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  Contents

  Gaia

  Unstimulating

  Tatiana

  Normal Girl

  Sam

  The Good Guys

  Ed

  Falling

  Jake

  So Intoxicating

  Tatiana

  Impossible

  Tatiana

  Victory Hug

  Gaia

  Hatred

  Tatiana

  Stare

  Karate Chop

  Ed

  Heart Monitor

  Gaia

  Sneak Peek of Fearless #29: ‘Lust’

  To Nall

  GAIA

  When I was very little–I mean braids and teddy bears little–my mother used to read to me from Little Women every night before bed. She used to read to me from a lot of books, but Little Women is the one I remember the best. Like everyone else who’s ever read the book, I wanted to be Jo. Jo was cool. Jo was a writer, even though women weren’t supposed to be writers. Jo spurned men. Jo took care of everybody. And above all, Jo wasn’t pretty–she was awkward and unkempt and a tomboy. In short, I probably wanted to be Jo because I already was Jo. I was never going to be the beautiful, admired, gracious Meg or the sweet, meek, victim Beth. And Amy? I pretty much just wanted to kick that annoying little twit in the head.

  But the one thing Jo had that I wanted most was her sisters. (Except Amy.) She would have done anything for them and they for her. There was this bond between them that was like nothing I had in my life. My parents were great, but it wasn’t the same. I wanted a confidant, someone to have adventures with, someone to share my daydreams and my nightmares with. Someone who would understand. I wanted that unconditional love and friendship that was all over the pages of Little Women.

  But as many times as I asked and begged for a little sister, the answer was always the same. “Maybe someday . . . ,” my mother would say, a sad, wistful look in her eyes. I know she wanted more kids, but I also know that she and my father had a seriously complicated life, what with Loki sneaking around and pretending he was my father so he could take me out of school and coach me and try to brainwash me. They probably wanted to wait until things calmed down. Well, they never did. And then she was killed.

  So the closest I ever came to a sister was Tatiana. I’m not saying we ever approached anything like unconditional love, but I would say we had an understanding. We lived together, we shared a room, and our parents were clearly in love (or so I thought). It was impossible not to draw the conclusion that we might be sisters one day and that in some ways we already were.

  You see, we were in it together. (Again, so I thought.) We bonded over our superspy parents and the constant level of mind-bending insanity in our lives. I thought we were on the same side–that we would be there for each other no matter what. And I could almost see a future where we’d become really close. It felt like it was almost destined, you know? I mean, where else was I going to find someone who had as screwed up a life as I did? Someone who understood it all.

  But as usual, I was wrong. Tatiana betrayed me in a way I never would have thought possible. She tried to kill me. Betrayal doesn’t get much more serious than that.

  So much for sisters.

  Maybe it’s true, what they say. Blood is thicker than water. You shouldn’t trust anyone but your family. Your true family. Your blood.

  Huh.

  The only blood relative I have that I know is alive is Loki. The evil, psychotic, scum-sucking maggot monster of death.

  Sometimes the irony of life just makes the head spin.

  unstimulating

  She couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t gotten worked up and focused and generally jazzed during a fight.

  Broken

  IT WASN’T A UNIQUE EXPERIENCE FOR Gaia Moore, wandering the streets of New York City with nowhere to go. It wasn’t even a unique experience for her to believe her father was dead, that she was next, that around every corner she passed could be the gun that held the bullet that would end her life. It was just that it had been so long since she had been so entirely alone. Weeks, even. Months.

  There was no one left.

  Gaia pulled her collar up against the cold breeze that blew harder and more bitingly with each passing moment. It was late spring already, but then, Manhattan never seemed to adhere to the Farmer’s Almanac. The island had taken on the general attitude of its inhabitants and had mastered the ability to give an “Up yours!” to even the likes of Mother Nature. And so here was this winter wind on the heels of a warm spring day. At least it kept the throngs of people off the streets and inside, watching their rented movies and eating their delivery food. Fewer innocents for Gaia to trample. She turned a corner and bent into the wind.

  Just above the soft worn cotton of her jacket, Gaia made sure her eyes were free and peeled. Natasha had been captured and was now in the custody of the CIA. At this very moment she was being questioned, interrogated, maybe even beaten (one could dream). But Tatiana was still out there somewhere. She could be anywhere. And she still had orders to kill Gaia.

  Not if I kill you first, Gaia thought, her rage bubbling over from her heart into her thoughts. It was still hard to swallow, the fact that Tatiana was in on it. The fact that everything they’d been through together had been a lie. That she’d actually been snowed by a little blond DKNY-sporting fake. In the beginning Tatiana had acted so helpless, like she didn’t know how to fight, like she didn’t understand the simple art of tracking someone. How many times had Gaia risked her own neck to help Tatiana? And she’d actually been proud of the way Tatiana was coming along. How she was learning to take care of herself, kick some butt of her own. Even if she was also turning into a materialistic, party-animal Friend of Heather. But it was all an act.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Gaia spoke into the collar of her jacket, her warm breath heating her cheeks and mouth. So she’d lost Tatiana. Big deal. She’d lost more important people in her lifetime. Much more important. And if she bumped into the girl right now, she’d kick the crap out of her first and ask questions later. One question, actually. The only one that mattered.

  Where is my father?

  Yes, Natasha had claimed that he was dead. And Gaia had no reason not to believe her. Except, of course, that everything else the woman had ever said or done had been a lie. At this point Gaia gave her father a fifty-fifty chance of still being down with the breathing folk. But she was a hundred percent sure that Tatiana knew the truth. And those were good odds to be working with.

  If she only knew where the hell the girl was.

  “All alone, no place to go, all alone, no place to go.”

  Gaia paused for a moment, taken off guard by the rambling words of the homeless man who suddenly blocked her path. He looked at her with wild, blank eyes, shaking a battered blue-and-white coffee cup in front of her, the piddling change inside rattling pathetically. He was bundled inside about four flannel coats but somehow still looked impossibly cold. He shuffled toward her, his gooey gaze settling somewhere around the bridge of her nose.

  “All alone, no place to go, all alone, no place to go . . .”

  She knew he was just one of the thousands of unlucky people who had been driven insane by a life on the streets, but for a moment it felt like he was looking right through her skin into her heart. Somehow he was extracting the e
xact words she was trying to keep from eating away at her.

  “All alone, no place to go, all alone, no place to go . . .”

  “All right, all right!” Gaia said. She stuffed her hand into the depths of her jeans pocket and came out with a quarter. “Here,” she said, slapping the coin into the cup. The man didn’t acknowledge it—he simply took up the refrain once more.

  “All alone, no place to go, all alone, no place to go . . .”

  Gaia started to run.

  She ran to feel the wind on her face, to get her blood pumping, to hear the roar of the cars and people passing by in her ears, to drown out the man’s ceaseless words.

  “All alone, no place to go, all alone, no place to go . . .”

  She ran and ran, without even realizing that she was headed for Ed’s building until she was standing right in front of it. The tears that had been ripped from her eyes by the stinging wind made little streaks across her temples, tightening the skin. Gaia pulled in a breath and hugged her jacket to herself. She stared at the door.

  This was it. This was the place she always used to be able to come to when there was no place else to go. Ed had been the one person who was there for her, without fail. But she’d screwed that up, too, hadn’t she? She’d screwed everything up.

  Trying not to think about the comfort that lay just beyond those sleek glass doors, Gaia turned her steps toward Washington Square Park. It was time to admit the inevitable. If she was going to get any rest tonight, which she’d need if she was going to track down Tatiana tomorrow, then she was going to have to scare herself up a park bench. Washington Square Park was downtown’s Motel 6 for runaways and druggies. The only difference was a person didn’t need to lay out any cash to get a bed.

  Gaia slipped into the park by the west entrance and started along the circle. A large woman dozed, sitting up, on the first bench, surrounded by dozens of shopping bags full of clothing and rags and heaven only knew what else. There was a shopping cart tied to the bench by a red bandanna, and a kitten was curled up in the child’s seat among a bunch of tangled scarves. On the next bench was a scrawny kid wearing barely enough clothing to keep him comfortable on a hot summer’s day, shivering away even as he slept. Gaia averted her eyes and swallowed back her pity. He was probably an addict who had left a perfectly good home behind him somewhere, and at that moment Gaia couldn’t feel sorry for him. All she could think about was the warm bed out there with his name on it.

  Finally Gaia came across an empty bench, and she glanced around to make sure the immediate area was creep-free. Satisfied, she lay down, her face toward the back of the seat, and curled her arm under her head.

  Don’t think about anything, she told herself. You can deal with it all tomorrow.

  Soon Gaia felt herself starting to drift, and she silently thanked the stars for her ability to fall asleep anywhere. But just as her thoughts were fading to black, the entire bench shook from the force of a powerful blow. Gaia sat up straight and looked right into the stubble-covered face of a square-shouldered, square-jawed, totally strung-out junkie. His eyes were lined with red and his breathing was ragged. He bared his teeth like a rabid dog.

  “This is my bench, girlie,” he said, gracing Gaia with a cloud of breath that smelled of rotten beer.

  “Leave me alone,” Gaia said, starting to lie down again. She was definitely not in the mood.

  The junkie walked around to the front of the bench, grabbed the back of Gaia’s jacket, and yanked her to the ground. Her shoulder hit the asphalt and her head bounced against the hard ground. Quickly Gaia rolled over onto her back, grimacing. She scrunched up her nose and tried not to breathe.

  “Look, when I got here, the bench was empty,” Gaia said. “You don’t look like the brightest guy in the world, but I’m sure you’ve heard of finders keepers.”

  “F’you won’t give up the bench, I got no problem takin’ it from ya,” the guy said.

  Gaia rolled her eyes. For once, she didn’t feel like fighting, but she’d already had more than enough of the grandstanding banter part of the evening. She had a feeling that this was the type of guy who could stand here and trade threats until he passed out, but there was no telling how long that would take. Besides, the sweet taste of sleep was still clinging to her, and she wanted to get back there. So she decided to take the shortcut. She reached out and shoved him.

  The junkie staggered back, surprised, then narrowed his eyes and threw a wide, arcing punch. Gaia easily blocked it, grasped his arm, and turned into him, jabbing her elbow back into his stomach. He doubled over slightly, and she brought her skull back into his with a crack. When she spun away from him and took her fighting stance, he already looked pretty beaten up. Gaia was about to let down her guard when he let out a battle cry and rushed her, tackling her right to the ground.

  Gaia tried to push him off her, waiting for her adrenaline to kick in, waiting for that rush of energy, but it didn’t come. She was just tired. And not a little bit bored. As she contemplated this, the junkie got one good punch into her gut and another to her jaw that sent stars across her vision. Gaia had had enough. She propped her calves under his torso and lifted, flipping him up and over her head onto his back. He let out a groan as he fell, and Gaia got to her feet to hover over him.

  “Are we done yet?” she asked.

  He waved his hands in front of his face and winced. “We’re done! We’re done! Please don’t hurt me!”

  “Fine,” Gaia said, trying not to show how relieved she was. “Just get the hell out of here.”

  The junkie stood up, keeping his distance from Gaia, then ran off awkwardly into the night. Gaia trudged back over to her bench, feeling heavy and low and disappointed. She couldn’t remember the last time she hadn’t gotten worked up and focused and generally jazzed during a fight. And right now she felt about as alive as she did in her highly unstimulating math class every day. What was wrong with her? It wasn’t like she hadn’t been in places as depressing as this before. She’d spent almost her entire life in them.

  But this time was somehow different. When she reached inside and tried to summon up some kind of motivating emotion—anger, vengefulness—all she felt was . . . broken.

  Gaia lay down on the bench again, her brow furrowed as she put her head down on the pillow of her bent arm.

  Don’t think about anything, she told herself again. You can deal with it all tomorrow.

  Then she closed her eyes and let sleep finally come.

  Safe House

  TATIANA’S HAND SHOOK VIOLENTLY as she attempted for the third time to master the simple act of inserting a key into a lock. She blamed her shivering on the fact that she hadn’t expected the sudden shift in the weather and so hadn’t dressed for it. She also hadn’t expected, however, to see her mother get dragged off by a couple of huge men in black spy gear.

  “Damn it. You must focus,” she said to herself through her teeth. If her mother could see her now, she’d be ashamed. Tatiana had to pull herself together. Her mother was counting on her.

  Finally Tatiana gripped her right hand with her left to steady it, and mercifully the key slid into the lock. There was a moment of suspense as she turned it, but the lock clicked and the door swung open with a slow, angry creak, as if it had just been woken from a deep slumber. Tatiana had the right place. She was home.

  She slipped through the door and quickly punched the code her mother had made her memorize into the keypad on the near wall, the red light flashing menacingly as she worked. After hitting all the numbers, Tatiana pressed her thumb into the enter key and squeezed her eyes shut. The alarm let out a loud beep, and when she opened her eyes again, the red light had turned to green. Tatiana closed the door behind her and fastened all five safety locks. She leaned back against the door and allowed herself to breathe. She was safe. Alone, but safe.

  Peeling off her lightweight jacket, Tatiana decided to explore her new abode. In the semidarkness she found a light switch and flicked it on, illuminating the
small living room with the weak light from a single overhead fixture. She’d been hearing about the Alphabet City safe house ever since she and her mother had arrived in New York City, but she’d never been here. The moment she saw the place in the light, she felt an almost painful longing for the lofty space of the Seventy-second Street apartment.

  Your mother is most likely in a jail cell right now, she told herself. Quit your whining.

  She breathed in the musty, sooty smell of the air and took a few steps into the tiny square living room. The walls were plain and white, and an old but comfortable-looking corduroy couch stood to one side. A table next to it held a single glass lamp with a dingy shade. Tatiana walked over to the one piece of artwork on the wall—a framed print of Renoir’s The Luncheon of the Boating Party—and lifted it from the nail that held it in place. Just as she’d been told, there was a square, gray safe door built into the wall. Tatiana quickly dialed in the combination, which she’d also committed to memory, and the door popped open, letting out a hiss of air.

  There were stacks upon stacks of bills inside—American dollars, Canadian dollars, Mexican pesos, British pounds, and Russian rubles. Tatiana grabbed a few twenties from one of the bundles of dollars, then pulled out a stack of passports. As she flipped through them—there were at least ten with her picture, each from a different country—she smirked sadly at the names her mother had given her. Annie Whitmore, Corrine Deveneaux, Marianna Alonso, Marcella Tuscano.

  I could just disappear, Tatiana thought, allowing the seduction of such a thought to momentarily send her pulse racing. She gazed at her picture on the Italian passport and imagined it—imagined herself on the white sands of the Mediterranean, sipping something fruity and letting her bare back bathe in the sun. But as quickly as the image came, she squelched it. She wasn’t going anywhere without her mother. Not now. Not ever.

  She took the last items out of the safe, a nice, sleek .45 pistol and a full clip, then crammed the passports back inside. She shoved the clip into the gun, savoring the menacing click as it locked into place. After making sure the safety was on, Tatiana slipped the gun between her waistband and her back. Then she closed the safe and hung the painting again. She had to check the rest of her provisions.