Lexi Blake - Dungeon Royale

And given up his work? Should Diana have left her children at home to stay with their mother? Should she have put that pressure on her marriage? Penny knew how hard it was for a relationship to survive that kind of burden. When she really looked at it, she’d driven Peter away because she wouldn’t make time for him. First there had been her father’s long battle with cancer and then her mother’s dementia. She’d made choices. Perhaps they’d been the right ones, but they’d led to her engagement dying a slow, pitiful death.

“It doesn’t matter now, George. I don’t blame you. You did what you could.”

“It does matter. Damn it, I don’t want you to end up a bitter old woman. It’s the last thing Mum would want.”

Penny stopped cold and turned back to her brother. His suit was plastered to his lanky body, his normally perfect hair bedraggled. There was no mistaking the fire in his eyes.

She felt a spark of her own. “I’m thirty-two. I’m hardly old.”

But she felt every single one of those days.

“You don’t date. When Diana and I offered to watch Mum so you could go out, you always turned us down. You don’t go out with friends. God, I don’t even know if you have friends. I’m worried because I don’t think Mum dying is going to change anything for you. I think you’ll just go on the same way. I think it’s gotten easy for you to be alone. I think it’s gotten easier for you to be angry than it is for you to forgive us. We weren’t as good as you, Pen. If it had been left up to me and Diana, she would have gone to a nursing home a long time ago.”

They had argued it was the best place for her, but Penny couldn’t send her mum to one of those places that reeked of urine and death and utter despair.

God, the last few months, it had been how her own home smelled.

Dying was a horrible business. Even when the death wasn’t her own.

“Come out to dinner with us. Just you and me and Diana. We’ll tell everyone else to take a hike. Just the three of us.”

“I want to go home.” She just wanted to be alone. She wanted to shut the door of her house and…what? Mourn? Wallow in self-pity? Eat ice cream and pretend like she wasn’t turning in to exactly what George was afraid of?

She’d stopped smiling. She used to bake cakes for her fellow employees and go to lunch with the “girls,” as she called them. She used to laugh and let them tease her about her crush on Damon.

It had all gotten to be too much. Even she could break.

Could she put herself back together? She’d made the choice to put her life on hold to take care of her parents. Could she find the girl she’d been?

George stared at her, his arms open. She could be mad at him or she could choose another path.

A sudden memory hit her. Her younger brother slugging an upperclassman at their school because he’d called Penny ugly. Diana had been there, holding her hand and promising her that everything would be all right. George had taken a black eye and Diana had taught her everything she knew about makeup.

They had been a little gang, the three of them. No one else could understand what it meant to have lost their parents. Others could sympathize, but they couldn’t understand the uniqueness of her grief.

She’d been strong for years and never quite realized what it had cost her. No smiles. No tears. No anything.

Grief hit her like a wave, rolling across her and bringing an odd sense of peace.

She let the umbrella fall away and stepped into her brother’s arms.

For the first time in years, she allowed herself to truly feel.

MI6 Headquarters

Seven months later

“What are you trying to say, Nigel?” Damon Knight looked across the wide, solid desk at the man who had been his handler for the last ten years. The very air seemed to have stilled around him.

Nigel sat forward, his graying hair perfectly coiffed and his eyes serious. They had come up through the ranks together, but Nigel had taken the analyst route while Damon liked to be in the field. He was rather afraid his wishes weren’t going to be taken into account now.

“Have you looked at the reports from the medical team?” Nigel asked.

Fuck. A hole was opening up in front of him and he wasn’t even close to being ready. He didn’t need to read the medical reports to know what was in them. “I’m perfectly fit.”

It had been seven months since his partner, his best friend, had walked into his office at The Garden and put a bullet in his chest. He’d sat there, bleeding out at his desk, visions of murder and revenge running through his dying brain.

And a deep regret that no one would miss him.

It had only been luck that one of the Doms at his club had dropped by to set up a scene for the evening. Otherwise, he would be dead.

“Not according to these reports you aren’t.” Nigel set the folder between them. “According to this, you’re permanently incapacitated. You lost an enormous amount of blood. There was some question about how long you were technically dead.”

He couldn’t help but answer through clenched teeth. “I’m not brain damaged.”

“Of course not, but it had to have affected you.”

“I’m not suffering from bloody PTSD.” He’d gone through every counseling session they’d forced on him. When the bloody hell had the Secret Intelligence Service become a bunch of psychobabbling, talk-about-their-feelings wankers?

He might have spent too much time with Ian Taggart, but the man had a point. Spies should have nerves of steel. If they didn’t, if they required weekly hour-long sessions to discuss their feelings, they bloody well shouldn’t be spies.

Nigel frowned. “Fine, let’s talk about the physical damage then. That bullet tore apart your left lung. The doctors were forced to remove a portion of it.”

“The good news is, I have a spare.” They had only been forced to remove a small portion of his left lung. Unfortunately, MI6 preferred its agents to have full lung capacity. No matter how hard he worked out, he always hit a wall.

He didn’t mention the other problems he was having, the problems the doctors in Dallas had discovered with his heart. If Nigel knew about those, he wouldn’t be sitting here talking about assignments.

Nigel sat back. “Damon, you know how much we all want this to work. No one on the team wants to see you out of the field. You’ve been our most effective agent since the moment you walked through the doors.”

Ah, there was a “but” coming. Damon could feel it. He just didn’t want to hear it. “Excellent. I’m very glad to hear it because I am ready to get back in the field. I have some thoughts about information building on The Collective.”

Seven bloody months. He’d spent seven months recovering, waiting, thinking. And plotting his revenge. He was ready to start again, ready to do just about anything that brought him one step closer to getting his hands around Basil Champion’s throat.

“Yes, I found your file on them very interesting.” Nigel’s fingers drummed along the thick file folder he’d turned over.

Damon had spent his recovery time in Dallas with Adam Miles and Charlotte and Chelsea Dennis, using their brilliant computer skills to find absolutely everything he could about the shadowy organization known only as The Collective. As far as he could tell, they were a secret organization run by some of the world’s largest corporations and richest men. They used secret agents culled from intelligence agencies across the globe to manipulate the world economies to suit their companies.

He’d put together everything they’d been able to find, and none of it was completely solid. It was all conjecture, and he was pretty sure Nigel was starting to think he was a conspiracy nut.

“Perhaps it’s not concrete, but you know that an operative has to listen to his gut. This is me. I’m listening to my gut and my gut says this is real and Baz is involved.”

“You know the chief is fairly certain that Champion was a double.”

It took everything Knight had not to groan. “He wasn’t working for MSS.”

The theory was that Basil Champion had turned and started to work with Chinese intelligence.

“It would explain the influx of cash you found.”

“But it does nothing to explain why he left when he did. He chose to blow up his career because he realized that Ian Taggart had found out about The Collective. Hell, the man practically told me he was offered Nelson’s job.” Eli Nelson had been a CIA operative recruited by The Collective. He’d run guns where it suited the corporations involved to keep civil wars going in order to spike prices on oil and other resources. He’d stolen technology plans from non-Collective companies. As far as Damon could tell, Nelson had planned and carried out a couple of terrorist plots that had aided the corporate bottom line. After the Taggarts had sent Nelson to his just rewards, Baz had become their go-to guy.

“The CIA believes Nelson was also working for MSS,” Nigel explained.

Damon slapped a frustrated hand against the desk. “Tennessee Smith wants you to believe that. He’s hiding something. Damn it. You don’t have to believe me now. You just have to give me some tech staff so I can prove it. I’ll find him, Nigel. I’ll find that bastard if it’s the last thing I do.”

“How do you feel about moving into training?”

“I feel rabidly, violently opposed to it.” He wasn’t going to be relegated to the training gym. No. He didn’t want to spend his time training recruits for the life that should have been his. He damn straight wasn’t going to invest in a bunch of idiots who would likely get themselves killed. “I’m not a trainer. I’m never going to be a trainer, Nigel.” He stood, his head swimming just a tad because it really was rather hard to breathe in this building. He couldn’t imagine being chained to a desk day after day. It would be a living purgatory. “You’ll have my resignation on your desk by noon.”