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Overview
Does revenge have an expiration date?
Broken hearted and bullet-ridden, agent Caria Milosc returns to work after the attack that nearly toppled the Trinity intelligence organization. As she digs deeper into her new mission, she uncovers secrets about her boss, leaving her with a moral dilemma--show mercy or taste revenge.
How long can one man cheat fate?
After a favor that nearly cost him his life, mercenary Ivan Skavinsk reunites with an underworld group he had infiltrated. Deep in the jungles of Bolivia he finds he may have pushed his vigilantism to the brink.
A gritty story of modern espionage and the complexities of the human spirit.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781948540469 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | BHC Press |
| Publication date: | 08/29/2019 |
| Series: | Trinity Missions , #2 |
| Pages: | 268 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.61(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
TRINITY HEADQUARTERS, ZURICH, SWITZERLAND
What do you do when life gives you lemons? Peering out of the break room, Caria pondered the question as a lemon seed washed into her mouth with the last gulp of her tea.
"Wondered where you snuck off to Firecracker," Dean Gaithers quipped, jabbing his thumb into her ribs as he strode through the door.
The seed shattered as she ground it between her molars. Spitting it into the trash can, she slammed her cup down on the counter. The room had suddenly become too small for the both of them. Dean had that affect on a room. Her spidey-sense told her his eyes were already on her ass. Life had just tossed her another lemon.
"What do you say we go blow off some steam over a few drinks?"
Canting her head, she raised an eyebrow to maximum height. The mischievous look on his face was a red flag that his proposal wasn't complete.
Leaning on the counter, he gave her a once over before returning his gaze to her face. "And who knows? Maybe later ... we could make some more steam."
Her lip curled up. She zoned in on a place on his jaw that she wanted to introduce to her fist. Staring at his smug face, she realized she had the answer to her question.
"I'll be busy throwing up," she said and headed out the door toward the sparring ring in the center of Trinity's training room.
"Well, when you're done the offer still stands!" Dean yelled from the break room door.
Grinding her teeth together again, she winced. There was no lemon seed to buffer her anger this time. Eyes locked on the sparring ring, she marched toward her salvation.
What do you do when life gives you lemons? Beat the shit out of them and send them back to life in a body bag.
The lemons life had given her were her newly fractured heart and soul. The only remedy she could think of was to give or take a beating that would make her mortal shell better accommodate them.
If life had taught her anything it was that a battered shell can sustain even the bitterest fruit. It's called survival. Breathing and circulation don't give a damn about your feelings — they have a job to do. Her callous heart and lungs forged on ahead, no matter that she felt broken inside. Perhaps she wasn't in enough pain to operate on auto pilot as they did. A good pummeling would surely jolt her system.
Snatching up a pair of boxing gloves at the side of the ring, she watched Darren Krewolt spar with a recruit. A respite of peace washed over her, standing in the center of his domain. She smirked remembering how some of her co-workers called this floor of the building "the dungeon" where Darren oversaw the physical training of all the operatives at Trinity. Without a single window, it was as gloomy as a tomb — the only illumination coming from the soft yellow glow of industrial light fixtures above the ring.
Along the concrete walls were classrooms, more aptly named prison cells. She'd spent her fair share of time in them when she was a new recruit, learning things like Trinity protocols, tradecraft, weaponry, cultural familiarization, and the worst — studies in eloquence. It had been tedious until she'd started her physical training with Darren.
That seemed so long ago now. Her last several years as a Trinity operative had consisted of mission after mission. It had left her little time or reason for physical training, little time to visit Darren in the dungeon. She'd missed him.
Lately, she'd been spending all of her time in the dungeon but it wasn't with Darren. The attack that Luc Campone's mole made on Trinity two months ago had destroyed much of the control room upstairs and killed over a dozen employees in the operations section. As soon as she'd gotten back from hunting down Campone in Belarus, she'd been given only two tasks — heal from her wounds and train new recruits.
Heal? What in the hell was that?
All she'd ever known was breathing and one foot in front of the other. Things happen and then tomorrow shows up no matter how you feel. Who had time for healing?
She'd played her cards, however, to appease Gerry Strakner, her boss. After she'd rested all she could tolerate doing so at home, she'd marched into his office and hadn't left until he'd given her something productive to do. Training new recruits certainly hadn't been what she'd had in mind, but she'd accepted the assignment after he emphasized how badly Trinity needed new recruits.
The destruction of the attack had set operations back and forced everyone at Trinity to fill ad hoc roles until things were back to normal. She knew she was partly to blame. She hadn't let the mole in who'd planted the bomb, but she'd unknowingly supplied him with a key piece of information that helped him carry out the blast. Gerry had assured her neither he nor anyone else at Trinity held her responsible, but his behavior of late was making her doubt the truth to that reassurance.
The reconstruction of Trinity's damaged upper level had been completed last week. Gerry's office and the new operations section now had reinforced bullet-proof cubicles. Each operations support specialist's desk now contained fire-resistant Nomex components and steel plates, capable of withstanding a blast in the event of another explosion. Gerry even had escape shoots built into hideaway walls so employees could drop down to the training floor for rapid evacuation. He'd cut no corners, working day and night since the attack. Somehow, he'd also managed to recruit a few more staff members to replace some of those who'd perished in the attack — people who were seasoned or skilled enough to juggle multiple- mission planning.
As far as she saw it, Trinity was ready to be operational again, ready for her to be operational again. She had been patient, training recruits in the dungeon for the past few weeks, but she'd had to share that task with Dean.
Standing now in the place where she'd been trained on eloquence, she knew she could put it better, but Dean was a dipshit who thought he was hot shit. She'd been kind to him for two seconds too long when she'd first arrived at Trinity years ago. She'd quickly learned he was the kind of person who should come with a warning label, one that read: Always in heat. Stay back one hundred yards or your leg will be humped.
She had tolerated him and the restlessness she felt from being stuck at headquarters because Gerry told her he needed her help with the recruits. She was proud to be contributing a useful skill, proud to be helping Gerry out when he needed it most. However, her pride had fled when she ran into Evan Rilco last week.
Shoving her hands into the boxing gloves, Caria ground her teeth, as she thought about the encounter. If she hadn't gone upstairs to visit Jancy Dupriex she wouldn't have crossed paths with Evan. She happened upon him checking in with his mission support specialist for an upcoming assignment. Evan — back on mission status! She'd about lost her mind. She'd been asking Gerry for a mission for the last two weeks, and each time he said he didn't have any. The second Evan headed down the hallway, she stormed into Gerry's office.
"No missions, huh?" she snapped.
Gerry rubbed his temples and she knew it was a ploy to avoid eye contact. Her fingernails dug into her palms when she heard him make an exasperated sound.
"I assume we're talking about Evan?"
"You're damn right we are. You going to tell me he's just running to the grocery store for you?"
"We talked about this, Caria. Your mission is to heal."
"Heal? Evan got a concussion and second degree burns in the attack."
"Were we talking about you or Evan?"
She wound her arm around like a baseball pitcher winding up. Something in her shoulder jarred inside where she'd been shot in Belarus. Channeling her pain into the look of hostility she bore down on Gerry helped her complete a fluid and convincing motion. "There. Healed. Done. Satisfied?"
Gerry's goatee morphed as he pursed his lips. "I wasn't finished, smart-ass. I let you train recruits, didn't I?"
"Let me? Wow! Yeah, with Dean Gaithers. How gracious of you," she said, folding her arms. "I've had to rinse my ears out with scotch every night to disinfect them from the disgusting things that pervert says to me."
The look he gave her bordered repulsed and dumbfounded. Did he really not know? He'd had a lot on his mind since the attack. And to give him a little credit, she'd been on back-to-back missions prior to this. He probably hadn't ever seen her and Dean interact much before, but there was no room for sympathy in bargaining.
"Do you want me to talk to him?"
"Fuck no!"
"Then how do you want me to handle it?"
"Get me the hell out of here or I'm going to break his neck."
The velocity of his sigh would make you think she was asking for the world. She bit her tongue and waited.
"I don't have anything yet that I need you on. Just be patient."
Patient, she reflected as she watched Darren connect a powerful jab into the recruit's ribs. She'd been patient. She was still being patient, but seriously, what the hell was going on? The longer she spent in the dungeon, the more she found herself dissecting Gerry's behavior of late. He'd gone from babying her to avoiding her.
She respected the hell out of Evan. He was a solid operator, always sound in his judgment. But why was he back on mission status and she was banished to the dungeon? By banishing her to recruit instructor, Gerry had to be either punishing her or saw her as a liability after the attack. One thing was certain. There was something he wasn't telling her — she could feel it in her gut. She'd found out lately that there had been a lot of things he hadn't told her.
Luckily, her loyal friend, Jancy, was also Gerry's right-hand woman at Trinity. While Gerry kept her in the dark, fortunately, Jancy always tried to keep her in the loop. After she got back from Belarus, the biggest bombshell Jancy had dropped on her was that mastermind behind the attack on Trinity, Luc Campone, had actually founded Trinity with Gerry. He was the bastard she'd tried to stop from replicating a plague-like virus in Belarus. How could a man like that have had anything to do with creating an organization that was committed to eradicating evil?
Jancy told her that Gerry and Campone had met in Vietnam and later worked together in the CIA. Not long after they left the agency and founded Trinity, Campone double-crossed Gerry by absconding with a large shipment of weapons and drugs that Trinity operatives had commandeered to hand over to the US government. He slipped away in the night with enough bounty to earn him a pretty profit for what was only the beginning of the less than noble path he took. He mustn't have trusted Gerry not to seek revenge and so had planted a mole in the ranks of Trinity just waiting for the day that Gerry or his people got too close.
Damn Caria's luck that she had been the one to stumble across the wretched man after all those years he had been off the radar. She'd poked the bear and the bear had poked back. It had set a course of events in motion that had gotten good people killed — too many, and she had been living with their ghosts ever since.
It would remain the stuff of legends in Trinity that she had crossed paths with Campone. She didn't want to be a legend. If Gerry had only told her about his past, let her know who Campone was, she could have put a bullet in Campone's head the second she'd seen him in Belarus. It would have saved a lot of people at Trinity ... and one person in particular in Belarus. She didn't want to think about it anymore. She was sick of thinking.
Tightening the gloves at her wrists, she looked up at the fight in the ring. Darren sucked punched the recruit in the ribs, causing the younger man to sputter and double over. Holding her glove up to her cheek, she yelled, "Hey, Hot Chocolate! Why don't you try that out on me?"
After a few more jabs to his victim, Darren strode over to the ropes with a proud rigidity in his strut. The sweat on his face and bald head glistened under the fluorescent lights. He waved off the recruit as though his arm was heavy. The battered man wasted no time hobbling to the other side of the ring, where he escaped through the ropes like some decrepit broken creature.
Darren's bright smile broke through his pristinely trimmed goatee. His face always lit up when she threw a saucy moniker at him as though he didn't receive enough compliments. She couldn't understand why. His physique would put other fifty year olds to shame. Resting his sinewy forearms on the ropes, he pried off his gloves.
"Miss Milosc. Who do I have to thank for the honor of your presence in my humble domain today?"
"Darren, my darling, I don't need to be forced to seek the pleasure of your company."
He let out a laugh and chucked a glove at her feet. With shapely biceps accented by his red tank top and his shaved, balding head, he looked like the American actor Delroy Lindo. Why such a handsome man was unmarried other than to his thankless job was beyond her.
His laughing, honey-brown eyes caught hers as he let out, "Oh. It's gonna be like that, huh?"
She spared him a sour look. He knew her and the sarcasm she hid behind too well. She stopped fastening her gloves when she saw him take off the one that remained on his hand.
"Well, get in here then, but you can leave those off," he said, gesturing to her gloves.
A tingle of excitement prickled her neck and she smirked. Bare-handed? Now they were talking! That'd crush those damned lemons.
"Oh, no!" Darren said, wagging a finger at her. "I'm not scrapping with you. You sick little devil. You know not to come in here unless it's to work on something you're not good at."
It was too good to be true. She grumbled under her breath, ripped her hands out of the gloves, and lobbed them at the floor. The sound of Darren's chuckle floated above her as she climbed inside the ring. She felt the floor reverberate as he paced around the ring, amping himself up. All she wanted to do was blow off some steam, not get a lesson. Bare-handed scrapping would have been the perfect remedy for that, but apparently he wasn't in the mood to humor her.
She proved to him long ago that she was an excellent boxer. Her neighbor, Costas, had taught her the sport when she was just a kid, against much protest from her mother. She'd spent every free moment of her childhood sparring with his four sons in their boxing club down the street, learning Greek curse words.
In the Army, she'd learned jujitsu. After Gerry recruited her into Trinity, Darren had added tae kwon do and judo to her repertoire, but she had never learned to appreciate judo as much as Darren would have liked. She was fast with quick reflexes. She was, however, a woman and a small one, coming in at around a hundred and forty pounds. Darren never stopped emphasizing the need for her to learn how to take down larger opponents whenever he had the chance or that her life could depend upon it someday.
Taking an unenthused stance in the ring, she found Darren's amused eyes looking at her I'm-not-happy-about-this face. Judo it was going to be.
"You ready?" he asked. She didn't miss the taunting tone he laced into the question.
"Do your worst," she grumbled.
Holding her arms akimbo, she sidestepped as did he. Soon they were circling each other like two hungry predators, eyes locked.
"Where's your mind at?" Darren broke the silence.
"It's here."
"We'll see about that."
He came toward her from the side and tried a throwing move. She pivoted, but found herself caught in a grapple. Grunting under his massive strength, she managed to slip from the hold only to end up in another.
"Come on! You know what you need to do!" he warned.
"I know, damn it!"
She pivoted and tried a leg sweep, but missed, catching the back of his knee with only her toe. Fine. She'd flip him instead. Freaking Darren and his stupid judo. Pivoting to the side, she dropped her knee and pulled him down with her, but as soon as he started to budge, he yanked her back up and shook her in their grapple.
"No! No Sutemi-waza!" he yelled, scolding her sacrifice technique.
It was supposed to make an attacker think he'd pinned the victim, but the victim would then come back with a grappling move once on the ground. She often fumbled with leg sweeps because men were so much heavier and larger than her, so she resorted to bringing attackers to the ground, much like in jujitsu. It wasn't the first time Darren had scolded her for being so predictable, but she still had yet to shed the habit. It was why she loathed judo. She wasn't good at it and who had time for things they weren't good at?
"But I'm good at Sutemi-waza!" she snarled through his hold around her neck. She tried another leg sweep, but he didn't budge. A clean strike to his lower rib cage gave her some satisfaction.
It must have pricked a nerve because he taunted, "Fine! Go ahead."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "No Death for the Wicked"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Drea Damara.
Excerpted by permission of BHC Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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