Under Cover - Part One of Three
Title: Under Cover (Part One of Three)
Author: heartofslash
Fandom: Eastern Promises, sequel to Deep Cover.
Pairings: OFC(Lydia)/Nikolai Luzhin Nikolai/Kirill mentioned
Rating: NC-17 overall.
Warning: Graphic descriptions of physical disfigurement, remembrances of het sex, problematic power issues and seething resentment, and generally nasty people
Warning: Will make no sense at all if you have not seen Eastern Promises (which I highly recommend, although be warned that it contains violence, gore, brutality and very nasty people with some very offensive ideas and habits) and Deep Cover.
Disclaimer: Not meant to infringe on any copyright, only to expand a story I invented that was a continuation of a story I enjoyed. I own nothing. Only the writing that follows is mine.



Under Cover

The undiscovered country.

My map of the world is a series of concentric circles of escalating risk. Central is safest, my flat, protected by state of the art surveillance and detection systems and a back door no one else knows about. I don't use it often. Fine, I've never used it. But it's there, behind the wardrobe, in case I need it. That provides a sense of security no motion-activated alarm or row of locks on a solid steel door can ever match. That's home.

Home is closely bordered by my office, meaning my own, private office in the basement of a bland grey building in central London. Most agents at my level do not, in fact, have their own offices. Usually they have a corner of a room, or a false corner constructed of cabinets and screens covered in tacked-up alert notices and wanted posters. Even then, they share, sometimes time-share, depending on who is in, who is out.

"In" means debriefings, office work, data analysis, reports. "Out" means being in the field, and that's two circles away from my private office.

I get my own office because I have to take my sunglasses off to examine things like documents and maps, and I tend not to wear them when I'm working on the computer. No one likes to be around me when I take them off. It makes them uncomfortable. Sometimes, I take my sunglasses off for strategic purposes. Sometimes I take them off just to be a bitch.

I like home. I like office. My centre circles are comfortable. And now that they let me out more, my office is even more comfortable. Less of a prison.

Home and office are suspended in what I to like to think of as "my life". The rest of the bland grey building, where petty rivalries and long-term grudges have to be navigated with some caution, and the neighbourhood where my flat is physically situated. These are the various places I visit regularly, shops and services, the cobbler who takes care of the boots I need to keep my feet on the ground in a world I do not see all of. The park. The library. The chemist who makes me eye patches in a skin tone that matches my own perfectly. The gym where I make myself strong. The alley behind my flat. The things everyone would have in their life, if they had my life.

My life is where I am intimately acquainted with the geography, the entry and exit points, the human variables. Not safe, but not particularly dangerous either.

Then there is "out". The hot zones. Places I have to go where it's not safe, quite possibly dangerous. Meeting spots. Suppliers. Contacts. Lookouts. Dark places, some. The bread and butter of the job, so to speak. Necessary evils in my profession.

I don't do the sort of spying I used to do, but I handle. Oh, I know how to handle. I am an efficient, effective and, some might say, expert handler. That is what people like me do when they are in the places I call "out". Usually. That's what the "out" places are for.

And then, beyond them, are the badlands.

#

The clunk of the tumblers was clumsy, as the mechanisms of all public lockers tend to be, but the door opened, and had not been opened since she closed it, so her belongings were still safe, still hers. Lydia pulled out the grey duffel bag, checked that the wallet and the leather coat were as she'd left them. It was always a relief to retrieve these things. Without them, she could not get back home where it was safe.

She ducked into the toilet, which they called a washroom there, for a quick change. She pulled a smaller, dark green carryall out of the duffel. She placed her plain, nondescript clothing into the grey bag, and put on new plain, nondescript clothing, jeans and a t-shirt and a hooded sweater - not a hoodie made of sweatshirt material, because if you put up the hood of one of those, people think criminal. This was a speckled brown knitted sweater with a droopy hood, not of any particular style or era, a slightly eccentric article of clothing but not terribly noticeable. She pulled the dark brown leather jacket on, placed the wallet into the inner pocket. It contained her identification. Some of it, anyway. One set. The set she needed to board the plane for home.

Lydia looked in the mirror. Under the harsh light, the right side of her eye looked plastic, unreal, as if a make-up artist had stretched a sheet of latex over it, artfully puckered it at the edges, mottled it with not-quite-skin-tone paints, sprayed it with something that gave it a dull sheen. Her eye studied the graft and scars for a second or two, as it always did, the same as most eyes did when confronted by something that startling, and then looked away. Other eyes did that as well. She looked at the rest of herself. The rest of her was just fine.

Lydia had just spent two weeks in what she called the badlands.

#

The concentric circles are not two-dimensional. They don't exist on a flat piece of paper. Imagine, instead, a ball. You are looking at the ball dead on at, for arguments sake, the north pole of the ball. There, at the closest point, where the ball bulges toward you, is the circle of "home". Small. Neat. Contained. Paint it blue, if you wish. The colour of peace.

Around it, surrounding it, is the thin band of "my office". It can be a dull grey.

Next is my life, yellow, and that takes up almost the rest of the ball that is within your field of vision. You can just see the thinnest strip of "out".

The "out" circle goes over the top of the ball, around the ball at its widest point, and a fair way on the other side.

To make this easier, take the image of the ball in your mind and roll it toward you so that "home" disappears, and ends up on the exact opposite side of the ball. Now you are looking at the south pole of the ball. Now you see "out", descending from the top and ascending from the bottom, and moving toward the centre from both sides. "Out" takes up most of this side of the ball. You can colour it with whatever shade you like, but it should be something a little bit alarming. It can be orange, if you like.

In the centre of it, around the south pole, there is another circle. This you should colour a very alarming shade. Red would be most appropriate. Red with a small, black circle at the very centre of it. But it's the red you're looking at, that alarming red circle.

That is the badlands.

#

In the badlands she went to the meet arranged by a contact that she handled, a contact who did not know that she was the one who would make the meet, mostly because he'd never actually seen her in the flesh. In the badlands she rented the flat where the dirty work would be done. In the badlands she traded things that are not ordinarily available on the open market. The badlands there were things that were not entirely on the books.

In the badlands she had to think faster than the other guy. She tailed and was tailed, watched and was watched, did and was done to. In the badlands she made something happen that was not supposed to happen, but had to happen, because that's the way things work. Somebody has to do the dirty work.

She used to live in the badlands full-time, but now they only let her into them for special occasions. Four missions, since her recent return to more active duty.

She'd survived the badlands, once again, and this was her reward, this visit to the undiscovered country.

#

Not the death Hamlet speaks of, but death of a sort, because here I am dead to everyone.

The undiscovered country can be anywhere. It can be in London (although not likely) or the south of France or here, north of the border, in a country I've not been in before, an ocean away from home. It can be at a luxury resort in the mountains or in a dirty little slum near a port or on the outskirts of a major city, on a mild but overcast day, in a neighbourhood where hotels and strip malls compete with parking lots and conference centres for attention from the new arrivals at the international airport.

The undiscovered country is not a geographic location; it is simply where no one knows I am. It's not easy, but then, vacations are never easy.

#

The bad guys didn't know where she was; the good guys didn't know where she was. After every assignment, she would dump her identity, grab a different one (preferably one no one knew about because she had not acquired through the usual channels), and take off for a day or a week of not existing. It was her safety valve. Her way of adjusting to the change of terrain and altitude. Alone, and unencumbered.

#

That tiny black circle.

It's connected to the circle of home, the opposite pole, by a wormhole. Sometimes I go directly from one to the other.

And no one can see me.

#

Her reflection, in spite of the fluorescent lights and her lack of sleep, looked healthy. Her hair, her skin (the unscarred parts of it), her eye – all bright, clear, shining. It was exhilarating, what she'd done, what she was doing, what she was being. It suited her, damn it all. She should be doing this all the time.

Too bad they would not deploy her full-time. Hardly anyone ever got deployed full-time, unless they were undercover. Under deep cover. There was a system of rotation, alternating deployment with office stints and rest, to minimize burn-out. She didn't even get the usual amount of fieldwork; because she was so "recognizable", she couldn't work undercover.

But she could work covertly. And she had discovered that she liked that as much, perhaps more, because covert meant she could do this. She could visit the undiscovered country, if only for a brief time, before she returned home.

She tossed the cheap, oversized sunglasses into the garbage, and put on a sleeker pair that suited her better. Hid what they had to hide, showed her what she needed to see. With the hood up, she looked like someone who wanted to be left alone, but not in a menacing fashion. She rolled the grey bag as small as it would go, and tucked it under her arm. On her way out of the subway station, she dropped it into the frequently emptied refuse bin beside a news agent's stall.

No one followed her.

She had not expected anyone to follow, but she checked anyway. It's easy to get lost when no one is looking for you, but it's as easy to land on someone's radar screen without realizing it. Perhaps you'll show up as an unidentified 'blip' at first, but someone as recognizable as her had to take precautions to not show up at all. Otherwise, that bastard Crawford would be after her.

Even handlers have handlers. Hers was a real piece of work. Nominally, Crawford was her supervisor. In reality, he was the bane of her existence.

It would seem illogical, in any other field of work, to put a skilled but possibly unstable employee under the direct supervision of someone who, for all intents and purposes, did not trust her as far as he could throw her, which wasn't very far because Crawford was one of those behind-the-desk kind of agents who ate too much junk, drank too much alcohol, smoked too many cigarettes and believed too many of his own stories. He had a sour smell and liked to look at her over his glasses the same way he probably looked at his teenage daughter when she tried to leave the house wearing a miniskirt and fishnet stockings. Lydia was quite vocal about how everything about him was distasteful, but the higher-ups thought that was a good thing. The figured that if she was going to crack, Crawford would spot it first, and if she was going to do anything shady, she would go to some lengths to hide if from Crawford, but would not be able too because her sheer loathing for the man would cause her to slip up. Hate fucks up your concentration.

That actually made sense. Or it would have made sense if Lydia really hated Crawford. Actually, her loathing wasn't personal at all. She thought Crawford was a bastard, but she did not hate him. She hated some of the things he did, and some of the things he made her do, but she did not feel anything for him. He was, to her mind, an irritation, like static the electricity in her sweater or the obnoxious radio host droning in the background. Lydia did not waste any emotion on him.

She was aware of his surveillance of her. It was subtle, well-planned, textbook executed. He was never sloppy, never obvious. She generally knew when she was being watched, and assumed, to be on the safe side and also because Crawford was a thorough bastard, even if he wasn't always smart, that she was being watched at other times as well. It was all part of where she came from. Regular agents do not trust the deep cover agents. Deep cover agents can only trust themselves. That's the way it is.

How could she be so sure she was not being tracked now?

She couldn't. She was reasonably sure the ID she'd used to cross the border was clean, and she knew her exfil had gone as smoothly as it could. She knew that Crawford suspected her of taking planned vacations, but she also knew he was powerless to stop her. As long as none of the locals identified her as suspicious, she would be clear.

She left the train station, walked three blocks east, turned right into an alley that led behind a laundrette to a small park. "Ridson Parkette" the sign said. She sat on a bench and waited for the sun to come up. No one appeared to be watching her. She got up and moved fast, down the street, across to a shopping mall, through the mall to the far parking lot.

Alone.

#

Crawford snapped his laptop closed when the door opened. The Inspector looked down at him with a sour expression.

"Good afternoon," Crawford said tightly. "And what can I do for the Russian Desk today?"

"You know damn well what you can do. Let me talk to Constant."

"Agent Constant is unavailable," Crawford replied as smoothly as can be.

"Agent Constant was due back yesterday," the Inspector said, just as smooth.

How the hell had he found out? Crawford tried to shrug it off, not look too surprised. "You know I can't divulge those sorts of details, Inspector."

"You don't have to; I already know she's late coming home. She's always late coming home. Isn't it your job to know where she is at all times?"

"Don't tell me how to run my agents. If Constant needs a day or two, that's her business."

"She never used to need a day or two."

That may have been true. By all reports, she used to always be punctual. Painfully punctual. You could have set your fucking clock by her reports, whether they came by phone, post or newspaper advert. Crawford hadn't known her back then, but he'd read the reports and knew he did not have the same control, the same rapport, the same degree of authority over her as her last supervisor, something old Milton had gloated about at his retirement party. "So, you've got the lass back in the field, young man. Good for you," Milton said after a good half dozen glasses of sherry on top of the wine at dinner. "Keep your eye on the gate. She's liable to slip out on you."

Crawford always suspected that she'd pulled the same tricks on Milton, but the file showed none of it. Clean as a whistle. Hard to tell if it was Milton or Constant who'd managed that. Or maybe the reports were all true – she'd trusted and respected Milton, and she was just pulling these disappearing acts to piss off Crawford, whom she did not trust or respect.

Those deep cover types were flighty, but Lydia Constant was a cut above. He'd prefer to use almost about anyone else, but there were certain things, certain tasks… let's just say that Agent Constant possessed the sort of elastic principles that made her ideal for running a certain class of covert operation. The sort of elasticity that made her not really care whom she fleeced.

But Crawford was damned if he was going to let some Scotland Yard inspector gloat about his inability to keep one errant field agent in line.

"Is there something particular you want from Agent Constant?" Crawford asked.

The cocky prick sat down in the chair opposite Crawford's desk, crossed his legs and gave Crawford one of his oily smiles. "I'd like to know where Nikolai Luzhin is," he said.

You and half the security agencies in Europe, Crawford almost said, but did not. Because, damn it, he wanted to know where Luzhin was as well.

#

Safe, Lydia slid her hand into the inner pocket of her coat for her talisman. Smooth and warm, it lay in wait. It always waited for her, in the undiscovered country, yet another reward for a mission well accomplished. She ran her fingertips over the melted plastic, then wrapped the chunky beads around two fingers, heard the click of them as they settled.

She did not think about Nikolai Luzhin often. This was not a pining sort of remembrance at all. She kept his beads with her because they gave her comfort, as they must have given him when he used them, when he'd made them back in his other life. Religious or cultural in nature, they were a lucky charm. He had survived far worse than her, come through hell, and he had walked away two years and eight months earlier, vanished without a trace, to his own undiscovered country. She did not keep the beads to remind herself of him so much as to remind her of the job that got her out in the field again.

She had accomplished the impossible. Her reputation had always been solid, but her abilities had been thrown into doubt by injury and disfigurement. Such a waste, to be sidelined because of doubts, fears over something so inconsequential. There had never been any evidence that she'd been rendered inoperative by her wounds, yet the doubt had persisted.

She could, on an intellectual level, understand why her superiors questioned her ability to function in the field after losing an eye. It was only natural for them to do so. But they had refused her even the slightest chance to prove herself. They'd locked her away in the basement, given her respectable analysis to do but not so much as entertained the thought of sending her out again. Not until they'd become interested in Scotland Yard Russia Desk's rogue agent.

Face it, she told herself. You owe Nikolai Luzhin. If it weren't for him, she'd still be in the basement, fulltime.

Where was he? Two years, eight months in the undiscovered country. Imagine that.

She didn't need years or even months. A couple of days were all she planned to spend. She had a reservation at a nondescript hotel. She would get breakfast, go to the library until it was time to check into the hotel and, of course, keep low key. Keep to her room. Rest. Relax. She would take some time to breathe deeply and lie naked in bed and probably touch herself, although that would be an inadequate substitute.

The edge of a bead dug into her palm. So comforting but still with edges.

She moved smoothly, yes. Smooth with the practice of someone trained to waste no time or energy. She left the library and arrived at a bus stop at the same time as the bus did. She sat near the rear door, looked out the window, and at the reflections of the other riders in the smudged window. She exited the bus a stop away from the hotel, doubled back, entered the hotel lobby, bag slung over her shoulder, loose hair falling over the side of her face, fake ID at the ready. She had to drop the beads inside the pocket so that she could sign the registry.

The sound of cigarette lighter plastic must be distinctive, because the clerk said, "We do have one room available in which smoking is allowed."

Lydia looked up sharply. Perhaps... She may want to have a cigarette after all. It was not a habit of hers, but sometimes she did it, because the taste made her think of…

The worry beads weighed heavily in her pocket. She'd almost asked him for one, once, when a sudden craving had hit her, but that would have blown her cover. It was a nasty dirty habit, one Adele would never have partaken in, one she'd had to take up for an earlier assignment and had resented ever since. It wasn't like she missed it, but when people smoked around her, sometimes it happened. That raw urge in the back of her throat. Nikolai had smoked around her outside, at the Café Arbat, but had been polite enough to turn his head to direct the smoke out over the river. He was so polite about it she'd barely noticed he smoked until they'd kissed and she'd tasted it, not strongly but noticeably.

She licked her lips.

"It's at the end of the corridor," the clerk said, pointing to the schematic encased in plastic and stuck to the surface of the desk. "The exit here leads to the back of the restaurant. This door leads to the dining room, through the bar."

Lydia studied the clerk's face. Young, a little pimply, mildly bloodshot eyes. He spoke with the accent of a Francophone long-immersed in English culture. He had crooked teeth. None of these things were a sign of anything in particular – anyone could have affected them - but the slightly lewd look he gave her made her believe that he was what he seemed - a young man who liked to believe she had come there looking for an illicit encounter, and that maybe by pointing out the features of this private room - easy access, smoking allowed so it would not limit her choice of one-night-stand, close to the place where the most likely candidates would be hanging out - he'd have a chance. Or at least, he'd have something to wank to that night.

He wouldn't think like that if she took her glasses off and swept her hair back and scared the crap out of him.

That made Lydia smile. "Yes, that looks quite private," she said. And it did have the advantage of the unseen. She would not have to walk through this lobby, past his gaze, ever again. Whether she decided to smoke or not made no difference. She'd been in enough hotels to know that the room would be clean, the air fresh. They probably did a better job of airing out the smoking-allowed rooms than the others. And the non-smoking rooms were more likely to hold the faint smell of children or the elderly.

She paid in cash.

She was right. It was clean and pleasant in the room. There were two double beds, table between them, desk with mirror above. Absolutely indistinguishable from a million other hotel rooms. She put her bag on the bed, took a few things out, and felt a wave of exhaustion.

Thirty six hours was too long to go without sleep. She double checked the locks on the door and window, then lay down on the empty bed and closed her eye.

#

"I got nothing out of him."

"You really thought Crawford was going to tell you anything?"

"He's a prick."

"Everyone knows that. Can't imagine how anyone puts up with him."

"Obviously, Lydia Constant doesn't, because this is the third assignment in a row that she's been late coming home from, that I know of."

"And just how do you know she's late?"

"You think you're the only person with informants, Standish?"

"No, sir."

"I didn't lose all my skills when I went into management, you know. But, damn him, Crawford is refusing to cooperate."

"I don't know why he should, sir. From his point of view, you're the one who let Luzhin go in the first place."

"Only because it was the only way I could convince him to talk to MI6. I had to get him to talk to them. There was pressure, pressure I never told you about. We needed to know what he knew. It seemed reasonable at the time, but now I need him back."

"You really think he had something to do with those two corpses?"

"You mean those two, Russian vor corpses with their throats slit and their fingers cut off? Why, yes, Standish, I think he did. Just a wild hunch, I suppose"

"No reason for sarcasm, sir. I mean, one would think that once he got away from here, he'd want to stay away. The last trace of him was in Las Vegas. Why would he come all the way back here for a couple of revenge killings? Doesn't make any sense. And sir, to be honest, I don't see why he'd be in contact with Agent Constant."

"You wouldn't. You didn't see them together."

"No one saw them together."

"I did, right after, when we picked them up."

"Sir, weren't they unconscious?"

"And then later, in his cell, when she visited him. I watched on the monitor, and what I saw convinced me that he'll be in contact with her sooner or later. Or she'll be in contact with him. I believe the feeling is mutual."

Lieutenant Standish shook his head. These monthly visits were a joke. There was no way a guy like Nikolai Luzhin was going to risk his freedom for a piece of tail. And not for a piece of tail like that. Standish had met Lydia Constant on several visits to her office and frankly, she was okay when she had her sunglasses on but she was a right disaster when she took them off, something she seemed to enjoy doing, if only to give people the creeps.

And even if Luzhin did fancy her, what the hell would she want with him? Every time they asked her about him her face darkened, she scowled, she turned her back on them and told them to get out. Once, she'd accused them of sexism, and coldly informed that that contrary to films and romance novels, women are not pathetic creatures who go wobbly-kneed for every man who comes along, and if she was required to fuck as part of her job it was only a function of the patriarchal attitudes that both cops and criminals hold. In a world where there was gender equality, she'd told them, fucking would not be such a useful espionage technique. The way she said "fuck" made Standish think of the way most people would react to finding their mouth was full of vomit.

In fact, Standish fully suspected that Lydia Constant played for the other team, as they say. Those boots she always wore were a dead giveaway.

#

Lydia woke to the glowing 9:45 of the digital clock. More than enough time for dinner before closing time. She sat on the bed beside her bag and pulled out her hairbrush. She sat at the desk with the mirror above it and brushed slowly, carefully arranging the waves so they would do the most to cover her face. Even in the undiscovered country it was necessary to be under cover to some extent.

The good thing about dark hair is that it hides what is beneath it well, but if it falls over your good eye you can still see through it to some extent. It's harder to see through blonde hair. Something to do with the refraction of light or something. It was the sort of detail that came in handy when working out disguises.

It was harder for men. In the old days of shorter, neater haircuts disguises had been more difficult. Of course, they had hats back then. Hats may not hide your face, but they can change the way your face looks, the shape of it. More importantly they change the way people see you. The difference between a fedora and a cloth workman's cap was a whole world. And the sorts of people who wore fedoras barely noticed the sorts of people who wore workman's caps. Still don't today, even without the hats. There's a reason you always see the surveillance team riding around in a plumber's van in the movies. It's because in real life, no one ever notices the plumber's van.

The bridge of her nose ached. Those cheap sunglasses had been too cheap. She patted the ridge gently. Fuck it. No one here would see her again. She could forego the glasses, give her nose a night off. She rummaged through her bag and found a paper packet that contained a self-adhesive bandage large enough to hide the fact that she did not, in fact, have a right eye. Accident while housecleaning, she decided. Vase fell from the shelf and shattered violently. Shard flew right in before she had a chance to turn her head. She would, god willing, see out of it again. She'd know in a few weeks. In the meantime, she was a little distraught that the vase had belonged to her late Aunt Clarice, who would have been furious about it being broken and guilt-ridden about the damage to her favourite niece.

If anyone asked.

No one would. But it pays to be prepared.

Dinner was simple and perfunctory. She had a glass of white wine with it. She had been unable to drink red wine since…

#

I feel no guilt.

I feel no guilt about drugging Nikolai with the wine and bringing him in. He'd lost perspective. Someone was going to take him out, sooner or later, so I do not exactly feel guilt. As far as I'm concerned, I saved his life by deceiving him.

In spite of the lack of guilt, I do feel something akin to remorse. Yes, it had been against his will, and it is always wrong to force anyone to do anything. Yes, I lied to him, and it is also wrong to lie, even though my business is to lie. I lied terribly to him.

But I was truthful when it mattered. As was he. I may have had ulterior motives, but nothing was faked.

Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like without the ulterior motives, if I'd not been worried about getting him to drink the wine, about giving the signal and setting up the snatch. What if it had not been in the back of my mind that a half dozen heavily armed men were going to bust in and carry us both away? I might have been able to relax and enjoy it more, which would have been pretty amazing because I enjoyed it so much even under those difficult circumstances.

I enjoyed him in spite of those difficult circumstances. As I had hoped I would. All that planning, knowing how it was going to end, sitting with him, telling stories, flirting in a way that did not look like flirting, gradually sensing him warm up, open up, start to desire me, then going back to my little flat over the drycleaners, unable to go to my real home, missing home but that's what deep cover is all about, lying in that little bed at night and thinking about what it was going to be like when I finally invited him up – all that did the same to me; I grew warm. Open. Desirous.

I'd been planning to open the wine immediately, even though letting it sit out for a while helped to mask the taste of the drug. But things were going well, so I waited. But if it had turned my stomach when he'd kissed me, I would have ended it then and there. I would have said something about being nervous and needing some artificial courage. He would not have protested. And if he'd grabbed me roughly or made demands, I would have knocked him flat on his ass without hesitation. It would have blown my cover, but I would not have allowed that sort of thing to continue. Fucking can be part of the job but rape? Never.

As it turned out, he submitted to my scrutiny willingly. He even looked a little frightened. Frightened of my reaction? That I'd reject him? No doubt, that was it. I'd got him so fucking hard while I was looking at his ink, he must have been desperate for the sex. All part of the plan. I figured that at least when he was half-naked, I'd have him at a disadvantage if things turned ugly.

I don't know why I thought that; Nikolai Luzhin had certainly proved that being naked is no disadvantage in a fight.

But there, it was all part of the plan, because he was naked in front of me, and that had to make him feel vulnerable for the plan to work, and so I made sure it worked.

I prolonged it. Who wouldn’t have? To have a man like that at my mercy is not something that happens every day. Every quickened breath, every minute twitch of muscle under all that black-stained skin, it was like lightning. And that was on top of the fact that I've always liked the look of tattoos, on the whole, as a class of decoration.

And after the scrutiny, oh, he was so intent on giving me pleasure. I'd come to doubt men like that really exist, men who really care about what the woman feels. Of course, since the thing in Sarajevo with Ilya and the acid, my choice of men hasn't exactly been the cream of the crop. I admit to being out of touch with the modern sexual norms. I admit I had not known what to expect from Nikolai. Of course, what I got was more or less what I'd been aiming for all along, after all my elaborate deceptions. After all my efforts, it was the least I deserved.

I'd hoped. But known? There is no way to know until you experience.

The psychiatrist had made me clear the whole plan with him ahead of time, and I'd been reasonably forthcoming about my seduction plans. I kept a few details to myself. The white cotton panties had been my idea alone, and I saw no reason to mention them to the shrink or anyone else. That was between me and Nikolai. They certainly had the desired effect. Nothing drives a bad man wild quite like being reminded that the woman he's with might be good.

#

The debriefing had been brutal. They'd wanted details, anything that would shed light on Luzhin's character. Anything that would give them an edge in their interrogation of him. She'd described the sexual acts clinically, with detachment, as befitted an agent of her calibre. There would have been no point in lying about them anyway. There was no doubt that they'd examined her thoroughly while she was still knocked out. They knew about the sex.

They didn't know everything about the sex. They didn't have to know how many times… but of course they would have searched the flat and counted the condoms. They didn't know the quality of it, though.

She'd left out the things that were, frankly, none of their business. There was no need to lay herself, or him, bare in a brutal fashion, and some things are too personal to share.

So no one else knew just how well he used his mouth. That was her secret. And the shrink did not know everything he'd whispered to her, or what she'd whispered back. He'd grilled her, they'd all grilled her, but she'd kept the story consistent.

She had made a point of wrapping her arms around herself and admitting to feeling just a bit sullied because she'd had to have sex with a man who had done such brutal things. She'd lied and told the shrink the sex had been just what you would expect from a man like that – hard and fast and animalistic, with a lot of grunting and not much foreplay. No, she would not go so far as to say she felt violated, just a little used. They acted like they understood how distasteful it must have been for her, but were relieved that she would have no lasting damage from it. They sympathized. They praised her toughness. Her dedication to duty.

Her handlers did not know exactly what it had done to her when he'd held her ass like that, when she was on his lap with his tongue in her mouth, or that she'd come from the thrust of his cock inside her and the friction of her clit against his hard stomach, and how she'd never actually had an orgasm in the middle of fucking before in her life, not like that, without any fingers or anything, but he'd grabbed her thighs and held them against him when they shook and she'd gasped in his ear. They didn't know about his hands in her hair and his lips grazing the edge of where her eye used to be and him not flinching at all, but fucking her gently and telling her things men only tell when they are so close, so close.

And she'd sure as hell never told anyone about waking up in the middle of the night six months later, soaking wet and throbbing between her legs, in an undeniably post-orgasmic state, with the taste of his tongue in her mouth and the smell of his skin surrounding her, and the harsh rasp of Russian words filling her ear. Or how hard she wished that she could wake up like that again, and that sometimes she had.

Maybe the clerk was right about her. He must have smelled it on her the second she'd walked in the door; she needed to get laid.

No easy task. She wasn't exactly a prize beauty. But at least with the bandage on she wasn't disfigured so much as temporarily injured. Lonely travellers staying at a medium-low priced hotel between flights weren't going to be overly deterred by a bandage over one eye. She had nice legs, as long as the patch where they'd taken the skin to cover her eye socket was kept in shadow. She had great tits, when she chose to show them. She had a terrific ass, which was why she made sure her jacket fell to the bottom of it. In her line of work, it paid to be less noticeable. But if she'd wanted to be noticed, she would have been, and in all the right ways.

The real problem was her pickiness. She'd always been discerning, and had found herself even more so since Nikolai. It wasn't as if he'd exactly spoiled her for other men, but he had set a daunting standard. She found herself wanting a degree of toughness, and holding up a standard of intelligence and skill and dedication and sheer manliness that most men could not live up to.

She wanted hard. She wanted sleek. She wanted dangerous. She wanted someone who would dive into her and not care if he drowned, but who would not drown because he was too strong to drown. And she wanted that wry sense of humour. That wolfish smile. Those teeth, not just any teeth, those teeth scraping her to the bone.

She wanted Nikolai Luzhin's tongue on her clit, and his tattooed fingers thrusting inside, and his moans vibrating against her when she tightened her thighs against his head. She wanted Nikolai's cock, pushing in hard, his fingers digging into her thighs, still wet from being inside her. She wanted Nikolai's voice burning in her ear, Nikolai's starred chest crushing her breasts, Nikolai's muscles going hard against her clit while she came and he wanted more.

She went to the bar and ordered a double and looked around the room. There a couple dozen men in the place, at least half of them alone and open to the prospect of a quick lay with no strings attached. Fucking businessmen, jerks looking to cheat on their wives, losers.

Maybe Nikolai had spoiled her for regular society; she might have to go somewhere sleazier.

She put her boot on the rail and the movement pressed the worry beads into her skin, at the juncture of her thigh and her hip, where she'd slipped them into the front pocket of her jeans. She lifted her heel so they would dig in even more.

Here in the undiscovered country, she could do that without worrying about any of her colleagues noticing the bulge in her pocket. Without anyone caring if she drained her glass and wished it burned more. Here she could have another one. She could pick up one of these men and take him back to her hotel bar with her, and fuck him until she didn't want to fuck anymore. Or she could go back to her room alone, touch herself gently, stroke and caress and imagine a hot tongue tangled with her fingers, lips pushing against them, a shoulder forcing her leg to spread wider. Or she could get shitfaced and go back to her room and fall asleep and not care what she dreamt, even though she knew what she wanted to dream.

The bartender picked up the empty glass and looked up, past her shoulder.

The ambient temperature rose.

The bartender's mouth twitched and he stared with one of those intense bartender stares, sizing up the customer, deciding if he should call security.

Lydia felt the air move behind her right ear.

The voice was low, quiet, wry. With an unmistakeable Russian accent.

"The most dangerous woman in Northern Hemisphere," Nikolai Luzhin purred in her right ear. "Imagine that."


Part Two is here.