Bargains and Betrayals by Shannon Delany Read Free Book Online Page A

feeling things aren’t what they seem at my job.”
    “Do you refer to the cover job you hold as a research librarian or your actual job?”
    “Actual.”
    “And you thought the CIA would be honest with its employees—an organization that deals regularly with liars of all nationalities?”
    “You wonder why your phone is tapped.”
    “ Nyet . I do not.”
    “What if the CIA branch I work for…” She paused, staring into her coffee cup. “What if…”
    “The very best fiction starts with a simple ‘what if.’”
    “What if it’s not the CIA at all, but something else entirely?”
    I set down my mug. “That would be a fascinating bit of—”
    “Don’t say fiction,” she warned, her tone dangerously flat. “I’m starting to think it’s fact.”
    “Why?” I slugged back a swallow of coffee, needing the acrid heat to sharpen my senses. “And why tell me this?”
    “I don’t know who else to tell. I need to work it all out. Puzzle the pieces together. Hearing it out loud might help.”
    “Is there not a mirror in your flat? Say it there.” I licked my lips. Mentally I measured the angle of her eyebrows, the dimension of her eyes, the set of her mouth, the width of her nostrils, trying to find the truth in the mathematics of expression. Either she believed what she was saying or she was an actor of the finest caliber. “So tell me. How is the CIA not like the CIA?”
    “When I was transferred out here, it wasn’t a promotion.”
    “But Junction’s such a thriving metropolis,” I scoffed.
    She ignored me and plowed forward. “There had been problems with my boss.… We had been…”
    “… in a situation that made you appear to be a woman of loose morals? Of easy virtue?” I interjected. I was beginning to enjoy my morning after all.
    “His wife objected to the intimacy of our relationship.”
    I blinked. Wanda seemed the stoic type. The never-break-a-law-or-moral-code type.
    “So I can make you shut up.” She was not proud of the realization. “He transferred me out here. I figured I’d be digging through bogus Cold War paperwork at the warehouse forever.”
    I raised my hand. “Why do we have a warehouse of important government-type files in this region?”
    “Cheaper real estate. Our government makes cuts in strange areas. So I was excited to get out of there—even on a wild-goose chase—well, a wild-werewolf chase. Even if I—who never understood the Dewey decimal system—was sentenced to spend time as a research librarian. I took a pay cut, another transfer, but other agents were losing their jobs back at headquarters. I couldn’t imagine that .”
    “You didn’t ask questions.”
    “No. I even felt lucky.” She looked up from the cup. “But with all this—me having to tell my superiors so often we couldn’t bust down your door and drag your asses out—”
    “Thank you for that. What may at first appear a ballsy, self-confident move often equates with shortsightedness and stupidity. And Cat seems to like the door attached and the upholstery not so bloodstained.”
    But she rambled on, “And with Kent gunning for Jessie at the pistol range—”
    I opened my mouth to ask after Kent. His sudden disappearance had not slipped my mind completely.
    But she ignored me. “And the way I’m being told I need to keep you away from Mother right now…”
    “What? Why?” Kent, and the very real possibility the woman sitting across the table from me had left his body in a shallow grave, was not nearly as important.
    “Things are ugly, Alexi.”
    “Is Mother—well?”
    “She’s still aging rapidly. I don’t think they really know what to expect. How long she’s got.”
    “You need to get us in there.”
    “I’m working on it.”
    “Actions speak louder than words.”
    She nodded. She knew. “So all that and the royally weird beat-down Pietr took when they crated Jessie away…”
    “That was the doing of Pecan Place.”
    “What if they’re fingers on the same