WASP
Chapter One
Zoe
Dabbur zann ala kharab esshoh
The buzzing of the wasp brought ruin to its nest - Egyptian Proverb
Zoe twisted her body into a new position under her blankets. Tugging the covers up under her chin, she desperately wished for sleep to overtake her anxious, over-caffeinated mind. She squinted at the clock readout glowing from her bedside table, calculating. It had been forty-two hours since she’d last closed her eyes. And even that had been a nightmare-driven sleep, leaving her worse off than when she’d gone to bed.
That night, her flip-flopping and moaning had propelled Gage from her side. He’d stomped across her room, pulled on his pants, and headed home to “actually get a little shut-eye.” She hadn’t heard from him since. Zoe rolled over to punch at her pillow, trying to find a restful position to curl her body.
He didn’t answer my text.
Her friends had warned Zoe about seeing a new guy just as she’d signed contracts to start a lab project, especially one this big and this time-sensitive. But first off, Zoe didn’t like to be told what to do. And second? Gage was a Marine Raider, an elite special operator, with a highly capable warrior’s body. Why shouldn’t she have a little indulgent pleasure to balance out the stresses of her day? Days. She hadn’t slept for days.
Metal on metal, a scrape sounded at Zoe’s front door, followed by the slow moan of unoiled hinges. A smile curved her lips as she imagined Gage sauntering into her apartment to answer her request for some stress relief.
Good. This is precisely what I need.
She sat up, regretting having pulled on Gage’s sweats to wear to bed. She flipped her covers to the side. It would be nicer if he found her in something lacy…or maybe nothing at all. Zoe gathered the hem of the black hoodie to tug it off, but whispers from the living room stilled her hands. More than one set of heavily booted footsteps stole over the wooden floor, followed by the scratch of a drawer sliding open.
Zoe froze. Her mind was on fast forward, but the joints of her body held tight, as if rusted and ineffectual. Her brain screamed at her arms and legs to move, to grab a weapon, to hide. Something. Anything.
As she cowered there, her ears worked to dissect the moth-like movements down the hall. She registered the sound of each leaf of paper as it was lifted and rejected. She had a good idea of why someone had broken into her condo. Her liaison, Colonel Guthrie from DARPA—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the R and D arm of the US military—had warned her to take extra security precautions, but she had scoffed at the idea. Few people actually knew what Zoe did for a living, and as long as she was tight-lipped, she thought she was safe. She was foolish, was more like it.
This could be an ordinary breaking and entering, she tried to reason. But her gut refused to be that naïve. Everyday robberies didn’t happen on the twentieth floor in a secured high-rise. When the intruders were done sifting through her desk, surely they’d come and wrench answers from her. Zoe couldn’t handle pain. She wasn’t a hero. She’d tell them everything.
Straining against her fear-paralysis, Zoe slid off the bed. First her toes, then her knees found the rug. As she pushed and forced herself into action, her brain whirled, feeding her information. She knew that her limbic system was working hard to keep her alive. Though letting off the brake on her body’s movements would go a far distance in helping her. Ironic that the system meant to save her was probably going to expose her instead. Her mind whirled with odd tidbits of information that she knew couldn’t be random. Her brain was sifting through data it had accumulated in its twenty-eight years of life and thrust specific stories forward—survival strategies.
The loudest message came from a book she had read about Nazi Germany. The Jews, in hiding, would gather all of their bed linens and turn the mattresses over so the Gestapo wouldn’t feel the warmth from where their bodies had lain. Zoe eyed the crumpled linens on her queen-sized bed. She forced her arm to smooth the covers into place and shake the pillow, so it looked like a sloppily made bed. She snagged her phone from the nightstand as she pulled her arm back to her side. The effort left her panting.
Her unyielding lungs had lost their elasticity. In the ninth grade, her friend, Hope McBride, stood in front of the class to give a speech and stopped breathing until she turned red, then blue, then passed out on the floor. That’s how Zoe had learned the phrase anxiety-induced syncope. The idea of passing out with intruders in her apartment was even scarier than her current panic, so Zoe worked to suck more air up her nostrils.
Hide. She had to hide. Zoe let gravity pull her the rest of the way to the floor. The sheepskin rug muffled the sound of her collapse. She rolled, tugging her body past the green dust ruffle until she lay under her bed. It was hide-and-seek 101—the very first place anyone would search. Her body iced at the thought.
Light waves, her brain whispered. That was how the intruders would become aware of her. Her body mass would stop the light from hitting the rear wall. Move. Move now! The best she could do was to swivel and align her hips with the far corner of the bed, letting her legs extend out the length of the wall; her torso stretched across the headboard. She glanced down at the phone, clenched in her fingers, and drew a blank on whom she should call for help. Someone from DARPA? The Pentagon? Zoe was learning to hate adrenaline. Thoughts refused to crystalize. Pulling up her recent calls, hoping for inspiration, she saw FBI Special Agent Damion Prescott’s name and tapped out a text that read: SOS. She pressed send, then quickly squeezed the button to silence the ringer.
Zoe listened past her panting. The guest bedroom door scraped open. Then the bathroom. They were getting closer. Zoe toed the elastic at the ankle of Gage’s sweat pants over her feet. She turtled her head and hands into the perspiration-soaked hoodie to hide her skin. The number 9-1-1 suddenly surfaced and floated to the top of her swirling thoughts. She dialed.
“9-1-1. Where is your emergency?”
Zoe wanted to jump through the phone and throttle the man for answering so loudly. “Shh. Listen.” She managed to say just as her bedroom door snicked open. Zoe pushed the phone into the front pocket of the hoodie, hoping the dark fabric would hide the screen light. Her body was traitorously loud. Her pulse swished rhythmically in her ears. Her heart rate galloped. Her breath came in ragged gulps. Zoe knew they would hear her. And if they didn’t hear her, they would surely smell her as her adrenal glands forced fear stench through her pores. The intruders would drag her out from under her bed. Then they would…
Before Zoe’s brain formulated a prediction, a loose floorboard squeaked as someone moved into her room. The bedroom light clicked on. Exasperated voices conferred. She heard someone move toward her closet and the whoosh of hangers being thrust aside. Zoe stopped breathing. A hand shot under her bed. Fingers splayed wide, it swished through the air before it pulled back out again.
As foreign words in deep male voices jumbled their syllables together, Zoe tried to pick out what language the men were speaking. There was a pause in the men’s discussion, then in heavily accented English, “She isn’t here. Her bed hasn’t been slept in.” He was on his cell phone. “Yes, okay… Be there in five.”
The front door whined on its hinges. “Hey, Zoe. I’m here.” The sexy grin in Gage’s voice pried open Zoe’s jaw and dragged a horrified scream up her throat.
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