Riding The Edge - Elise Faber Page 0,36

triceps. “Just a graze. Thankfully, I moved fast enough to at least avoid that.”

I studied the mark, debated for a moment at retrieving my own medical kit for the knife wound, but knew we might need it later.

It was better to conserve resources.

Especially, if the rest of the team was in the same position as us.

Right then. On to the next thing. Reaching for my belt buckle, I yanked it out of its loops.

“Um,” Ava began. “What are you doing?”

I undid the button, tugged down the zipper.

“Getting naked.”

Eighteen

Southern Italy

Unknown hrs local time

Ava

“Getting naked?” I asked.

More like squawked, but that was mostly because he’d sprawled on his back and was shoving his pants down his legs.

“Seriously, Dan. What in the fuck are you doing?”

He reached into the front of his boxer briefs, and I slammed my eyes closed. Why in the fuck was I slamming my eyes closed? I’d seen it, and I’d loved it, and I wanted to get my hands and mouth and tongue all over it again—

But by the time I managed to open my eyes again, his hand was out, his pants were coming back up, and he was tossing a small package my way.

I caught it reflexively then winced, remembering just where his hand had been.

“New from the tech squad,” he said. “Small blade in the hem of my boxers. You’ll have to open it up though. Fred”—the man back at main headquarters who designed a lot of our equipment—“just threw it in at the last minute. I swear, he used duct tape and superglue.”

Lifting it up so I could see the small silver package, wrapped in what indeed looked like duct tape, I began working at the seam.

With my teeth.

Probably, I should have been grossed out.

But frankly, I’d had my mouth in worse places, and . . . also I didn’t consider Dan’s cock a worse place.

Glorious, maybe.

Ugh.

Enough.

No decisions in this cell. Even if his words, his lack of disgust had me wrangling with what I’d always thought was the truth about who I was.

Eventually, I got the edge on the package open and was unpeeling the tape. “This is far below Fred’s usual standards.”

Dan buttoned his pants, yanked up the zipper. “He’s trying to figure out the safest mode of blade transport. It’s more difficult than the sole of a shoe, putting it in a waistband or hem of a piece of clothing.”

“You don’t want to stab yourself trying to get it out.”

“Right,” he said. “Or just walking around.”

“But it needs to be small and relatively undetectable, especially during a potential pat-down.” I slanted a glance at him “Is this where you tell me that your junk is so big, and that’s why they didn’t find it?”

A snort. “Not hardly.” His eyes flitted up, a cocky smile curving his mouth. “Although, this could be the point where I say you’ve seen it and . . .”

“It’s tiny?”

He mimed like I wounded him.

“Stop.” I smacked him lightly, kept unwrapping, even as I considered our options. The first thing I’d done when I’d woken up in the back of the van transporting us was to check our supplies. I’d run through our resources, painfully bound my wound in the back of the moving vehicle, checked that Dan was breathing. It hadn’t taken long to discover that all of our weapons had been taken.

Luna.

Poor Luna was probably tossed in the trash or the water somewhere, never to be used again.

I spared a moment for my poor rifle, most certainly discarded like a broken toy in some sad, dark place, and focused on getting out of here. “They knew about the blades in our boots, but not the first aid kits.”

“Or the underwear knives.”

I shuddered. “That’s not the name to call them.”

“Point made,” he said. “And taken.”

“Aside from bad word usage, they knew our room, and I’m guessing they also knew also about the surveillance, otherwise we would have seen them coming on the cameras.”

“Do you think they hacked it?”

I sighed, pulled the tiny knife from the plastic wrapping, and handed it to Dan. “I don’t know. But they would’ve had to, right? Either that, or we have another—” Breaking off, because I didn’t want to finish the sentence, I just shook my head.

He didn’t have that problem. “Traitor.”

“Right.” The question was, “Is this one new or the one we already know about?”

A nod. “Exactly.”

KTS didn’t exist in a vacuum. We’d had traitors before, those who gave in to the temptation of power or money. Daniel—the former agent