Wicked Lies: A Dark Mission Novella by Karina Cooper Read Free Book Online Page A

meant if they had to make a quick escape, it would have to be through a window.
    Not that quick escape numbered among Jonas’s talents.
    He had to trust in Naomi.
    “All right,” Gordon said, breaking the musty silence with his gravelly calm. He rose from a crouch by the now-occupied sofa, shrugging one shoulder as if easing a knot from it. “I’ll head off. You need anything?”
    Sanity? Jonas shook his head. “Nothing you’ve got,” he said with a quick, wry smile. “Thanks, Gord. I owe you.”
    “Nah.” The man waved that away with a rough, callused hand. “No debts in this business. Too hard to keep track.”
    “That’s very harmonious of you.”
    Another shrug, but this one easy. “Good luck, Jonas.”
    “You, too.” Jonas watched the larger man cross the small apartment, let himself out and shut the door behind him. A brief second later, the door creaked as he tested its weight. Jonas’s smile flipped crookedly.
    Apparently satisfied with the strength of the panel, the missionary’s shadow passed over the blind-drawn windows and was gone.
    Silence fell like a hammer. Too sharp. Too musty, thick with everything already filling up his head. Jonas turned his gaze to the couch, the back of it gutted and exposing the wooden supports beneath the springs. Not exactly a trendy hotel down here, but it wouldn’t matter.
    He wouldn’t be here long enough to complain, and Danny needed somewhere safe to heal up.
    “Come on, Nai,” he muttered. The sooner she got here to flex that creepy thing she could do, the better off everyone would be.
    A sound from the couch sent fine ripples across his senses, his already too-stretched awareness. Nerves and stress. All wrapped with a worry so tight, Jonas wasn’t sure how he wasn’t climbing out of his skin.
    “Jonas?” A ragged plea.
    Crap. “I’m here.” He shifted his weight on his crutches, rounded the couch and struggled to shed the bag weighing down his shoulders. Danny twisted, pain a stark mask beneath the blood and grime already wrenching at Jonas’s heart, but his eyes remained closed.
    The bag hit the floor a breath after Jonas dropped the crutches. They clattered to the threadbare carpet. As pain licked a warning up his spine, Jonas bent, grabbed the edge of the couch by Danny’s side and lowered himself to the floor.
    A hand narrowly missed his nose.
    Jonas caught it, eyebrows knotting, even as he hooked an arm around the front of the kid’s shoulders. “Stop. Don’t move, Danny.”
    “Oh God. It hurts.” The fingers in his tightened. Hard. “Don’t go.”
    The pleading note buried in his croaking voice broke what was left of Jonas’s resolve. “I’m not,” he said fiercely. He bent, using as much of his weight as he dared, to pin Danny’s shoulders to the bed. Ignored the pain wrecking his lower back, his thighs, into his knees.
    His palm slid across Danny’s. Rough skin to rough skin. It caught something in his chest, hitched a cautionary note.
    That bruised but functional eye opened. A line of brown, a glint of feverish black.
    Danny’s free hand rose. Locked in Jonas’s shaggy hair, fingers tight against his scalp. Jonas sucked in a breath. His heart shot into his dick so fast, he couldn’t even form a warning if he tried.
    “Knew it,” Danny rasped, this side of a groan. “Knew you wouldn’t leave me. Green eyes.”
    Oh, whispered something raw and needy in Jonas’s mind. Shit.
    H E WASN’T ALONE. Danny stared into eyes a cross between brown and green, a muddy kind of emerald that didn’t reflect so much as draw him deeper in. Dark enough to promise all kinds of interesting things. They glimmered at him from behind a pair of rimless glasses, perched crookedly on a straight, thin nose that fit the rest of his narrow face.
    His mystery angel wasn’t a large man. No club rat with a gym fetish, no vain boy-toy looking for a sweet deal. Hollows under pronounced cheekbones suggested that, like his grandmother, Jonas needed