Chapter 20

CHAPTER TWENTY

I woke to the sound of Satin shrieking from the room in the plane where the fridge was. I leapt out of her bed, likely shredding her sheets, barreling in, ready to grab her and protect her with my body if we were going down.

But the plane still seemed like it was flying—and she was curled up into one of the chairs, looking at the phone in her hand, before throwing it away.

“What happened?” I asked, running to her side.

She didn’t answer me, she just pointed in the direction her phone had flown. I picked it up, and saw the screen—it was a story about how a bank manager in Moscow had unexpectedly died.

“This is bad, isn’t it,” I asked her.

“Yes,” she answered, before using her fingers to press her lower lip in to chew. She didn’t have any make-up on now, but she was still beautiful—and I knew I had to fix things for her. “That’s two drops compromised, Ace. That means there’s only the third, and who knows if the United States will even report it? It could get swept off the news by some silly holiday shopping news!”

I spied the time and date on the corner of her phone. After all of our jet-setting, we only had a day left.

“Does your information have to compete with the holidays?” I wanted to go on and say I’d rather take her to the moon than let her place herself in danger again, then thought better of it.

This was her mission, after all.

She frowned and bowed her head before quietly saying, “The timing is meaningful to me.”

If it meant something to her, it meant something to me, too.

“Okay then—how can I help?” I asked, kneeling down in the aisle, and placing a hand atop her armrest.

I watched her swallow and felt her thinking. “It’s clear my team’s been compromised. My enemies might’ve gotten lucky in Morocco, what with the paparazzi taking photos, but not in Russia, not without an inside man. So I can’t go to DC anymore—it’d be a death sentence for anyone I met.”

“What’d you need to do there?”

“Hand off a chip for its data to be announced on Ambitron’s channels.”

I recognized the name, they were a well known news corporation.

“I take it we can’t just drop you off at their front door?”

“Not unless I want to get their building bombed.”

I rocked my head back, slightly. “Hmm.”

She waited, one eyebrow cocked above her blindfold. “Hmm?” she asked.

“What if I knew a bombproof building with a direct line to every satellite over North America? Would you even need a news connection, if you could just get your information out, all over the internet?”

She pensively bit her lips. “People would be more likely to discount it as a prank, without the weight of an official news organization behind it.”

“I understand.” She wasn’t wrong—and there wasn’t much I could do about that part. “But would it lend some gravity to the situation if every MSA branch in the world shared your list at the same time?”

Satin quietly gasped and put her hand on top of mine. “You…you could do that?”

“I think so,” I said. I was pretty sure Royce hadn’t fired me, and I had a fantastic in with my branch of the MSA’s IT department. “Although you would definitely have to pay me.”

She rose up in her seat. “In what?” she asked, in an aggressive purr.

It was like her voice was lightning and my dick a lightning rod—but I didn’t want anything about our relationship to actually be transactional. That wasn’t me.

“It’s the kind of thing I would do for any client, Satin,” I quickly clarified. “I was just teasing.”

But the corners of her lips still curved up. “I wasn’t,” she said, and lifted the armrest between us.

I was frozen, as she leaned toward me, over the aisle. “Lay down, Ace,” she commanded—and I did so at once.