchen counter and pondered whether this particular client needed the super-duper countersurveillance electronics, or the super-duper-whooper version.

      He thought the super-duper would do. But these people had money and they seemed to like to spend it. He shook his head at the papers and contemplated letting a game of darts make the choice. The countersurveillance protection, he could provide. The security, he could provide. Dealing with the people? Another mind-set altogether. He found himself constantly fighting the urge to sell them some Florida swampland just to see if he could. Not that they were stupid people. By no means.

      Just not possessed of much imagination.

      Cole’s own imagination was getting lonely. Time for a Selena Sanity Fix.

      He

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