Chase Me (Paris Nights Book 2)(20)

“I suspect she can,” Elias said. “But that doesn’t mean her restaurant can. Or her current career can. Food poisoning. At a restaurant already at the center of every critic’s eye this year, as they love her or hate her or swear she’ll never make it. Merde, it’s a top chef’s worst nightmare.”

“At least she’s alive,” Mark said. “Which she wouldn’t be, if she were exposed to ricin. She probably has friends who aren’t alive, from the last Paris attacks.”

A grim look settled over Elias’s face. He didn’t have to tell them that he also had friends who were no longer alive. They all had friends who were no longer alive, these days. “Who the hell made this call? Were my people involved or was it the damn CIA?”

“It’s a coordinated initiative,” Mark said wearily. Within their team, that was working fine, but on a larger scale…it had already been a nightmare coordinating operations between the CIA and the military when they only had one country involved. “That’s all I’ve got.”

One of those visions of Violette Lenoir dying of ricin again. Not rippling under him in a glorious orgasm, shining with life, but wrenching in death, convulsions going weaker and weaker, until all of her was gone.

Sometimes he really wished he had gone into ranching or something for a living. Surfing. Skiing. Something else challenging and daredevil that didn’t stuff his brain with so many visions of so many different moments of dying. His brain was so damn good at switching out the real bodies seen with those of the people he most cared about, too.

A lot of people claimed his breed were psychopaths. But Chase knew how many of them had gone into the military not because of too little empathy but too much. They’d seen those bodies jumping from the windows of incredibly high buildings rather than burn alive, and the pain and the fury on their behalf had been too much. I’ll get those bastards back for this, the teenage boy thought. I’ll make sure it never happens again. And he enlisted.

Maybe that teenager adopted some traits of psychopathy later. Learned how to turn off that empathy switch, because what else were you supposed to do, when your mission night after night might be to slip into someone’s compound while he was asleep and kill him? But he wasn’t born that way. The problem of that teenage boy who enlisted wasn’t that he was born with too little heart where others were concerned…it was that he was born with too damn much, and he didn’t know how to give enough of it, except with his actual blood.

“I just think they could have used some excuse besides food poisoning,” Chase said. Damn it, and he’d been the one to say he didn’t care what they came up with. “What the hell was wrong with the kitchen fire excuse?”

“This leaves Al-Mofti in greater doubt, which gives us that many more chances to finally pinpoint where that bastard is.”

“Yes, but…” Chase logged into Twitter and found #audessus #vilenoir. Oh, shit. A sick feeling grew in his stomach. What the f*ck? Had some * just called her a “dumb c***”, with a “women don’t belong in a real restaurant” added on? He was going to kick somebody’s ass. “Can you retract it? Correct it?”

“Chase,” Mark said firmly. “You have to hold it together. We’ll run ‘salmonella tests’ for a few days, follow any leads we might get, and later we can say the salmonella cases were traced to something else and nothing to do with the restaurant. I hope I don’t need to remind you that stopping Al-Mofti is our top priority.”

A vision of Flight 997’s family members, the screaming agony of the mother of the little girl who’d flown by herself for the very first time to see her grandparents and now would never be coming home. “No,” Chase said, feeling sick. “No.”

“And do not tell her,” Mark said. “We still don’t know what, if any, connection her pastry chef might have with any of this. We need doubt. We don’t want anything certain to slip out.”

Fuck.





Chapter 9


By four that afternoon, Vi had one thing on her mind: Chase Smith.

If she ever found that slimy bastard again, she was going to kick him so hard in the nuts he wouldn’t even be able to look at a woman he wanted to screw for months without wincing.

Not that she knew what the hell was going on, but she knew how a man’s eyes flickered when she caught him out. Like, You’re married, aren’t you? Or Navy SEAL. She knew what normal health inspectors looked like, and she knew they didn’t bar her from her own restaurant. And she knew what it was like to be screwed by a man who didn’t see her body as anything more than an enjoyable byproduct of his running his tank right over her life.

You’re lucky you snuck out without leaving your number, you bastard. She rolled her right shoulder and touched her right cheek, where both had been bruised when the police had to forcibly remove her—pushing her against the wall by the restaurant back door and cuffing her. More good fodder for the cameras.

Putain, she might have broken Twitter.

Fortunately, her arrest had been a catch and release deal. The police had just wanted her to calm down and give up her own restaurant into the hands of imposter health inspectors. One of them had even told her a pretty woman like her shouldn’t get so upset, she should show more class. And she hadn’t even been able to deck him, because all the power was in his hands, and he would just have arrested her again, and this time kept her locked up.