Chapter One

 

I've had a weird, fucking life. And it hasn't shown much sign of turning 'normal' lately, whatever that word is supposed to stand for.

My father decided I was awfully cute when I was quite young, and so, paranoid that he was, he made me go to Karate class. I definitely didn't like it, but at Eight, what choice did I have? At Twelve I began taking Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu because there were limited uses for Karate if you didn't want to break someone's bones.

I was a tomboy. If I was a kid today the freaks would say I needed to take hormone therapy to become a boy. But when I was young, way back in the dawn of history, which I mean ten years or so ago, they just thought I was gay. The voice didn't help. It's always been kind of deep for my size and gender.

I got teased a lot. My teen years were a long struggle not to put people through walls. Not that they didn't deserve it, in my opinion, but it tended to get me into trouble.

Girls were bitches. They didn't understand me and I didn't understand them. But I got that some of them were jealous of me for various reasons, ranging from my looks to my ability to pound people. They tended to be overly emotional and cared deeply about their looks, their sexiness, and their boyfriends. I cared about none of that.

Boys were horny assholes who only wanted into my pants. And failing that they wanted naked pictures and would stoop to almost anything to get them. They tried to bribe girls to get pictures of me in locker rooms. They climbed trees next to my house to peer in the windows. They tried to hack my computer in hopes I had some there.

I knew there was an ongoing bet over who would be the first to fuck me. And I knew it would be all over the school if I ever gave in.

There were some girls almost as bad. They were the out lesbians. They assured me I was one, and tolerantly dismissed by denials. My interest in cars, my interest in guns, my interest in sports and martial arts, my lack of interest in fashion, shoes, hairstyles, and boys, all proved to them I was a dyke.

They just wanted into my pants, too.

The thing is, my mom died when I was young. So I was mostly raised by my father, along with two older brothers. He was ex-military and had a shooting range in the basement. So I got to shoot all kinds of neat guns, and compete with my brothers.

He tried to persuade me to join the military, but fuck that. All that 'yes, sir', and 'no, ma'am' shit would drive me out of my fucking mind. Plus I like to come and go when and where I please too much. I knew that the fun stuff in the military was mostly reserved for the guys, anyway.

Which is reasonable. I can't hump a hundred pound pack up a mountain trail for miles and miles and then do it again the next day. I don't have the weight, the heavy bones, or the upper body strength. I know what I can be good at and what I can't.

Becoming a cop sounded like more fun, anyway. So that was what I did. For a few years. Then it got fucking stupid with all the rules about what you could and couldn't do. People pointed cameras at us everywhere we went waiting for us to make one wrong move so they could call CNN and sell the video.

It was like being in fucking high school again! Only instead of wanting into my pants, they all wanted me to violate someone's civil rights (the definition of which kept growing). And God forbid you dare to touch a Black guy for any reason at all. They all turn into a Monty Python character and start screaming "Help, help, I'm being oppressed!"

One day I was in a fancy building in downtown Boston with my partner doing a routine investigation. Someone had rifled ladies' purses while they were at lunch, and stolen laptops too. It was a building full of civilians but they did some contract work for the military, so there was a fed there.

Brian was twice my age and twice my size, and very good at flirting. I figured he'd be interesting in bed, and that whatever happened it wouldn't get back to my colleagues anyway. I was right on both. But he was also kinky in that he liked to tie girls up.

That seemed interesting, so I let him. And for a while, every time we met he'd tie me up and then fuck my brains out. It was an uncomplicated relationship, but very satisfying on at least the physical level. We were basically fuck-buddies - kinky ones. Not that bondage is all that kinky.

When I started bitching about my job and talking about quitting, he referred me to a friend of his who ran another federal agency that needed women. I'd never even heard of it before. It wasn't one of the biggies, you know, like the FBI or DEA or US Marshals. It was the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency.

Which sounds a fuck of a lot more interesting than it actually is. Mostly it does background checks on both military people and contractors who work with the military. It also does physical security checks on private companies that supply the military and checks their data security against foreign hacking.

So when I started I wound up going to various offices and warehouses to check their locks and how good their computer security was. I also did background investigations, mostly by computer. DSS has an awesome array of access to virtually every government computer in the country.

After a few months, I got reassigned. That's when I met Able. He's about my height, which is five feet eight, but twice my width. I mean, the guy's got really broad shoulders. His arms and hands match. So does his dick, though it took me a little while to find that out.

He's got a hard face, which is appropriate. He's a hard man (in both senses of the word). He's got short dark hair, a nose which has been broken at least once, a strong jaw, and a small scar on the side of his right cheek. It's not an ugly face, nor exactly scary, just... hard.

Anyway, Able had a different job than what I'd been doing. It was tracking people who were doing things they shouldn't be doing. It was real counter-intelligence work, and I was startled to find myself doing it. I'd been a Boston cop only a year earlier. And not one with a ton of experience.

What I did have was a history of growing up in a house with a Lebanese housekeeper, which, given how busy my father was, wound up making me fluent in Arabic by the time I was ten. In the private high school my father sent me to they required you to learn a second language.

I already had one and had been kind of smug about it. My father wasn't letting me off easy, though, so he'd decided I would take Mandarin. And that was that. I guess being able to speak Arabic and English kind of prepped me for learning languages. I found Mandarin a lot easier than my classmates and took it again in college.

I wasn't as fluent in it as I was in Arabic, but I could read and write and understand almost everything people said.

Do you have any idea how rare it is to speak Arabic and Mandarin? Well, the agency does. So despite my lack of experience, they assigned me to Able to basically be his bitch. In fact, he put it just that way. "You don't know shit about counterintelligence. You're just my bitch," was how he explained it to me. "Don't do anything I don't tell you until you learn something."

He was about fifteen years older than me, but that was okay. I was used to being around guys older than me. All my sexual relationships had been with older guys because I'd found those my age were too fucking childish and uninteresting.

He was a decent teacher. He talked incessantly, as if maybe that was a nervous habit. All the time we were in a car he'd talk, and not about the weather. It was always about cases, always about methods, about systems, about experiences he'd had, and what he learned. He talked, I listened.

Whenever there was something unpleasant to do, I did it. Whenever there was some dumb, pain in the ass job, like driving across half the state to pick something up, that was me. He didn't encourage me to express agreement much either.

"Just do what you're fuckin' told," was what he'd reply.

Now you'd think that would piss me off. But he said it in such a routine, matter-of-fact way that I wasn't offended. Plus, as I said, he was older, and way more experienced and knowledgeable. I translated stuff we found in places we visited or overheard what people said to themselves when they didn't think we could understand them.

The thing was, he almost never identified himself to the people he spoke to. And when he did, he showed them an ID that said he was with the US Marshal's Office. The first time he'd done that I'd asked him about it later.

"Don't ask so many fuckin' questions," he replied.

Another place he showed them a badge from ICE - Immigration and Customs Enforcement and threatened to have people deported. When we got back in the car I looked at him but didn't say anything.

"None of yer fuckin' business," he said.

"I didn't say anything."

"You wanted to."

"Do I get multiple badges from different agencies?"

"You're lucky I even let you wear clothes," he growled as he started the car. "Fuckin' broads ought to be kept naked in the kitchen."

I knew that wasn't a serious commentary. He was taunting me.

"That doesn't sound very sanitary."

"Okay, you can wear an apron in the kitchen. Nothing else."

"You're just a tad... misogynistic, aren't you?"

"I'm old fashioned."

"As in a caveman?"

"Wanna see my club?"

That was the first time Able said anything remotely sexual to me. It sure wasn't the last. Over the following weeks, we looked into things he made other little 'jokes' about the proper place for women, which was mostly the bedroom and kitchen.

I could have been pissed but I didn't get the idea he was saying that stuff because he believed it. I figured he was testing me. I just wasn't sure why or what for. Besides, I never challenged that he was the one in charge. As I said, he was older, more experienced, and way more knowledgeable about this stuff. I was with him for translation purposes, for his convenience.

That was okay. I was picking up a lot. So that wasn't going to last forever.

We were interviewing a Chinese guy one morning - which means Able would tell me what he wanted and I'd translate it, then translate back what the guy said. As is often the case, he wasn't very interested in telling us anything. Able then grabbed him by the throat and pinned him to the wall - which startled me a bit.

"Tell this little fuck that I know he knows his cousin's number and if he doesn't give it to me I'm going to pop his fucking head like a zit."

His big hand squeezed and the Chinese guy's eyes bulged as I explained his choices.

"He says he doesn't know," I translated back.

Able lifted the guy up, with one arm, his hand still clutching his throat as he pressed him against the wall with his feet dangling just above the floor.

"Think again," he growled menacingly, his face an inch from the other guy.

We got the number, or A number. Able lowered him to the floor and let him breathe while I called the number, pretending to be the secretary for an insurance company we knew he'd dealt with. I got his new address, and Able handcuffed the witness.

"What are we going to do with him?" I asked.

"The second I let him go he's gonna call his cousin and tell him to run. So we're taking him with us."

With us meant in the trunk of the car.

After he slammed the lid he gestured for me to get in.

"Are we supposed to do stuff like this?" I asked doubtfully.

That was the first time he ever hit me. It was a sharp slap to my ass.

"Get the fuck in," he said, going around to the driver's side.

I got in.

I have to admit I was impressed by just how strong he was, both physically and emotionally. Wimps don't excite me. I was a bit doubtful about the slap on the ass. It had stung, after all. And there were a couple of ways to interpret a guy slapping you on the ass. One was sexual, the other a kind of sexist arrogance.

Either should have pissed me off. Oddly, neither did. It was just Able, after all. And besides, the thought of him wanting me was... weirdly, darkly... interesting.

"I mean, isn't stuff like this technically against the rules or something?"

He couldn't slap my ass sitting down.

"So let em complain to ICE."

"But you're not really with ICE."

"Then their complaint isn't going to be very far, is it."