They had agreed that the Engineer should meet the new guy at the gate, but when the rattling truck pulled away in a cloud of dust, it was the Soldier who stood by it. The Soldier suspiciously eyeballed the person, three flowered suitcases, and five heavy, wooden crates of supplies through the fence. The suitcases were mismatched and heavily scuffed. The crates, however, were new and the small gaps in the slats exposed the vivid edges of produce and the red, swaddled shapes of meat. The Soldier eyed the crates hungrily, but the figure worried him, anonymous under the layers of wool and cotton.
"Are you requesting permission to enter this facility? Only good, red-blooded Americans can enter this facility. Are you a good, red-blooded American?" The Soldier wrapped a calloused hand around the chain links and glared down at the figure, eyes running up and down the bulky coat for clues.
Shivering in the desert cold, the figure stood quiet, shocked—the bulky man standing on the other side of the fence was hostile to the point of snarling. She looked him up and down. Facility? This place can't be a military installation, she thought. No military in the world would put an active duty soldier in cherry red cotton. His wind-buffed cheeks matched his uniform shirt, and he wore an archaic helmet. Did I get hired to cook for some kind of mental institution? Are you a mental patient?
"No response, eh?" His eyes narrowed and he leaned into the fence. "A good American would respond. What's in those boxes, Comrade? Have you come to infiltrate our good American taste buds with your Commie borscht?"
The Engineer, who had been held up by a phone call, ran in behind the Soldier just in time to hear the word 'borscht'. He grabbed the Soldier's shoulder and pulled gently. "It's okay, Doe, I can take it from here."
"You will not let this base be infiltrated by commie scum," the Soldier bellowed, letting himself be slowly pulled from the chain link fence.
"It's okay, Solly, I promise this one is an American." The Engineer patted the Soldier's shoulder and tried to steer him away from the gate.
The Soldier gave them both one last, lingering glare and stomped away, snow crunching beneath his boots.
"Did…. Did RED not tell you I was coming?" The voice's pitch was too high to be masculine, and now that the Engineer looked more closely at the lumps in the overcoat, he realized that the figure was female. He grimaced and sighed. This would cause at least as many problems as it fixed on a base full of lonely men. Even if the men who were sleeping together didn't take an interest, enough of the men would to make the whole situation a catastrophe waiting to happen. He wondered, darkly, if this was a punishment for asking RED to shell out more for the mercenaries and decided the Administrator was just vindictive enough to do it.
The figure shuffled her feet in the snow. "It's cold and I have a lot of supplies. Help me get them in?"
Without another word, the Engineer grabbed two of the crates and tucked one under each arm. The figure grabbed a crate and balanced it precariously against her chest on one arm, the other dragging a heavy suitcase. The Engineer led the way back to the base, trying to figure out how to explain the problems she caused by being there. He couldn't think of a damn thing to say, even when they bumped into the Heavy, who took the crate from the small figure and followed along.
In the kitchen, the figure started shedding layers. A thick overcoat was laid over a chair, followed by a jacket, a scarf, a woolen hat, and a set of leather gloves. Emerging from the cloth cocoon was a short woman, auburn hair spilling out from under a woolen cap. Black, squared glasses sat on a long, slightly down-turned nose, lightly dusted with freckles. Not a speck of make-up, the Engineer thought. Maybe she's the practical type. His eyes kept going, looking at the thick flannel—definitely practical, he thought approvingly—and finding deep cleavage. The Engineer groaned under his breath. Oh this is fantastic, he thought sarcastically. Half of 'em have a thing for tits. And who doesn't have a thing for red-heads?
The Heavy raised a thick eyebrow. "Is a woman. Will be trouble."
The Cook put her hands on her hips. "Look, I'm just here to do a job. No need to get excited."
"Miss, I don't think you understand," he said, leaning on the walnut of the dining room table and making it groan. "We're lonely out here. They let us go to town and those of us that want to make our arrangements with professionals or enthusiastic amateurs. But Miss, we ain't got to town in six months." The Engineer pushed his goggles up, staring into her eyes—brown, maybe, he thought. "You can do the job all you want, but someone's going to try to get friendly with you."
She eyed the man in front of her, his metal hand flexing with a faint whir, and the giant beside him. If these two and the yelling man at the gate—Solly, she corrected herself—were anything like the rest of the team, they had no chance of getting near her. Both of the men staring at her were grim, humorless, and absolutely not her type. The man who'd yelled at her just seemed crazy, as if he were somehow speaking directly from the 1950s, down a long tube to the present.
It's my first job all over again, she thought. Everyone lined up to listen to the manager and some burly motherfucker leaning over to whisper "what do you think you're doing here, little girl" in my ear. Didn't scare me off then, won't scare me off now. She eyed them both coolly and turned, dismissing them. "I'm sure I can handle it."
The Cook ran her hand over the first crate, checking for damage in transit, and heard a sharp intake of breath behind her. Good, she thought. You can learn this lesson early. Unzipping her suitcase, she removed a crowbar and pried open the crate. The Cook preoccupied herself with pulling the eggs from their nest and checking them while the men stood there, the Engineer fuming. After a moment, she looked over at him and spoke. "Would one of you go get the other two crates and the rest of my bags?"
He took another sharp breath, then sighed. "Well, big guy, at least the food will be better." The Engineer turned to leave, motioning the Heavy along with him.
"да. At least that, until one of us scares her away or worse."
She rolled her eyes as their footsteps faded.
Trouble started before dinner, when the RED Sniper wandered into the kitchen for a coffee refill. He stood in the kitchen door way, shocked to stillness. A woman was bent in front of the oven, sliding loaves in their pans into neat stripes, her ass forming a heart as she bent. If he hadn't known someone was coming, he'd have dropped and dented his thermos. When she'd placed the final pan, she stretched, knuckling her lower back. He followed the flour dusting up her forearms, immediately imagining himself tying them to something—the position was very perfect for a hold.
The Sniper cleared his throat and spoke. "Look at the little Bird. Whose bad idea were you?"
She whipped about, hand hovering near the knife tucked into her apron. A tall, thin, horse-faced man stood behind her. His skin was heavily tanned and weathered, and his dark brown hair bristled in sideburns, slightly darker than the shaggy ends peeking out from under his worn leather hat. The color of his eyes was hidden by large, yellow glasses. One long-fingered hand reached up as she watched, and she heard a rasp as he scratched his chin. Something in his eyes reminded her of nothing so much as a cat, raising the little hairs on the back of her neck. He shrugged the nylon strap of a rifle back up on his shoulder, thermos in his other hand, but otherwise remained still.
The silence stretched on for some time while she tried to decide how to introduce herself and what might be safe to say to this man. He was patient while she thought, a quietness that he seemed to draw around himself like a coat. Finally, she responded. "I'm the new Cook. Who are you?"
He eased into the kitchen slowly, watching her hand hovering near the blade with a slight smile that made her decide to put a chair under the door handle at night. "I'm the Sniper."
"They warned me not to ask for names, so I'll just use Sniper." She watched him closely, looking for clues—a hunter, she decided, one who spent more time around animals than people, more time speechless than speaking, and no one she wanted to meet in a dark alley. He smelled like sweat, smoke, and gun oil.
"Right," he said, his slight smile broadening into a grin. "I'd hate to have to kill you."
The Cook raked him with her eyes, a contemptuous gesture that the Sniper found rather appealing—the quick, defensive ire made him wonder what sort of woman she was. He thought he could guess if the company had sent her out to the middle of the desert by herself. If this one hadn't been on the wrong side of the law, he'd be very surprised.
"You can try it, Slim," she said. "But not before I get a good stab in at this distance."
The Sniper's grin spread feral across his face, exposing his canines. "You'll do just fine." He tapped his thermos with a nail. "I need coffee."
She pointed to one of the large, burlap bags of beans on the counter. "The coffee you were using was that awful, tinned stuff, so I bought my own. The grinder is in the cabinet above the beans, and the French press is beside it."
So she had already settled into the space. It answered a few questions about what she thought she was doing there, but didn't answer the question he found himself thinking. "That's a lot of work for coffee," he said, probing gently to see if she would do what he asked or snap at him.
She snorted and turned back to the stove. "Did you need me to make your coffee for you, as well?" The look she sent him over her shoulder was rude to the point of brusqueness, and he wanted to chortle, pleased. Not a pushover, but someone who genuinely thought they were there to work—he wondered what the Spy would make of her, and what leverage his partner-in-crime might discover over the time she was contracted to be there.
The Sniper smiled again, his lips quirking up. "That is what you're here for, isn't it?" And that, he thought, is the question. What did they send you for, little girl? There's no way RED sent you here just to cook. They ain't that kind of company. He looked around at the newly clean kitchen, bleach still a sting in the air. But you sure think they did, little Bird.
The Cook sighed and tugged the end of her braid in frustration. Another one, she thought, just as hostile as the first group. Aren't any of you fuckers happy to get the help? "Fine," she said, irritation tightening her voice. "Leave your thermos. It'll be about ten minutes."
Lazy, she thought. Lazy, lazy bastards. The kitchen had been moldy with unwashed grease, and it had taken her several hours and an entire bottle of bleach to get it clean enough not to be hazardous to their health. The refrigerator alone had held enough green, fuzzy things to let her make her own penicillin, which she might have needed simply to scrub their cutlery.
The Sniper clunked his thermos down and leaned against the wall, making her cross the room to get it and giving him the faintest hint of scent, something that ran strong to vanilla. Much like the cat he resembled, he found himself completely unable to not bait her, to see what she responded to. "Like the braid," he said. "Makes a nice handle."
She turned, eyes widening and then narrowing under her glasses, her hand going back to the knife tucked into her apron. "I will stab each and every one of you motherfuckers if I have to."
Yeah, he thought, wrong side of the law, but not very. And working just a little too hard to be intimidating.
The Cook snatched the thermos from the counter near the Sniper, grimacing at the crust of dried coffee around the lid, and took it to the sink to wash the accumulated crud out of the metal cylinder. As she made the coffee, the Sniper watched her move. Short, jerky, harsh contractions of her arm made him estimate her to be stronger than she looked. She was quite small, a little over a meter in a half, and solid with the muscle needed to work in a kitchen. She'd fight hard when she fought, and he found himself wondering how hard he'd have to work to subdue her. When she presented him with his now clean, full thermos, he decided that he could do it in the first minute, for all the angry posturing she'd done. Been months since the last time I saw a woman on her knees in front of me, he thought. I'm going to fix that. Soon.
She could see it on his face when she turned. The Sniper almost didn't get his hand clear of the thermos on the counter before the tip of her knife wedged into the wooden counter, where it would have pinned his hand. "Try it, Slim," she said, "and see what happens."
A challenge, he thought, the beginning of heat tingling across his body, and grinned at her. "I'll be seeing you later, little Bird."
The Sniper retrieved his thermos and tipped his hat to her, eyes never leaving hers behind his yellow glasses. Before he left the room, he saw her hand shake slightly on the blade in the counter and whistled a warbling bird call that lingered in the air long after he had left: mockery and a warning that she understood immediately.
The announcer bellowed and cackled the end of the day's fight—the Cook jumped, startled, and started to take platters out to the dining room table. She arranged and rearranged several roasted chickens, loaves of still-hot bread, a bowl of buttered sweet peas, and a pile of mashed potatoes, then scolded herself for being nervous. If the Sniper, Solly, the giant, and the Engineer were any guide, she was about to have a ridiculously awkward dinner service, but it wasn't as if she'd never had a hard service before. There was nowhere for her to sit, so she decided to simply behave as if she were at a banquet. She tucked a clean towel over one arm and stood in the corner, straightening from her slouch as she heard the squeak of shoes outside the door.
The Scout, usually first to dinner, stopped in the doorway. He scanned the room, finding the Cook, and burst into laughter. "Holy shit," he said, recovering quickly. "They sent us a chick."
She looked at him—two-thirds leg, probably all stomach, she thought—and wondered if she'd made enough. His blonde hair stuck out from under a dingy ball cap in every possible direction, and she could see the chain of a set of dog tags on the back of his tanned neck. His red t shirt was speckled with brown. With a startled jump, she realized he was covered in dried blood. He was clean-shaven. She wondered if he were even old enough to shave. His once-over started at her feet, and was cheerfully naughty. He whistled once, grinning, and she glared at him.
The Scout was, despite his hooting laugh, rather pleased. They hadn't just picked a woman, they'd picked a petite woman. She is kind of adorable, he thought. A little rounder than I like 'em, but good enough. The glare didn't worry him in the least.
A tall, dark-haired man in a filthy lab coat shoved him from behind. "Move, kinder. Some of us are hungry."
She thought the man in front of her might be as old as his mid-forties. A smattering of white in his hair and the beginnings of lines beside his eyes told her that he was certainly not a boy. He moved with a slight slouch, as if accustomed to carrying a heavy pack, but the skin she could see was firm over thick cords of muscle. Well preserved forties, she thought. A good looking man. He wore a filthy lab coat, stained to the waist, and she found herself looking for dried blood again. She found it. The man was drenched in drying blood, as if he'd been butchering hogs. The Cook shifted uneasily, a chill running up her spine.
The dark-haired man looked at her from head to toe before swearing quietly in German, spit flying from his mouth. "Fräulein," he said after a few seconds, "you are perhaps not what I meant in my report." The small red-head in the corner was precisely what he had been afraid of when the Engineer had said the Administrator sent a woman. Look at her, he thought, she's looking at my coat and cringing. They sent a small, red-headed, large-breasted, female civilian. He could not imagine what in the hell the Administrator had been thinking.
It hit him like a slap in the face, his head rocking back. Oh no, he thought, paling. No, surely not. Surely, Helen, you are not that cruel.
Her shoulders and chin lifted, defensive anger drawing her attention from the blood-soaked lab coat. "RED offered me a hell of a lot of money to do this for a few years, and access to some kind of anti-aging technology. I think we can all get used to one another."
The Medic wanted to pick her up by the shoulders and shake her.
The mercenaries filed in, each pausing in the door to look at her and then past her to the table. She tried not to wilt under their intense, hostile scrutiny. Man after man walked through the door, leering, measuring, trying to make her flinch—no friends in this room, she thought, eyes darting from face to face. She was used to working with ex-cons, but this group of men made her nervous in a way the men she used to manage never had. The air over the table fairly simmered with menace and underneath it an explosive, pent-up frustration that she'd only seen in kitchens right before someone stabbed the man next to him. She was relieved when they turned away from her to eat, and slumped in the corner with an audible sigh when the last man had seated himself.
At the strange, hair-ruffling sensation of being watched, she looked up. Another dark-haired man sat, fork dangling from two fingers and staring. His suit was filthy, one side singed and its red sleeves darkened with fluids she refused to consider. His expression said, quite loudly, that he was thinking about bending her over the table. It said he was sure he could make her like it, and he wanted her to see what he was thinking. After a moment, he spoke in a purring baritone. "I think this is exactly what we needed for morale."
The mercenaries turned when he spoke, eyeballing her. The Cook didn't know if she wanted a shower or just to run out of the room, to get away from the sensation of being publicly stripped from the inside out. The mercenaries watched the flush disappear into the open dip in her shirt with various expressions. She wrapped her arms across her chest, pushing her shirt fully closed. "Which one are you," she forced out between her clenched teeth. A fucking game of chicken, she thought, so you can see what makes me flinch. Fine, I flinched. Stop staring at me.
"Me, petite? I am the Spy." He gave her a little half bow from his chair, his lips curling up at the edges in something that wasn't quite a smile. "But we should introduce ourselves. This," he said, gesturing to a large, black man beside him, "is the Demo."
"Hello, lassie," the man said, his uncovered eye blinking slowly before he returned to piling his plate.
"And this," the Spy said, "is the Medic."
The man in the lab coat scowled at her.
"This is the Heavy." The Spy pointed at the huge, bald headed man who'd taken her crates. He looked up, a quick flash of blue under heavy brows, before turning back to the food.
"This is our Pyro." A heavily scarred, black-haired man looked up, his gaze lazily wandering the room before settling on her and sharpening. She had barely noticed him as he walked in, and his once over had been furtive. His face was solemn, but his eyes were full of violence. "Don't mind him," the Spy said. "He's a bit strange."
"A bit strange?" She found herself unable to look away from his face, from the expression in them—there was no sex in his eyes, only a stillness that spoke of the willingness to attack.
"Don't worry. He's safe enough."
When she finally tore her eyes away, it was with a shiver.
"Our Scout." The Spy pointed at the boy, who grinned at her again.
"This is pretty good, lady. You always going to cook like this? You should. It's really tasty." He gestured with a gnawed chicken leg, fragments of skin and grease flying across the table. "It's almost as good as my ma's."
The Cook blinked at him and realized she was wringing the towel with both hands. "Thanks. I think." She smoothed the towel back over her arm. Jesus, she thought. I have to stop flinching.
The Spy spoke as the Scout took a breath to continue. "Don't encourage him. He talks constantly."
The Scout scowled but went back to the chicken leg in his hand.
"You have met the Engineer and the Soldier." The man with the metal hand waved once, stiffly, and the man who'd yelled at her didn't look up from his plate, merely grunted.
Before the Spy could introduce him, the tanned, horse-faced man spoke. "We've been introduced."
She scowled at him. "Yes. Yes, we have."
The Sniper's eyes slid down into slits. I'm putting a chair under the doorknob and taking a knife with me to bed, she thought. "The Administrator told me to announce that if any unpleasant incidents occurred, I would be getting hazard pay, and it would be taken from the pay of the mercenary or mercenaries who caused the incident."
As she finished the sentence, a faint accent crept into her voice. The Spy recognized it immediately, adding to his observations on her. "Parlez-vous?"
She blinked, startled. "Petit-peu. Je ne suis pas du France. Suis Cajun."
"Acadien." He smiled, teeth bright against his tanned skin. "Your French is rusty and a bit vulgar."
"We don't speak your pretty French." Her shoulders hunched, despite her best effort to ignore the tension in the room and the oddly acute sense of having been somehow disappointing.
"It's still," he said, eyes glittering as he tilted his head to consider her, "a pleasure to hear la belle langue from someone in this godforsaken place, however corrupted." After a pregnant pause, his voice purred out into the distance between them. "I could always help you learn a better language."
Her head snapped back as if slapped. "Je préfère sucer une chèvre."
"I had no idea your tastes would be so dirty." The last word in the sentence dropped from his lips like a teaspoon of cold honey, rich and thick. "How exciting."
The Cook paled. I walked right into it, she thought, like a stupid little girl. For lack of anything better to do, she retreated to the kitchen. She had no idea what possessed her to answer someone so obviously baiting her with that sort of answer—some horribly masochistic sense of competition. She realized, startled, that it was masochistic. She had reacted like a tuning fork, immediately ringing out when he'd tapped her. She looked toward the door that separated the kitchen from the dining room, the single door out of the room, and wanted to run out of it. What kind of man is that, she thought. What the hell kind of man is that?
She could hear the Demo from the dining room. "Yeh ought not trouble the lassie, Frenchie. She's liable ta slip something into yer food yeh won't like. Might ruin our dinners as well."
"Hey," said Scout, swallowing loudly. "What did she say?"
The Spy smirked. "Our petite Vipere has surprisingly low tastes." He twirled the stem of his wineglass between his fingers and watched the liquid in it send legs along the glass. The Spy was not surprised to have provoked that response in her, nor was he surprised that RED would have sent a masochist. It had a certain elegance: they'd all been confined to the base for months, the tension growing, and finding a particular kind of woman was hard at the best of times. Helen, he thought admiringly, you wicked, wicked woman. Is she ignorant or just frustrated?
He saluted the Administrator with his wineglass, catching the Sniper's eye. His lover grinned—the flash of temper and the overworked response had been as good as a flag for them both.
"She said she'd rather blow a goat," the Heavy replied.
The Scout laughed so hard he choked on his mouth full of chicken, spitting fragments across the plate and the scarred table. The Engineer pounded his back. "Easy now, kid."
At the end of the table, the Soldier stood both fork and knife up on either side of the plate and bellowed at the Engineer. "You said she was an American!"
"She is, Solly, she is."
"We speak English here! She cannot be an American and not speak English."
The Medic and Heavy made eye contact over the table, and the Medic rolled his eyes at the shiny-eyed Ukrainian, whose shoulders were quietly shaking. The Soldier was, if nothing else, funny. He's been yelling the same things for the last fifty years, and not once, the Medic thought, has he realized how dumb he sounds.
From the kitchen, the Cook yelled at the table. "You can get your own goddamn desserts."
The Soldier got up, clearing his chair before anyone could respond to her. "I'll help you, little lady." He Soldier walked in again armed with an apple pie in each hand. "This is the USA. We love apple pies and every one of you foreign maggots will learn to love them, too."
The Pyro grabbed at a pie pan as it passed, snagging the entire pie and sticking his fork into the middle while glaring at the table. His teammates let him have it and he proceeded to eat the entire pie quickly, arm curled protectively around the tin.
The pie, as it turned out, was quite good. When the mercenaries left the table, there were no leftovers.
The Cook went to bed as soon as she'd finished cleaning the kitchen, dining room, and dishes, taking a knife with her. In her room, she locked the door and wedged the desk chair under it, resolving to buy an alarm the next time she was allowed in town. It took her a long time to fall asleep, the creaking noises made by the bed startling her into semi-coherence when she rolled over.
The mercenaries waited, exhaustion battling for their attention. When the Spy could hear the soft sound of her snores, he reported back to the living room.
"What in the Sam Hill are we supposed to do with that?" The Engineer's flailing hand knocked his hard hat off his head with a crash, exposing the stubble of his shaved head. "They don't let us get off base nearly often enough and now they've put a spare woman in the middle of the base like dangling a damn bit of candy in front of a room full of hungry diabetics." The Pyro handed his hard hat back to him wordlessly and sat back down in front of the fireplace.
"I agree," the Medic said, leaning heavily against the mantle of the fireplace above the Pyro's head. "One of us is liable to do something, and in the mean time she will ruin morale. We are a competitive group before this." Helen, he thought, you'd better not have sent her for what I think you did, not without telling her.
The Sniper and Spy spoke nearly simultaneously. "Let the little bird stay." "I wish to keep the little Vipere." They looked at each other, tension rising. The Spy managed to keep his amusement off of his face, but the Sniper knew him well enough to know how pleased he was that they appeared to be in competition. It was a tactic they'd used many times to divert attention from their relationship.
In the sudden silence, the rasp of a lighter was loud. The Pyro's voice was scratchy with disuse. "I want more pies. Keep her."
"Gentlemen, there is a solution." The Spy steepled his fingers in front of him, elbows balanced on the arms of the armchair. "We could have a little competition." He watched the Medic as he spoke—he'd never tired of needling the man. The Medic had appointed himself their handler early, and jumped into arguments, disagreements, and any sort of problem with a sense of self-possessed authority that the Spy found incredibly annoying. As he'd expected, the Medic immediately appeared annoyed, but the Demo was the first to speak, surprising everyone.
"You bastards are all the same. Cannot ask the lassie, no, we have to settle it between us. Have yeh tried asking? Have yeh ever tried asking?" The Demo snorted over the mouth of the bottle. "I expect you'll have to both be paying her hazard pay in a week." The little thing needed all the help she could get, the Demo thought. He recognized the expression on both the Spy and Sniper's faces, and pitied the poor girl.
The Scout shifted in his chair. "It ain't like girls are hard to get. I'm sure she'll want one of us."
The Medic threw up his hands, letting them fall with a slapping sound against his thighs. "This will be a disaster."
From his own chair, the Heavy sat forward. "Is a solution. Cannot little men share?" Selfish little boys, he thought, fighting over a new toy. There were times he was glad not to be straight, not to be a part of their stupid competitions over women in bars.
"I don't know how they do it in your country, big guy, but we don't do that. I know you and Medic have your arrangement, but some of us don't want an audience." The Scout jiggled a leg. "Froggie here probably would, pervert that he is, but I wouldn't."
"Did not suggest оргия, but would share with Medic." If the Medic hadn't already had the thought, he would soon. He knew his lover too well not to notice the tension in the man, not to have seen his eyes dart to her, his body turning toward the woman, to have seen his lover steal a glance at her breasts—all the little signs that the man seemed to only notice in others. If only, he thought, then immediately stopped himself. The Medic was neither one nor the other, and nothing he could do would change it.
The Medic flushed. "Misha, discuss later. Nicht für andere!" Do you not realize, Mischa, what is happening here, he begged silently. We are talking about a woman who has been sent, unknowing, like bait to the wolf pit.
The Heavy chuckled at his partner's embarrassment. The man was very interested—flushing, refusing to speak—he wondered how long it would take his lover to recognize the emotion. The Medic wouldn't risk letting himself be exposed, wouldn't even ask for what he so obviously wanted if he thought anyone was watching, his need for control making him hide from himself. "Very well." It will come out later, the Heavy thought, amused. And, as always Klaus, you will be startled by it.
"I'd share with you two." The Pyro made eye contact with both the Medic and the Heavy, his eyes skipping to them and away. "Don't want to share with Spy and Sniper."
The Sniper snarled. "As if I would share my catch with that man."
The Spy rolled his eyes but said nothing. He was going to get even with the Sniper for that particular bit of theater later—there was such thing as being too expressive.
The Demo took a deep breath and sighed explosively. "Did yeh nae listen? We must ask the lassie what she wants. I don't know what yeh think yeh know, but if yeh want to know a lass' passion, ye cannot parcel her up like a fresh kill."
"And who, my dark Scot, would you share with?" The Spy's eyes glittered.
The Demo shrugged, the abrupt movement displaying his temper. "How, Frenchie, do yeh think you'll get her ta agree ta anything?"
"In the game of seduction, my friends, you must have a little patience." How many of you, the Spy asked silently, have wondered what she has really been sent to do. How many of you realize that she may not know what she has been sent to do? The Medic had, from the expression on his face. The Spy considered the faces around him. Myself, Bête, the Medic, and no other, he thought, not bothering to look at the Soldier. If he had been alone, he would have been laughing hysterically—Helen, he thought, this is rich even for you.
The Demo wanted, very badly, to punch the Spy in the mouth for being a smug son of a bitch. The sneaky fucking peacock in his prissy suits needed to have sense, or at least some humility beat into him. If the bastard couldn't disappear and stab him in the back, the Demo would have already picked that fight with the Spy, just to roll him in the mud and rip the clothes he was so ridiculously proud of.
The meeting broke apart, the mercenaries trickling out of the cooling room. The Soldier was left watching the embers, waiting for the rest of the mercenaries to go to bed. If they'd been watching, and he hoped they weren't, they would merely have seen him slumped in an arm chair.
He was thinking a variety of things, thoughts circling like a hawk. He couldn't let the Spy do whatever he planned to do—the girl seemed nice enough, and was definitely out of her depth here. He knew the rest of the mercenaries thought he was affably crazy, or maybe just crazy, and he hadn't been able to help himself at the gate. Sometimes, he thought he was crazy. Maybe they were right. Maybe he was crazy.
The shit that comes out of my mouth, he thought, is a mash of my old man and every stupid cheer the military beat into me. It's like a fucking disease. For awhile I meant it, and now I can't stop doing it.
"Hell," he said. "How the fuck do I even get her to take me seriously enough to listen?"