first rule of KTS is no arguing with the doctor who’s patching up your ass. We only have one doc on the team and don’t want her to abandon us.”
Olive snorted. “You guys are the cool team,” she said. “I could never abandon you.”
“Shh,” Laila replied. “It’s the only way I have to keep this one in check. Or to not get any grand ideas about going off on his own.”
I huffed. “I don’t need the drama of running my own team all the time. It’s bad enough when I have to do it on occasion.”
The vast majority of KTS was broken up into teams of five to ten agents, each usually working as separate units. Sometimes we grouped up, if our missions overlapped, or reorganized briefly if a certain subset of skills was needed for a particular task. But for the most part, we each stayed with our own team, receiving an assignment and seeing it through to the end.
For the past two years, Laila’s team had been focusing on the Russian mob, and more specifically, focusing on one clan, which was heading what our team suspected was one of the largest human trafficking rings in the world.
There was a special place in Hell for people who harmed innocents.
And, one could hope, an even more special place for those who made their living by selling men, women, and children.
“I thought the first rule of KTS was to get the bad guys,” I said, clenching my jaw when a wave of pain washed over me as Olive poked and prodded at the wound on my back.
“Wrong,” Laila said. “That’s, at minimum, rule three.”
“What’s rule two?” I gritted, trying to keep my voice even as white-hot agony radiated through me.
“Rule two is to never argue with your team leader.”
“Sure it—” I broke off, biting back a curse when Olive did something that rained fire down my spine. Sweat beaded on my forehead, and my head went fuzzy. But I still didn’t want to be sidelined for fourteen fucking days. I’d had worse injuries, and the bad guys were still out there.
Starting with the ones who’d killed our source.
“Two weeks light duty,” Olive repeated. “And if you argue, I’ll make it three.”
I made a face, trying to keep my voice even. “You know my mom used to use that same threat with me,” I gritted.
“Did it work?”
Yes. Yes, it had.
But I didn’t admit that aloud. Instead, I focused on keeping still when I was really, really done with all the wound tending. Slap a Band-Aid on. Or hell, just rub some dirt in it and be done.
Fucking doctors.
Wanted to be all sanitary and shit.
But since Olive didn’t appear to intend to stop the doctoring anytime soon, I shut up and held still, my gaze moving from Laila, who was transferring files from the USB onto KTS’s servers, to Ava.
Tiny. Curvy.
Strong as hell. A woman who was a foot shorter than me and still could easily knock me to my ass, and I knew most of her dirty tricks.
But she always seemed to have more dirty tricks.
When I’d asked her about those tricks a week ago, while we’d been preparing for this mission, asked her how she’d become so adept at hand-to-hand combat, her pale brown eyes had filled with pain.
Such pain that I’d actually stepped toward her, wanting to take her into my arms, to hold her close and stroke a hand up and down her spine, promising that everything would be okay. I’d held her once, and it had soothed every ache inside me. But we’d been pretending since then—to only be teammates, that we had not been intimate for a week, that we hadn’t shared all of what we’d shared.
Glorious, physical satisfaction.
But so much more than that.
Or at least I’d thought it was more.
I’d shared. I’d opened up. And it was only later, after we’d come back to headquarters, when the job was starting up again and she’d gone back to being distant, that I’d realized what she hadn’t given.
I’d told her about growing up with apathetic parents, how that used to make me angry until I’d traveled around the world and seen so many other places. That was before I’d realized how much I’d had—a roof over my head, parents who didn’t have to choose between food and paying the electricity bill. Were they a little out of touch? Certainly. Did I have a closer relationship with my best friend’s mom rather than my own? Also, yes. Did I