When Kat lifted her head up from between Stacey’s thighs, she said in a tone not unlike one might use to remark on the weather, “We’re going back to Seattle.”
“What?” Stacey panted, still catching her breath from the explosion of bliss that had seized her only a moment ago.
“I said we’re going back to Seattle.”
“You mean a city in France called Seattle, right?”
Kat crawled forward, flipping her lustrous blond hair over her shoulder as she lay down next to Stacey. “Why do you care if we go back?”
“Come on, you know why I care.” Stacey hadn’t been back to her hometown in almost five years, not since her former best friend dumped her for a rich piece of ass. Even that might not have been a deal-breaker—chicks before dicks, after all—but for the fact that her “friend” had used knowledge of the future to save her life…and then never told her. Never gave her an option to choose if she wanted to defy fate or not, or to come to terms with whatever that decision might have been. She should be dead. She was dead. How many times had the universe killed her, only to have its will thwarted by a woman who fucks to see the future?
Stacey wasn’t one to hold a grudge, but…okay, she held a grudge. She had her own hot piece of ass now, her own soul mate, a reason for living even though she wasn’t supposed to be alive. Kat made room in her hectic life for Stacey, had brought her girlfriend into the fold so they could be together. For over five years they’d been a team, doing odd jobs for Kat’s employers, an organization Stacey knew only as Northwalk. Kat admitted she had blood relations with the top echelon of the group—their leader was her mother—but they weren’t close, and only communicated when business required it. Stacey and Kat had traveled the world together, occasionally doing something as grand as stealing a piece of fine art from a wealthy asshole (Kat excelled at the honeypot con), or something as simple as picking up a person’s mail. Maybe fate had decreed she and Kat should be together, too.
Now they lay in a ridiculously fancy hotel room in a posh resort on the French Riviera, and Kat wanted to go back to goddamn Seattle, where it had all begun. The place she’d run away from, the place where she’d died, and where the person she had trusted the most, who’d lied to her for years, still lived.
“So what if you run into her?” Kat skimmed a finger along Stacey’s sweaty collarbone, working her usual magic. It wasn’t a coincidence Kat dropped this bombshell in the middle of their lovemaking. Sex was her greatest weapon and she wasn’t afraid to use it, even against her own girlfriend. “You don’t owe her an explanation.”
“I know that,” Stacey snapped. “But she owes me one, and she’ll dance around it instead, all, ‘I did what I thought was right,’ and ‘I knew you wouldn’t take it well, blah, blah, blah.’” She pushed herself to the head of the four-post bed and hugged her knees. “You know Seattle sucks this time of year. Cold and rainy doesn’t inspire holiday cheer. I never had a white Christmas growing up, not once.”
“You won’t have a white Christmas here, either.”
“The white sands of the Mediterranean are close enough.” She sighed. “Why do we have to go back?”
“Something big is about to go down.”
Stacey cringed. Shit. This was what she’d been hired for, but still she had hoped this day would be much farther into the future. She didn’t know or care what Northwalk’s ultimate goals were, as long as she and Kat could be together. Her gaze raked over their five-star hotel room, the midafternoon sun glinting off bay windows framing an azure sky, Kat’s naked, tanned body coiled across the white bedspread. Paradise—like she’d died and gone to heaven. She shuddered, thinking of all she was about to lose. “But why do we have to go back?”
Kat sat up. She put a hand on Stacey’s arm and squeezed reassuringly. Then her grip tightened, until her fingers dug into her girlfriend’s flesh. Stacey yelped and tried to pull her arm away, but Kat held it fast. She was stronger than she looked; quicker, too. And meaner.
What was Kat doing? Her ice blue eyes cut into Stacey’s with a ferocious intensity Stacey had never seen before.
“We need to go because Cassandra says it has to be now,” Kat said, her voice pitch-black velvet. “And I want my goddamn inheritance.”
* * *
You will walk up the stairs until you reach the eighteenth floor. You’ll use the security badge you procured from your lover to exit the stairwell and gain access to the inner offices. If you stay flush with the outer walls, you’ll avoid the cameras. After you reach the executive suites, you will spot a conference room under construction. You will find a cluster of boxes filled with nails and other construction supplies in the corner of the room.
That is where you will plant the bomb.
Obey my divine will, as you, my child, are my agent of flesh, commanded to break apart the ebony fox and red raven. Love me as I love you, and fear me as they will fear you.