Shatter by Joan Swan Page A

Mitch’s whole body tightened so hard, he swallowed a moan and looked away.
    “Feel better?” he asked.
    “Not really. I think my head’s going to explode.”
    She came toward him and his tension ratcheted up.
    “What are you doing?” she asked, standing by the bed. Naked beneath that robe. One pull of the tie and she would be his. His to touch. To taste. To take.
    Refocus . “Writing down the things I know, adding in what you’ve told me, trying to piece it together.”
    She sat on the bed and reached out to pet Dex. The dog put his head back down with a heavy sigh of contentment.
    “Try to get some sleep,” he said, hoping she’d take the hint and get out of reach.
    Her hand stopped moving over Dex’s fur and lay right next to Mitch’s thigh. “I’m exhausted, but can’t turn my brain off.”
    He wanted do things to her that would make her brain stop working altogether. Guaranteed.
    His cell rang. He blew out a breath of frustration and rolled toward Halina, sliding his phone from his back pocket. She smelled of flowers and spice and made him think about licking her . . . everywhere.
    His phone display read GI JOE and killed his sexual fantasy. He swung his legs off the bed, pushing to his feet and crossing the room so Halina wouldn’t overhear his conversation with Owen.
    A former ally to Schaeffer, Colonel Owen Young had switched sides when the team uncovered Schaeffer’s blatant attempt to use Owen as a scapegoat. He’d aided the team’s escape to safety during a recent confrontation gone wrong, ending in the car accident that had put Schaeffer in a coma. Mitch knew Owen wasn’t in this for purely altruistic reasons, but neither was Mitch.
    Working for DARPA as a department head gave Owen connections and access to information the team couldn’t get, even with all the high-level, inside contacts the team had. That’s why Mitch had called in a request for deeper information on Halina while he’d been in the storage unit and she’d been sleeping.
    But Owen was also still working for Schaeffer in an off-the-record capacity, which made Mitch think hard about everything Owen said and did, even though the man had never yet crossed the team. Owen’s boss had loaned him to Schaeffer for some undisclosed research supposedly related to his work with the Armed Forces Committee, when he’d really planned on using Owen the same way Mitch and the team were using him now.
    The real difference—which Owen was well aware of—was that Mitch and the team wouldn’t fuck him upside down and backward the way Schaeffer would in a heartbeat.
    “Yeah,” Mitch answered his phone.
    “You’ll want to rethink using Beloi as your key witness against Schaeffer.”
    Fuck. Mitch’s stomach tightened in preparation. He dropped his head and rubbed his temples. “Well, good morning to you too.”
    “The Beloi family,” Owen continued, “is one of the families on our watch list. They’re former KGB members who were cut when the regime switched over after the Cold War.
    “A lot of those guys went bad, started running every type of criminal ring you could imagine—money laundering, protection rackets, drugs, weapons, security for big criminals, even contract killings. Some of the better ones went on to become double agents. The Belois were of the darker persuasion and unique in that they made the spy business—even after it went south—their family business.
    “Halina’s not included per se, but her extended family, the people who raised her from the age of nine after her parents were killed, are. Everyone listed on the watch is male. She is mentioned in the dossier, but only as the female orphan of parents taken out as revenge for a prior assassination the father executed.”
    Mitch closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to the lids. “Does she know all this?”
    “Doesn’t look like it. In fact it looks like the pattern throughout the family was to keep the females out of it. Something about the culture. Must