𝓒𝓸𝓵𝓭 𝓐𝓼 𝓘𝓬𝓮 [𝕮𝖍𝖆𝖊𝖓𝖓𝖎𝖊]

14

The girl would be dead by now, Madame Lee thought, picking at her egg sandwich, if Rosé had decided to follow her orders. It had neem an ugly decision, but in the end , necessary. One of those horrible choices a commander in chief had to make for the sake of the greater good. She'd never had to make one of those decisions before, and it haunted her, when little else did.
Maybe Rose never received her instructions. She hadn't responded to the last transmission, though she might have been to busy. Or maybe she got the instructions and decided to disobey them. She'd never done that before, he took orders like a machine, with no sorrow or pleasure, her soul and conscience frozen in a block of ice.

Oh, God, she hoped so. She hoped for once Rose went with her gut rather than her orders. Chae-rin had no choice but to make that order. If Rose delayed, or chose not to kill the girl, there might be enough time to prove she was harmless.

Time. They were running out of time. They had another clue to the Rule of Seven, Kang Seulgi was in place at Kai's main residence and managed to come up with a connection to a diamond mine in Africa that employed thousands of workers. Again, owned by Kai, and he'd made no effort to divest himself of it. If the planned explosion went through, the carnage would be hideous, and no one would think Kai had anything to do with it. He'd lose a bundle.
So why was he doing this, if it wasn't for money? Lust, revenge, sheer boredom? It could be all of those things. Kai was a spoiled baby who liked shiny toys and big explosion.
And Chae-rin had finally found out for certain when some of those noisy explosions were scheduled to take place. April twentieth. And the knowledge chilled her to the bone.

--

Rose Park didn't let herself sleep. That was an indulgence for the weak, something that could wait until the assignment was complete. In the meantime she could close her eyes and let the feeling of physical satisfaction drain through her body, shutting off her mind at the same time. She wasn't kind of a woman to take regrets and mistakes interfere with her life. Taking Jennie Kim to bed was most definitely a mistake. And she didn't regret it for a moment.

She'd looked so stricken. From the admittedly hurried intel she'd received on her it was a pretty sure thing that she'd just given her the best ride of her life, and instead of purring she'd looked shattered.
She'd expected to fuck her to sleep so that she had a few hours to figure out what the hell she was going to do about her. And instead, she was the one lying in a postcoital daze, while she must be wide awake wherever she was.

She wasn't the best she'd ever had, far from it. She'd had sex with women trained for such high-level work, she'd had affairs with women who loved sex and their bodies and knew how to make the most of both. She'd had sex with women madly, desperately in love with her, and she'd even had sex with a woman who hated her. She wondered if Jennie fit in that category. Probably.

She'd even made love, long, long ago Joy had been a frail, and she'd gotten her out of war-torn Sarajevo and fallen in love by the time they'd reached England. She'd been a sweet, generous lover and she would have died for her. And almost did.
She was younger then, of course. And in her twenty-six years of hard living, that was the only time she'd ever let herself be vulnerable. She still had the knife scar from when she tried to gut her. The Committee had neglected to inform her that beneath that innocent exterior was a traitor and a killer, one whose skills matched hers. Almost.

Jennie Kim had been angry, resentful and remarkably inexperienced, if she could trust her judgment, and she usually could. She'd planned how she was going to take her, and there were no surprises, she'd responded exactly as she meant her to. No, scratch that. There was one major surprise.

Her own response.

She was adept at turning off any distracting thoughts, and she did so now. she couldn't afford to be lying in bed, mooning over an upright lawyer who was going to cease to exist for her in a few short hours.
And she'd been gone too long. her instincts came awake, full force, and she jumped out of bed, and she felt colder than she had in her entire life.