Something inside her had snapped this afternoon, and she had stopped caring, stopped planning, stopped waiting. She wasn’t going to loll around in this fucking wheelchair, letting Archer hurt her in ways big and small, letting Mal get close to her again. He was here to kill her husband, to finish what she’d failed to accomplish. But Mal had a second agenda, to find and destroy Archer’s latest pet project and bring that down too, and he couldn’t kill Archer until he’d taken care of that little detail.
Sophie didn’t give a flying fuck. Archer had his iron in a dozen fires, all of them disreputable, ranging from Ponzi schemes he was running for the hell of it, since he didn’t need the money, to parts for nuclear warfare, to biological weapons. Wipe out one, and the others would just keep going under new management.
She wasn’t going to wait any longer. She was going to put a bullet in her husband’s brain, one long overdue, and it would be up to Mal to pick up the pieces. If that included killing her, then so be it. Anything was better than waiting.
She sat in hot water till the skin on her hands wrinkled. She washed and washed every trace of him away from her. She still couldn’t get away from the phantom memory of him inside her, pumping into her, and each time she thought about it her stomach knotted with anger and confusion, and she refused to consider why. She had no concrete reason to hate Mal. In fact, she knew damned well she didn’t hate him—she just wanted to cut his throat.
She laughed without humor. She was being emotional and ridiculous, the same flaws that had gotten her into this mess. What the fuck was wrong with her? You didn’t hate a man for giving you the best orgasms of your life with just about zero effort. He was after the same thing she was—he’d even given her a gun. He was an ally, albeit an unwilling one.
She didn’t want an ally. She’d been alone in this for too long, and she was afraid to trust anyone, even another Committee agent. Maybe especially another Committee agent—she knew as well as he did just how ruthless they were required to be. She was collateral damage and she accepted that fact. She just didn’t want Mal to accept it.
She pulled her French doors closed. There was no way she could lock them, but she hoped Mal would get the message when he came back upstairs. She turned the air conditioner up high and levered herself onto her bed, using only her strong arms, then turned off the light, plunging the room into darkness. If she looked hard enough, she could find the pinprick of red light that gave away one of the surveillance cameras—whoever had installed them hadn’t made much of an effort to hide them. For just this moment, for a short while, she was going to indulge herself. She was going to lie quiet and still in the darkness where no one could see her. She was going to stay very still and do something she hadn’t done in almost four years.
She was going to cry. She had felt the tears on her face earlier, but she hadn’t let go. Now she was going to release the tight hold she had on her emotions and sob.
Ever since she’d found out the truth about Archer, she hadn’t dared give in to her emotions. Even when she was lying on the ground, a bullet in her back, vicious pain ripping through her, she hadn’t shed one tear. She’d been afraid if she started crying, she might never stop, and she had to survive. She wasn’t going to let Archer win.
Today she could cry. Today she could give in to all the disparate emotions that swirled around her and release some of the tension—she could cry for the lost years, for the stupid girl who’d been blinded by Archer’s charm, for the stupid woman who’d fucked Malcolm Gunnison knowing he didn’t care if she lived or died.
But she couldn’t. She was wound so tightly with fear and tension that she couldn’t let go. Tears would have broken through some of the stultifying despair. She felt like a kettle of water on a hot stove, the steam building up and no way to release it. She’d trained herself never to let go, and now when she needed to, for just a short, self-indulgent moment, she couldn’t.
She’d cried when he’d fucked her. Because that was what that encounter in the boathouse was. He’d taken her, she’d been too needy to resist, and she thought she remembered that her face had been wet. She tried to bring that feeling back, to push herself into tears, but it was like trying to force an orgasm. She could get just as far as the despair but no further. She lay in the dark, dry-eyed, alone, and abandoned.
She was being ridiculous. She finally had someone she didn’t have to lie to. They were hardly compatriots—in fact, he felt more like an enemy than Archer did at the moment, but the truth was, for the first time in two years she should have hope. After all, he was the one who’d brought the handguns onto the island, though he’d been stupid enough to let her get her hands on one.
Though that wasn’t like Malcolm Gunnison. She told herself he was a dirty, treacherous snake, but he wasn’t stupid. Unlike her, he didn’t make mistakes. He would get the job done and get off the island, without letting any foolish weaknesses make him doubt his mission. He was a machine. She was human. It was no wonder they were mismatched.
But machines weren’t subject to impulses, to emotions, to unexpected acts. And she knew what she was going to do.
Despite Mal’s earlier words, he made no attempt to bring her down to dinner, proving once again that he was a smart man. If he didn’t keep his distance, there was no telling what she might say or do that would incriminate him. He’d pushed her too far that afternoon, and he knew it. It would be one thing if they’d just gone through the motions of hasty sex. It had been more than that, though, and she hated it. There had been emotion flowing between them, feelings, ones she refused to admit to in the aftermath, ones he wouldn’t notice in the first place. He just thought she was pissed.
He was giving her time to calm down, and she heard his and Archer’s voices drift up from the veranda by the pool, the whisper of the waves from the ocean beyond coming and going, obliterating their words. It didn’t matter. They would both be lying to each other—nothing they said would be important.
She lay still in the bed. Elena brought her a dinner tray, but Sophie sent it away, the thought of food making her stomach twist. Never eat before a job, Isobel Lambert, the Ice Queen, had told her. Tonight she had the biggest job of her life. She would do the one thing she could to break the bonds that tied her, the sticky spiderweb that trapped her with Archer and Mal. If she died doing it, so be it.
It was after midnight when she slipped out of her bed, reaching beneath her mattress for the handgun and taking it with her into the bathroom. She’d done a thorough cleaning when she’d first taken it, so she made do with a simple field cleaning now before reloading it. There were enough bullets—even if her aim was off it was more than sufficient to kill Archer and then run like hell. With luck, Joe’s first instinct would be to go to his boss and try to stanch the blood, and if miracles happened, she could get back to her room before anyone noticed she was gone. After all, she was a cripple—how could she get up and down the stairs to shoot Archer?
She could try to ride that, or she could simply run like hell and hope Joe didn’t find her. Elena had been right—there wasn’t one inch of the island she didn’t know, and with Archer dead, who’d be paying Joe’s bills? She’d been in this world long enough to know that loyalty meant nothing—it was the bottom line that mattered. If there was no practical reason for Joe to find Archer’s killer, then he’d simply leave, go somewhere else and find new employment.
And maybe pigs would fly. In the end she was willing to risk it. She couldn’t wait any longer.
She climbed back into her wheelchair and headed out onto the balcony. The night was still and calm, and she could hear Archer quite clearly. He was fucking one of th
e women, encouraging her with particularly vicious threats, and she could tell by the sound in his voice he was close. Archer never minded having an audience—in fact, he preferred it, though she’d always refused that game when they were together. Where was Mal? Was he fucking someone else, side by side? Getting a blow job while he watched. Hell, was he the one being fucked by Archer?
She couldn’t see that happening, though Archer would have loved it. So where the hell was Mal?
Joe would probably be in bed, though he was always on call when Archer wanted him. Mal could be anywhere—out swimming again, wandering around the island, asleep in the room next door. No, she would have heard him come in—she’d been paying careful attention. She looked out at the dark ocean, but there was no sign of him. She’d watched him earlier, slicing through the waves, his long, sleek body beautiful in the clear gulf waters. In fact, she couldn’t look away, and when he finally gave in to the gathering dusk and waded in, she watched him until he disappeared from her sight. It wasn’t until then she realized she’d been absurdly tense, barely breathing, her body growing warm.
She had to get the hell out of here, before she made another monumental mistake, and she was more than willing to risk her life to keep that from happening. She wasn’t worried about reclaiming a normal life. She was hardly likely to lose her mind over some damned man when . . . if she got off the island. Clearly Archer and Mal were anomalies. Maybe she was attracted to danger. Except the classically handsome hit man from New York whom Archer had imported had left her cold.
In fact, she couldn’t think of very many things Archer and Mal had in common. The dangerous world they lived in—but that was her world as well, and if anything she wanted to escape from that life. Archer was a sadist, Mal a straightforward bastard. All she could guess was that some strange trick of chemistry had opened her legs to Malcolm Gunnison, and the sooner she got away from him the better.
It was past two when she heard the footsteps on the stairs, the door next to her open and close. She held her breath, panicked that he’d decided a late-night visit would be a good idea, but within moments the lights went out, and everything next door was still.
She wasn’t going to be fooled that easily, and she waited a full hour, sitting in her chair, alert, the gun tucked beside her. Even if Mal was trying to outwait her, see if she was truly asleep, he would have dropped off by now. Archer spent his nights plying his guests with alcohol, and even the most adept of men—and she did consider Mal very good at his job—would end up having to swallow a few. Mal would be sound asleep by now.
Besides, if he’d had any doubts about her, nothing would have stopped him from coming into her room and checking. Nothing would have stopped him from coming into her room, into her bed, into her body, if he’d had any interest in repeating this afternoon in a horizontal position. But he hadn’t. He’d done what he had to do in the boathouse and it looked as if she wouldn’t have to put up with it again, thank God. Because putting up with it wasn’t really the right term for the most shattering sex of her life.