Salvation

Part One

Chapter One: A Cold Shower

Sydney hated disguises that involved bikinis. Not only did the damn thing keep riding up, it left no place to hide a weapon.

And this tiny pearl-white number left nothing to her companion’s imagination. She watched him watching her, gritted her teeth to keep her bubblegum-bimbo smile in place, as the small power-boat rapidly approached a much larger yacht.

Using her hand to shade her eyes against the Mediterranean sun, she pretended to admire the boat, but she was really scanning the horizon for another (albeit smaller and less luxurious) yacht scheduled to be prowling these same waters. Aha. Lady Liberty, right where it was supposed to be. She knew Vaughn and her father were watching her arrival through high-powered binoculars and offered a quick wave while her companion was busy pulling up alongside his own yacht, The Consuelo.

Her companion was Antonio Marinus, a fifty-two-year-old black-market arms dealer with a sunburned bald spot, a sagging pot-belly, and a fetish for tall American prostitutes. Sydney sighed as he helped her step up onto his yacht’s lower deck, forcing herself to tolerate his clammy touch and greedy stare. Why did she always end up impersonating hookers in this job?

Marinus, apparently unable to keep his grubby little hands off of her for another minute, led her directly down into the yacht’s dimly-lit, air-conditioned hold. She consoled herself with the knowledge that all was going according to plan so far – she’d met him on the beach as her “pimp” (a.k.a. Jack Bristow) had arranged, convinced him she could be a lot more fun on a big boat than in a resort hotel room, and now found the ship blessedly free of guards. She spotted the captain, a distinguished-looking white-haired man, on deck as they came down, but he appeared more interested in his nautical charts than in the high-priced entertainment his boss had brought back.

“You see, I have company this weekend,” Marinus explained in Italian-accented English. She smiled, feigning interest, while he fumbled with his cabin’s door-knob. The man was actually shaking with excitement, how pathetic was that? “Normally I have many people here, lots of parties, but my friend – he likes his privacy. And he pays well for it, no?”

And should we be expecting this “friend” anytime soon? Sydney wanted to ask, darting a quick glance down the semi-dark, cabin-lined hallway. Hopefully, whoever he was, he was just as old and washed-up as Marinus. She didn’t fancy fighting in this string-bikini number.

She waited for Marinus to shut the door behind them and asked for a drink. “Of course, of course,” he agreed, motioning her toward the bed. Obviously foreplay was not in this man’s vocabulary. His back to her, he uncorked a bottle of merlot on the dresser. “So, you like boats, eh?”

“Yeah, I like boats,” Sydney answered, directly behind him. She hit him hard and fast on the side of the neck with a well-placed karate chop, and he went down instantly, without a sound. Out cold. “I like boats,” she went on, digging around in his pocket until she found what she wanted – a small silver key. “I don’t like sweaty old men drooling all over me, but I like boats,” she lectured his unconscious form, looking around the room for the safe their intel told them was on-board. Her voice trailed off absently. “Gross, sweaty old men...”

Aha! There, in the closet, visible through the half-opened door, was a large black safe. She twisted the key in the lock, surprised by how relatively unprotected Marinus would leave something so important, and cackled with pleasure when she found what she’d come for: the thick dossier containing the names, addresses, profiles – and yes, even photographs – of his clients and associates. She checked that Marinus was still unconscious, then, unable to resist, flipped through the file until she found who she was looking for.

Emotionless brown eyes stared out at her from the full-color picture. Arvin Sloane. The subsequent pages listed addresses of his numerous and supposedly untraceable hiding spots, details on his known associates – Sark was there, but only a grainy security photo and his name, the man was an enigma – and a complete history of his weapons deals with Marinus, going back almost sixteen years. Sydney punched a fist in the air, elated at this major victory. Finally, she had something concrete on the man, buildings to stake-out and accounts to track, not just rumors and riddles to chase after blindly.

Now it was time to go, before Marinus woke up or his mysterious friend made an appearance. Sydney squeezed the gold earring in her left ear – her comm. “Mountaineer is ready for extraction,” she declared.

“You have the file?” This was Vaughn, sounding as excited – and astonished – as she felt. Usually their lunges after Sloane ended in disappointment.

“I do,” she confirmed, easing the door open and checking that the hallway was still empty.

“We’ll see you in about two minutes,” Vaughn promised her.

Sydney hurried along the hallway, keeping her eyes and ears open for signs of the captain or Marinus’s mystery-guest. At the foot of the stairs leading up to the deck, she suddenly froze, having just heard a familiar British accent.

Sark.

Damn! “Hold on the extraction,” she whispered, “I’ve got company.”

“Syd? What’s happening?” Vaughn demanded. She loved him for the stomach-softening concern in his voice.

“It’s Sark. Hold the extraction.” She back-pedaled, hurriedly retracing her steps down the hallway. Marinus’s door was still closed, as she’d left it, and all seemed quiet inside, suggesting he remained knocked-out. She didn’t want to hide in there in case he came to; Sark would be enough to keep her occupied. Better to find an empty room – shit, these were all locked! Calm down, Sydney – okay, see, here’s one. Just breathe.

She stepped inside the unlocked cabin as Sark’s feet hit the top of the stairs. She plastered herself against the wall beside the door, ears straining to hear his footsteps as he came down the hall. If she had a weapon, she could just lean out and blast that distinctive smirk right off his face...

Naturally, his footsteps stopped directly in front of the room she’d chosen to duck into. Sydney’s heart pounded as she cast around for a hiding place; the closet would have to do. Cramming herself in between the carefully-pressed suits – this had to be Sark’s room, the scent of his expensive cologne filled the closet – she left the door open a tiny crack to give her a partial view of the room. She waited, heart in her throat, praying he wouldn’t drop in on Marinus first and find him unconscious, willing him to go back out on deck and enjoy the sunshine.

No such luck. She heard him come in, watched him drop a slim Italian-leather briefcase unceremoniously on the bed. He stood in full view of the closet but never looked her way. Sydney’s breathing seemed incredibly loud in the cramped, humid space. At home, if her closet door stood open even a crack, she always had to check, throw it open to see what was hiding there – luckily for her, Sark seemed to have no such paranoia.

She wondered how long she might be stuck in here, the dossier clenched under one arm, her skin becoming increasingly slick with sweat. Right now, he was checking the voice-mail on his cell phone, kicking his leather sandals off and obsessively straightening them at the foot of the bed. She couldn’t recall ever seeing Sark so casually dressed. In place of his signature black suit, he wore loose-fitting khakis and a short-sleeved white button-down.

Which, she realized with a shock, he was now unbuttoning. Oh man. She forced down a giggle. What would Vaughn say, if he knew she was trapped in a closet watching her arch-enemy undress? Probably, Shut your eyes. But she didn’t dare do that around Sark – he was too quick and sneaky.

The shirt slid easily off his arms, and, suddenly captivated by the inherent sensuality with which he moved, Sydney didn’t feel like laughing anymore. His skin was fair and flawless, his body lean and muscular – Just the way I like ’em, a wicked little voice whispered in her mind. She shook her head to clear it. The zipper on the khakis slid down, and they followed the shirt to the floor. Sark was less than a foot away in nothing except white boxer-shorts, and the atmosphere in the closet was getting stuffier and stickier by the moment.

“Sydney?” Vaughn’s voice in her ear nearly made her jump, both from surprise and guilt. Like he’d just walked in on her with a lover.... She darted a furtive glance at Sark, wondering if, in the stillness, he could hear Vaughn’s voice, but he now had his back to her, methodically folding the clothes he’d just discarded. The boxers were still in place. “Sydney?”

She tapped her earring twice, hoping her awaiting rescuers would get the signal. Can’t talk now, honey! Trapped in a room with a vicious, cold-blooded killer at the moment!

When Sark reached for the waist-line of his boxers, Sydney immediately looked away, focusing on the row of dark suits around her. She doubted he would have afforded her the same decency had he been in her position, but hey, it was those small distinctions that made them so different. In a moment, she chanced another look, found to her relief that he had wrapped a towel around his waist, and then realized with a sinking feeling that he was headed straight for the closet.

Sydney grabbed the only weapon she could find – an empty wire hanger. Sark, completely unaware of his peril, opened the closet door and immediately stumbled back as the hanger whipped across his cheek, drawing blood. He cried out, either from surprise or pain or both, and Sydney took total advantage of catching him off-guard. She landed a barefoot kick squarely to his stomach, where the rib cage converged, winding him. He doubled over beside the bed. She snatched the .9 millimeter off the nightstand and leveled it at his head.

“Hello, Sark,” she said evenly, smirking as she watched him realize he’d just stripped in front of her.

His eyes narrowed and his nostrils flared, trying to fill his lungs with air again. He straightened and raised his arms slowly, showing her he wasn’t interested in making any sudden movements that would end in his death. A trickle of blood skated down his right cheek from the gash below his eye. “Agent Bristow,” he said back, dipping his head at her, slightly breathless from having the wind knocked out of him. He looked very young and very vulnerable wearing nothing but a loosely-knotted towel about his waist.

The bikini was riding up but Sydney fought the urge to pull it down. A cornered Sark was a dangerous Sark – more dangerous than usual, even. She was considering her options for escape now that the plan had gone to hell when she heard an unfamiliar male voice in the hallway, calling, “Mr. Sark?”

His cold blue eyes snapped to hers. “The captain,” he whispered.

Sydney reacted rather than strategize. “Bathroom,” she ordered him, shoving him through a door into the tiny adjacent washroom. She shut and locked the door. “Get in,” she hissed, nodding at the shower. He cocked a questioning eyebrow at her but stepped in; she followed, pointing the gun at his head. His back was to the faucet. She reached around him and turned the water in, careful to keep the gun on him and to protect the folder under her arm from the water.

He grimaced, and she took a twisted pleasure in knowing the spray was icy on his back. She put a finger to her lips, grinning when he glowered at her, his jaw clenched around a thousand nasty comments. His skin around the hanger-cut was red and puffy, but the bleeding had already stopped. They waited. Seconds passed, then minutes. Nothing else happened. Apparently, Marinus was still out and the captain hadn’t discovered him yet, but Sydney knew her luck couldn’t hold forever.

Sark was shivering, so Sydney found some compassion and reached around him again, adjusting the knobs until the water was lukewarm instead of freezing. The towel around his waist was soaked, and Sydney knew he was wondering how long it would stay up. So was she.

“Now what?” he demanded, defiantly lifting his chin. She admired how disdainful he could look with a gun aimed between his eyes. At least he wasn’t smirking, for once.

She was wondering that herself actually. Think, Sydney – got to get out of here. A flash of sunlight suddenly played across his face, and she noticed, for the first time, that the shower had a small curtained window that looked up onto the deck. Perfect.

“Come here,” she ordered Sark, pulling him around by the arm so his back was to the window. It had a crank-out lever; it would be a tight squeeze, but she could wriggle through. First she needed to get it open. “Move and you’re dead,” she promised him, the gun pressed into his stomach.

Before she could try the lever, she had to pull down the curtain rod. That proved to be a challenge one-handed; she pressed herself against Sark, tugging fiercely, acutely aware of his cold, wet skin sliding back and forth underneath hers. His breathing became slightly ragged. When she chanced a sidelong glance at him, he was staring straight ahead at the shower curtain, and while it might just have been the pink-tinged sun rays spilling in around them, she could have sworn he was blushing.

“Got it,” she announced triumphantly, tossing the flimsy plastic rod over her shoulder. No need to leave a weapon at his fingertips, even a flimsy plastic one. Now for the lever... The crank was old, rusted from years of steamy showers. Sydney stretched on tip-toe, her stomach plastered against Sark’s, straining with all her might on the tough old metal. Turn, turn, turn, dammit, her mind screamed at the lever.

“Miss Bristow.” Sark’s unusually husky voice startled her; her finger worked against the trigger, nearly squeezing it. She leaned back enough to look in his eyes and was surprised – and amused – to find the normally clear-blue gaze undeniably hazy and slightly desperate. “Would you like me to help you?”

She blushed for not having thought of that herself. “Be my guest,” she shrugged, letting him know the gun was still aimed at his mid-section as he turned, grasped the lever with both hands, and wrenched it hard to the left. The metal groaned, squeaked, then gave grudgingly, rolling centimeter by centimeter towards him while the window pushed slowly open, letting in a tangy-scented breeze.

“Ready for extraction,” Sydney told Vaughn, toying with her earring. She heard an audible sigh of relief on the other end – and suffered a pang of guilt for how attractive she was finding the muscles rippling in Sark’s back as he worked the window open.

“There’s broken glass on the ledge,” Sark told her, turning to face her again, and she opened her mouth to thank him for the heads-up but never got that far. They both froze as the sopping wet towel, the knot finally worked free from the friction of their bodies and his efforts to open the window, fell to the shower floor.

Sydney couldn’t help it. She tried valiantly to keep her eyes on his face, but her gaze had a mind of its own – it went directly to where she ordered herself not to look.

Well.

She broke the mutually mortified silence by giggling. Terribly childish, she knew, but how could she not? Here was Mr. Cold-As-Ice-Super-Spy looking as if he hoped the floor would open and swallow him whole. He responded by raising an eyebrow, and she knew how badly he wanted to ram the gun down her throat.

Then their gazes collided and she stopped laughing.

Dangerous. He didn’t look embarrassed, suddenly, and that both frightened and excited her. Her pulse quickened. Her feet carried her forward, unbidden, closing the small gap between them so she was pressed against him again, this time with only her barely-there bikini between them. His lips parted – his head ducked towards hers – she noticed how soft and thick his eyelashes were –

But there were noises outside. Sharp, crackling noises. Gunfire – the extraction! Sydney jerked her head back from Sark’s, noted his own bewildered look, then flashed him a quick, shaky good-bye grin and cut his legs out from under him with a powerful kick to the left kneecap. He crumpled but didn’t cry out this time; she heaved herself over the sill, cutting her palms and scraping her shins on the broken glass he’d warned her about, and sprinted across the short expanse of deck to the railing. A bullet – apparently the captain could do more than read nautical charts – whipped past her head as she sailed over the railing and onto the deck of the awaiting Lady Liberty.

Chapter Two: War Games

Well, that wasn’t one of his finer moments.

Sark forced himself to wring out the sopping wet towel and drape it carefully over the edge of the tub. He ignored the captain’s shouts as he methodically dried off and slipped into the suit he planned to wear back to Paris. Every movement was deliberate, as if by controlling his actions he could hold in-check the white-hot rage that threatened to blind him.

Goddamn-Sydney-Fucking-Bristow.

He ordered the captain to steer for the mainland. Marinus was nursing a nasty headache in his cabin when Sark walked in and shot him point-blank in the face; knowing what Sloane would do to the man for his carelessness, it technically qualified as a mercy killing, though Sark couldn’t help imaging Sydney’s smug face in place of Marinus’s terrified one as the bullet slammed home.

And then he’d almost kissed her. What the hell was that about? Not that it hadn’t been perfectly obvious – oh god, someone please just shoot him now – how aroused he was by her in that little string bikini...

Six hours later, climbing into the limo that met him at the airport, Sark was still fuming. He dreaded the cold, accusatory glare Sloane would fix on him and the probing questions Irina would pin him down with later. He needed a stiff drink and a hard work-out to stop his mind from racing through the millions of ways he could have handled that situation to his advantage. Not dropping his cool right along with the damn towel would have been the first step; he should have smirked at her, cocked his head as if to ask if she liked what she saw, shown her he was as in-control naked as he was impeccably clothed. But no, instead he’d stood there blushing like a prom-night virgin in front of the prettiest girl in school...

The hide-out in Paris was a fabulous hotel suite. Sark joined Sloane and Irina in the Victorian-style parlor, pouring a glass of merlot while Sloane lamented the difficulties this breach would cause.

Placating, but with a touch of impatience Sark knew her well enough to discern, Irina said, “It’s unfortunate, yes. How many addresses on the list were real?”

“Only one.” Sloane glowered at Sark, implying it was his favorite place in the world. Sark swirled his wine and kept quiet, not trusting his bruised pride to make the appropriate apologies. Oh sure, blame it all on him – after all, it wasn’t like Sydney Bristow was a back-stabbing double-agent who Sloane should have executed a long time ago – or at least empowered him to use deadly force with instead of insisting on these interminable war games –

“That’s easily fixed, them,” Irina was observing brightly, casting a sidelong glance at Sark that plainly intimated she was growing weary of holding Sloane’s hand. Sark smiled thinly, as if to say, See what I’ve been putting up with for months?

“Sark will go to Madrid and make sure there’s nothing there they can use to trace you,” she went on. “He can leave tonight. As for your associates who might have been exposed, well, you can tell them you’ve already dealt with the man responsible.”

Irina was a wicked enemy and a wonderful ally. A good deal of the tension in Sark’s neck – the part not born of a stiff, abiding embarrassment – immediately relaxed when she placed the blame fully on Marinus, effectively warning Sloane that Sark was not to be touched. With that settled, they went back to discussing the latest Rambaldi scavenger hunt. Too tired and preoccupied to keep up with the plotting, Sark wandered out onto the terrace.

Irina found him there later, after Sloane finally retired for the evening. “He’s a toad,” Sark commented, glancing into the now-empty parlor. “A fat, grumpy, incompetent little toad.”

“He underestimates Sydney,” Irina observed, obviously and unabashedly proud of her daughter. Sark privately agreed, even shared in the pride somewhat, but the sting of his deflated ego lurked too near the surface for him to compliment Agent Bristow tonight.

Keenly aware of Irina’s penetrating stare – the woman could be as disarmingly earnest as her daughter – he asked when his plane left for Madrid.

“Not for a few hours. You should rest now. You look tired. And that cut needs bandaging.” Sark reflexively touched the inch-long gash left by the hanger and winced. Irina laid a hand on his shoulder, standing close behind him. “Sark, if something else happened out there today, I need to know.”

Damn her perceptiveness. Keeping secrets from Irina was a dangerous business, but Sark had already decided he wouldn’t reveal that humiliating – that word was so inadequate – little scenario in the shower even under the cruelest torture. “Nothing,” he assured her, focusing his gaze on the horizon to avoid hers. “I’m just not used to losing.”

She smiled softly. “Then rest up for Madrid, because I’m sure Sydney will be there.”

* * * *

Running for her life under a rain of bullets was becoming an all-too-common part of Sydney’s routine.

She sprinted up the spiral staircase of the gorgeous Spanish villa, firing randomly toward the pursuing guards below as she turned each corner. Bullets whipped through priceless works of art and shattered exquisite sculptures on every landing. Good Christ, how high was this place, anyway?

Luckily for her, Sloane’s ambush party couldn’t hold a candle to her speed. Crashing through the attic door, she estimated she had a full sixty seconds before they panted in after her. Plenty of time. She dashed to the far window, the secondary escape route Vaughn had mapped out for her on the surveillance photos during the flight, tugged the rappelling rope out of her bag and clamped it to the hook on her belt. Footsteps echoed on the marble stairs. Forcing the window up, she swung herself over the edge and leapt out backwards into the sultry Madrid air.

Three feet down, she jerked roughly to a halt. What the - ? She pulled at the rope, her feet braced on the building’s pink-stone facade, expecting Uzis to appear over the ledge and bullets to smash into her.

Instead, a lone, smug and all-too-familiar face peered out of the window at her. Sark.

“Is this why they call you Mountaineer?” he quipped, touching the taut rope, which had apparently snagged on something, with the point of a shiny switchblade.

Sydney’s throat tightened. If he cut the rope, it was a good five-floor drop to the cement drive below. Something Francie had said after one of her disastrous dates popped into Syd’s head – “there’s nothing worse than a small man with a big ego.”

It was an uncomfortably warm day in Madrid, she was finding, dressed in black from head to toe with the noon-day sun beating mercilessly down on her. Sweat streaked her hair and coated the back of her neck. In what she hoped was a casual manner, Sydney pushed lightly off the building with her boots, swung out slightly, bounced off gently again. If she could just work that rope free of whatever had snared it - !

“I don’t think so, Miss Bristow.” Sark, catching on to her, seized the rope just outside the sill and held it firmly. His eyes graced over her; the hanger-cut on his cheek was swollen and bruised, like, she suspected, his smarting pride. He played it off coolly, whatever he was feeling. “You’re not made for cloak-and-dagger ensembles, Sydney. I prefer the bikini.”

“I could tell,” she shot back. Okay, Syd, the object here is not to be dropped to your death...

Today he was in complete control, no hint of the vulnerability he’d let seep through on the yacht. He actually grinned at her – slightly different than his trademark smirk, the way his lips parted slightly to reveal a row of perfect white teeth – and Sydney found herself disconcerted by the idea that they now had a private joke, something just for them. A history. It smacked of a ‘connection’, unnerving her.

Sark hauled upward on the rope, dragging her back up to where he waited; Sydney instinctively planted her feet against the stone and let her body go dead-weight, making it impossible for even someone as strong as Sark to lift her.

His eyes glinted and the knife flashed. “Either you come up or you fall down, Miss Bristow,” he warned, and she knew he didn’t bluff on ultimatums.

She really had to consider, however, which was worse: plummeting to an instant, squishy death or being reeled in like a fish by her greatest nemesis.

“Up,” she said, at last. Live to fight another day, she consoled herself.

She climbed up the building while he hauled on the rope. When she reached the window, he gave her a hand over; they were both out of breath and sweating from the exertion. Her cheek brushed his before he stepped back, sliding a gun from his belt holster and leveling it on her. She noted that the suit was back, signature black and impeccable.

Unable to resist, she broke the silence with his line from the shower: “Now what?”

Again, that quick, almost sheepish grin danced across his lips – again the feeling of a warm laugh building in her throat. Sydney smoothed a scowl into place, refusing to smile.

At least he got right down to business. “Now, Miss Bristow, empty your pockets.”

Damn. So he knew she’d scavenged before the commandos arrived. Reluctantly, she pulled the disk onto which she’d downloaded Sloane’s hard-drive out of her side pocket and tossed it to the floor at his feet.

“Is that all?”

“Yes,” she lied.

Sydney considered herself an accomplished liar, but either Sark had a crystal ball or she had a tell he’d picked up on. Or maybe he just knew her that well...Anyway, he wasn’t fooled.

“Unhook the line from your belt, please,” Sark instructed. Sydney obeyed, wondering where this was going. “Let’s play a little game of finder’s keepers, shall we?”

Okay, so, a pat-down – only he didn’t approach her. She challenged him with her eyes – Lost your nerve, Sarky?

But no, this wasn’t really about the back-up disk hiding in her bra. It was about revenge – pay-back for the shower incident. “Your boots,” he said.

Bewildered, Sydney retorted, “What about them?”

“Take them off.”

“I’m not hiding anything in my-’

“Agent Bristow, please, humor me.” How very British – making it sound like a polite request when he had a gun aimed at her heart and looked hopeful that she might force him to use it. Stooping carefully – no sudden movements – Sydney unlaced the black combat boots and pulled them off. “Socks too, please,” he said while she was bent over.

Socks and shoes removed, Sydney straightened. His catty smirk frightened her. Where was this headed? “Now your comm.” He gestured at her earpiece; she didn’t suppose it would matter to him that she’d gone radio silent until the rendezvous point, which she was scheduled to be at in five minutes. Please, Vaughn, come find me... “You can throw that out the window. Don’t want any eavesdropping.”

As her one tangible link to a rescue sailed out the window, Sydney fought down panic. Focus, Syd – you can get out of this, she told herself. He’ll slip up, they always do.

In brisk, clipped commands, Sark ordered her to remove her watch, her utility belt, and her hip holster. Sydney watched the pile growing on the floor with a fluttery sensation in her stomach, afraid she knew where this was leading after all. As evenly as if he were remarking on the weather, he said, “Now your trousers.”

Fuck this. Sydney lifted her chin, eyes blazing. “If you want my pants off, Sark, come do it yourself.”

His smirk deepened, revealing a tiny dimple in his cheek she’d never seen before. “Is that an invitation, Sydney?” She blushed but stayed motionless, resolute. He sighed. “This is what we call a strip search, Agent Bristow. I gave you the opportunity to hand the disks over willingly, but you’ve elected to be uncooperative, as usual, so,” he voice hardened somewhat, his finger tightening on the trigger, “remove your trousers.”

Because she knew he really would shoot her, Sydney gritted her teeth, undid the zipper, and kicked the black pants away from her ankles. The light-weight black sweater brushed the tops of her thighs, hiding her lacey black panties, which she was desperately wishing she’d left at home in place of less, well, revealing underwear. She vividly recalled how appreciatively she’d looked him over when his khakis hit the floor in that sun-filled room only forty-eight hours ago; now his eyes slid down her legs and back up to her face with the same expression she knew she had worn.

“The shirt, too, please,” he said, but the bite was gone from his voice. He didn’t look quite so confident anymore, and that tiny hint of uncertainty gave Sydney a new burst of hope. Okay, girl, he wants to play, then – you play.

Before undoing her shirt, she reached up and released her ponytail so a curtain of hair fell around her shoulders. Conjuring what she hoped was her best strip-tease simper, she smoothed her hair into place, swiveled slowly so her back was to him, and inched the shirt up over her stomach, watching him over her shoulder. No doubt about it – Mr. Nothing-Gets-To-Me-Super-Spy was blushing again, his jaw hanging open slightly in astonishment. She tugged the sweat-sticky shirt over her head, held it in mid-air for a moment with her fingertips before dropping it, then, one arm diagonally across her stomach and resting at the top of her black-lace panties, she pivoted to face him.

It could have been a perfectly seductive moment – his eyes were smoky, matching the sweltering atmosphere in the attic that was only partly caused by the summertime heat – except for the small black disk poking conspicuously out of her filmy black bra.

Their eyes met. Sydney knew she was blushing, too, but it didn’t matter anymore. He snickered, effectively cracking that cool veneer, and, hard as she clamped her lips together, Sydney couldn’t suppress the throaty laugh that rippled out of her, either.

He didn’t drop the gun, but she wasn’t afraid of being shot anymore. He crossed to her; she kept her hands at her sides – maybe she wasn’t that confident he wouldn’t shoot her – as he plucked the disk out of her bra. “Thank you, Sydney,” he said politely, like she’d just passed the butter or something equally trivial.

“Now that we’ve both had the opportunity to strip for one another, can I go?” She hoped her light tone masked her fear. The last thing she wanted was to be held captive – and probably tortured – by Sloane. That was another all-too-common theme in her life.

“I’m sure your CIA friends will be along to collect you if you just wait,” Sark replied, and she pushed out a relieved sigh, tingling all over as the tension worked out of her limbs.

Or was it because of his gaze? Suddenly aware that she was still half-naked, Sydney folded her arms protectively over her chest. He raised a knowing eyebrow at her, as if to say, See how it feels? He stooped, careful to stay out of her kicking range and to keep the gun trained on her, and tossed her shirt up to her. She held it across her mid-section, covering her bra and panties. “Are we even now?” she inquired, unable to hide the twinkle of amusement in her eye.

Sark shook his head, another full-fledged grin surprising her. “Oh no, Miss Bristow. We aren’t even close. I’ve at least allowed you the dignity of remaining semi-clad – after all, I think that bikini might have been more revealing than your underwear.” He held her gaze for another moment, and a warm flush spread from Sydney’s scalp to her toes as she remembered the twinge of excitement in her gut when his towel slipped away. Then he backed toward the door, holding the gun on her until the last minute, when he paused to say, “I do so enjoy these little games, Miss Bristow. Until next time, then?”

When he disappeared down the stairs, Sydney sat down heavily on the window ledge, the breeze warm and comforting on her mostly-bare back, trembling all over with relief. She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, but she did know – and it unsettled her terribly – that she was truly looking forward to her next meeting with Mr. Sark.

Chapter Three: Bubblebath

Vaughn couldn’t cook to save his life, but Sydney was so hungry that she chewed gratefully on the sticky, slightly-under-cooked mac and cheese anyway.

They ate on the couch in her apartment, plates balanced on their knees, the TV turned to an old black-and-white movie with the sound off. Grateful for his company and for the respite from high-stakes danger, she just wished her mind would shut off and stop circling back to the same topic – Sark.

Vaughn had already asked her a dozen times if she was all right, and she could feel the question building in him again, like flood-waters swelling behind a dam. When the cavalry arrived at Sloane’s villa, a tense fifteen minutes after Sark made his exit and left her stranded between fury and amusement, Sydney was redressed and ready with her cover story: Sark showed up, they fought, he overpowered her, took the disk, and left her there. Nobody questioned it, but Vaughn immediately wondered aloud why Sark hadn’t killed her. Then he’d asked if she was all right, so tender and concerned that Sydney, accustomed by now to lying, blushed and turned away before assuring him she was.

Maybe that’s why he still wasn’t convinced.

She had no intentions of telling anyone – her father, Vaughn, certainly not Kendall – what had actually transpired in the attic, just as she hadn’t told a soul about the shower incident on The Consuelo. It irked her that she should feel guilty about it. Not only could she not stomach the embarrassment of her father and Vaughn’s inevitable outrage at Sark ordering her to strip, she also didn’t see the importance of it – what had transpired between her and Sark both at sea and in Madrid had no effect on the outcome of either mission. On the yacht, she made it out with the dossier; in the attic, he could just as easily have patted her down and found the back-up disk. Therefore, she reasoned, it was none of the CIA’s business. Dammit, she was entitled to a personal life, wasn’t she?

So now Sark was part of her personal life. She shoved that line of reasoning away, fully aware that she was grasping desperately for justification at what she was holding back, not from the CIA but from Vaughn, her boyfriend, who was definitely part of her personal life. The thought of his reaction – not just the outrage, but the betrayal he would feel knowing she’d seen Sark naked and had been seen nearly naked by him – reinforced her decision that the truth simply wasn’t worth the heartache it would cause. Her mother’s encoded message leapt into her mind – Truth takes time.

But if she was completely honest with herself – and Sydney liked to think that she was – she wasn’t entirely certain she could keep a straight face when she recalled the look on Sark’s face as she started her strip-tease – nearly as priceless as when the towel dropped. Mr.I-Kill-For-Fun-Super-Spy meets his weakness, and her name is Sydney Bristow.

She realized she was grinning stupidly just thinking about it, and Vaughn returned the smile, looking slightly puzzled by her odd behavior tonight. Sydney scooted back and snuggled up against him. Good, safe, loving Vaughn – the solid feel of his shoulder beneath her cheek reminded her of everything she adored about him. She knew herself well enough to realize she was drawn to a certain kind of man, the caring, nurturing, protective kind. Danny was a doctor, a man devoting his life to saving children from the disease that had stolen his brother from him; Vaughn was her handler and her partner, her knight in shining armor, a constant companion and an anchor through these past turbulent years. She knew, as she’d known with Danny, that his love for her wouldn’t fade with time, or diminish if age sapped her beauty, or waver during the hard times inevitable for any couple. Vaughn was safety.

And Sark? Sark was...Danger. Insanity. Passion. Intrigue. The id to Vaughn’s super-ego. Sark was the kind of man who would make love with the same slow, burning intensity he orchestrated his elaborate schemes with, who would take his time and see to it that his partner was consumed whole by desire before giving in to his own needs – And where the hell was this train of thought going? Since when did she contemplate what kind of lover Sark was?

“What are you thinking about?”

Perhaps it was the very vivid image of a very naked Sark running through her mind that made Sydney automatically replace the “what” with “who”. “No one,” she said, then mentally slapped herself. Way to go, Syd – Freudian slip, anyone? “I mean nothing.” Oh, nice recovery. She turned what she hoped was a distractingly adoring smile on him and wiggled closer, deeper into his chest. He smelled wonderful.

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

Again with that question. She tried not to be annoyed. “Vaughn, really, I’m fine.” He caught the irritation in her voice and frowned. She smoothed over it by catching the front of his shirt and burying her face in his neck, murmuring between kisses, “But you can check me for injuries if you want...”

“Mmm,” he laughed, surrendering to her sudden seduction, “strip search.”

Sydney jerked back, as suddenly as if he’d smacked her. Could he know? Her eyes snapped to his face, her heart in her throat, searching for a sign. Don’t be ridiculous, the little voice in her head lectured – the same voice that kept her running when bullets kicked up behind her heels. How could he possibly know? You’re just reacting to your guilt – again.

“Syd, what’s wrong?” Vaughn was really concerned now, totally baffled by what she knew had to be her stricken expression. She looked away, and whether it was simply exhaustion or frustration over her weird mood tonight, Vaughn snapped, “Jesus, where are you tonight? Where have you been the last few days?” She glared at him, and he looked sulky, slouching down on the couch and shifting away from her. “Certainly not with me,” he grumbled.

Her defenses up, Sydney recognized on some level that she was making the situation worse. She needed to apologize, to smother him with kisses, to melt away his suspicions. But she was furious that he had suspicions to begin with – and furious with herself because she knew he had reason to doubt her. It was all so damn confusing, but her infamous stubborn streak had set in, and she refused to back down or admit any wrong-doing. “If you have something to say, say it,” she challenged, her voice as frosty as her glare.

“You’re always this way after – him.”

“Sark.” He confirmed whom he meant with a very pouty nod. Sydney stared him down, made him squirm. “And what way is that?”

“I don’t know...Distracted. Distant. Like your mind is still with him. Or, on him. Or...Christ.” Vaughn raked a hand through his hair, looking as if he wished he’d just left it alone. Sydney didn’t flinch. She sat rigid, her spine so straight it hurt, and drilled holes in the side of his face with her eyes. He was staring at the TV unseeingly. “Forget I said anything. It’s stupid. We’re both tired.”

Okay, here was the perfect out – just take it. Only she couldn’t. She felt a twisted need to make him apologize, to force him to admit that Sark held absolutely no control over her. “No, I don’t want to forget it.” She sounded petulant, like an obstinate child. “You think I have some obsession with Sark. I think we should talk about that.”

“I didn’t say obsession,” Vaughn protested, alarmed at the idea of Sydney being ‘obsessed’ with a mass-murderer. “I said you’re not yourself after encounters with him. I mean, come on, Syd, this isn’t you.” He gestured at her painfully erect posture and blazing eyes.

Deflated by the note of real concern in his voice, Sydney sunk back against the couch, still angled toward him, and tucked one foot underneath her. How could she be angry with Vaughn for questioning how strange she was acting? Sweet, devoted Vaughn – who watched her race off into life-threatening situations on a daily basis, who came through whenever she needed rescuing, who massaged her neck and tickled her feet and brought her burnt-toast breakfasts in bed and sustained her in the chaos that was her life. She owed him honesty. No, more than that – she owed him loyalty.

She cast around for the right words, studying her hands. She needed to stop biting her nails; they were ragged and brittle. Another on-the-job hazard – a precursor to ulcers and nervous breakdowns. “Have you ever,” she began haltingly, paused, started again, “Do you ever – think about – other people? Since we’ve been together, I mean.”

Looking out from under her lashes, she saw that his jaw was clenched, but he made an effort to answer evenly and honestly. “I mean, you know, of course, sometimes. Like if a really nice-looking woman walks by, I’ll think, ‘Whoa, she’s gorgeous,’ or, ‘Nice legs,’ or something, just for a second. It’s, I don’t know, instinct or something.” She smiled encouragingly, nodding him on. “But if you mean do I sit around and fantasize about other people, then, no.”

Fantasize? Well, fuck him. She did not “fantasize” about Sark – and remembering that delicious moment when his towel finally dropped each time she took a shower did not count as a fantasy, it qualified as a memory. “Are you suggesting,” her voice was wooden, but laced with a dangerous if controlled fury, “that I fantasize about Sark?”

“Do you?”

He held her gaze, and Sydney couldn’t look away. She wanted to pummel him, couldn’t recall ever being so incensed with another human being. Then she took notice of the pain, the insecurity, underlying his anger. He wasn’t picking a fight; he was looking for reassurance, for confirmation that she loved him, that she thought about him, that she didn’t lie in his arms pretending he was a suave, cocky, undeniably handsome blonde Brit – or anyone else, for that matter.

Sydney released the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding in a whooshing sigh. How could Vaughn ever understand? He lived in a world of black-and-whites, a world of obvious and distinct boundaries – this was right and that was wrong, this person was good and this person was bad, end of story. Sydney didn’t share that world. She wandered in the shadows, where the good people, like her father, could still deceive and betray her, and the bad people, like her mother, could still comfort and complete her. Sark, and what she felt for him, lay somewhere in that gray area, a place as foreign to Vaughn as the surface of Mars. A place, she realized suddenly, she wanted to protect him from.

“I do not fantasize about Sark.” There was no anger in that denial – it was quiet, almost sad. Vaughn paused, waiting for her to go on. “I can’t help it that every time we meet, it’s under life-and-death circumstances, and that makes everything with him more intense. I can’t help it that he’s tied up in my mind with all the mixed emotions I have about my mother, and that makes me analyze everything about him more than I should. But it’s not what you think. It’s just the job. He’s just part of the job.” Keep talkin’, Syd – you might start buying your own bullshit.

“Syd.” Vaughn’s voice was soft. He looked truly apologetic, embarrassed by his jealousy. He stroked her cheek. She turned her face into his palm, accepting, the anger and the tension gone from both of them. “I’m sorry. I can be so stupid sometimes. I shouldn’t have – questioned you. I’m really, really sorry.”

“That’s okay.” Sydney unfolded her legs, stretched, inclined her head toward the bedroom. “Let’s just go to sleep and forget about it, okay?”

He agreed. But even though he slept in her bed that night, it was the first time he stayed over that they didn’t make love. And Sydney wondered what that meant – and why it had to mean anything.

* * * *

Thirty minutes into a hot bubble-bath, Sark wasn’t any closer to relaxed..

He watched the bubbles dissipate into thick foam on the surface and his skin pucker from the now-lukewarm water. Back in Paris, he wanted to push all thoughts of Sydney Bristow out of his mind, but she haunted him tonight.

Somehow his clever revenge scheme had devolved into a mutual joke. He didn’t humiliate her; she mocked him, tossing her silky hair haughtily over her shoulder and teasing him with what lay underneath that filmy bra. When the game began, he fully intended to end it with her naked and degraded – possibly in tears, certainly fighting them back – while he walked away smug and victorious, her fearful respect for him firmly back in place. Instead, she turned the tables, and once again, he blanched.

If she knew the willpower it took not to shove her against that wall and rip that lacey underwear off –

Watching her strip, he’d revisited that horrible prom-night virgin sensation from the yacht. He was certain she’d seen his mouth hanging open for a full second before he thought to close it, that she’d noticed how the gun was forgotten in his nerveless hand. At least he hadn’t completely frozen, like in the shower – although he had laughed, which was almost as humiliating. That word again. He needed to find one that more accurately described the gut-twisting horror of being completely unmanned, twice in less than a week, in front of the most captivating woman he’d ever met.

The bathroom door opened and Irina entered without knocking. Mildly annoyed at the invasion, Sark glowered at her from the claw-foot tub. She ignored it, perched on the edge of the marble counter a few feet from the tub, facing him. Some men might have felt awkward suffering that scrutinizing gaze while totally naked, but Sark generally felt totally exposed around Irina whether he was fully clothed or hidden only by a thinning layer of bubbles.

“Finally put Sloane to bed?” he inquired, not bothering to hide the bitterness. Sloane had treated his victory in Madrid with disdain, as if the precious disk Sydney almost walked away with wouldn’t have brought his entire organization tumbling down.

“Sloane’s gone to Bermuda for a few days. He said he needed time alone.”

Sark snorted derisively. “Still pretending to mourn the turn-coat wife?”

Irina arched a disapproving eyebrow. She looked very much like an older version of Sydney when she did that – damn, there was Sydney again, creeping into his thoughts...“Sloane loved Emily very much, in his own way.”

Her tone gave Sark cause to reflect again on his employer’s complicated, secretive relationship with Sloane. Watching them together on the plane after her extraction from the CIA, Sark suspected they might have been lovers once, and while that mental image made him nauseous, it also stirred unwanted musings on how he might end up in twenty years – tangled in lies and regrets like Irina, with no relationships or memories unstained by deceit and betrayal. Except for a few mortifying ones that involved bikinis and towels.

“Your story about recovering the disk left a lot to be desired,” Irina observed, coming around to the real reason for her visit. Sark slid down lower in the water, watching the bubbles wash over his chest. On the flight back, he’d concocted what sounded like a plausible scenario – He fought with Sydney, overpowered her, took the disks and, considering he was under strict orders from both Irina and Sloane not to kill her, left her for the CIA to retrieve. Only his throat dried up and his eyes skirted around during the telling of it, and all the while Irina watched him with a flat stare that said, simply, he wasn’t fooling her in the least.

“I know you, Sark.” She didn’t sound angry, which surprised him; normally Irina didn’t tolerate one ounce of dishonesty from her associates. He half-expected her to slide a gun out from under her black-satin robe and execute him – like she had with Khasinu, poor bastard. “You’re troubled. Something’s happened.”

Until he met Sydney, Sark disregarded Irina’s moments of seeming earnestness as part of the elaborate mask she constructed for herself. But seeing the same ardent sincerity and instinctive compassion reflected in her daughter – all of which he knew was completely genuine in Sydney – Sark wondered more and more how much of Irina’s intensity was feigned and how much was a remnant of who she was before the KGB recruited her. In any case, long ago he privately tagged them “Laura Bristow Moments”, imagining this as the face she put on to wrap Jack so completely around her finger, and he knew he was in for one right now.

Picking up a small silver pitcher from beside the sink, she suddenly slid off the counter and came to kneel beside the tub. “Lean up,” she ordered, and Sark obeyed. She dipped the pitcher in the soapy water and poured it over his head, with his neck tilted back so the water didn’t run into his eyes. Sark sighed. It had been a long time since anyone had washed his hair – since he was a child, actually. Her fingers massaging his scalp finally succeeded in relaxing him.

To a spectator, the moment might have seemed sensual, but not to them. Irina was an incredibly beautiful woman, but her beauty was just part of her to Sark, like her malice and her brilliance; not like Sydney’s beauty, which turned him into a dithering idiot on a regular basis. Damn, there she was again – he couldn’t escape her this evening.

“You know I want Sydney to be happy.” Ah, here it was, the Laura Bristow Moment. Sark kept his eyes shut, mostly to avoid meeting her gaze but ostensibly to keep the lavender-scented shampoo out of his eyes. He suspected he was about to be warned off from any romantic advances toward Sydney. “I believe this Michael Vaughn makes her happy.” Well, sure, Sark wanted to say, the guy looks like a Calvin Klein underwear model – what red-blooded American girl wouldn’t be happy with him? “I know in the past I’ve asked you to try and recruit Sydney to our side,” here it came, he was certain, the keep-your-hands-off-my-daughter speech, “and I was hoping you were ready to try again.”

He choked on surprise as much as the wave of water she accidentally dumped down his face. “Ooh, don’t open your eyes,” Irina warned. She dried his face roughly, saying as his head was covered by the towel, “When Sydney was a little girl, she hated having her hair dried. She had such long hair and just couldn’t stand to sit still while I dried it. So we played this game. She’d cover up her head with the towel and I’d pretend I didn’t know who was under it, ask her if she was Donald Duck or Mickey Mouse or Winnie the Pooh. She loved it.”

So Sydney had a previous history with towels. He smiled darkly at his own slightly self-debasing humor.

Glad the little trip down memory lane had given him time to compose himself, Sark slumped back in the tub, his hair sopping and his mind spinning. Irina continued to kneel beside the tub, studying him intently, the towel folded in her damps hands. “Tell me again how Sydney reacted when you asked her to join with you.”

“She looked at me like I’d just stepped off a space-ship and left me to be captured by Russian guards,” he replied crisply. He realized how sarcastic he sounded and made a conscious effort not to. “She didn’t waver for a moment. The entire time we were at SD-6 together, she made it perfectly clear that she didn’t trust me. And now that you’ve escaped CIA custody under such – questionable – pretenses, I assume she’s more determined than ever to see us both brought to justice.” The picture of her tawdry smirk before the shirt came off flashed across his mind, and he shoved it away. Could she be questioning that determination? Her morality usually made her predictable; he felt confident that he understood her motivations, her perceptions, her standards. Perhaps that was why her sudden playfulness in the attic had unnerved him so greatly.

“But she was willing to murder Sloane. She completed the op. He would have died if you hadn’t saved him.” Irina was up and pacing now, still holding the towel.

“Yes, but what she did wasn’t out of revenge, or hatred, even. I saw how difficult it was for her to contemplate murdering anyone, even Sloane, in cold blood.” He swallowed, not liking how difficult these next words were to say. “As you’ll remember, we were blackmailing her with the life of the man she loves.”

Undoubtedly picking up on the subtle yet undeniable strain in his voice, Irina stopped pacing and pinned him down with her bug-under-a-microscope stare. He forced himself not to squirm. “What would you say to asking her again?”

He considered, briefly, that this exchange might be simply to gauge his reaction rather than to seriously attempt bringing Sydney into their organization again. He sighed, held her gaze evenly and answered with absolute honesty. “Sydney has made it very clear in the past that she will not betray her country. She believes what she’s doing is justified by the people it protects. She needs an ethical motivation for what she does – one I don’t believe we can offer her.” Standing up and reaching for the towel, which she tossed to him without ever taking her eyes off of his face – much more self-control than her daughter, he noted – Sark added, “But I can ask her again, if you like.”

Irina’s eyes narrowed just barely for one instant. Then she nodded. “Do that. I think her answer may have changed.”

Chapter Four: Recruitment

The guy across the terrace was definitely cute and definitely into her.

Sipping strawberry iced tea at an outdoor café, Sydney first noticed him when his leg brushed her chair as he walked by. Glancing up, she’d appreciatively watched the swing of his hips under the loose jeans as he meandered to a table in the opposite corner. When he sat down, his gaze, hidden behind a pair of Oakley sunglasses, shifted her way, and the corner of his mouth lifted in a cocky grin because she was staring. Embarrassed, Sydney had dropped her eyes back to her dog-eared copy of Rebecca, but every few minutes since then she couldn’t resist sneaking a look to see if he was looking back.

He always was. And each time he quickly looked away.

She couldn’t be one-hundred-percent certain what he looked like. In addition to the wide sunglasses, he wore a plain black baseball cap turned around backwards. A few blonde curls poked out at the back. The slightly baggy jeans and untucked black button-down drew attention to his lean, muscular frame in a decidedly understated way, leaving her to imagine – quite enjoyably – the rock-hard biceps and perfect washboard abs underneath. His casually expensive clothes and sensual, confident strut belied the cocky assurance of a frat boy, not normally her type, but the harmless flirtation distracted her from the uneasiness of the past few days.

Sydney rarely took time off from work. But after the disturbingly close encounters with Sark and the argument with Vaughn, which had created an exhaustingly strained super-politeness between the two of them, she needed a break before she completely lost touch with reality. After her huge failure in Madrid, they were at a dead-end in the Sloane investigation anyway.

Measuring the length between her not-so-subtle glances by how many pages she turned, Sydney waited until Ms. Danvers was terrorizing Max de Winter’s nameless new wife before she snuck another look at the mystery man. A pretty brunette waitress was flirting shamelessly with him, but his eyes darted over to Sydney, and she couldn’t help but feel smug. Sometimes, crawling around in the underbelly of the espionage world, she forgot that she was a woman as well as an agent, forgot how it felt to be openly admired by a stranger who didn’t think she was a hooker.

Yeah, she still had it.

Her own waitress paused by her elbow, startling Sydney. The girl, openly jealous, jerked her head toward the mystery man and announced, “That guy said he’s paying your check.”

Ensconced in the gothic-romance mood of her novel, Sydney mentally rescripted the words and pictured them in the mouth of a distinguished and properly amused English bartender: “The gentlemen in the corner would like to buy your drink, madame.” Cue soft rose-colored lights and a tender love ballad…

Well, it was a nicer come-on than Sydney would have thought a frat boy capable of. Playing to the moment, she raised her glass toward him, and he tilted his head in a semi-bow. She giggled.

The game of sly stares continued for another five minutes, during which Sydney, staring blankly at the same page in her book, concocted an elaborate mythology around her mystery man. His name was Ross – her favorite – and he was twenty-five, a graduate student at the UCLA film school. He grew up in L.A.; he surfed, played football and directed excellent independent films that were already creating a buzz around the festivals. No girlfriend, of course. Possibly a dog. Yes, a little Jack Russell terrier named Benji that he took for a run at the beach every morning.

Her waitress reappeared, this time absolutely green with envy and coldly polite. “That guy wants you to join him.”

Again her make-believe English bartender, eyes dewy with the romance of it all: “The gentleman requests the pleasure of your company, madame.”

Reminding herself that she was involved – hell, more than that, in love – with Vaughn, Sydney decided the least she could do was thank the mystery man for the drink and let him down easy. Ignoring him would just be too rude after her shameless flirting. Besides, she hadn’t been hit on in such an intriguing way since –

She did not just think, Since Sark told me to take my pants off. Now, that was fucked up.

Fully aware of the growing smile on her mystery man’s face, Sydney wound her way through the closely-packed tables, silently rehearsing a gentle rebuttal: “Thanks for the drink, it was really sweet of you, but I’m seeing someone.”

When she reached his table, he inclined his head toward the empty chair. Struck by the odd familiarity of that, Sydney sat down, though she’d intended to simply thank him and walk away.

He leaned forward, prepared to speak, but she stopped him by lifting her hand slightly and blurting out her practiced speech: “Thanks for the drink. That was so sweet of you. But I’m seeing someone.”

His mouth twisted into a weird, almost uncomprehending frown. God, she hoped he wasn’t going to be an asshole about it. “Look, I can pay you for the drink,” she offered, fumbling in her bag for her wallet.

“Sydney.”

That horribly familiar British accent stopped her cold. She had to force her eyes back up to the mystery man’s face. The Oakleys were now on the table and the signature smirk glued into place over what she knew was a valiant attempt not to burst out laughing.

Well, fuck.

The disguise, so unbelievably simple, had obviously not been intended to fool her – just any other sharp-eyed law enforcement agents who might spot a wanted terrorist strutting around L.A., she chided herself. And she couldn’t believe she hadn’t recognized him. He just looked so – well, fuck, again – damn cute in the cap and glasses.

“Would you like another drink? Something stronger than tea, perhaps?” He was mocking her discomfiture.

Sydney ordered herself to stop gawking. “What do you want?” she hissed, wishing she could be as cool and unreadable as him instead of spilling her frustration all over the table.

“I see the sainted boyfriend came through in Madrid. I trust you had time to put your clothes back on first.”

Did she imagine the bitterness behind his sarcasm when he mentioned Vaughn? Their eyes locked momentarily, filling the space between them with steamy recollections of her skin against his in the shower, his eyes running down her in the attic. He unconsciously touched the bruised, still-swollen hanger-cut beneath his right eye and twitched a self-deprecating smile at her.

Sydney was tempted to return his sardonic grin, tempted to fall into the natural and electrically-charged banter they normally bounced off one another. But she understood, with an abrupt stone-cold clarity, that if she kept allowing him to draw her in, one day soon whatever resistance she still had to his magnetism would totally crumble. And then?

Madness.

So she fixed him with a heartfelt malicious glare and pictured the greasy, charred remains of the innocent souls he’d incinerated in Mexico City – a dozen people dead because of his and Sloane’s ambition. That made it easier to spit out with real hatred, “I said, what do you want?”

He actually looked puzzled by her sharpness. Damn that baseball cap – it made him look so young, so boyish, so innocently sexy. She blanched, ordered herself to stop it – there was nothing “innocent” about him. He toyed with his mug of iced coffee, sliding a finger through the drops of condensation on the rim. Sydney swallowed hard and willed away the thoughts of where else his slender fingers might run that softly.

“Irina sends her regards.” She noted, and appreciated, that he didn’t say ‘your mother’. “She asked me to make you an offer.” He paused, waiting for a response she didn’t give. “A job offer,” he clarified, prompting her.

Sydney shot him a withering no-shit-Sark glare. Leaning back in the metal chair and folding her arms across her chest, she demanded icily, “Is there something about the word ‘no’ you don’t get? Because I can spell it out in eight different languages if need be.”

“I expected as much. So your mother asked me to offer some incentive.”

“So which one of my friends do you have held hostage now?”

He frowned, actually had the audacity to seem offended by that. “Meet me at this address,” he pushed a napkin toward her, “tonight at nine o’clock.”

Palming the napkin, Sydney kept her eyes on his, defiant. “Give me one good reason why I shouldn’t bring an entire CIA team with me and haul your ass in.”

“Because this is the game we play, Sydney, and you want to see where it leads as much as I do.”

He slipped the Oakleys back on and sauntered away, leaving her in stunned silence.

* * * *

And he was back!

In the privacy of his hotel room, Sark permitted himself an ear-to-ear, cheek-stretching victory grin.

The look on her face when she recognized him – that muted horror and jaw-dropping astonishment – God, he loved crashing through that paper-thin ice-queen exterior she pulled out around him.

Of course, he reflected, stretching out languidly on the bed and closing his eyes, he’d suffered his own stomach-softening moment of disappointment when he realized her coy smiles were intended for a perfect stranger, not for him. For several minutes there, he’d actually thought she was dropping the act and embracing the mutual attraction crackling between them. He never dreamed that silly, half-hearted disguise would fool super-spy Agent Bristow.

On a positive note, however, things couldn’t be going too well with the underwear model handler if she was turning up the heat with total strangers. He suspected Agent Vaughn was a bit too tame for Sydney Bristow; when she let her hair down – he remembered with a tingling shiver how she’d literally done that in Madrid – she could be an incredibly sensual woman with insatiable appetites. Not something a straight-arrow company man like Vaughn could appreciate. Vaughn, Sark decided, would expect a hideously routine life with Sydney: sex twice a week – same position, same two-minute foreplay after the first couple of years – and a weekly card game with their suburban friends and big family Christmases and three perfect children and a charming house with a two-car garage. The ultimate all-American family. Sydney would suffocate in that world; she needed someone who challenged her, not placated her – who embraced her dangerous passions, not stifled them. Someone who could match that ferocity in her eyes, the hunger he’d seen when she nearly kissed him on the yacht.

And where the hell was this train of thought going? Since when did he care what type of man Sydney Bristow needed?

Angry with himself for obsessing about her – again – Sark poured himself a glass of merlot from the well-stocked bar and switched on his laptop. It was perfectly natural, he consoled himself, to want some kind of connection with Sydney. That connection was what would eventually convince her to join his team, and while he wasn’t entirely sure why Irina was so set on that, he was intrigued by the opportunity to work with her again.

So tonight he would play up that connection for all it was worth and see who won this round.

* * * *

Spritzing a dab of perfume on her wrists, Sydney told herself the added touch was not for Sark.

She had checked out the address on the napkin after leaving the café. It was a trendy jazz bar called Red’s – not the sort of place she would have pictured Sark in. She pictured him in one of those impeccably-tailored suits, sipping wine on the candle-lit veranda of a five-star restaurant.

And dammit, she was picturing him again.

Francie was working at the restaurant, Will was buried under analysis projects for the CIA, and Vaughn was obviously trying hard to give her some space, but even though the apartment seemed empty without any of them, Sydney was glad she could prepare for this meeting alone. She studied her reflection in her closet’s full-length mirror. The long gray skirt and silky cream-colored blouse just looked too much like a secretary’s get-up – Hi, Sark, it’s your new assistant, reporting for duty. Stepping out of the clothes, Sydney rifled angrily through her closet, which was beginning to look bare as the pile of discarded outfits on the bed grew.

Okay, Syd, who do you want to be tonight? Someone in-control, totally poised, completely unaffected by him. Sydney liked disguises; they gave her a confidence she didn’t feel wearing her own skin.

For almost the twelfth time, her eyes fell onto a simple black dress she’d worn to a New Year’s Eve party a few years back. She remembered the appreciative stares the dress had drawn all night. But was it too much? Would it seem like she was trying to impress him, or, worse yet, seduce him?

Syd, you’ve stripped for the man, her inner voice piped up. What more could you do to seduce him?

Okay, well, granted. Sydney fingered the light material, studied herself in the mirror, picturing how it would look on her. The spaghetti straps would accentuate her toned arms; the hem brushing her mid-thighs would reveal just enough leg to tantalize. Sweep her hair up in a bun, add some tear-drop gold earrings, step into some strappy black sandals – this could be a killer outfit.

Sliding the dress over her head and smoothing out the wrinkles, Sydney tried not to wonder what Vaughn would say.

* * * *

He was waiting for her beside the front door.

Approaching with what she hoped was a casual stride, Sydney watched his eyes travel over her in a slow, admiring stare that started a tingle from her toes, where his inspection began, to her lips, where his gaze finally came to rest. Then it flicked up to hers and goosebumps shot down her bare arms.

“Nice dress,” he said when she stopped in front of him. She was breathless, and it had nothing to do with the brisk two-block walk she’d just made.

“Thanks.” She didn’t comment on it, but he looked devastating as well – the black suit again, only this time without a tie and the white Oxford open at the throat. They made, she knew, a gorgeous couple.

Although a long line waited in front of the club, the doorman showed them right in, and a hostess led them up a winding staircase away from the ear-splitting music of the live band. They walked through the crowded upstairs dining room and out onto a private back terrace which overlooked a quaint, landscaped garden. The hostess, beaming at what she took to be a very happy couple, left them there and disappeared.

Sark hadn’t touched her – she was a bit disappointed that he hadn’t taken her arm on the way up, and furious with herself for feeling that way – or spoken since his initial compliment. With the music and conversation inside muffled and mixed with distant traffic noises, Sydney suddenly felt horribly alone with him, as if they’d been air-dropped onto the moon. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

He broke the silence. “I took the liberty of ordering for us when I made the reservation. I hope that’s all right.”

As if on cue, a waiter appeared with two glasses – cabernet for Sark, a red-gin fizz for Sydney. She didn’t know which annoyed her more – that he knew what her favorite drink was or that he was so confident she’d show up that he’d already ordered.

“You didn’t have any trouble finding the place, then,” he commented, making polite conversation. Only the way his lips twitched, she knew he wanted to add, Or recognizing me this time. She entertained a quick fantasy of smashing her glass into his smug face. Man, could he get under her skin.

“Look,” she sounded rather testier than she meant to, letting him know he was getting to her, “I appreciate the little romance-routine and everything, but could we just get down to it?”

“Hot date with Agent Vaughn later tonight?”

Again, that underlying hint of jealousy when he mentioned Vaughn. Sydney ignored it. She remembered the pact she’d made with herself in the mirror before leaving the apartment: He will not get to me tonight. He will not make me smile, or blush, or laugh, or – God forbid – think about how soft his face can look when he doesn’t think anyone’s watching.

“You’re quiet tonight.” The way he said it was so damn familiar, like they really were a couple and he was slightly put-out by her attitude when he’d gone to so much trouble to be romantic.

And why did she automatically apologize? “Sorry. I’m just – this is weird for me.”

“You’d prefer a cold shower or a stuffy attic?”

“What I’d prefer is to get this over with.” There you go, Sydney! Embrace the bitch within. “So start talking.”

She had him on the ropes, she could tell. He obviously expected her to be thrown off-guard by the romantic illusion he’d worked so hard to create. She remembered something she’d said to Vaughn after one of Sark’s attempts to recruit her – that he was like that really cute guy in high school who never expected anyone to say no to him. She bit back a smirk. Mr. Smooth-As-Silk-Super-Spy didn’t look nearly so sure of himself now.

The gruffness in his voice betrayed his frustration and, possibly, disappointment with how the evening was turning out. “You may not see it, Sydney, but you and I – and Irina – are working toward a common goal.”

Interrupting his obviously-rehearsed recruitment speech, Sydney asked, “What about Sloane?” He cocked a bewildered eyebrow. “You’re working with him, too, aren’t you?”

“Sloane is a means to an end.” She patted herself on the back for bringing that note of impatience into his voice. “If you would let me finish…” She shrugged, smiling cattily, determined to keep knocking him off-track. It made things so much more fun – and conjured up delightful towel-dropping memories. “Our goal, as you know, is to complete the work begun by Rambaldi.”

“Excuse me.” Sark sighed as she interrupted again. “My goal is to keep terrorists – like you and my mother and Sloane – from getting your hands on anything as dangerous as Rambaldi’s weapons.”

“Forget about the weapons. What I’m talking about…” The arrival of that dinner he’d taken such care to order cut off his impassioned speech, and Sydney hid a satisfied smile behind her napkin. Nothing seemed to be going as planned for Mr. Sark tonight.

When her plate was set in front of her, though, Sydney had to give him points for good taste – and credit for knowing her remarkably well. The shrimp salad and butter-drenched garlic sticks smelled wonderful and tasted even better. Suddenly ravenous, she bit into the bread and licked the melted butter off her lips.

She looked up just in time to see him blanch as her tongue ran across her lips. That intense shivery feeling skated down her shoulders to leave a funny tickling sensation in the pit of her stomach. He was watching her mouth in a way that made her want to drench him in butter and lap it all up –

Well, fuck. Again.

“You were saying,” she prompted, trying to sound nonchalant and falling somewhere more in the raggedly-breathless range.

“Immortality.” He blurted out the word and it surprised her. What the - ? Oh, yeah, Rambaldi. His eyes had yet to leave her mouth, and she was trying not to squirm. The breadstick fell back to the table, forgotten. He ignored his food as well. “That’s what we’re interested in. Rambaldi’s secret to eternal life.”

Not for the first time, Sydney wished she could go back in time and blow Milo Rambaldi’s head off before he ever started inventing. She remembered the Prophecy – her mother was supposed to complete his work and, apparently, destroy the world in the process. Sydney wasn’t sure she bought into that prophet crap, but she knew her mother’s obsession with Rambaldi, like Sloane’s, had destroyed countless innocent lives. Like her own, for starters. And what was Sark’s interest in it all, anyway? Was he as fascinated as they were, or – was he here for something else?

She made a conscious effort to lace her voice with disdain. “Again, I don’t see the common goal. I couldn’t care less about Rambaldi’s fairytale.”

“Ah, but you are interested, as you said, in keeping his work out of the wrong hands.”

“Which doesn’t explain why I would come work for you.”

“Are you so sure about what the CIA wants Rambaldi’s work for?”

Sydney paused, considering it. She realized that not everyone in the CIA was altruistic; men like Kendall, for instance, often focused more on the personal gain gleaned from bringing in a big collar than on actually stopping the bad guys. She had wondered, from time to time, what those at the top of her organization might do with the kind of power promised in Rambaldi’s manuscript.

But while she might have her doubts about the CIA, there was no question about the havoc Irina or Sloane or probably even Sark would use the manuscript to unleash. Everytime they got their hands on a Rambaldi artifact, all hell broke loose. “I don’t have any illusions about the people I work for,” she answered, holding his gaze, which had thankfully shifted away from her mouth, letting him read the honesty in her eyes. “I’m sure some of them want Rambaldi’s work for their own purposes. But I have to trust that there are enough people in the CIA that want to protect the world, and that they balance out the ones who just want the power.”

“People like…your father?”

Sark had a dangerous gleam in his eyes, giving Sydney the uncomfortable feeling that he was holding an ace. She wriggled slightly in her seat, trying to work out the sudden tension balling up in her gut. “I suppose.”

“Or Agent Vaughn?”

“Of course.” She outright glared at him – Don’t go there, Sark. The memory of those few awful minutes when she’d doubted Vaughn’s loyalty leapt up to haunt her, putting her on the defense.

“This man?” Sark slid a folder – where the hell had he been hiding that? – across the table to her. Sydney opened it and her mouth dropped open in shock.

Arvin Sloane’s arrogant face stared up at her, seated on a bus-stop bench in Rome. And next to him, clutching a briefcase and looking very nervous, was Will Tippin.

Chapter Five: Revelations

It took a few minutes for the shock to dissipate enough that Sydney could think. And then she thought, Not Will. It just didn’t make any sense.

Sark studied her, sipping wine. The food got cold on their plates, but neither one cared. Tension crackled in the silence, running like waves between them.

He waited for her to speak. When she finally did, she sounded shaky. “I don’t believe it. You could’ve faked the picture – put it together digitally or something.”

“Ask Marshall to analyze it. You’ll see that it’s real.”

Okay, so, he wasn’t bluffing. Acid burned in Sydney’s stomach, nauseating her. The rich aroma of the food threatened to make her gag. Not Will – not Will – please, not Will.

Goddammit, was anything or anyone in her whole fucking life real?

“Mr. Tippin’s association with Sloane came as a surprise to us as well,” Sark said, purposefully understating the impact this revelation was having on her. She stared at him, aware that she should be asking questions or blinking or at least breathing. He was beginning to look concerned. “We know he’s assisting Sloane in finding the location of several Rambaldi artifacts. There’s an audio tape of their conversation in here,” he tapped the folder, “but Mr. Tippin only alludes to his superiors. He doesn’t name anyone directly.”

This was all coming too fast. He’d lost her. “His superiors?” she echoed dumbly.

“Yes. He refers a few times to his ‘master’ – an odd choice of words, I found – but that’s all.” Sydney’s stomach was really churning now. She gulped in some air, noting the increasingly alarmed look in Sark’s eyes. “Based on her observations in custody, Irina thinks he’s probably working for someone at the CIA – good Lord, Sydney, are you all right?”

This last outburst was in response to her jumping up, rushing to the railing, and vomiting over the edge into the garden. Someone shrieked down there; foggily, Sydney was aware of running footsteps below, of strong, steady hands leading her back to the table, of the waiter appearing to ask if everything was all right.

“Here, take this.” Sark pressed a glass of something fizzy into her limp hand. Sydney stared at him, feeling disconnected, unable to process what was happening. He knelt in front of her chair, which was now turned away from the table, looking so worried that Sydney almost laughed.

Mr. I-Don’t-Give-A-Fuck-Super-Spy was concerned about her. And wiping vomit off of her chin with a napkin.

Oh Will. Her thoughts crashing into one another, Sydney buried her face in her trembling hands. The taste of vomit coated her throat and threatened to make her retch again. Will. Her friend – Danny’s friend – Vaughn’s friend – Francie’s lover. Had he been on the other side this whole time, wheedling his way into her life like Irina had with Jack, or was this her fault? Had he been recruited into something sinister because she got him involved with the CIA in the first place?

“Please drink this. It’ll calm your stomach.” Sark still had his hands on her knees. Sydney pushed her hair out of her face and obediently sipped the fizzy drink – ginger ale. He patted her leg, as if to say, Good girl.

Gradually, as the fog in her head cleared, Sydney became aware that his thumb was stroking her bare leg, sliding along the delicate bone connecting her calve to her thigh. The tenderness in his touch set off a firestorm of emotions in her already-jumbled mind – longing, sadness, passion, anger, confusion.

Anger won out. Jerking her legs away so hard her knee knocked into the table, she snapped, “I’m fine.”

She didn’t have to add, So get away from me. He stood, gracefully brushing the wrinkles out of his suit. Glancing over the railing, he observed dryly, “I do believe you puked on someone down there.”

Well, fuck.

There was something so remarkably funny in the way he said it – or maybe she was just on the verge of insanity, mentally reeling through years of footage involving herself and Will, searching for clues that he’d been holding a knife behind her back – that Sydney heard herself giggling. Sark looked at her, curious, probably wondering if she’d completely lost it, but once she started, Sydney couldn’t stop. She hadn’t laughed – really let go into a full-bellied, lung-constricting laugh – for months. So in the midst of all this shock and turmoil he’d dumped in her lap, she was roaring with laughter, gasping with laughter, shaking with laughter...

And crying. It just happened; the hysterical laughter caught in her throat and transformed into a low, plaintive cry. Quiet sobs followed it, building in intensity as the tears blinded her. She wanted to stop, couldn’t, realized this was probably what it felt like to crack up completely.

“Sydney. Sydney, stop.” Sark’s voice was thick with – what? Anger? Concern? Fear? He grabbed her by the shoulders; she wrenched away. What gave him the right? She’d earned a good fucking emotional collapse, hadn’t she?

He hauled her to her feet, his grip so tight it bruised her upper arms, and shook her roughly. She twisted feebly. Reality was slipping away into some dark void, and Sydney was really scared that she was losing her mind. The sobs grew louder, rising into a weird high-pitched wail, almost like keening.

Sark slapped her. Not hard enough to turn her head, but hard enough to hurt. She went quiet instantly, stunned, and then acted on reflex – she punched him.

When her fist connected, she knew she’d knocked at least one of his teeth out. He staggered back, momentarily dazed, and in those few seconds, Sydney’s calm reserve kicked back in.

Her face was a red, wet, blotchy mess. Ignoring him – she hoped his goddamn jaw was broken – she plucked up her napkin and mopped away the tears. The sobs had left her hollow and quivering; the night was warm but she had to concentrate very hard to stop herself from shivering.

Don’t lose it like that – EVER AGAIN, her inner voice warned.

Tucking a loose strand of hair behind her ear, Sydney steeled herself to face Sark. She found him sitting on the railing, watching her, a white handkerchief pressed into the hole left by a missing back tooth on the left side. His crooked bottom lip was bleeding freely, dripping blood in a crimson stream onto his white shirt.

With the napkin she’d used to wipe her tears, Sydney dabbed the blood off his chin. She felt suddenly, weirdly, tender toward him. “Let me see,” she commanded softly, pulling the hand holding the handkerchief away from his mouth.

He permitted this, although the malevolent stare he fixed her with told Sydney he was feeling anything but tender towards her. The missing tooth was on the bottom; blood welled up in the socket, and he turned slightly to spit it out. She took the handkerchief from him and poked it down against the wound, causing him to wince. “Bite down, hard,” she ordered. “It’ll stop the bleeding.”

He mumbled something that sounded very much like, “Bite this,” but with his mouth full of handkerchief, she couldn’t be sure. She filled a clean napkin with ice from her ginger-ale glass and held it against his jaw to stop the swelling. He glared at her, a tuft of handkerchief sticking out between his lips and drool on his chin, and it might have been comical if she wasn’t so drained, physically and emotionally.

Another fine mess...

“I can’t give you an answer right away,” she heard herself explaining. She realized she wasn’t thinking about the words – it was like her mouth had disconnected from her brain and was speaking for itself. “There’s no way I’m coming to work for you or my mother, whatever you think about our common goals. But if there’s a mole in the CIA – if Will’s caught up in something, or part of it or whatever – then I might help you find out what’s going on.”

Sark pulled the handkerchief, soggy with blood and saliva, out of his mouth so he could say, “Might?”

“I have to think about it, okay?”

Reluctantly, he nodded. She sensed his disappointment.

She also sensed that she should step away now, before that feverishness in his eyes built any hotter. The night was suddenly still, without a breath of air. The music below sounded muted, like it belonged to a dream or another dimension; in its place, she heard her own heartbeat, unnaturally amplified. Acutely aware that she had cried off all her carefully-applied make-up and that her breath smelled faintly of vomit, Sydney succumbed to a blush.

He touched her face, gently, and for the first time she was aware of the stinging where he’d smacked her. It was nothing compared to the stinging in her chest, right above her heart. How could he look so – soft? This man, she knew, was not soft. People who killed other people as blithely as Sark did couldn’t know the meaning of the word soft.

“I’m sorry I hit you,” he said, his voice one breath above a whisper.

Or, maybe he could.

“Me too. Sorry I hit you, I mean.” She was surprised to find it was true – it wasn’t like this was the first time they’d been in combat together, or the worst they’d ever hurt one another. Their eyes locked. She smiled weakly, seeking the safety of their usual banter, falling short. “I think I may have needed it.”

“Me too.” He didn’t clarify whether he was agreeing that she’d needed to be slapped or suggesting he’d deserved her punch. They shared a smile. Sydney felt the shivers threatening again, but these had nothing to do with her weariness. Because, suddenly, she wasn’t weary anymore; she was charged with a cagey energy, snapping with an electric desire to lick the flecks of blood away from his mouth. What would he do if she just – slid her tongue out and flicked it over his lips –

“Well.” He broke the spell, not a moment too soon. Sydney fell back and the world jerked into focus again, a breeze ruffling her hair and sirens screaming on the freeway and music thumping away inside. “I’ll contact you in twenty-four hours for your answer,” he announced crisply, rubbing his jaw where a bruise was already forming.

“Right. Okay.” She strove to match his business-like tone, snatched up the folder and held it protectively against her chest. “I’ll look into this and let you know what I decide.”

But she already knew her answer, and he knew she did. Because Will was in trouble – and probably placing everyone she loved in peril as well – and she didn’t have any choice but to ally with the enemy.

* * * *

By the time Sydney reached Vaughn’s apartment, she was trembling again.

She didn’t want to go home in case Will was there – she needed time to sort this out, because otherwise she’d tip him off by acting weird. She prayed Vaughn wouldn’t be out somewhere, doing a guy thing with Weiss or whatever.

She didn’t know until he opened the door that she was going to attack him.

He never even got out the automatic, “Sydney, are you all right,” that she read in his eyes. She grabbed the front of his tee-shirt – he was deliciously sweaty from working out – and pulled him down into a bruising open-mouthed kiss.

She just wanted to disappear – melt into this – blend into him until she didn’t exist anymore...

Vaughn stumbled inside and fell hard onto the couch with her straddling him. Sydney never let him come up for air, never even let his hands leave his sides. She tore his shirt and boxer shorts off while she bit down hard on his lower lip, making him flinch. She didn’t bother to remove her dress, just kicked the panties away from her ankles and took him, with the dress up under her armpits.

Disappear. Melt. No Will; no Irina; no CIA; no Sloane; no Sark.

Well, maybe Sark, grinning knowingly at her from the periphery of her mind.

It was over almost before it began. Sydney collapsed onto his chest, completely spent. For a few long moments the only sound in the apartment was their rough breathing.

“Are you all right?”

Sydney had never made love to anyone like that – so fierce, so punishing, so desperate. So she expected more of a reaction from Vaughn than what seemed to be his stock question lately.

She rolled off of him, nodding wearily, the energy gone and a consuming emptiness replacing it. He retrieved his underwear and pulled her dress down over her thighs. Both actions annoyed her. What, she wasn’t supposed to do anything spontaneous when it came to sex? She was just supposed to lie there, prone beneath him, smiling contentedly and moaning at appropriate intervals?

Well, she wasn’t being fair – or rational. Sex with Vaughn was nothing to complain about. He was a considerate lover, always sweet and thorough. Just maybe not – well – very passionate.

She shook those thoughts away because they smacked of betrayal. Like picturing Sark’s grin during sex smacked of emotional adultery.

“Glad I didn’t have company,” he joked, trying to break what was fast becoming an awkward silence. “Want a drink?”

She nodded again, feeling mute. Now that she was here, she was nervous about what she had to say. It didn’t help that Vaughn was acting slightly disapproving of the way she’d move love to him; it made her feel embarrassed for being so uninhibited.

“You look nice,” he observed from the kitchen, pouring them both a glass of strawberry wine. “Did you go out with Francie or something?”

“Sark contacted me tonight.”

She didn’t intend to just blurt it out like that, but there it was, hanging between them like a tangible mist. She gauged his reaction carefully; he paused in pouring the wine but tried hard to maintain a neutral expression. “What did he want?”

Briefly amused by how Vaughn could load the pronoun ‘he’ with loathing when referring to Sark, Sydney sat up on the couch and sipped at the wine. Vaughn sat on the coffee table, watching her. “He asked me to come work for my mother.”

“Persistent, isn’t he?” There was something almost cruel in the way Vaughn stared at her, the way he bit the words out in a short, clipped burst, like machine-gun fire. Sydney tried to ignore it, but he was pushing, deliberately so. “Is that why you were so – worked up?”

As usual when her anger crossed over into a dangerous rage, Sydney went icy cold. Her voice reflected it. “Excuse me?”

“That little scene earlier.” No attempt to hide the disapproval now.

“It’s called making love, Vaughn.”

“I know what it’s called.” He should have picked up on the way her hands clenched reflexively in her lap, the hard set of her jaw, the absolute stillness in her eyes. This wasn’t the time to do this, couldn’t he see that? But he kept going, oblivious to her fury, or maybe too focused on his own. “And that wasn’t love-making. That,” he looked at her flatly, “was an exorcism.”

The emotional punch landed so close to home that Sydney nearly doubled over. He saw her wince and dared her to deny it. Feeling like she was in the sparring ring, Sydney geared up for her return blow: “You’ve got a real inferiority complex when it comes to Sark, don’t you? Is it that he’s so good-looking, or that he’s so charming, or that he’s so mysterious?”

That one hit home. Vaughn’s mouth spasmed into an ugly snarl. “A nice string of compliments for someone who tortured your best friend and tried to gun me down in a stairwell.”

Ouch. The mention of Will was like a kick when she was already down – not that he knew that, of course. The folder she’d intended to show him was somewhere by the door, where this meeting had begun so differently than it was ending up.

The silence held between them until, finally, they both looked away. “Syd,” he sounded as sad as she felt, “what the hell is going on between us?”

A whole lot of nothing, and that’s the problem. “You keep accusing me of obsessing about Sark,” she retorted stonily, refusing to surrender to the temptation to crawl into his arms and sleep for a hundred years, until Sark and her mother and Will and Sloane were all dead and she needn’t worry about them anymore.

“Yeah, and you keep proving me right. Now you’re even bringing him into our bed.”

For a second, Sydney wondered if she’d moaned Sark’s name or something – God, that would be enough to make her eat a bullet – but she suspected, had she done that, Vaughn wouldn’t have been so calm while he poured the wine. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but it’s insulting,” she said stiffly.

“I’d love to think you were making love to me before. I’ve been waiting so long for you to let go like that, to just let down and take me, instead of waiting for me to come to you. It’s like we’re still – I don’t know – doing that weird dance we had to do before SD-6 went down.” This was classic Vaughn, and normally she would have found it adorable – the intense, sorrowful eyes, the hint of brooding in his voice, the carefully-chosen words. Nothing harsh or spontaneous about Agent Vaughn, she reflected, and was surprised by the venom in that thought.

He leaned forward, completely earnest. If she hadn’t been so furious, it would have been endearing. “Syd, when I opened that door and you – you know – I felt like the luckiest man alive. Here’s this fabulous woman who just can’t keep her hands off me, right? And I’m thinking, Finally. Finally I can see that she feels exactly the way I do – like one inch between us is too far, or one minute without touching is too long. And I thought it was about the fight we had, how weird it’s been between us, that you were showing me it was okay and we were back to normal – better than normal, even. But it wasn’t any of those things. It wasn’t even about me.” He looked away from her resolutely cold stare. “You expect me to think it’s just a coincidence that you make love to me like you’ve got this desperate need to purge yourself of something, and it’s right after you meet with him?”

Oh God. He really knew, didn’t he? It was that obvious how much Sark got to her, wasn’t it? If she could just go back – if she could just not do the Marinus op, if that whole shower incident could just be erased – or did it go back further? She rubbed her temples, closing her eyes and trying to remember when a sizzle of sexual tension crept into her out-right abomination of Sark.

She wanted to say, But I love you. I don’t know what I feel for him, maybe in another life it could be love, if we were different people, but it can’t be, and I know it. And I want to love you. I want you to love me and I want to stop hurting you and make this whole mess just go away.

Only she couldn’t. Maybe it was pride, maybe it was stubbornness. Or, maybe, it was the realization that if she admitted out-loud to another living soul that she could, and very possibly might, fall in love with Sark, as twisted and despicable and sick as that was, then it would become real. She couldn’t handle that.

So, instead, she did something that reminded her very much of her mother – she turned it around on Vaughn. “You know what I think? I think you liked pining away after me more than you do actually having me. I think you’re more cut-out for the angst and the brooding part of love than the relationship itself. I think you’re looking for a way to mess this up so you can move on to your next obsession.”

If words could be taken back. Vaughn’s face fell so sharply, the pain in his eyes leapt out at her so palpably, that tears sprang into Sydney’s eyes. She instinctively moved to comfort him; he backed away, and she froze. She had crossed a line with him – or he had crossed a line with her – whatever, lines had been crossed, and they couldn’t be uncrossed.

“I can get my things from your place tomorrow.”

The finality in that statement wounded Sydney, terrified her, caused her to back-pedal. “Please don’t,” she begged, softly pleading. “Vaughn, please. I can’t explain everything right now, I need to go see my dad, but something happened tonight – not the way you’re thinking, please – and it’s – I’m not myself. Please, let’s just not do this right now.”

Seconds seemed like hours while she waited for his response, her hands clutching her knees, afraid to reach for him and be rebuffed again. Her heart felt torn in two; one part wanting the freedom to be as emotionally wrapped up in Sark as she wanted, the other part warning that without Vaughn as her anchor, that madness she was so close to descending into would consume her entirely.

“Okay,” he agreed, at last, not meeting her eyes. “Okay.”

“Okay. I have to go.” Aside from needing to run Sark’s offer by her dad, Sydney also needed to escape this hopelessly fucked-up atmosphere with Vaughn. She offered what she hoped was an apologetic smile. “Will you call me tomorrow?”

A beat. “Of course.”

He walked her to the door and kissed her cheek where it was slightly puffy from Sark’s slap. Sydney caught his arm, pulled him in close for a hug, felt some of the tension ease out of him when she held on. “Vaughn,” she whispered, but didn’t know what else to say.

He stepped back, looked into her eyes for a long moment. “Be careful,” he said by way of good-bye.

It was the first time since their passionate kiss in the ruins of SD-6 that they’d left each other without saying I love you.

* * * *

If he had to watch another tender moment between Sydney and the underwear model, Sark was certain he would vomit.

God, look at him pawing her, Sark silently raged, spying on the couple’s good-bye through high-powered binoculars. He’s probably saying, ‘Oh Sydney, please don’t go, let’s have another randy little fuck, right here on the porch this time’.

Tailing her from the restaurant – she was so distracted she hadn’t noticed him, a first for her – Sark wasn’t surprised when her first stop was Agent Vaughn’s. He was surprised, however, when she practically kicked the door down and took the man right there on the stoop. That was not a normal Sydney Bristow moment.

That was a Sydney-Bristow-thinking-about-Sark moment.

Well, he liked to think so, anyway. Possibly she was head-over-heels in love with the underwear model (he needed to stop calling the man that, before it slipped out in front of Sydney and earned him another sucker-punch) and whatever was happening between her and himself was only a reaction to the intense situations they routinely ended up in together. He’d certainly thrown her with that picture of Tippin tonight. More than thrown her. He remembered her shrill, unnatural laughter and keening sobs with a shudder – not because of her, for fuck’s sake the woman had earned a nervous breakdown with Irina and Jack and Sloane pulling her around in their sick tug-of-war, but because of how suddenly protective he’d felt of her. Christ, he’d nearly admitted the whole thing was a lie just to calm her down. The slap he settled for was more of a reflex really, like the punch she instantly retaliated with. They were very good at hurting one another, he noted.

And he’d almost kissed her. Again.

The porch-light embrace ended – thankfully – and Sydney, out of habit, checked the street for anything out-of-the-ordinary. Sark hastily lowered the binoculars and hunkered down behind the wheel. He was parked a safe distance down the street, but one never knew. It didn’t do to underestimate Sydney Bristow, his aching jaw and the tooth wrapped in a bloody napkin reminded him.

They were headed to her father’s now, Sark was certain. He easily followed her half-hearted loops and turns; her head wasn’t in the game tonight.

As bad as he felt for Sydney in this little game sometimes, Sark truly pitied Will Tippin. The picture, as he’d told Sydney, was real enough, but it didn’t depict what she thought it did. Thanks to the Francie-clone L.A. asset, Sydney’s enemies had intimate access to Tippin’s mind. Under nightly hypnosis, classified information was extracted from him and orders were given for the next day. A number of weeks ago, those orders had been to meet with Sloane in Rome to spill his guts on everything the CIA knew about the location of Rambaldi artifacts; thanks again to hypnosis, this time performed by Sark himself, Will remembered the trip as a Rambaldi research-expedition, properly sanctioned (as it had been, no need to get their one good CIA insider kicked out for breaking protocol) by the agency.

But Sydney, of course, didn’t know about the Francie-clone. When Jack proved that both the picture and the audio tape were real, she would be convinced Will was a traitor. And the father-daughter duo wouldn’t risk trusting anyone else in the CIA with that information until they knew whom this mysterious “master” was, leaving them with only one viable option – make a deal with the devil. Namely, himself and Irina.

Following Sydney’s winding path, Sark mused that he could never give up his own face, his own voice, his own body for someone else’s like his L.A. asset had. Sydney was more comfortable in disguises, he knew, but Sark lived the persona he’d created – unflinching, remorseless, deadly.

Unless, of course, towel-dropping and strip-tease incidents could be counted...And now he had knocked-out-tooth incidents to add to that list. How remarkable that every time his guard went down, Sydney was involved.

True to form, Sydney parked outside her father’s house and darted up the walk. It was close to midnight, but Jack answered the door immediately, fully-dressed. Watching them disappear inside, Sark picked up his cell phone and called Paris.

Irina answered by asking, “Were you successful?”

“I believe so. She’s talking it over with daddy-dearest as we speak.”

“Jack will agree that they don’t have any choice. She’ll do it.”

“You’ll forgive me for saying again that I can’t see how this little deception is going to convince her to come work for us long-term.”

Irina’s voice was tinged with a hard edge that made Sark wince with his new-found protectiveness for Sydney. “The deception is just the means of drawing her in. I have other ways of convincing her to stay.”

Chapter Six: Rendezvous

Another day in the life of Sydney Bristow. This one felt interminable as she awaited Sark’s phone call.

She told herself the edgy excitement stemmed from wanting to get this all over with, not from wanting to talk to him again, to hear his voice dip with pleasure when she told him what he wanted to hear – she was in.

The night before, she’d stayed at her dad’s until three in the morning, when she was certain Will and Francie would be asleep. This morning she went for an early run and didn’t return until she saw both cars were gone. Her dad was covering for her at the office; she wasn’t up to colliding with Will in the hallway just yet.

Around noon, Jack called to say he’d authenticated Sark’s intel – through non-CIA channels, of course. Sydney already knew deep-down that it was real, but she felt like crying anyway. Instead, she punished herself with a grueling hour-long work-out and then treated her sore muscles to a relaxing shower that, inevitably, reminded her of Sark.

She was more than a little worried about his phone call. Her resistance to him had hit an all-time low since that shivery scene at the restaurant last night, and she didn’t quite trust herself to be super-bitch-Sydney with him just now.

Vaughn, as requested, called while she was drying off. He sounded strained and tired, like she felt. Sydney made a deliberate effort to be sunny.

“You know what I was thinking?” she asked, pulling on her most comfortable today-I-do-nothing pair of sweats. “I was thinking we should take a weekend trip somewhere. Soon. Maybe up to San Francisco. Francie says they have some really neat old vineyards and these great bed-and-breakfasts up there.”

“Maybe.”

She tried and failed to hide her irritation at his sulkiness. “If you don’t want to go, it’s fine. Just say.”

He sighed. “I just don’t see how running away from our problems will solve anything.”

Why did he have to be so fucking – and predictably – difficult? “Okay, fine. Excuse me for trying to make-up,” she snapped, and hung up on him. He didn’t try to call back.

The call left her agitated. She paced the length of the living room and back again a dozen times, slapping her feet down so hard the soles tingled. Bright sunshine blazed in on her, but she didn’t want to go out and enjoy the beautiful day. She wanted to stay in and be miserable, because she was seriously fucking things up with Vaughn and one of her best friends was either willingly aiding or being forced to aid her worst enemy and she was heading out for an indeterminate amount of time with Sark, and probably her mother, two people she never wanted to see again.

Well, that should have been true, anyway. On both counts.

The phone rang and she pounced on it. “Hello?”

“You look bored, Sydney.”

God, even his voice sent excitement rippling down her spine. She was not in an ice-queen mood with him today, not even close. “Hi.” That came out far too soft, way too breathless.

“Hi.” His voice sounded similar. She smiled into the phone.

“You can see me?” Perched on the counter, Sydney twirled the phone cord around her index finger until it cut the circulation off above her knuckle. “Where are you?”

“In an undisclosed location outside your apartment, watching you.”

Great – and me in my sexiest outfit, she thought sarcastically, almost forgetting to scold herself for caring. She switched to the cordless phone, jumped off the counter and headed for the bedroom.

“Where are you going?”

It gave her a fun jittery feeling to know he was watching her. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” she replied, surprising herself with her sultriness. He chuckled, silky and soft, giving her that delicious low-down tickle.

She flicked the blinds closed in her bedroom and he protested. “Hey, no fair.”

“Where are you?” she asked again. She pictured him in his fully-loaded Mercedes, top-down so the breeze ruffled his hair. Stop picturing him, Sydney, dammit!

“I’m not far.” Again with the low-down tickle, knowing he was hiding somewhere nearby and she was half-naked, the sweats on the floor as she stared into her closet for inspiration. “Listen, I know we said twenty-four hours, but since you’re starting to look like a caged tiger - ”

“It’s fine. I’ll do it.” She actually heard him smile and rushed to add, “But just to find out what’s going on with Will and if it goes any further than him. After that, it’s over.” She might have sounded sterner if she weren’t hopping around on one leg to pull on her sexiest pair of low-rider jeans. No, not sexy – comfortable. Right.

She broke the short ensuing silence with, “So how’s your mouth?”

“It bloody hurts.” She laughed at the pout in his voice, so sultry, suggesting she could perhaps kiss it better – don’t go there, Sydney – so different from Vaughn’s grumpy skulking. No, don’t think about Vaughn.

Yes, think about Vaughn, Sydney, her annoyingly pragmatic inner voice insisted. Isn’t he supposed to be your anchor, your rock, your lover?

Yes, but – this was too much fun, playing around with Sark with the safety-net of distance between them. No chance of random near-kissing encounters mingled with the banter; no way for this flirtation to lead anywhere, except maybe phone sex. Hell, at this point, she wouldn’t put it past herself.

“The tooth,” he went on lamenting to her in that delectably pouty voice, “was unsalvageable.” Sydney tugged on a brown tank-top that brought out the gold flecks in her eyes and experimented with different hairstyles in front of the mirror, murmuring for him to continue. “I spent all morning having a cap put on. I think I’ll send the CIA my dental bill.”

Her hair twisted up into its usual ponytail – she wouldn’t want him to think she was trying to impress him or anything – Sydney stepped back into the kitchen. He chuckled again, obviously catching sight of her. “The sweats looked fine, Sydney.”

Hoping he wasn’t close enough to see her cheeks redden, Sydney crossed to the living room window and peered out, eyes scanning the street. He taunted her, “You’ll never find me that way, Miss Bristow. You have a difficult time recognizing me in disguise, as I recall.”

She stuck her tongue out for his benefit, eliciting yet another chuckle. “I’ve never heard you laugh this much,” she teased. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you were happy.”

A pause. For a moment, Sydney’s heart stopped too, afraid he’d just slammed the phone down on that too-intimate remark. “Would you like to play a game?”

Pleased that he was still with her, Sydney felt saucy enough to retort, “So long as it isn’t your version of ‘finder’s keepers’.”

Okay, now they definitely had a private joke, and she was finding it difficult to remain uneasy about that. “No,” he agreed, a hint of a husky timbre to his voice, “I thought next time we played that you could be in charge.”

Oh lord. Sydney closed her eyes and willed her heartbeat to slow down from its frantic patter. She resisted the urge to slide down the wall, knowing he was watching her, refusing to let him know how melty that sexy rumble in his words could make her.

“Sydney?”

“I’m here.”

“I can see that. Do you want to play?”

“Mm-hmm.” Good Christ, was she really doing this? Playing games with a mass-murderer? What would her dad say? His voice popped into her head immediately, so deep and sad: ‘Think of the consequences, Sydney. You know what he is – what he’s capable of.’

Yeah, but he was also capable of making her want to slide like butter into his arms, of convincing her with a look that she was the most beautiful woman in the world, of arousing a dangerous passion in her that no one, not even Danny, had ever awakened in her. It was addictive. He was addictive.

And, like all addictions, this was probably going to end badly. She needed to get on with the op before she totally lost it and succumbed to this – whatever it was.

But right now, they were playing a game, and like he’d said, she wanted to see where it led. “Okay, go to your back door,” he was instructing her. “Good. Open it. Now turn to the left. No, sorry, my left. I mean, your right.”

She giggled. “What’s this game called? Mr. Sark Learns His Directions?”

“Actually,” and suddenly he was right in front of her, leaning against the corner of her house with absolutely no fear of being spotted in broad-daylight, “it’s called, Hello Sydney, time to go.”

* * * *

Twenty minutes later, her hastily-packed bag was in the back of his Mercedes and they were speeding north along the freeway out of L.A.

Propping her bare feet on the dash, she eyed the purple-black bruise along his slightly-swollen jaw sympathetically. Combined with the yellowish-green mottling over the scabbed hanger-cut, he really didn’t look like he’d fared too well in these recent close encounters with her. She resisted the urge to trace the bruises with her fingers, to drop tiny kisses along them until the memory of the pain she’d caused him was erased – sweet Jesus, if she didn’t stop thinking like this, she was going to attack him right there in the car.

“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me where we’re going,” she countered, not really minding the secrecy. It frightened her how much she was coming to trust him.

He surprised her by answering, “A little house outside of Santa Rosa.” Taking his eyes off the heavy late-day traffic long enough to register her surprise, he reminded her, “You’re not a hostage, Miss Bristow. You’re part of the team now.”

Hardly, she wanted to say, but didn’t. The atmosphere between them was as relaxed as the physical attraction would allow, and try as she might to stay focused on the op, she didn’t want to ruin it. “In that case, you should probably call me Sydney.”

“Okay, Sydney.”

She tapped her toes on the dashboard and watched him from the corner of her eye. She was glad he wasn’t like some guys, ultra-protective of his car. She remembered a high school suitor who actually told her to wipe her feet before she got in. The careless way he wore incredibly expensive clothes and drove fabulously luxurious cars convinced her that the opulence was just the outward trappings – underneath, he had a lot more layers than some spoiled rich kid or money-grubbing mercenary. She wondered, not for the first time by any means, how he had gotten involved in this life in the first place, and what made him stay in it.

Sark was semi-casual today in light-weight olive-green trousers and a loose, untucked tan button-down. She wondered if he ever sat around in old sweats like she did and realized with a jolt of excitement that she might soon find out.

Sark in his natural habitat.

“Will my mother be there?” she asked, more for something to say than anything.

He shook his head. “She isn’t risking re-entry into the States yet.”

Smart move. But – “So it’s just us, then?”

She tried to keep it light, but the quick way his gaze slid up her body lodged a knot of anticipation below her heart. “Just us,” he confirmed, eyes back on the road.

They rode in companionable silence for a while. Not liking to speculate on where his thoughts might be, Sydney instead searched for a way to shatter the overpowering illusion that they were headed off for a romantic weekend somewhere. She settled for mentally reviewing the plan her father had laid out, hearing it again in his deep, serious voice:

“Irina will want you somewhere that she has the illusion of control, probably out of the city. A wire will be too obvious, and they’ll probably scan you daily for trackers, so even a time-delay device wouldn’t work. Once you get there – wherever ‘there’ is – you’ll have to find a way to contact me. The object is to keep yourself safe, of course, and to find out who Sloane’s CIA informant is, if Will is indeed not working alone. Irina will have a plan for that, and I’ll keep checking it out from my end. But keep your eyes and ears open, Sydney. This may be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see how their operation works from the inside. And remember that this is just the carrot in front of your nose to her – her goal is to recruit you permanently, so she may be more willing to open up, to give you access to her organization in order to win back your trust. With any luck, you’ll find out what we need to stop both her and Sloane for good.”

She was just wondering how Jack was going to cover up her unexplained disappearance with the agency when Sark suddenly leaned over and reached under her knees to pop open the glove-box. Sydney’s heart jumped into her throat. What, a gun? Her piece was in her bag in the backseat – stupid, stupid, stupid, Sydney –

His hand emerged holding a pair of sunglasses. If he noticed her momentary terror, he didn’t comment on it. Instead, he settled the familiar-looking Oakleys onto his nose and, catching her eye, smirked as much as his swollen jaw would allow.

Remembering that afternoon at the café – was it really less than two days ago? – Sydney recalled the fantasy she’d built up around her “mystery man”. “Do you have a dog?” she asked, out of left-field to him.

He glanced at her strangely, probably worried she was cracking up again. “Allergic,” he replied. So no Jack Russell terrier named Benji. “Although, when I was a child, I found this stray dog and loved him so much I took allergy shots so I could keep him.”

While the idea of Sark as a child – and loving something – was strange, she wasn’t surprised that he would suffer painful weekly shots rather than give up something he wanted. “What was his name?”

“Bean.”

She laughed without meaning to. “Why that?”

“I can’t remember.” Slightly evasive, that.

“What happened to him?”

“He got old and one day he just – stopped eating. Then in a few days he stopped walking. I carried water to him and stayed up with him for three nights before he died. In his sleep. Quite peaceful.”

She was moved. So Sark was human – or at least he had been, at some point.

She wanted to say something else – to share the story of her beloved goldfish Pepper and her dad burying him in a matchbox behind the garage with a very formal funeral to console her four-year-old self. But he seemed so preoccupied that she leaned back in her seat and watched the miles roll by, thinking – when she wasn’t careful with her thoughts – that it was nice just to be near him.

* * * *

Driving at night was like exploring an alien planet. The headlights poked tiny holes in the blanketing darkness, revealing little more than the lines on the road and the trees that stood a few feet to either side. Every curve opened up new possibilities, new dangers. Sark liked the thrill of not knowing what lay around the next corner. For a man devoted to certainty, whose survival depended on absolute assuredness, it was a small release from his tightly-controlled life.

Sydney had lapsed into silence two hours back and was now breathing evenly, giving him time – possibly too much time – to think. He’d never told anyone about Bean, poor old thing. Sydney had a knack for opening him up. Since she was undoubtedly here as much to spy on her mother’s operation as to find out about the alleged mole, he would need to be more cautious with what he told her.

She was still asleep when he turned down the wooded lane leading back to the small rented house. The crickets were chirping and the wind was blowing up a rain and the way her chin dropped onto her shoulder made her look young and vulnerable in the moonlight.

He slung her bag over his shoulder and closed his car door softly. She didn’t wake. Crossing to her side and telling himself this was not the way to build up a resistance to her, he lifted her in his arms like a child and carried her inside. For such a tall woman, she was surprisingly light, like a small sack of flour in his arms. Her head rolled onto his chest and rested there, her hair tickling his chin. Again the urge to protect her swept over him, unsettling.

She woke when he was depositing her gently onto her bed. He was leaning in close to settle her shoulders onto the pillows, and her wide sleepy eyes smiled up at him. “We’re here?” she murmured, her lips a fraction away from his own.

“Go back to sleep.” He spoke gently and rested his weight on his palms, one on either side of her head, knowing – and trying not to dwell on – how good it would feel to stretch himself out on top of her. The silky way her eyes slid over him suggested she wouldn’t resist. He swallowed and fell back, wondering just how long he could keep suppressing those urges. “We’ll talk in the morning.”

She closed her eyes and drifted off again, looking very content for a woman in the clutches of the enemy.

Chapter Seven: Whipped Cream and White Lies

Standing in front of her mirror the next morning, Sydney asked herself just what the hell was going on.

Actually, when she caught sight of her beaming reflection, that horribly insistent inner voice shouted at her to SLOW DOWN THE FUCKING TRAIN. She had spent an entirely pleasant afternoon and evening with Sark – not one attempt to kill each other, or decimate one another with words – and then allowed him to tuck her into bed. Hell, with her mind so foggy from sleep and him leaning over her smelling all musky and manly like that, she’d nearly asked him to stay. She knew her eyes at least had made the invitation – the way he’d backed up, like if he didn’t get away from her fast they might both bust into flames, convinced her that his emotions were as conflicted as her own.

Only yesterday, her emotions weren’t conflicted. She’d been entirely at peace with the easy companionship between herself and a mass murderer – and Will’s torturer – and the man who nearly let Vaughn die from that virus – and the person who once threatened to burn her face off with acid if she didn’t assist him. So today, she was experiencing a double-dose of confliction.

In acquiescence to her guilt, Sydney made a deliberate attempt not to look nice for him. She left her hair hanging wet around her shoulders, said to hell with it on the make-up, and shrugged into a fuzzy white robe she’d found hanging on the back of her bathroom door. Sark, it seemed, had gone to considerable trouble to ensure that she was comfortable here. Her sheets were imported silk; her corner desk boasted stationary, stamps, and her very own notebook-computer; her private bathroom was stocked with all of her favorite brands – and a wide assortment of bubble-baths, which sent her mind off on steamy scenarios that she only chased away by forcibly reminding herself of Will’s bruised, swollen face after he’d been tortured at Sark’s command.

Trying to focus on the up-coming mission, she contemplated sending an email to her dad. But she knew the computer would be hooked into a network that Sark could monitor, so she didn’t risk it, although she also assumed Sark knew her father was clued-in to their little plan.

On her way down to breakfast, she vowed not to think of him as a person – or as a man – anymore. Master-manipulators like her mother – she noticed a lot of her mother in Sark, same cold-blooded ruthlessness off-set by a devastating charm – had done enough damage in her life; she’d played the fool by being recruited into SD-6, by believing Arvin Sloane would never really do anything about it if she told Danny the truth, by coming to trust her mother again during those months Irina was in custody. No way was she falling into the same trap with Sark.

Breakfast – nothing extravagant, just fresh-squeezed orange juice and strawberry pancakes topped with whipped cream – awaited her in the small, sunny kitchen, but he didn’t. While she ate, Sydney worked up the nerve to face him with a frosty reserve rather than a wide, welcoming, six-hours-was-too-long-without-you grin.

As of yet, she hadn’t figured out a way to contact Jack, and she hoped he wasn’t worrying.

“’Morning, Sydney.” That creamy British accent from behind her nearly melted Sydney’s hard-found resolve. Not looking up from her plate, she responded with a stiff nod.

“Sleep well?” He moved around her to fill his plate, and Sydney’s eyes almost fell out of her head. All traces of Mr. Completely-Polished-Super-Spy had vanished into faded threadbare jeans and a ribbed white undershirt that made him look as boyish and innocent as the cap and glasses had. And damn sexy, too: his narrow hip-bones jutted over the tops of the jeans and the shirt clung to every rippling muscle, leaving virtually nothing to the imagination. But her imagination was doing very well, just the same.

So much for speculating on what he lounged around in – now she was fighting to paste his remorseless killer’s face over this expressive, endearingly youthful one. How could one man change so dramatically from moment to moment? How could she possibly reconcile the man she’d watched blithely shoot another point-blank in the head with the man who now bestowed a sunny, happy-to-see-you-Syd smile on her?

Which one was the real Sark, anyway? That reminded her so much of what she felt when looking at Irina that she managed to retrieve some of her icy resolve.

He must have picked up on the frostiness because he arched an eyebrow at her sullen, almost unresponsive nod. She watched the question flick across his face – ‘Did I do something wrong?’ – but he didn’t ask it. Instead, he let the brilliant smile sag into his usual half-frown and ignored her while they ate. She bit back her disappointment that he hadn’t at least asked if everything was all right. It left her feeling inexplicably grumpy and hostile.

Ten silent minutes later, their plates cleared except for smears of strawberry syrup and dabs of whipped-cream, Sark produced a glossy black-and-white surveillance photo depicting a very nervous-looking Will – her stomach, heavy with the rich pancakes, threatened to revolt again when she saw him – sitting in a car with a handsome middle-aged man. Sydney stared blankly at the picture for a full three minutes, trying to clear her head, uncomfortably aware that when she wasn’t tightly-focused on hating him she kept mentally undressing her breakfast companion.

Tipping his chair back slightly, Sark stretched his legs out and crossed them at the ankles. “The man in the picture is Dr. Allen Rikkets,” he told her, all business. Sydney drew a blank on the doctor’s name and waited for him to go on. “In the late 1970s he began conducting ground-breaking research in the field of genetic manipulation. He was recruited by the CIA and worked for them until 1996, when he was arrested for selling biological weapons technology to a Muslim extremist group. Following his arrest he said that he had been working under orders from a high-ranking CIA official, trading the technology for intel on Rambaldi’s manuscript. But before a deal could be drawn up to get him to name names, he disappeared, right out of federal custody. He was presumed dead by most until we took that photo of him with Mr. Tippin three weeks ago.”

Sydney stared down at the photo, taking a moment to process what she’d just heard. So Will had gone to Rome and met first with Arvin Sloane and then this Dr. Rikkets, both of whom had former connections to the CIA and to Rambaldi. She knew that no one escaped CIA custody without substantial – and possibly inside – help; even her mother would never have gotten away if Jack hadn’t allowed her to in the hopes that she would lead them to Sloane. And if Dr. Rikkets really had been prepared to give up some big names to save his own skin, then the only reason he hadn’t simply been assassinated had to be that whatever he was working on was far too important to someone. Someone with enough power to spring him from CIA custody.

Genetics and Rambaldi – a common equation, she was discovering.

Feeling Sark’s gaze on her, Sydney glanced up as he dipped a finger into a glob of whipped-cream topping and casually flicked the tip of his tongue out to taste it. She almost choked on her juice, suddenly very aware that she wasn’t wearing anything underneath her robe. Dear god, what this man could do to her. In one instant she’d gone from mapping out the Rambaldi-Sloane-Rikkets-Will-CIA connection to wanting to slide onto his lap and claim his mouth with hers and find out if his tongue really was as soft and skillful as it looked with the whipped-cream –

Oh lord, he was now aware of her staring. His gaze followed hers to his finger and a slow smile played on his lips.

Well, fuck.

He purposefully licked the last of the cream away, watching her the whole time. Good Christ, she was practically panting.

His cell phone chirped and Sydney sagged against the table when he turned away to answer it. C’mon, Syd, get a grip! Don’t let him get the upper-hand – good Christ, don’t think about his hands – oh for fuck’s sake. She drew in a deep, steadying breath, glad he was absorbed in his conversation (which might have been interesting if she could hear the other side, but all he did was grunt and murmur). She closed her eyes, composing herself, forcing the hormones back into their cages.

Looking back on it someday, she assumed she might giggle at ordering herself not to have any more meals with Sark that involved either butter or whipped-cream, but at the moment her inner voice was deadly serious about it.

“Sydney, you’re not paying attention.”

His mock-impatience brought her back to reality. The phone call was over and he’d apparently been talking to her. Okay, focus, Syd – think about Will. Got to find out what’s happening to Will.

“I’m sorry. Go on,” she said, in what she hoped was a very steady and normal-sounding voice, remembering to fix her coldest scowl in place.

He ignored the scowl. “I said, the plan is now for us to go to Rome and make contact with Dr. Rikkets. Since your friend Mr. Tippin went straight to him after his meeting with Sloane, I think it’s safe to say the visits are connected.”

Sydney was tapping her feet on the linoleum now, feeling that cagey energy she always felt when focused on a mission, swinging into the calm, confident rhythm that had so impressed her superiors both at SD-6 and the CIA. “So you’re thinking Will and Dr. Rikkets are probably reporting back to the same person at the Agency – someone who’s on Sloane’s side in this Rambaldi quest.”

Sark confirmed that with a nod. “Unfortunately, neither one of us can just go ask Dr. Rikkets who he’s working for. Irina doesn’t want Sloane to know that we’re aware of Mr. Tippin’s involvement with him, so I can’t approach the good doctor myself, and Dr. Rikkets would certainly tip off this ‘master’, to use your friend’s language, if a CIA operative like yourself were to drop in on him. So…”

Sydney silently finished the thought for him: So we get to put on fun disguises and play make-believe. How wonderful. At least the shop-talk was making it easier to be coolly formal with him – and he wasn’t trying to draw her into any warm, witty exchanges. Yet. “What’s our cover?” She glanced at the handsome man in the picture and had a sinking feeling that she already knew. “Let me guess. I’m a hooker?”

His eyes danced at her, picking up on the weary resoluteness in her voice. “Sydney, I hope you know that if the opportunity for me to get you back into a bikini ever arises, I will not hesitate to take it. But if one of us were going undercover as a hooker for this particular man, it would have to be me.”

Oh. Sydney impulsively returned his grin, forming a mental picture of Sark impersonating a gay male prostitute. The image was so hilarious that she nearly cracked up.

He arched an eyebrow at her, and she marveled at the myriad emotions he conveyed with that gesture – concern, cold disapproval, amusement, anger, bewilderment. This time it was amusement. “I assure you I can play a very convincing prostitute when the situation calls for it, Agent Bristow,” he declared, then promptly stabbed a look at the whipped-cream on her plate that was so laced with hidden meaning she felt her cheeks flush again.

She struggled to maintain a wintry yet professional tone without slipping into that breathy voice he had such a knack for eliciting from her. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to question your – talents. I’m sure they’re many and varied.” Dammit, there she went, being drawn into another one of those warm, witty exchanges.

“Thank you.”

With an effort, Sydney battled back the blush and smoothed the laughter out of her voice. Remember Taipei, Sydney – remember Will with teeth yanked out of his head and blood spilling down his chin and nightmares to haunt him for the rest of his life…“So if neither one of us is pretending to be a hooker, what does that leave us?”

He rested his elbows on the table, forming a steeple with his fingers, resting his chin on his fingertips. She noted that the swelling in his jaw was gone but the sooty bruise remained. “I’m told that you have some skill with breaking and entering.” She nodded, feeling stiff again under that adorably twinkling gaze. “The plan is quite simple, really. Dr. Rikkets has to keep evidence of his dealings with his employer somewhere, and I’m betting it’s in his lab.”

Sydney sighed. “Let me guess. Big bunker-type place with state-of-the-art security and fifty guards who are all kung-fu and weapons experts.”

“Naturally. With some satellite surveillance and mine fields thrown in for flavor.”

Well, dammit to hell, this was fun. They played nicely off each other, anticipating one another’s thoughts, predicting one another’s reactions. They were both good agents – no, that didn’t really describe it. They were stellar – practically prodigies in their field. No matter how much her co-workers detested Sark, Sydney hadn’t met a single agent who didn’t respect his ability as a spy. And she herself had already been offered the ultimate compliment – to defect to the other side. Criminals didn’t bother recruiting the good guys unless they had something worth going out on a limb for. And the ultimate compliment for Sark, had he known it, was that having him for her back-up made Sydney more confident about the op than she could ever remember feeling about another mission.

How weird to feel so secure when the enemy was the one watching her back.

“Our flight leaves in an hour. There’s a private jet standing by on the airfield for us.” He paused. “I – assume you’ll want to call your father before then.”

Sydney took a moment to recover from the surprise. She’d assumed he was aware that she’d shared his intel with Jack, but she certainly didn’t expect him to give her permission to contact him. “If you don’t mind,” she ventured, guardedly, half-suspecting a trap.

“Of course not. I actually sent him an email last night myself to let him know you were safe and would be contacting him today.” Sydney imagined her father’s reaction when he opened a message from Sark – the clenched jaw, the balled fists, the desire to beat the cocky British son-of-a-bitch over the head with the computer. “You can use my cell phone. The line’s secure.”

“Why would you let me do that?” Sydney couldn’t hide her curiosity. “What’s to stop me from just – telling him where we are and asking for a team to come bring you in?”

“If we’re going to work together, Sydney, we’re going to have to start trusting one another sooner or later.” He leaned forward, so intense that she rocked back to escape him. That shivery feeling was sliding down her back again. “I know you don’t believe that we have anything in common. I know you think I’m the devil himself – or at least working for her. But in time, I believe you’ll see that we could make a fantastic team.”

Oh, she didn’t doubt that. She already knew his talent in the field was superb and that she enjoyed working with him – only the smoldering gaze he had fixed on her told Sydney that he was talking about something else as well. And she didn’t doubt that either. The animal attraction she felt for him was strong enough to take her breath; she imagined how their bodies would fit together naturally, how his hands would know just where to touch her, how her mouth would know just the way to kiss him. Until this moment, she hadn’t really known what people meant when they said ‘chemistry’.

His fingers reached out and trailed softly along the inside of her wrist, light and almost teasing. Shock-waves reverberated from his touch, racing up her arms and plummeting down into the pit of her stomach. Another fabulous low-down tickle moment with Sark. And if he didn’t get his hand off of her, that new-found resistance to him was going to crash at her feet and she was probably going to take him right there on the table.

“Could you-?” She heard the shakiness, the note of pleading in her voice, and blushed, her eyes still half-closed and focused away from him. A wave of disappointment washed over her when he immediately withdrew his hand.

Releasing a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, Sydney forced her eyes up to his. “This is just a temporary thing,” she insisted, wondering who she was trying to convince – him or her. “My being here has nothing to do with you.” How lame did that sound? “I need to find out what’s happening with Will, and that’s it. The only reason I’m here. And once we have those answers, I’m going back to the CIA.” He had fallen back in his chair, was studying her with a look very akin to sadness, absently stroking the bruise along his jaw. He looked so vulnerable that she added, “Look, Sark, maybe if we weren’t on opposite sides of this thing, we could be friends. But I could never betray my country. I could never betray my father. And I could never trust Irina Derevko.”

She didn’t say that she could never trust him, and Sark must have picked up on it, but he let the moment pass, nodding in mute acceptance. The intensity ebbed, leaving them both quiet and thoughtful. “I’ll give you some privacy to talk,” he said, abruptly standing. He placed his cell phone on the table in front of her. “I’ll be in my room if you need anything.”

At the doorway, he paused and looked back. “Sydney,” he hesitated, “could I ask you a question?”

Her throat tensed up so that all she could do was nod.

“Are you wearing anything under that robe?”

Suddenly feeling very much like the sultry woman who had stripped for him in Madrid, Sydney responded with a catty smile and turned to make her phone call, knowing that was all the answer he needed.

* * * *

Sark turned on the shower but didn’t undress.

He sat cross-legged on the bathroom floor with his back against the locked door, steam billowing around him and sweat glazing his forehead.

Irina’s sly words rang in his ears: “I have other ways of convincing her to stay.”

It was him. He got that now. Him. Sark. He was the key to Sydney’s undoing. Almost flattering that Irina would give him so much credit.

Oh, she would be laughing if she could see him now. He pictured her on the balcony of the Paris hotel, sipping a top-shelf martini and grinning knowingly because a half a world away Mr. Sark was doing just what she’d known he would – seducing her daughter.

Being quite completely seduced himself.

The situation was, he admitted, beginning to feel nauseous from the soaring temperature in the bathroom, hopelessly fucked-up. Here he was, trying to make an honest connection with Sydney, only the whole thing was based on a lie. A rather tenuous lie. Tucked safely in his briefcase in the next room was the disk he and Irina had fabricated – a falsely incriminating file that he had uploaded onto Rikkets’ computer, the file Sydney was supposed to find tonight in Rome, the file that was supposed to make her question everything and everyone she’d ever loved or believed in. Leaving her with nowhere to turn – except to them. Or, he now understood, rather, simply to him. Love by evisceration.

The problem was, about a million things could go wrong with this mission. For starters, Sydney could easily find a dozen things to contradict the fabricated intel while poking around in the lab. Or she could be caught. Sark shuddered, remembering the screams of the human test subjects in Dr. Rikkets’ nightmarish lab.

Finally succumbing to the heat, Sark crossed to turn the water down from scalding-hot to lukewarm and peeled the sweat-sticky clothes off his back.

Of course, there was no turning back now. He couldn’t very well just stride into the kitchen and announce that the whole mission was a set-up, an elaborate ruse to convince her that the CIA was no better than SD-6. Sydney would never forgive him for the deception. And if she ever found out about Francie…

Fuck Irina. She had them both right where she wanted them: Sydney determined to save her friend, Sark determined to hide his lies. And the only way for him to do that was to keep telling more.

Standing under the tepid spray, Sark rinsed the sheen of sweat off and let the apprehension run down the drain with it. Life, he found, went smoother when he didn’t allow for the possibility of failure. They would fly to Rome, raid the lab, download the incriminating file, and retreat to the villa in Florence that Irina had arranged for them. She hadn’t said “romantic weekend”, of course – she’d said “bonding experience”. But Sark knew now what she wanted. She wanted Sydney’s world smashed into little pieces and her defenses at an all-time low and Sark there to put it all back together, to comfort her and offer her another home, another family, another chance at happiness.

And he would do whatever it took to make it work, because it was what he wanted, too.

Chapter Eight: Love By Evisceration

Lowering herself down from the skylight into the empty storage room, Sydney tried to focus on listening for footsteps instead of remembering the last time she’d been attached to a rappelling rope in Sark’s presence.

Not that she was exactly in his presence, but the silky British accent in her ear-piece brought him vividly to life in front of her eyes. “Almost there,” she whispered, and then her black combat boots connected soundlessly with the cement floor.

“All right. Turn to your left and you should see a set of double doors.”

His voice in her ear gave Sydney a small fit of shivers as she imagined him leaning down close to whisper to her. C’mon, Syd, focus here, her inner voice intoned.

Dr. Allen Rikkets’ lab was an endless maze of corridors and tunnels, and even after working for the CIA and SD-6, Sydney suspected he was the most paranoid man she’d ever met. Alone, she could never have broken in here; as it was, Irina had provided Sark with the satellite codes to temporarily shut down the surveillance feed and with a map of the mine-field surrounding the enormous compound so Sydney, her heart in her throat and expecting to be blown to bits with every step, could sneak up to the lab from behind, climb the fire escape at the back, and rope down through the skylight into the deserted storage room. From the electronically-equipped van outside, Sark was watching for guards on the closed-caption tv feed he’d hacked into and steering her through the labyrinth-like hallways based on blueprints again provided by her mother.

“The hallway’s clear,” Sark assured her when she hesitated in front of the double doors. Sydney glanced around for cameras, wondering if he could somehow see her or if he just knew her that well. “When you’re in the hallway, turn to your left and continue down past six doors on the left side.”

Distant screams echoed when Sydney eased into the hallway, making her freeze. “What is that?” she hissed.

“Dr. Rikkets uses human test subjects,” Sark answered evenly. Sydney’s mind immediately flashed through a dozen ways to rescue the poor people being used as guinea pigs somewhere in the maze-like building. Again, Sark seemed to read her mind. “Forget it, Sydney. There’s simply no way.”

Okay, well, obviously, but she hated to admit that he was right. It went against every moral cell in her body to abandon innocent people to torture. What, she found herself wondering as she crept down the dimly-lit hallway, would her dad do in this situation? His voice jumped into her mind: “The object is to keep yourself safe, of course, and to find out who Sloane’s CIA informant is…”

Right. One mission at a time – find out what sick bastard at the Agency was making all of this possible, and she could return with an entire commando team and shut the place down. It was like fighting a dragon; you couldn’t just swing away wildly, you had to aim for its heart.

As the sixth door approached, Sydney whispered, “Okay, what now?”

“One moment, please.” She almost giggled at how cordial he was. On their previous missions together, she’d noticed how implacably professional he was, but after seeing him let his guard down – another snicker threatened as she pictured the towel falling – he sounded like a little boy playing soldier.

“To your right you should see a green door.”

Green door – “Got it.”

“Go through it and take the stairs up one flight. Tell me when you get to the top.”

Although no mission ever came with guarantees, Sydney hated wandering blind in the dark with no idea of where she was going. She suddenly realized that her life was completely in Sark’s hands – if he chose to abandon her here, or steer her into a trap, she would go to join those poor screaming souls whose pitiful cries echoed along the hall.

As quickly as the thought arose, she dismissed it. Whatever was going on between her and Sark – whether it was just plain old unadulterated lust or something (as she suspected) more profound – she knew he wouldn’t do that.

“I’m at the landing,” she announced.

“Okay. The hallway’s clear. Turn to your right, go down to the third door, and that’s Rikkets’ office.” A thrill of excitement fluttered in Sydney’s stomach, the way it always did when she neared the end of an op. Sark’s silky voice continued in her ear, “Guards patrol this hallway about every ten minutes, so when you’ve finished downloading the hard-drive, let me know so I can give you the all-clear.”

“Sir, yes sir!” she wanted to reply, but refrained.

Rikkets’ office was, as promised, empty; apparently the good doctor liked to head back to his fabulous mansion fairly early. She closed the door noiselessly behind her and headed straight for the computer. Armed with the username and password Sark had hacked into the system to find – she marveled at his skill with computers, which she had never realized so exceeded her own – Sydney was copying Dr. Rikkets’ hard-drive onto a disk in minutes.

Now came the cooling-her-heels part of the op, always her least-favorite. She paced, casting anxious glances at the door every few seconds, though she knew Sark would warn her if anyone approached. Since the flight out had been filled with preparations for the op, she was also just now finding time to reflect on the conversation she’d had with her father before leaving Santa Rosa.

His reaction to Sark’s email message was a surprisingly animated (for Jack) description of what “that cocky little bastard” could do with any further correspondence. He was as shocked as she had been that Sark was allowing her to contact him, but he, of course, saw something sinister in it. “These people are incredible manipulators, Sydney,” he warned her. “Don’t let your guard down for a second.”

Too late, Dad, she wanted to say, but instead filled him in on the new intel about Rikkets. Jack remembered the arrest but had assumed, like everyone else, that the “disappearance” was actually an execution to silence him before he named his superiors. And, Jack told her, things weren’t looking so good for Will on his end, either. Apparently the day Irina escaped CIA custody, someone had hacked into the ID-KLH satellite being used to track her and disabled it – and while the Agency didn’t consider him a suspect, Will was one of the few people with access to the satellite’s codes.

“What did you tell Kendall about my disappearance?” she had asked him, hoping her cover with the CIA would remain intact long enough to find out who the mole was.

Everyone, Jack assured her, was very worried since Francie called Vaughn to ask if Sydney might have gone on one of her business trips without telling anyone. Vaughn immediately called Jack, and after two hours of searching, her dad told her, Vaughn was in Kendall’s office demanding that they throw all of their resources into finding her. It got so heated, Jack said, that Weiss had to drag Vaughn out of Kendall’s office before it came to blows.

And Will? “He and Vaughn are investigating your disappearance independent of the Agency,” Jack replied, a trace of amusement in his voice. “I’ve thrown them some false intel through back-channels, to keep them off our trail of course, but I must say, Sydney, even if Mr. Tippin is a traitor, I’ve never seen two people as determined to find someone as they are.”

Touched, Sydney had fought down a stab of guilt about Vaughn going crazy with worry for her. They had left angry at one another, she realized, and now he was undoubtedly wondering if he would ever see her again, ever have the chance to make up for it. She felt so suddenly miserable that Jack picked up on it and asked if she was all right. Because she knew he would stumble through one of his awkward parenting moments if she told him about the fight with Vaughn – strange how his paternal ineptness used to infuriate her, since now that she knew him better she found it endearing – Sydney just said she hated to worry everyone, and would be glad when the mission was over and she was back home safely.

And she’d really almost believed that until Sark walked into the kitchen with his hair damp from the shower and his suit jacket slung over one arm and his tie hanging loose, looking so damn amazing that she nearly dropped the phone when she handed it back to him.

Now, waiting for the hard-drive to finish downloading – was it just her, or was this taking forever? – she found herself hoping again that they were headed back to Santa Rosa after this. She could handle a few more nights of being carried up to bed and a few more breakfasts where he was the most delicious item on the menu.

Or, considering the direction her thoughts were running in, maybe it would be better if she got on a plane for L.A. – alone – as soon as they were finished here.

The computer beeped, startling her, sounding very loud in the silence. “Okay, I’ve got the disk,” she told him.

“Good. The guards are…”

She hesitated, pressing firmly on her earpiece. “Didn’t copy that. Say again.”

Static.

Her heart sped up a beat. “Didn’t copy that. Say again,” she repeated, hearing the note of panic in her voice and forcibly smoothing it out.

Static. And then – undeniable sounds of a struggle. “Sydney!”

Her heart dropped into her boots when he called her name that way, so frantic, so desperate. She crammed the disk into her belt and bolted out of the office, adrenaline surging so hard that when she encountered the first guard he went down under one vicious kick. She tore back through the maze of hallways, not stopping to consider how her feet seemed to automatically know the way; she crashed into two more guards, cut them down with surprising ferocity, raced back into the storage room and clambered up the rope like the devil himself was on her tail.

Sprinting across the roof-top and nearly leaping down the six-story fire escape, Sydney heard herself murmuring, “I’m coming, I’m coming, just hang on,” over and over again, like a mantra that would keep him safe until she could get to him.

As her feet pounded over the ground, her mind raced just as fast. This sudden crisis smacked of a double-cross; if she had been discovered inside, Sydney could have chalked it up to accident or carelessness, but for the van – parked a safe distance from the lab – to be discovered, well, there was simply no easy explanation for that. And since the only two people who knew about the mission were Jack and her mother, Sydney was laying odds that Irina had just betrayed her. Again

If they hurt him, Sydney vowed, I’ll kill her myself.

She never slowed up, even as she crossed back into the mine-field. No tentative edging out of here like the way she’d crept in; she didn’t have time to be scared now. At the edge of the dirt road leading into the compound, she spotted the van, and the moonlit silhouettes of at least five people standing over something – or someone. Her heart beat so hard against her chest that it felt bruised. Dear god, she prayed silently, if you just let him live…

Ten feet from the van, Sydney dropped into a crouch and crawled rapidly to the edge of the ravine separating the road from the mine-field. The banks were coated with loose shale, and she had to be very careful as she slid down not to make any noise. Once at the bottom, she belly-crawled up to the edge on the opposite side and quickly took stock of the situation.

The five guards were having some fun, obviously, with their captive. Sark lay prone at their feet, facing the van, and they were delivering merciless kicks and stomps to his back and legs. White-hot rage coiled in Sydney’s gut, and she couldn’t ever remember feeling such grim satisfaction as she took aim and squeezed the trigger of her .9 millimeter.

Three guards were down before any of them got their guns out. Sydney leapt out of the ditch and felled the first one with a bone-crunching fist to the nose; he went down with blood streaming and eyes watering. She stepped over him to deal with the last one, but Sark was already on his feet, and in two graceful moves had the remaining guard flat on his back.

She immediately came to him and started to ask if he was all right, but Sark pressed a finger to his lips and jerked his head toward the van. She nodded her understanding – someone was inside. Together, they crept silently up to the back of the van, and Sark yanked the door open.

Dr. Allen Rikkets had heard the commotion outside and was waiting for them with a gun. For one terrible moment, Sydney saw it aimed at her heart; a second later, Sark shoved her roughly out of the way as the barrel flashed.

Landing hard on her backside in the gravel, Sydney watched in mute horror as the bullet spun Sark sideways. She waited for him to drop, waited for her world to crash down as the life bled out of him, but instead he snarled and leapt at Rikkets, tearing the gun away from him and smashing the handle into the man’s head in one smooth motion. Pushing up to her feet, Sydney just stared as the two men struggled, slamming each other into the sides of the van and tripping over the tangle of chords in front of the bank of monitors. She gasped when a knife flashed in Rikkets’ hand; Sark jerked backwards, drawing his stomach in toward his spine, closed a steely grip over his opponent’s wrist and snapped the bone. With a cry, Rikkets dropped the knife. Sark didn’t hesitate; he snatched it up, seized the doctor by the throat, and – to Sydney’s horror – buried it in Rikkets’ chest up to the hilt.

An instant silence, charged with rage and shock, descended on them. Rikkets gurgled twice. Sark stepped back from him, and the man slid slowly to the floor, blood bubbling out of his lips and eyes staring out unseeingly.

Sark turned on her, and Sydney stepped back instinctively, shaken to the core by his expression. The rage was gone; in its place was a cold nothingness – empty eyes, icy unfeeling killer’s eyes. She backed up against the door – which had somehow fallen shut – as he approached her.

“Are you hurt? Did you get the disk?”

The questions, so normal-sounding, made her wince. She wanted to look away from him but couldn’t – wanted to hide the revulsion in her face but couldn’t. She had seen Sark kill before but had never been so close to it, a captive audience to a brutality she couldn’t reconcile with the cocky yet surprisingly gentle and incredibly sensual man she had seen beneath that emotionless exterior.

“Sydney?” He sounded pained, and for a minute she thought it was just a reaction to her obvious repulsion, then realized he was wobbling slightly. Blood soaked his left shirt-sleeve, dripping off his nerveless fingers as he swayed toward her; more blood showed on the front of his shirt, an inch above his waist. Oh god, she realized, he was hurt – how badly? She opened her arms and caught him as he pitched forward, the strength flowing out of him with the blood.

“I’ve got you, I’ve got you,” she assured him, cradling him in her arms and sinking to the floor of the van with him. His breathing came hard and fast; he was hiding the pain, squeezing his eyes shut against it, stifling the urge to cry out with it. Sydney felt his pain as deeply as if it were her own, the disgust at what he had just done sliding away and melting into an intense need to protect him, to wipe away that grimace of pain creasing his brow. “I’m just going to look,” she told him, the way she would have reassured a child, her fingers trembling as she unbuttoned his shirt and gently laid it open.

The blood on his stomach poured from a stab-wound – apparently, he hadn’t jumped away fast enough when Rikkets produced the knife. Luckily, it was superficial, although it would certainly need stitches to close it up. He flinched and bit down hard on his lip when she eased the shirt off his left shoulder. The bullet he’d saved her from had gone clean through, and didn’t look as if it had shattered the bone, but Sydney remembered with absolute sympathy the stomach-dropping agony of a bullet slamming into her own shoulder.

Neither wound was life-threatening, but he was losing a good deal of blood. She watched his increasing pallor with growing concern. “We need to get you out of here,” she said, tearing a strip off of his shirt and staunching the shoulder-wound with it. “Hold this,” she ordered him, pulling his right hand up to the bullet-hole. “Hold it tight.”

He nodded. Sweat glazed his forehead. Sydney slid out from under him as gently as she could and drug Rikkets’ body out of the van by the feet. His dead eyes stared up at her the whole time, making her shudder. She dropped him unceremoniously in the gravel behind the van, slammed the back doors and started around to the driver’s side.

A figure appeared suddenly around the front, and Sydney raised her gun automatically, then froze as a striking brunette stepped into a shaft of moonlight. “Hello, Sydney,” her mother said.

* * * *

Pain, Sark found, could be controlled. His mind acted like a machine: the nerve-endings reported the pain, his brain thanked them for the information, took stock of the severity of the injury, and told the nerves to ignore it. That was it – he simply shut it off.

Irina patched up his wounds as the van bounced and shimmied toward the fabulous countryside villa. They didn’t speak to one another. Sydney drove, and she didn’t speak to them, either, except to ask Irina for directions now and again.

When they finally stopped, dawn was peeking over the horizon. Sark refused Irina’s help as he climbed down but gladly leaned into the arm Sydney slid around his waist as they made the short walk into the spacious, sprawling villa.

She helped him upstairs and laid him down on a soft bed. “I think my mother wants to talk to you,” she said, gently plumping the pillows behind his head. “Are you up to it?”

He nodded. Sydney stroked his cheek with the back of her hand. “I’ll be in the next room if you need anything,” she promised, and left with a stony glare at Irina, who was watching their little exchange from the doorway with a perfectly neutral expression.

She closed the door behind Sydney and filled a basin with water in the bathroom. Sark hardly trusted himself to speak to her; he knew shouting insults and accusations at Irina Derevko was a very bad idea, so he stuck with silence. She sat on the edge of the bed and bathed his forehead, looking unsettlingly maternal for a woman who had just double-crossed him.

“I should have told you about the set-up,” she admitted, after a full five minutes of silence. Sark looked away, refusing to be so easily placated. “But,” she added, sounding slightly reproving, “you should have realized that I had to have some way of convincing her that Jack wouldn’t want her finding what Rikkets’ is hiding. Otherwise the information on the disk is meaningless.”

“I see,” he responded stiffly, pulling away from her touch and ignoring the pain in his stomach and arm as he struggled into a sitting position. Irina, in a move very reminiscent of Sydney, reached out and arranged the pillows behind his back again. His entire body ached from the beating the guards had given him. “And if Dr. Rikkets killed me, well, that would just make Sydney hate her father even more.”

“He wasn’t supposed to kill you. Either of you. You weren’t supposed to be hurt – just captured.” Another Laura Bristow Moment, he reflected sourly, only he was tempted to believe this one because she looked so convincingly concerned about his wounds. “Then I was going to extract you.”

“And become a hero in Sydney’s eyes again. Very clever.” Well, he grudgingly admitted to himself, it was quite clever, really. Convince Sydney that her beloved father had set her up to be killed to protect his secrets – and enter Mom to save the day.

Irina smiled slightly, sensing the deflation of his anger towards her. “Sark, you know how important Sydney is to me. Her happiness is my main concern in all of this. And when she sees what’s on that disk…” Her voice trailed away, and for one moment, he actually thought she was debating whether to go through with it or not. Then she fixed him with a determined stare. “I see the way she looks at you, the way she touches you. I want you to help her through this.”

Already got that, Irina, he wanted to say, but didn’t. Instead, he just nodded, feeling suddenly weary. She must have sensed it. She laid an uncharacteristically gentle hand over his and squeezed slightly, looking into his eyes so earnestly that it was impossible not to believe her when she said, “I’m sorry they hurt you. I would never have intentionally allowed that to happen.”

The moment held between them, the mysterious criminal master-mind and her equally enigmatic protégé, and Sark realized he just might be seeing the truly human side of Irina Derevko for the first time. Then, abruptly, she dropped his hand and stood. “I have to go talk to Sydney,” she said. “You rest.”

At the doorway, she paused, looking back. “Next time I recommending exercise a little more restraint in front of Sydney. She has an amazing capacity for forgiveness, but she’ll never be comfortable with cold-blooded murder.”

Yeah, no shit. Try as he might, Sark couldn’t erase that terrified look on Sydney’s face after he drove the knife into Rikkets’ heart, or the sudden way she’d backed up from him, either afraid she was next or repulsed by the thought of his touch. Neither scenario set well with him. Couldn’t she understand that it was simple reaction? You fight, you win, you kill. Otherwise he had to fight the same enemy all over again another day – and with the exception of Sydney Bristow, he usually found that quite tiresome.

The agony in his shoulder chased away the possibility of sleep. What he really wanted was a long, hot bath. Summoning the remnants of his strength, Sark slid off the covers and limped into the bathroom, every step reverberating with pain that started in his toes and worked upward.

Fear was not an emotion Sark generally allowed himself to feel. Fear could, at times, sharpen the senses, but it usually sharpened them too much, so that what needed to be executed gracefully and subtly ended up being bungled in a mad, terrified dash. Rage, now, rage – so long as it could be controlled – that was an asset.

But, he reflected as the tub filled with warm water and he eased the torn shirt off of his shoulders, tonight he had been consumed by both – fear when he saw the gun leveled at Sydney’s heart, rage when he realized Rikkets fully intended to kill her. If he’d been an instant slower – if he’d hesitated for even a second before jerking her out of the way –

A tremor started in Sark’s aching legs. He swallowed hard, dizzy and light-headed and nauseous. Blood loss, he consoled himself, you’re only human, after all. And good Christ if that wasn’t true. Human enough to be on the verge of tears because he had nearly watched her die tonight – and because the look on her face when the bullet spun him around showed exactly what he was feeling at that moment: they couldn’t lose each other.

For the first time since he was a very small child, Sark let go completely of his tightly-wound control. He slid down the bathroom wall, shaking, head throbbing and wounds stinging. He rubbed viciously at his temples, beat the soles of his feet on the floor, surrendered to the overwhelming release of what felt like years of bottled-up emotions. He didn’t cry, wasn’t sure he remembered how to anymore, but his throat ached around dry sobs.

Enough of this. The tiny voice in his head that steeled him in the midst of any chaos ordered him off the floor. Slowly, he obeyed, stumbling forward to the sink. His limbs still shook, but the tremors were controlled now, not like the electric-shock convulsions of minutes ago. The cold porcelain beneath his palms gave him a sense of reality, brought him back to himself. He focused on his eyes in the mirror, noting how haggard he looked.

And suddenly he realized he was not alone.

Sydney was standing in the doorway, her face, reflected in the mirror, so stricken that it wrenched him around.

So she bought it. She believed Irina’s lies.

Instead of thrilled, Sark felt an overpowering sadness sweep through him. Unlike that night at the restaurant, her grief now was controlled, but still frightening – perhaps more so because it was contained in her eyes, caged up, eating away at her inside like a cancer. He forgot the pain in his shoulder and stomach as a new level of agony circled his heart.

So this was what it was like to love.

Wordlessly, he opened his arms to her; she turned away, unable to face him. He heard the first sob steal into her throat as his hands closed around her arms. He turned her around and pulled her against him, crushed her into his chest, ignoring the pain in his arm as he tried to squeeze the anguish out of her. She clung to him, her face pressed into the side of his neck. Her tears soaked his bare shoulder. He rubbed her back and whispered meaningless words of comfort: “Shh, Sydney, it’s okay now. It’s okay now. You’ll be all right.”

When her lips brushed his neck, he thought it was an accident. She was, after all, distraught. Then they pressed again, more deliberately, sending a delicious shiver down his spine. Her mouth was soft yet hungry, sweeping along his throat and across to his ear, leaving ripples of desire in its awake. She slid her palms up his chest and cradled his head, her fingers tangling in the curls on the nape of his neck.

If she had any idea how much he wanted her…Sark shut his eyes, wavering on surrender, unable to summon the willpower to push her away. Instead he urged her closer, tugging her hips into his, rasping out her name in a whispery plea. Her mouth closed in on his, lingering on the bruise she’d made along his jaw; then she was kissing him, her tongue gliding into the sensitive corners of his mouth, her teeth grazing his bottom lip, and it was sweet and slow and soft and sumptuous and everything these weeks of slow-burning tension had promised it would be.

And also very, very wrong.

Sark knew his part, and even though he wanted her – that didn’t even come close to describing it, really, the longing for her was more like a palpable need – he no longer wanted to play his assigned role in this deception. He couldn’t, not tonight when she was succumbing as much to a manufactured grief – an agony created by Irina and himself – as to the bond that had been steadily growing between them since that day on Marinus’s yacht. He wanted her to want him, to come to him when her mind was clear and not fogged by despair, when she needed his arms around her so desperately for something other than comfort.

“Sydney.” He pulled his mouth free of hers, breathing her name against her cheek. They were both trembling. He felt her heart pounding in a wild rhythm that matched his own.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered. One look at her tear-streaked face and a pang of guilt ripped through him. “You’re hurt, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean - ”

Oh god. Could he really do this? Could he really refuse her? “I’m sorry, too,” he said, surprised by the weariness in his voice. He raked his hand through his hair, falling back to put some much-needed distance between them. “I just can’t, tonight.”

Looking into her eyes, he saw that she understood completely. No anger there; no feelings of rejection. He was hurt and weak and vulnerable, and so she was, and neither one was really ready for this. Not yet.

Sydney reached out and touched his cheek gently. “Mom,” he winced at the tenderness when she spoke her mother’s name, realizing how perfectly Irina’s plan had worked, “has to take care of some things back in Rome, make sure we can’t be linked to what happened at the lab. Then she’s making arrangements for us to meet her in Paris.” She smiled, her lips quivering slightly, pushed out a breath that sounded as shaky as he felt. “So it looks like it’s just us again, for a while.”

She glanced over his shoulder and suddenly giggled weakly. “Sark,” she nodded at something behind him, “the water…”

“Shit.” He’d forgotten about the tub, and water was pouring over the sides. He lowered himself as quickly as his aching body would allow and shut the faucet off.

Her hand slid lightly onto his bandaged shoulder. “Will you be okay?” she asked.

He nodded, not trusting himself to look at her when she was so close. “You?”

She paused, considering. He chanced a glance up at her, saw a renewed strength and determination there. “Yes,” she answered, sounding as if she were just deciding it herself. “I will be, now that I finally know the truth.”

And because he couldn’t bring himself to make her hate him, Sark let her believe the lie.

Chapter Nine: Fairytales

For the next three days, the world was theirs.

That first morning, Sydney couldn’t stop running her fingers over her lips, trying to remember what they felt like before she kissed Sark. He slept most of that day, wrapped in a blanket of morphine that Irina finally persuaded him to take before she left not long after dawn. An elderly Italian couple, apparently the villa’s caretakers, appeared exactly at mealtimes to place Sydney’s breakfast and lunch on the terrace that overlooked the beautiful marble-tiled pool. Exhausted as she was, she couldn’t sleep; her mind bounded through a thousand questions, piecing together and deconstructing and rebuilding the puzzle of her twisted world over and over again, refusing to surrender her to oblivion. After tossing and turning for nearly three hours, she gave up and explored the sprawling villa, admiring the arched doorways and cathedral ceilings and exquisite sculptures and antique furniture. But she couldn’t resist trailing her fingers along her lips every few minutes, and each time she did, she remembered with a delicious tingle the heat and weight of Sark’s mouth against her own.

Morning melted into afternoon, and afternoon slid into evening, and still she wandered, finding a neurotic comfort in the rhythm of her footfalls. She let her mind wander where it would as well: back into her childhood, when everything was simple and her parents were together and seemed so happy; into her adolescence, when she resented her father and longed for the mother she believed to be dead; into her undergraduate years, when she was approached and recruited by whom she believed to be the CIA; into her romance with Danny, when life seemed so perfect and the future so promising; into her recent past, when her mother turned up alive, when she thought Irina could atone for her sins, when Vaughn finally kissed her, when her father became one of her best and most trusted friends. Her father – Sydney’s heart literally ached just thinking of him. Could he really be the man Irina said he was? Could he have hidden a secret obsession with Rambaldi all these years, using Sloane and Rikkets and Will and Irina and Kendall and even his own daughter to bring him closer to the completion of that man’s work?

Could he really hate her for being Irina Derevko’s biggest lie of all?

She acknowledged that the real reason she believed any of it was possible was Sark. Oh, Irina’s intel – an intercepted cell phone call between Jack and Rikkets, warning the doctor of their plans, and the files Sydney herself had downloaded from Rikkets’ computer – clearly, almost indisputably, implicated Jack, and Irina’s presentation of it was alarmingly sincere, as if she couldn’t quite wrap her own mind around it. But Sydney’s mind revolted at the idea of trusting her mother again, just as her heart refused to accept that her father would really hand her over to a man like Rikkets. She had been racked with doubt until she walked in on Sark looking as close to the breaking point as she felt.

His expression when he’d turned to face her – no way to fake that. His eyes said it all – he would have done anything to protect her from the awful truth.

Of course, she wasn’t prepared to completely label her father as a criminal mastermind who ranked right up there with Arvin Sloane and Irina Derevko. Whatever Sark believed, Sydney wouldn’t put it past Irina to pull the wool over his eyes as well, particularly since she didn’t quite understand the relationship between those two. She reviewed what she’d learned about Rikkets’ operation and Jack’s possible involvement while she paced, waiting for the pieces to fall into place and the whole mess to make sense.

In and of itself, Jack’s cell phone call to Rikkets was quite damning. Naturally, Sydney would withhold judgment on that until she could find an unbiased source to authenticate it for her. But the disk was another story. She had downloaded that herself, and if it was a fabrication, it was the best and most intricate one she had ever seen. It detailed a relationship between Jack, a.k.a. Master, and Rikkets going back almost a decade and indicated that Jack had been instrumental in helping the doctor escape from federal custody. According to the information – emails, chat-logs, surveillance photos, data files – on Rikkets’ hard-drive, Jack had used his double-agent status to play both the Alliance and the CIA for fools, snapping up every available kernel of information on Rambaldi from both organizations, while Rikkets came closer and closer to unlocking the secrets of Rambaldi’s last and greatest work – the quest for eternal life.

How much higher up in the CIA the corruption went was unclear. Will was only mentioned twice, and was referred to as “The Pawn”. Sydney winced at the cruelty of that. At least the files implied that Will was an unwitting participant in it all; it seemed that Jack, if the intel really was authentic, had found some way to control Will’s mind. The details of that remained fuzzy as well.

Actually, Sydney admitted, a lot of holes still needed to be filled in before she wrote her father off as a traitor. Oh, she knew he could lie to her; the incident in Madagascar when he’d tried to frame her mother for attempted murder and the mystery surrounding his use of Project Christmas on her immediately leapt to mind. But she also believed that, deep down, he had her best interests at heart, that he loved her and would die to protect her.

Only, hadn’t she believed that about Irina just a few weeks ago?

She sighed as the thought came again – was anything or anyone in her whole entire fucking life what they claimed to be? Did anybody simply love her, with no strings attached and no ulterior motives?

Golden-pink sunrays sliced through the floor-to-ceiling windows as the sun sank in a fiery sky, descending on their first full day alone together here in Italy. Try as she might to stay away, Sydney’s feet carried her back to his door over and over again. He looked so young and helpless tangled in the silk sheets, a bandage wound around his shoulder and another covering the stitches in his stomach, new boot-shaped bruises criss-crossing his back and legs, the old bruise on his jaw fading into a light yellow-and-green-laced purple. She fought down the urge to crawl onto the bed and gather him in her arms and shield him from all the horror in their world. The knot of anticipation lodged underneath her heart again, forcing out some of the gut-gnawing grief, as she realized that soon she would have to decide whether to keep resisting those urges or to simply give in to them, as she had last night.

Strange that she had barely thought about Vaughn all day. Truthfully, she had barely thought about Vaughn since Sark collected her from her house – good lord, could it have only been three days ago? It seemed as if years had passed, as if Vaughn belonged to another life, to another time, to another Sydney. Whatever happened now, Sydney realized that she couldn’t simply walk back into his arms and be the woman he fell in love with. She wasn’t certain, really, who he had fallen in love with, because ever since they’d been together, he seemed more and more disenchanted with who she really was. And perhaps she felt the same way about him.

Or was it just the man on the bed who had crawled into her heart when she wasn’t looking, and now refused to release her from his spell?

Sydney padded away again, watching storm clouds roll in to blot out the twinkling stars. By staying here, by not calling anyone at the CIA (not even Marshall or Dixon or Vaughn or Weiss, whom she felt certain were all trustworthy), she was essentially joining with the enemy. Only – possibly – they weren’t the enemy after all.

Well, at least Sark wasn’t. Sydney turned down the long corridor in front of the library and realized she was making another circle back toward his room. She let her feet carry her, let her thoughts sweep her along. She wasn’t yet sure where her mother stood in all of this. Irina would have to do a lot more than disprove her father’s loyalty to win Sydney’s trust again; even if Jack – and that was still a big if in her mind – and possibly others in the top levels of the CIA did want to use Rambaldi’s work to rule the world, that didn’t mean Irina wasn’t after exactly the same thing.

She sighed as her mind jumped ahead to meeting her mother in Paris, where whatever grand scheme she had cooked up would be made clear at last. She sighed again and pushed the thoughts away. For now, she had two more days with Sark – two days to help him heal, to peel away his mysterious mask, to tear down the last of the walls that stood between them and what they both wanted. He had been right to stop her the night before; she wanted to come to him, wanted to pull him to her and push all of herself into him, but she needed to know who he was first. She needed to shred the arrogant, remorseless persona he wore as easily as his tailored suits and see the man inside before she gave herself over completely to falling in love with him. Those familiar shivers danced across her shoulders as she recalled the velvety touch of his tongue against her own, the hungry pressure of his mouth bearing down on hers. He would be, she reflected, well worth the wait.

The first raindrops pattered against the windows when Sydney stepped up in his doorway again. This time, he stirred slightly, as if sensing her presence. She curled up in a large fan-backed chair and watched him slowly crawl out from under the morphine-fog as lightning flashed in the distance. She switched on the bedside lamp, and when she turned back he was smiling sleepily at her, his eyes cloudy from the remnants of the medicine. “Hi,” he said, somewhat hoarsely.

“Hi.” Again that soft, breathless note in her voice. Her heart fluttered. Why was she so nervous? But it was a good kind of nervous, the kind that made her want to wriggle around and bounce on the balls of her feet. She settled back in the chair, stretching her feet out onto the edge of his bed. “Welcome back. How you feeling?”

Sark sat up gingerly. His hair stood straight up in the back, something Sydney found unbelievably adorable. Mr. Never-A-Hair-Out-Of-Place-Super-Spy with bed-head. He wore only boxer shorts, and even bruised and battered there was no denying what a gorgeous man he was. “Bloody awful,” he admitted, inspecting a deep black bruise on his ankle. “But better than before.” He took note of her black jogging pants and tank-top. “I take it we’re not leaving tonight.”

The seemingly unconscious way his gaze lingered on her mouth brought a warm flush to Sydney’s cheeks. The muscles in his arms and back stood out as he stretched his stiff joints, bringing to mind the memory of his lean, solid body pressed close against hers. She struggled against the urge to climb into his lap and start up right where they’d left off.

“Sydney?”

Had he been talking to her? The blush deepened. She jerked her eyes back up to his, hoping he hadn’t noticed her staring. “Yes. What?” Great – she sounded as disoriented as she felt.

Sark grinned, managing – if it was possible – to look even more appealing. “Agent Bristow, have you been into my morphine?” She made a face at him and he laughed before he remembered the stitches above his belly-button; his face contorted immediately when his skin pulled against the sutures, doubling him over slightly with pain. He waved her off when she instinctively reached for him. “I’m all right, I’m all right. Just…sore.” He straightened up again, very carefully, then wrinkled his nose. “And in desperate need of a shower, it seems.”

“Okay, but then you should eat something,” Sydney ordered, helping him off the bed and into the bathroom. He leaned against her, breathing into her hair, and her heart rate tripled. She fought to keep her voice steady. “I’ll go see about having some food brought up here, okay?”

The elderly couple sprang to attention when she entered the kitchen, and within ten minutes Sydney was carrying plates of cold chicken sandwiches and a bottle of cabernet up to his room, enough for both of them. She set the food on the nightstand and poured herself a glass of wine, realizing as the sweet liquor slid down her throat just how tired she was. She hadn’t slept in more than twenty-four hours. Yawning, she stretched out onto the bed – just until he comes back, she told herself – and closed her eyes to enjoy the muted sounds of the storm picking up steam outside.

How much time passed before she woke was anyone’s guess, but as her eyes adjusted to the darkness and her mind focused in on reality, she saw the first hints of dawn creeping in through the windows. She rolled over and discovered Sark asleep beside her, his face turned toward her and half-buried in the pillow. With sleep to smooth away the trademark smirk, he looked almost angelic. She smiled at that – Sark, angelic? – and surrendered to the temptation to touch him, gently tracing the line of his jaw, the rise of his cheekbone, the slope of his nose.

He opened his eyes and she pulled her hand away guiltily, but he smiled so softly that she couldn’t help smiling back. “You don’t handle wine very well, Agent Bristow,” he murmured.

Sydney glanced over her shoulder at her half-empty glass. “I guess not,” she whispered back. He settled his arm around her waist and scooted her towards him. Sydney’s breath caught in her throat as he looped his ankle casually over hers. With his arm across her, his face inches from her own, his legs entangled with hers, it was impossible to pretend she wasn’t already madly in love with him. “I should go,” she said, her eyes never leaving his, making absolutely no effort to leave. “You need to rest.”

“It’s almost morning,” he answered languidly. “Just stay.” He closed his eyes again, scrunching deeper into the mattress. “Just stay with me, Sydney. Just sleep.”

And how could she say no to that? Smiling at him as he drifted off again, Sydney closed her eyes as well and gave herself over to a dreamless sleep.

* * * *

Being nursed back to health by Sydney Bristow almost made getting shot and stabbed and beaten worth it.

In concession to his injuries, Sark spent the next day in bed. Sydney stayed with him, her chair pulled up to the bed, facing him. She’d found a book of ghost stories in the villa’s library, and they took turns reading them to one another; she laughed at his “spooky voice”, which she said sounded far too British to be frightening. When they tired of that, they talked about movies they liked, places they wanted to see, foods they craved, books they loved, music they enjoyed. He recited Robert Frost to her and she retaliated with Emily Dickinson. She didn’t ask about his past and he didn’t bring up hers. They ate in his room, side by side on the bed, and spoon-fed each other applesauce and strawberry ice-cream and raspberry yogurt. Neither of them mentioned Jack, or Rambaldi, or Sloane, or Irina, or Paris. It was as if they had a silent pact, an unspoken agreement that this was their time together, and nothing would interfere with it.

He wondered, of course, if she was thinking about her handler, the man waiting for her in L.A. The man she’d been willing to kill Sloane for. The man she loved. But he didn’t ask.

Every time her skin brushed his, every time their eyes met, every time he sensed her watching him, the tension in Sark’s stomach wound a little tighter. He knew she felt it too, but they didn’t talk about that, either. Yet as the day wore on into evening, the very air between them seemed charged, as if it knew that these last few days had all been leading up to something inevitable – and the climax was at hand.

She slept in his bed again that night, and again, nothing happened. Sark lay awake long after she fell asleep, staring at her back, listening to the gentle rhythm of her breathing, testing the smallness of her waist between his hands. She was, he decided, the most beautiful, captivating, perfect creature he’d ever seen. It required every ounce of willpower he possessed not to dip his head and kiss that fascinating spot where her graceful neck connected to her slender collarbone. He closed his eyes and allowed himself a small shiver; she didn’t wake but instinctively slid closer to him, and he rested his cheek against her hair.

Again the realization visited him that this, everything they had shared over the past weeks, was all built on a lie. Sydney was only here with him, not back in L.A. with Agent Vaughn, because she believed her father to be disloyal. Or, at least, she accepted the possibility that it could be true. So far everything was going exactly as Irina had planned, and perhaps it would even work – perhaps they would even manage to convince Sydney that it was all true, persuade her to defect to their side permanently. But then where would he be? Trapped in a lifetime of lies, waiting everyday for the other shoe to drop, tensing up each time she said she needed to talk to him, because the truth would be hanging there like an invisible cloud between them.

He suddenly pictured Irina, blood pouring out of a bullet wound in her arm, clambering into the helicopter in Tuscany after Sydney had shot her. Nothing in Irina’s life was real. All of her relationships were manufactured, all based on half-truths and out-right deception and remorseless betrayal. For years he had envied the love she professed to have for her daughter, but now that he found himself falling hopelessly in love with a woman who could never know the truth about him, he wondered if it hadn’t been easier when he was simply alone.

But he knew he didn’t want that, not really. Even living a lie with Sydney Bristow was better than living without her. And now if she would just come to him – if he could just sweep away the last of her resistance and show her what they could be together...

If she needed time, he decided, swallowing the desire that threatened to overpower him, then he would give her time. So long as he could have her forever, he was content to wait for her.

* * * *

When Sydney woke the next morning, Sark was already gone. She lay there for a few moments, breathing in the scent of him that lingered on the sheets, staring up at the ceiling and knowing, with a giddy anticipation, that today all of this luscious tension was going to explode.

She was ready.

Perhaps they hadn’t talked about family histories and spy horror-stories yesterday, but nevertheless she felt as if she knew him now. She knew his music, his movies, his books; she knew he could be clever, and charming, and witty; she knew the texture of his palms and the timbre of his laugh; she knew the shifting of colors in his eyes when he was amused, or impatient, or frustrated. This was Sark, the real Sark, this quiet, considerate, tender man who read Dickens and quoted poetry and listened to Metallica and adored Bruce Willis films. The man who could set her on fire with a look.

So what about the other Sark? What about those eyes – those cold, unfeeling eyes – when he drove a knife into another human being? Sydney mentally shushed her inner voice, shaking her head to force it away. Well, she’d done things she wasn’t proud of in the name of the job, hadn’t she? They became different people in the field. The difference was, she wore disguises; Sark just became the disguise.

And that’s an important difference, her little voice managed to point out before she squashed it completely.

Any lingering doubts she had Sydney washed away under a steamy shower in her own room. She wondered what they would do today. If he felt up to it, she wanted to explore the beautiful backdoor garden for a while. Maybe they could have lunch outside, since it was such a gorgeous summer day. She ran her hand lovingly over the gilded mirror in her bathroom. She would miss this place – not only was it fabulously luxurious, it also allowed her to pretend that this was their home, hers and Sark’s, and they weren’t really neck-deep in the high-stakes world of espionage, chasing after centuries’ old riddles and languishing in a web of lies that grew more tangled everyday.

A present, perfectly wrapped in royal-blue paper with a red rose on top, awaited her on her bed. Sydney giggled, glancing around to see if he was hiding somewhere, watching her. He wasn’t. When on earth had he found time to get her a gift? She pressed the silky, sweet-smelling petals to her nose and tore into the beautiful paper, as eager as a little girl at Christmas. What could it be – and she hadn’t thought to do anything for him, even when he was hurt –

Flipping open the lid of the small white box inside, Sydney promptly burst out laughing.

A pearl-white string bikini.

An exact replica of the one she’d worn that day on Marinus’s yacht.

A note from him fluttered out onto the floor. Retrieving it, she admired his firm, solid script as she read:

“Sydney –

I did tell you that if I ever had the opportunity to get you into a bikini again, I would take it. Well, here it is. Would you please join me at the pool?

– S”

* * * *

He was floating easily on the crystal-blue water with his back to her, and Sydney knew when she saw him that it was time.

Early morning sunlight danced on the water, catching the highlights in his fair hair. She cleared her throat slightly and he turned, grinning, his mouth open to deliver some cocky greeting.

The look in her eyes stopped him.

Very deliberately, Sydney stepped down onto the first step of the ladder into the pool. He was at the far end, treading water silently, his shoulder and stomach wrapped in water-proof bandages. Sydney reached up and tugged her ponytail free, letting her shower-damp hair cascade around her shoulders. She held his gaze as she descended into the pool, one step at a time until the water enveloped her shoulders and tugged on the ends of her hair. She watched him watching her as she came to him, parting the water effortlessly with broad strokes and languid scissor-kicks. He backed up until the edge stopped him, rested his shoulders against the concrete and supported his weight with his arms stretched out on the sides. His eyes never left hers.

Sydney swam right up to him. She didn’t hesitate; all doubt, all indecision, all uncertainty was gone. She slid her palms up his slippery chest and curled her fingers in his hair, pulling him down into a soft, slow kiss. The water rocked their bodies together, drew them gently apart, pushed them back together again. He let her lead the kiss, let her decide when to deepen it. She pulled his arms off the edge and placed them around her waist; his palms splayed open on her back, his legs wound around hers, trapping them together as passion built behind the kiss and Sydney parted his lips with her tongue.

But there was no rush. Sliding her mouth away from his, Sydney tilted his head back and kissed her way down onto his chest, where the water tickled her nose, then back up to his mouth, where his lips were damp and hungry. She sensed the restrained urgency in him and wrapped her legs tighter around his, letting him know she felt the same, that she was just as desperate for him as he was for her.

Sark clasped her hips and spun her around gently, pressing her shoulderblades into the edge. It was his turn to explore her with kisses; Sydney stroked his hair as he sucked on her neck, nibbled on her earlobe, kissed right down to the top of her bikini. She moved away from him slightly then, and he pulled back immediately, the question flashing in his passion-hazy eyes – Do you want me to stop?

Sydney slipped away from him, moving to the ladder a few feet away. She pulled herself up and turned to face him, her body still tingling from his touch and his kisses.

“It’s okay, we don’t have to,” he started, his voice husky and almost anguished.

She put a finger to her lips, silencing him. “I just want you to see me,” she said softly, and with that, she reached up and unfastened the bikini top.

His eyes followed it down onto the water, and she saw him draw in a deep, steadying breath before he looked back up at her. She shivered at the heat in his eyes, at how his gaze nearly scorched her skin. No one had ever looked at her that way – like if he couldn’t touch her, he would simply burn down into ashes right there. She was trembling as she eased the bottoms down and kicked them into the water.

Sark closed the small distance between them in two strokes, grasped her around the waist and lifted her easily back into the water with him. Sydney had never made love in a pool before, and the cool water against her naked and super-sensitive skin was almost as deliciously exciting as his caresses. He touched her everywhere, kissed her everywhere, let her small sighs and soft moans lead him to her most tender places; Sydney couldn’t help remembering the night she’d imagined the kind of lover he would be – thorough, deliberate, patient – and was astonished at how true it was – he never hurried, even though each time the softly lapping waves pushed them together she felt how badly he wanted her.

At last he trapped her between his body and the edge again. His voice shook when he whispered, “Are you sure?”

In reply, Sydney sealed his mouth with hers and reached down to pull his trunks away. He gripped the cement edge behind her as she lifted her self onto him, buried his face in her neck and bit down gently on her shoulder as he plunged into her. Sydney clung to him, her arms wound around his neck, her chin resting on his wet hair; he was slow, and gentle, and perfect inside of her, matching her rhythm completely, knowing just how to move to drag soft moans out of her that she wasn’t even aware of making. His skin slid along hers, wet and smooth and rippling with muscles, and she held on as tightly as she could, trying to lose herself in him and this moment and the ecstasy that rose to a violent crescendo and erupted inside of her like a million shooting stars.

When he pulled back, his breathing was ragged and his body trembled. Sydney rested her head on his shoulder, weak and exhausted and happier than she could ever remember being. They stayed that way for a few minutes while their heartbeats slowed down and their bodies reluctantly separated.

After a moment, he tilted her chin up and grinned at her. “Now what?” he asked, and she giggled as she remembered that not-so-long-ago day on the yacht.

Pressing her lips against his in a gentle kiss, she whispered, “Now, we go to bed.”

Chapter Ten: Sanctuary

The flight to Paris the next morning was filled with soft kisses, gentle caresses and quiet laughter. Sydney reveled in their last few hours of escape before the world closed in on them again. She wondered privately if Sark would drastically change – morph back into his vicious cold-blooded killer mode – once they landed; the signature black suit was back, an unspoken reminder that today the subjects they hadn’t yet dared to broach with one another would be the main topic of discussion.

She felt better when, ignoring the curious stares from the chauffer, he held her hand on the limo ride from the airport to Irina’s lavish apartment. He kept his fingers wrapped securely around hers as the maid showed them into the parlor; he leaned in close to whisper that she looked beautiful, and even though the navy-blue suit was hardly different from what she wore to work any other day, Sydney suddenly felt so elegant she might have been wearing an evening gown. When they settled onto the sofa, he draped his arm around her shoulders, his fingers absently toying with strands of her hair, not bothering to scoot away from her even when her mother walked in.

Loving the casual yet deliberate possessiveness in his touch – ‘This is my girl now,’ he seemed to say – Sydney watched her mother’s reaction carefully, hoping not so much for approval as for a clue to how this new-found romance might effect her big plan. But Irina just smiled warmly at them, looking for all the world like a mother meeting her daughter’s new suitor and finding him everything a parent could want for her child. Absolutely no surprise to see them together.

Doubt reared its ugly head again and Sydney wondered if this relationship with Sark could be part of Irina’s recruitment scheme. The memory of his arms locked tight around her through the night dispelled those thoughts immediately; more likely, her feelings for Sark had just been glaringly obvious for much longer than she realized.

Still glowing from their all-night-into-morning love-making, still grinning uncontrollably every time Sark’s fingertips brushed her collarbone, Sydney was nevertheless all business today. Questions needed answering before she went any further down this dangerous path she’d started on. The first and most pressing of those she delivered as her mother settled in across from them: “How does Will figure into all of this?”

Irina studied her for a moment. “I believe your friend is loyal to you and to your country,” she said at last, extracting a small sigh of relief from Sydney. Perhaps at least one friend was what he claimed to be, after all. “I can find no evidence that he was involved with the CIA in any way prior to his investigation of your fiancé’s murder.” So, Sydney reflected sadly, it was her fault Will had been caught up in this nightmare. Another casualty of Arvin Sloane’s ruthlessness...

Irina paused while the maid placed a tray of tea and scones on the coffee table, waiting until they were alone again to continue, “It’s possible that he either believes he is working for the Agency’s best interests or, as the files you downloaded suggest, that he is being psychologically manipulated by someone. Perhaps through hypnosis.”

Shuddering at the idea of Will being turned into a zombie, Sydney, her voice thick with doubt, countered, “And you think Dad is doing all of this.”

“Does your father have – access – to Mr. Tippin?”

“Define ‘access’,” Sydney retorted, rather sarcastically. She defied Irina with a cold stare, letting her know she wasn’t even close to fully buying this attack on her father’s loyalty. “He knows my friends, if that’s what you mean, but he isn’t close with any of them.”

Irina nodded, looking as if she were working this out herself as they went along. If it was an act, it was damn convincing – but wasn’t that her mother’s specialty? “Think hard, Sydney. Has anyone new come into your friend’s life in the past few months? Any new friends or new relationships?”

Sark, who appeared to be ignoring the entire conversation, suddenly leaned forward and poured himself a cup of tea. He glanced at Sydney, inclining his head to ask if she wanted some; she shook her head, surprised by how indifferent he seemed toward all of this. Or was that simply a mask to hide his discomfort? After all, he’d been behind the torture Will suffered in Taipei. Possibly he was just eager for them to move on to a less sensitive subject.

No chance of that today.

Focusing on her mother’s question, Sydney mentally rewound the last few months. Will’s life had changed dramatically after Taipei – he’d been forced to quit his reporting job, to pretend he was a heroine addict, to endure public humiliation just to save his life from SD-6. And now he worked as an analyst for the CIA, lying, like Sydney, to those nearest and dearest to him by saying he worked for a travel magazine. In that time he could have formed countless new friendships, with other analysts and agents Sydney didn’t know. But no one really stood out in her mind. He was dating Francie now, obviously, and that was new, but the idea of Francie being a secret agent almost made Sydney giggle.

Oh, there was – “Vaughn,” she said, without really thinking. Sark actually flinched beside her, and the color rose in Sydney’s cheeks. Irina arched an eyebrow, very close to looking amused by their simultaneous guilty reactions – Sark jumping, Sydney blushing. She plunged on, determined to maintain a nonchalant, business-like tone, “Agent Vaughn set up Will’s new CIA position. And of course he and Will have gotten to know one another since…”

“Since the Alliance was destroyed, yes,” Irina finished for her, sparing Sydney the embarrassment. Sydney kept her eyes straight ahead, not daring to even glance at Sark. Why the hell had she brought up Vaughn? Another subject they would soon have to discuss…

“Do you think it’s possible that Agent Vaughn could be working with your father on this?” her mother pressed, but before Sydney could respond, Irina leaned forward, her face as earnest as Sydney had ever seen it. “I wouldn’t suggest that Agent Vaughn is disloyal. I saw enough of him to know he isn’t. But he isn’t a company man, like his father was. He will bend the rules when he believes the ends justify the means, you know that. You’ve seen him do it.” She paused, as if weighing her next words carefully. “Could your father have played on Agent Vaughn’s hatred of me to draw him into all of this?”

Well, much as Sydney hated to admit it, it was possible. Vaughn had once told her about reading his father’s diary and learning how many orders he took from the Agency that he really disagreed with but never refused. She knew Vaughn was determined not to be that way – how many times had he shattered protocol for her, risked his position with the Agency and even federal prison to help her? And then he had nearly lost his job for launching a private investigation into Irina while she was in custody. Yes, if Jack really were looking for people to manipulate in this twisted little scheme, Vaughn would have been a perfect target.

And, thanks to her, he had access to Will.

“In any case,” Irina was saying, bringing Sydney back to reality, “I don’t think your questions about Mr. Tippin can be answered just now. There’s still too much we need to find out.”

That felt like a lead-in to her big plan, but Sydney wasn’t finished with her interrogation yet. She broke in with her second-most nagging question: “What is your relationship with Arvin Sloane?”

Irina glanced at Sark. Sydney followed her eyes and saw, with deep satisfaction, that his bland expression clearly intimated to Irina that he was on Sydney’s side in all of this. She snuggled closer against him, inexplicably comforted by the solidness of his chest against her shoulder, hoping he knew how much she appreciated his refusal to double-team her.

If she found his sudden switch of allegiances irritating, Irina hid it very well. Without missing a beat, she explained evenly, as if it were all very simple, “With the exception of myself, Sloane is the greatest Rambaldi scholar and collector in the world. We either work with him or we work against him. It’s easier for us if we work with him. But,” her voice hardened slightly, bitter beneath the surface smoothness, “if you’re asking me if I harbor any affinity for the man, the answer is no. When my plans are complete I intend to see to it that he is never able to harm anyone, ever again.” For a brief second, her eyes blazed, and Sydney read a true and unadulterated hatred there that rivaled her own contempt for Sloane. In the next moment her mother blinked it away and finished placidly, “Ultimately, he’s just a tool for helping us to finish Rambaldi’s work.”

Ah, Rambaldi again. “And why do we want to do that exactly?”

Sydney stared hard at her mother, searching for signs of evasiveness, but Irina answered in her usual forthright manner. “Rambaldi created a great many things. You’ve seen a few of his weapons, like the Circumference.”

That word evoked awful memories of Will’s torture and the terrible hours when she had feared Vaughn was dead; Sydney brushed them aside, feeling Sark shift uneasily beside her. Almost in spite of herself, Sydney was overwhelmed with compassion for him – what would it feel like to sit through a rehashing of her worst sins, of all the ways she had hurt someone she loved? She laid a reassuring hand lightly on his knee as Irina went on, “But not all of his work centered on destruction. Of course his greatest ambition was to discover the secret of immortality. Whether or not he succeeded remains a mystery. But,” again that almost imperceptible hardening to her voice, “what makes his manuscript so dangerous is that he came across the idea of immortality while creating his most powerful weapon. So whoever solves the puzzle of his final work will also unlock the secret to that.”

“And what was this weapon?” Sydney asked flatly, thinking again how ridiculous this Rambaldi obsession was. How could brilliant people like her mother – and her father, possibly – be so completely captivated by this nonsense?

“His writings refer to it as The Tenth Plague,” Sark surprised her by answering, finally joining their conversation. Sydney turned to look at him, but he remained focused on the windows behind Irina and spoke tonelessly, like a child reciting a memorized lesson for the teacher. “A genetic-specific virus that would kill all but those with a certain DNA sequence.”

The solemnity in his voice made Sydney suddenly doubt her easy dismissal of Rambaldi’s work. Sark didn’t sound excited or passionate about it, the way her mother and Sloane did; he sounded like she felt – tired of the whole subject, but unable to escape it. She wondered again why he was here, what had brought him into this world in the first place, realized she would soon need an answer to that question – and many others – about his deeply mysterious past.

Irina cut into her musing, picking up where Sark left off. “The name, of course, refers to the tenth plague visited upon ancient Egypt in the Book of Exodus.”

Sydney’s mind leapt back to a graduate class she’d taken on reading the Bible as literature: Pharaoh refused to free the Hebrews, so God sent the angel of death to kill the firstborn of every household that did not carry his mark – the blood of a lamb – upon the door. She shivered involuntarily as Irina continued, “So after Rambaldi created this virus, he needed to create the vaccine for it. And when he realized that manipulating a person’s genes could protect them from that disease, he took the next logical step to realizing that DNA could be manipulated to provide immunity from all diseases – even from old age.”

Sydney took a moment to process all of that, a moment in which Sark picked her hand up off his leg and laced their fingers together. She couldn’t help but smile at his touch, looking up into his eyes and finding that they reflected her own thoughts perfectly – Why didn’t we just stay in Italy and be in love for a few more days? Or weeks, or months, or years?

Glancing up, she was startled to find Irina watching them knowingly, as if she could read their thoughts. While it should have been pleasant, even gratifying, to realize that her mother was happy for her, the genuine smile in Irina’s eyes flooded Sydney with unwelcome doubts again. She battled them away by concentrating on business. “So Rambaldi created the ultimate biological weapon. He could vaccinate who he wanted and then unleash this virus on the rest of the world.”

Irina nodded. “Massive genocide. Only the chosen would survive.” She paused before adding gravely, each word falling heavily into the space between them, “The chosen with a specific DNA sequence. Those who would be invincible to disease and the effects of age. A superior race.”

So, eugenics. And genocide. And chemical warfare.

And people like Arvin Sloane were trying to unlock the secrets of this manuscript? Suddenly, Rambaldi seemed like much more than a crazy old dead guy – he seemed like the biggest threat to humankind that Sydney had ever heard of.

“So you’re saying,” she pressed, leveling an intense stare on Irina, desperate for any clue that this was all another elaborate deception, “that Dad is working for people at the CIA who intend to actually use this virus. Not just – keep it out of the wrong hands.”

“I believe your father’s involvement with Dr. Rikkets answers that question,” Irina replied. Sydney flinched at that – true, she had yet to authenticate the intel from Italy, but what if she did? What other explanation could Jack possibly offer for financing Rikkets’ genetic experiments on those poor people back in Rome?

Her thoughts must have been written across her face. Settling back in her seat, looking very much like the cat that had just trapped a mouse, Irina added, “The CIA stores all of the Rambaldi artifacts they obtain in a highly secured vault. They have teams of scientists who study his work. You know this. Why would they do that if someone there weren’t interested in learning the manuscript’s secrets? If they never intended to use the information, why wouldn’t they simply destroy each piece as they acquired it, making it impossible for anyone to ever finish his work?”

A wave of sickening doubt washed over Sydney, leaving her chilled. What in the name of all that was good and holy had she gotten herself into when she took that first step into this fucked-up life? Was it possible for anyone in this business to be who or what they claimed to be?

Had she ever really stopped working for the enemy?

She glanced up to find both Sark and Irina watching her intently, and abruptly, she felt very much like a fish that was about to be reeled in. It raised her defenses and made her ask rather harshly, “And why would I want to help people like you,” she stabbed a malicious glare at both them, “get your hands on something like that?”

Sark just looked away from her and focused on the windows again, expressionless, leaving Irina to answer, “Very simple.” Her eyes caught and held Sydney’s. “To destroy it.”

* * * *

Sydney waited impatiently for Sark to emerge from the cockpit and join her in the private jet’s cabin. Shoes abandoned haphazardly beside the small sofa, she drew her knees up to her chest and rested her chin on them, inspecting her bare toenails and remembering when she was younger and found time to paint them. That same teenage version of herself had drawn looping hearts around boys’ names on her geometry folders and believed ardently in the kind of love Shakespeare wrote about and wondered everyday what life would have been like with a mother to discuss all of it with – all the hardships of being a young woman exploring romance and sexuality and intimacy.

Sadly, even now that she had her mother back, she still couldn’t share that with her. They couldn’t bake brownies together and take all-day shopping trips and giggle about old crushes and figure out how she could let Vaughn go gently and happily discuss her future with the man she loved.

Mrs. Sydney Sark. She grinned wryly. It was about damn time she found out his real name.

They were headed back to L.A. now. Back to her former life. Back to her father and Vaughn and the CIA. Back to a place where anyone and everyone might be something other than what they seemed. Back to the proverbial lion’s den. Sydney found it difficult to breathe around the basketball-sized knot in her stomach, feeling as if she stood on a precipice and one misstep would send her plummeting to her death. This was a dangerous game she was playing, infiltrating the CIA under orders from a known terrorist, when the only person she was certain she could trust had been, until a few days ago, one of her most feared and despised enemies.

At last Sark joined her, ducking into the cabin with his tie unfastened and his jacket unbuttoned. Chiding herself for the delicious shivers she experienced every time he walked into a room, Sydney scooted over to make room for him beside her on the sofa. His presence was intoxicating. She resisted the urge to slide her hands up his thighs and watch a smoky indigo creep into his crystal-blue gaze as she popped open the buttons on his shirt one by tantalizing one…

Her own eyes must have clouded with desire, because he moved closer and cupped her chin in his hand. The way he looked at her – it made her forget to care about Rambaldi and the CIA and the mystery of his past…

But those questions had to be answered. They couldn’t just pretend they were the only two people on the planet, or that none of these larger issues existed. So when he moved in for a kiss, Sydney latched desperately onto her remaining vestiges of self-control and pulled away, staring hard into his eyes.

“So how much of it was true?” she demanded.

He leaned back but didn’t turn away, tilting his head slightly to the side. “How much of what?” he asked mildly, his expression guarded. Only his eyes betrayed his fear – the fear that she didn’t want him anymore, the fear that all of this happiness was about to go down in flames.

Oh god. She hadn’t meant to make it sound like she was questioning him – or them – or what had happened between them in Italy. What was still happening between them. “What my mother said,” she rushed to explain. “About Sloane and Rambaldi and this whole plan.”

Sark didn’t breathe an audible sigh of relief, but Sydney read it there in his eyes anyway, and it moved her to know how much he cared. She stroked the side of his face gently, conveying with her touch that nothing between them had changed. If anything, what she felt for him now was even stronger than what she’d felt the first time they made love.

He turned his face into her palm and kissed it, then took her hand in his and laid it in his lap, focusing on their entwined fingers. “Some of it was news to me,” he confessed, with what she recognized as nothing less than absolute honesty. His eyes flicked up to hers, intense and almost troubled. “Irina is hardly an open book, even with me.”

So. It was possible they were both being used as pawns here, both being led deeper and deeper into a web of intricately-constructed lies. Sydney closed her eyes as she mentally reviewed what she knew so far: Irina wanted her to steal the Rambaldi artifacts from the CIA’s vault, purportedly to stop Jack and his co-conspirators from wreaking havoc on the world with this gene-specific virus. The Tenth Plague. Yet even though Irina had readily agreed to let Sydney hide those artifacts until she was satisfied of her altruistic intentions, Sydney couldn’t get comfortable with the idea of handing that kind of power over to a woman with her mother’s history.

Rambaldi’s Prophecy echoed in her mind: “This woman here depicted at vulgar cost will render the greatest power unto utter desolation.”

Didn’t inspire much confidence that Irina was actually out to save the world, obviously. But then again, Sydney didn’t really believe in this Prophecy nonsense, did she?

Did she?

“So,” she began, but Sark raised a hand and stopped her.

“Sydney, I know you have questions,” he said, “but before I give you the answers, I want to show you something.”

A tingle of anticipation wriggled into Sydney’s stomach. “What?”

He grinned at her uncontainable eagerness. “We’ll be there in a couple of hours,” he promised, then yawned and rested his head on the back of the couch, looking soft and innocent and extremely kissable.

She hesitated for a moment, wondering what kind of stalling tactic this was. But his sleepy smile melted away her suspicions. She’d gone this long without knowing anything about him. What was a few more hours?

And until then, she could think of ways to pass the time.

* * * *

“Australia,” he said, when Sydney stepped off the plane and asked where they were.

“Australia,” she repeated incredulously, and he nodded. She shook her head, uncertain whether to be amused or nervous or irritated. “Sark, what about L.A.? The op - ”

“It can keep a day,” he answered smoothly, his grin – coupled with her overpowering curiosity – so irresistible that she laughed and allowed him to pull her toward a nearby Jeep.

Sark drove with one hand on the wheel and the other resting on her knee. They rode in companionable silence past endless expanses of empty desert, broken here and there by scrubby trees and crumbling wooden fences. Twilight descended and a chill crept into the air. He shrugged out of his suit jacket, wincing a little at the pain in his bandaged shoulder, and Sydney wrapped it around herself, breathing in his musky scent off the expensive fabric, relieved suddenly to have even a brief respite from the turmoil that awaited her in L.A.

How could she possibly pretend to be the old Sydney? Vaughn would see right through her – and if by some miracle she managed to fool him, she seriously doubted she could fool Jack. He knew her too well. And her disappearing act – not calling to let him know she was all right – would require a good deal of explanation, to say the least, as would their escape from his (albeit alleged) double-cross with Rikkets. And what disguise could she slip on that would hide the way she felt about Sark?

At last, he turned the Jeep off the main highway onto a tree-lined gravel road. The headlights offered a pale, shaky view of what lay ahead, but gradually, Sydney discerned the shape of a large house in the darkness ahead. He parked in front of it, killing the engine but leaving the headlights on so she could inspect it.

Large, yes, but not a mansion – just a house. Almost quaint, really, with curly-q’s of sun-faded gray paint peeling off the sides and knotted shrubs encroaching on the broad cement front porch. She waited a moment for him to explain. When he didn’t, she asked, “What is this place?”

He shifted slightly in the seat to face her. Darkness mostly obscured his features, but she heard the note of uncertainty in his voice, recognized that he found it difficult to share himself even with her. “It’s mine.”

While she understood, and had for some time, that the hot cars and fabulous suits and expensive wines were part of his super-spy persona, Sydney still pictured Sark living in an airy villa like the one in Florence or a luxurious flat like Irina’s in Paris. Certainly not this place, an aging if promising fixer-upper, in the middle of Nowhere, Australia. She fought to keep her expression neutral, yet the incredulity crept into her voice anyway. “This is your house?” He nodded. Was it her imagination, or did she spy a glint of amusement in his eyes that she would find this so hard to believe? She found herself grinning back at him. “How long have you lived here?”

“Since yesterday.”

“Yesterday?” For a moment, Sydney was completely bewildered – He’d bought a house? What the hell for? – and then it sunk in.

This was for them. Their house. Hers and his. Sark and Sydney’s.

“Would you like to see it?” he inquired. She heard the note of apprehension in his voice, loved him for it, for not being Mr. You-Know-How-Bad-You-Want-Me-Super-Spy for once. He could be vulnerable, and in those moments she sensed the man he could have been if life had dealt him another hand.

Once again the air between them crackled with expectation, only this time it had nothing to do with the inevitable collision of their bodies and everything to do with the long-awaited unveiling of his many secrets.

Sydney followed him onto the porch, slipping her hand into his as he unlocked the front door and switched on the lights. The warm electric-yellow glow reflected in his eyes as he carefully watched her reaction, but he needn’t have worried – she was grinning so broadly her cheeks almost hurt.

If someone had given her this house, this was how she would have decorated it. Sturdy but possibly second-hand furniture, lots of wicker and wood; a television built into an oak cabinet so it wouldn’t look out-of-place with the rustic decor; hard-wood floors graced here and there by charming Oriental-style rugs; a spacious kitchen, very modern but still old-fashioned in tone, no stainless steel or chrome. The downstairs contained a kitchen, dining room, living room, and utility room; the upstairs boasted a master bedroom, a small study, a large bathroom and a linen closet. French doors in the bedroom opened onto a wrap-around balcony that faced the backyard. Gently sloping hills rose in the distance, glowing silver in the starlight.

Sydney stood on the balcony and marveled at how instantly at home she felt here. She could picture them cooking dinner together in the kitchen, brushing up against one another by the stove and talking softly about their days; she could imagine packing a picnic lunch and hiking up into those hills, admiring the wild beauty of the place and finding a secluded spot to make love as the sun dipped below the horizon; she could see them wrapped in a blanket on the front-porch swing watching an afternoon storm roll in, smelling the rain and snuggling closer as the wind blew in an early-autumn chill. No Rambaldi. No CIA. No Sloane. No Jack, or Irina, or Vaughn, or Will. Just them. The fantasy was so bittersweet she didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Sark came up behind her, rubbing her arms gently. “I thought we should have a place that was just our own. Somewhere no one else knows about that we can come to when we need to just be us,” he explained softly, dropping a light kiss in her hair. “Does that bother you?”

She leaned back against him, pulling his arms around her waist and nuzzling his neck with her nose. How could she ever have thought he was danger? He was the safest place she’d ever known. “No,” she assured him, smiling up into his eyes. “It’s perfect.” He started to kiss her but she giggled unexpectedly, suddenly so giddy she almost couldn’t contain herself. “You bought us a house!”

“Yes, well.” Her grin was contagious and he spun her gently around, catching her waist and swaying to unseen music. A breeze ruffled her hair. “I realize that generally I should have bought you a ring first, but this seemed more appropriate for our situation.”

Mrs. Sydney Sark. The reminder of how little she actually knew about him wiped the smile off Sydney’s face; he sensed the change in her immediately, frowning as he stopped their pantomime dancing. “What’s the matter? Did I say something wrong?”

Would she ever get used to that heart-stopping tenderness in his eyes? Would that crooked slant to his lower lip ever stop evoking the irresistible urge to kiss him? Would it ever cease to amaze her how he could melt her with that adorable British accent? Sydney wrapped her arms tight around him, careful not to squeeze because of the stitches in his stomach, rested her head on his shoulder and stared across the backyard at the distant hills. Did it matter what his name was, or how he had come into this life, or what his involvement was with her mother, or why he cared about Rambaldi? Would any of it change how she felt about him?

You’re afraid to ask, her inner voice chided her. You’re afraid that once you really know him, you’ll be so repulsed that you’ll never be able to let yourself love him.

For once, she acquiesced to that voice. Yes, she was afraid. But she hadn’t gotten this far alive by running away from her fears; if this was going to last, then she had to know. Hadn’t someone once said that love was knowing the worst thing about a person and wanting to be with them anyway?

She took a step back from him and searched for a way to ask him about his past without falling into her usual interrogation-mode. “It’s just – I mean – Sark, we have a house and I don’t even know your first name.” He grinned weakly, pushing a hand through his blonde curls and staring down at his shoes, almost sheepish. Sydney plunged on, hoping this time he would just answer her, that he wouldn’t make her push. “I’ve wondered so many times who you are. How you came to be involved in all of this, with my mother and Sloane.”

He nodded, and when he lifted his eyes to hers, Sydney saw the understanding there, mingled with – well, the only word for it was resignation. He knew, as she did, that the moment of truth had finally arrived.

Chapter Eleven: Moment of Truth

So, his life story. Not something Sark generally shared with anyone. Well, not the real version, anyway.

So he supposed he should have been apprehensive about telling Sydney. And he had been, right up until the second he realized he didn’t have a choice – it was tell her or lose her. Now, it just felt nice to be completely honest with her about something.

Perhaps when this elaborate charade came crashing down around his ears one day, either now or years in the future, she would give him points for coming clean about at least a few things.

Sark made a mental note to give the realtor a fat bonus for how perfectly she’d arranged the house, right down to his favorite wines and Sydney’s favorite shampoo, just as he’d requested. He uncorked a bottle of merlot and they curled up together on the front porch swing. He had stripped down to his undershirt and replaced the suit pants with jeans; she had changed into gray sweatpants and one of his white tee-shirts. They were wrapped up against the night’s chill in the quilt off of their bed, her head on his unwounded shoulder, his bare feet propped on the wooden porch railing, both watching the fire-flies dance along the gravel road.

He wondered if he should tell her that the boards beneath the swing opened up into a tunnel for quick escape, or that the farthest cabinet in the kitchen had a false bottom where he’d hidden an impressive store of weapons. In the end he decided against it. No need to remind her of the insanity of the outside world here in their private sanctuary.

She waited patiently for him to begin, and he appreciated that, finding it difficult to start a story he had so rarely told, a story that held so many painful memories. “I left home as a very young child,” he began, hesitated, wondered if he should go back further, explain about his parents and why he had been sent to England in the first place. But Sydney nodded encouragingly. Perhaps she would be satisfied with the bare-bones version for now, and as time went on, he could fill in the gaps, the way (he assumed) normal people went about building a relationship.

After a long sip of merlot, he added, “Too young, really.” He paused, reflecting on Sydney’s own difficult childhood. “I don’t have to tell you what the loss of any semblance of love and stability can do to a child.” She edged closer to him, sighing at her own unhappy memories.

Sark was trying hard not to be overwhelmed by the past he so carefully avoided. Years of hard-fought repression unraveled around him: he smelled the cold, sterile hallways, the starched sheets, the dusty chalkboards; he heard the harsh rasp of the headmaster’s voice, the murmurs of frightened children with no one to wake them from nightmares, the heavy footfalls as the teachers patrolled the hallways at night; he felt the terror when those footsteps stopped outside his door, the iron grip of loneliness when he saw the school’s Christmas tree and realized he would spend yet another holiday there alone with the janitors and cooks. By a force of will he rose above it – compartmentalize, he ordered himself, just don’t feel it – focused instead on the wood-grain pattern of the railing and allowed his voice to slip into a detached monotone. “I was always eager to please the only family I had – my teachers, at my school in England. If I was praised for learning quickly, I forced myself to learn twice as fast. If I was praised for my performance on the rugby field, I forced myself to play twice as hard. I was always – older – somehow – than others my age.”

He sensed her understanding, realized it must have been the same for her. Hadn’t she been every bit as abandoned as he was? He found himself wishing he could have known her before she was recruited into SD-6, when she was just Sydney Bristow, as lost and insecure as he had been before this life gave him a purpose and a place, however twisted and sick his work might be.

Now came the hard part – hard because it involved so much more than just his own pain, but hers as well. Sark steadied himself with a breath and plunged on, like an exhausted swimmer floundering in deep water with no choice but to press on for the far shore. “One of my teachers was Alexander Khasinau.” She actually flinched, but when she didn’t comment, he continued. “His position at the school, of course, was only a cover so he could test Project Christmas on a few promising students. Myself included.” The muscles in her back tensed so rigidly her spine nearly arched, but Sark kept on, the words, now that he had begun, spilling out of him of their own free will, “I excelled at his tests, and naturally, I desired his approval so much that I became his best student.”

An unfamiliar pang of remorse caused him to stumble as he realized how much he missed Khasinau, the only father figure he’d ever known – and he hadn’t even warned the poor bastard…

Shoving the regret aside, he finished, “In time he brought me to your mother, and she took over my education. I moved up in the ranks quickly, became part of her inner circle. Over the years, as we took over more and more organizations, that circle began to shrink. And since Khasinau, she and I are the inner circle.”

In the silence that followed, he waited for her to react, to ask him to explain all he’d glossed over, to curse her parents for finding so many ways to fuck up so many lives. Instead, her shoulders quivered slightly, and glancing over, he saw tears sliding down her cheeks.

Christ. He’d made her cry – again. “Syd,” he began, his voice low and hoarse with emotion. He kicked the blanket away when it bunched up between them, keeping them apart. Did she know what her tears did to him? How they hollowed him out inside, reduced him to a stuttering helplessness? “Please don’t – we don’t have to talk about - ”

“They never gave us a chance, did they?” The bitterness stung him because it resonated on so many levels; no, Jack and Irina had never given her a choice about the life she would lead, and now, he wasn’t giving her a choice about whether or not to love him or this Agent Vaughn. He was deceiving her into feeling things she probably would never have felt otherwise.

And, like her parents, he would rather betray her than lose her. So he agreed softly, “I suppose they didn’t.” She didn’t resist when he wiped the tears from her face and lightly kissed her cheeks, the tip of her nose, her eyelids, her temples. He dropped his voice to a hoarse whisper, afraid speaking too loudly might prompt the night itself to scream the truth at her. “I told you once that we were destined to work together, didn’t I?” She nodded, and he saw the understanding in her eyes. “And we were destined for this, too, Sydney.”

He brought his mouth down onto hers, warm and tender, breathing into her all the love he felt inside. She responded with the same potency, winding her legs around his and easing her palms up under his shirt, dragging him down closer until even the air couldn’t move between their bodies.

God, he would have done anything for her. Told any lie. Killed anyone. Broken any law of humanity or morality. Even betrayed Irina. So what if it was all deception? So what if she wouldn’t be here without this charade? Since when had he believed in fate? He made his own fate, chose his own destiny.

And he chose Sydney.

* * * *

How wonderful it was just to be held.

Sydney memorized his profile in the moonlight, facing him, cherishing the protective weight of his arm wrapped around her waist. Even in sleep he wanted to be near her, she thought with a satisfied smile. And she felt the same way. She didn’t want to spend a single moment apart from him.

Only, for the immediate future anyway, she would have to. Closing her eyes, willing sleep to come, Sydney wondered when she would have him to herself all night again. A few days, at least. Possibly never again if the mission failed and they both went to prison. Well, prison for her. Most likely the gas chamber for him, if her father had anything to say about it.

A cold shudder worked its way down her body. They had best not fail, then.

In sleep, he looked so fragile. Now she understood why; he wasn’t so different from her after all, not really. She filled in the gaps in his story for him – he had never known a true family, never known the safety and security of loving arms to rock him to sleep, never known the thrill of strong hands to guide him through his first bike-riding lesson. He was even more of an orphan than she was.

Her mother’s message floated up out of the darkness yet again: Truth takes time. Well, now she knew the truth about him, understood the hold Irina had on him and the real reason he refused to walk away from this life.

Healing. That followed truth. And it would take even more time.

And time, it seemed, was never their ally. She yawned, her body exhausted from the last few days of whirlwind traveling but her mind racing with all that had happened, all that was yet to come. Tomorrow they faced reality again. Tomorrow she needed to find a way to discern which one of her parents was lying now before she stole from the CIA and turned herself into a wanted criminal.

Sark sighed in his sleep, looking suddenly troubled, and Sydney touched his face, letting him know that she was there, that he wasn’t alone anymore. His features relaxed again almost at once, and her heart broke for everything he’d suffered.

If they could just survive this next mission, she promised him silently, he would never be alone again.

* * * *

Before dawn, Sark stole down to the living room and turned on his laptop. As expected, an email from Irina awaited him. He perused it, made a few quick phone calls on his cell, learned what he wanted to know and waited for an old associate in New York to email him what he needed. The sun was peeking over the horizon, warming the living room in soft golden rays, when he punched in the Paris number.

“You’re not in L.A.,” she greeted him, sounding more curious than angry.

Sark grinned. He knew the pilot would call her, despite the generous bribe he’d given him. But she still didn’t know about the house. “We made a detour,” he responded blithely. Normally, he would have been much more apprehensive about disobeying a direct order from Derevko, but he understood that his new relationship with Sydney afforded him some latitude, if for no other reason than that Irina accepted he was doing everything in his power to maintain the seduction. No need for her to know how deeply in love he really was; she had enough ammunition to use against him without that. “I have what we need. Now how does Senator Kocher figure into all of this?”

“For starters he’s one of the most corrupt men in the U.S. government, and that is saying something.” Sark smirked at the contempt in her voice. “I’ve had dealings with him before. He actually helped secure permission for the operation that ended in my extraction. I paid him handsomely for that, although he seems to think I still owe him more.”

“So I take it my mission here is two-fold: get him to implicate Jack’s involvement in Rikkets’ escape from federal custody beyond a shadow of a doubt, and convince him that your debt has been settled.”

“Precisely.” He pictured her approving smile – always the proud teacher, that was Irina. At least they weren’t having a Laura Bristow Moment; this was pure scheming, lying Derevko. “Sydney, like everyone else at the CIA, knows exactly the kind of man Kocher is. It’s only the voting public and his constituents that he has fooled. When she sees his signature on that letter I sent you, she’ll believe in Jack’s betrayal. You found something to use as leverage against him?”

Sark grinned mirthlessly at the glossy full-color photos rolling out of the printer as they spoke. “Apparently, our dear senator has an unfortunate pension for young women.”

“How young?”

“Well, the pigtails always make them look younger, you know, but I’m saying, maybe thirteen.”

“Nice work, Mr. Sark.” He heard the smile in her voice.

“Well, he hasn’t agreed to anything yet, mind you,” Sark protested modestly.

“He will.” Irina sounded supremely confident. “I’ll arrange a meeting between you in L.A. Will tomorrow night give you enough time to finish your little detour?”

“I believe so,” he answered evenly, amused at the hint of irritation in her voice. Dangerous, yes, but oh-so-satisfying to have The Man on the ropes for once. Although he wished he could share her confidence in how smoothly this deception would be pulled off. Glancing toward the stairs, careful to keep his voice low in case Sydney had woken up – he knew she was an earlier riser – he said, “She’ll still insist on authenticating all of your intel through her own channels, Kocher or no Kocher, you realize.”

“Sydney trusts you. Point her in the direction of someone we can buy off, and leave the rest to me.”

Sark winced at how much deeper by the second he was being drawn into this scheme. Well, what did he expect? That suddenly he could just stop lying to her, just stop working to keep the whole façade in place? All at once he felt weary, old, drained, empty. He fought to keep that out of his voice, to end the conversation normally, as cockily as he’d begun it. “I’ll take care of it. I’ll contact you for instructions once we’re in L.A.”

He hung up on her good-bye, tossing the phone onto the coffee table with the laptop, digging his fists into his eyes. The hopelessness of the situation threatened to overwhelm him. He was really in it now, right up to his fucking neck – no way out that would end in his favor. And if lying to her at this point ripped his heart out, what would it be like as the years went on? Sooner or later, would he even be able to look at her without loathing himself completely, and then hating her for that, for her innocence in all of it?

“So is there a plan now?”

Sydney’s voice behind him made Sark jump guiltily, and he whirled around, expecting to read it there on her face – that she’d overheard, that she knew, that the game was up. But she crossed to him immediately and seated herself on his lap, kissing him so passionately that it took his breath away. He remembered thinking once that, with the right man, she could be insatiable; he loved being proven right. Within minutes she had him stretched out on the couch, mindful of his bandaged arm as she trapped his hands above his head with one of hers. He was already shirtless and her mouth greedily explored his chest while her free hand worked down the zipper on his jeans and slid them off his hips.

“Syd.” He nearly moaned that, blushed at the desperation in his voice. Did she have any idea how impossible she was to resist? But they had to talk – they had to plan – he had a few questions of his own for her, at least. So with an incredible force of will he hauled himself back into a sitting position. She growled softly in protest, but he held her at arm’s length, insisting, “We have to talk about tomorrow. About L.A..”

She frowned – not angry, just disappointed. “Here?” she gestured at the house, their sanctuary. “I thought this was just for us.”

The heat of her mouth lingered on his skin, making it difficult to sound firm. “It is. But I have to ask you about a few things.”

She tensed, and he knew that she knew what was coming. “If it’s about Vaughn,” she tabled, holding his gaze steadily, “there really isn’t much to talk about. I thought I was in love with him, but – I think he and I were mostly in love with the idea of one another. Infatuated with the whole notion of what was forbidden to us. And we built up something around each other that wasn’t really there.” She paused, biting her lip thoughtfully, looking far away suddenly. “All of this – with you and me, I mean – it sped things up, the end of things with Vaughn. But it would have happened eventually anyway. I couldn’t spend my life with him.”

Gratified that she recognized the same incompatibility with Vaughn that he had seen, Sark nevertheless forced himself to say, “But you have to pretend as if nothing has changed between the two of you. Until the operation is over, that is.”

Sydney drew her legs up underneath her and studied the floor. “Sark, this operation…” She chanced a sideways look at him, gauging his response. “I don’t believe what my mother says about my dad. Those two are determined to hurt each other, and making me hate the other is the best way they’ve found to do that.”

Could she know how true that really was? And now he was part of the same sick game as well, with her love as the prize. Somehow he remained calm and focused despite the guilt gnawing away at his insides. “So you want to authenticate your mother’s intel.” She nodded, glancing up at him with what he knew was slight suspicion. He mocked himself for feeling hurt. She was right to doubt him, wasn’t she? But if this god-awful ruse was going to survive, she couldn’t. He had to earn her absolute trust so he could betray her in a thousand ways. “Any ideas on how to do that?”

She shook her head, so he took the plunge. “I know a few people who could help us, if you’re willing to trust my sources.”

An eternity passed between his asking and her answering; his whole world hinged on that question, and the implied one he was too afraid to ask – Do you trust me?

At last, almost tentatively, then with greater vigor, she nodded. “Yes.”

Suddenly, as he had in Italy, Sark despised himself for all of this. His jaw clenched around the truth that threatened to spill out. There she sat, wearing his shirt and smelling of his cologne and beaming from his love-making, and here he sat, twisting her around his finger in the same ruthless way Irina had her father. Project Christmas indeed. Irina didn’t want a protégé – she wanted a fucking clone that could do to her daughter what she had done to Jack. All to fulfill some ridiculous prophecy that would either end the world as they knew it or prove them all fools for believing it was possible.

Sighing, Sydney stood and reached for his hand, pulling him to his feet. He went willingly, eager to be back in her arms, letting his hands rather than his lies persuade her of his love. “Let’s get a few more hours’ sleep,” she suggested, drawing him up the stairs behind her. “And when we get up, I’m going to make you pancakes this time.”

Well, fuck it. He might as well stop pretending he was the kind of man who could suffer the consequences of telling her the truth. He wasn’t. He didn’t have an altruistic or self-sacrificing bone in his entire body. He would take her to L.A. and play out Irina’s little plan and then sweep her off here, or somewhere even more remote, somewhere that no one could find them. And this time, they would stay gone, if it cost him every penny he had to hide them. If they couldn’t have the truth, then at least they could disappear and live out the lie in peace.

Which meant, of course, that tomorrow in Los Angeles he had to be very, very good at being very, very bad.

* * * *

Sark prided himself on reading complicated people – it was actually the part of the job he enjoyed most, deciphering motives and predicting actions – but Senator Max Kocher might as well have been an open book for all the challenge he presented.

A slender, brown-haired man in his early fifties, Kocher – Democrat, California – wore a tailored burgundy suit accessorized with a diamond-crusted pocket watch and three enormous rings – a ruby (his birthstone), a thick gold band (his wedding ring), and his Yale class ring. Not handsome, and he knew it, agonized over it, tried to make up for it. He worked out, moisturized, paid a professional stylist to manage his ever-thinning hair on a daily basis. Appearances were everything to this man, though, paradoxically, he also considered himself above the rest of the world. He took no precautions to avoid being seen entering a raunchy L.A. nightclub; he dared someone to question those implacable morals he liked to flash on the Sunday morning talk-shows. The press was so enamored of him that no one ever accepted the challenge.

Sark dressed for the occasion in black Armani. His gun was concealed in a belt holster beneath the jacket; a surprisingly inconspicuous ankle holster held a short but wickedly-sharp knife.

The room was private, of course. Sark knew the club’s owner – a man with questionable associations, to say the least – and had reserved an upstairs room normally used for VIP poker games and high-class drug deals. A bank of windows overlooked the writhing mass on the dance floor below; they were sound-proof to mute the painfully loud techno-pop music blaring in the rest of the club. Sark faced those windows, imagining Sydney – who wanted to be close but of course understood that the presence of a CIA operative might scare Kocher off entirely – down there in the crowd with her sleek blonde-bob wig and skin-tight leather jumpsuit. He was surprised they’d ever made it to the club the way she looked – he had nearly attacked her a dozen times.

And if he thought about her too much, not just about how amazing she looked but about how she trusted him enough to send him in here without anyway to monitor what he said or did, he would lose all focus. So he willed his mind back to the mission at hand.

In some ways, Kocher was cautious. The four flat-faced, stump-necked suits accompanying him were hardly a Secret Service detail; he took some care that his political connections didn’t learn about his criminal affiliations, apparently. No chance of these goons reporting his questionable behavior like a Secret Service agent might, but they were still as inept as any government suit, Sark noted, watching them watching him from behind their mirrored sunglasses. Overpriced bodyguards, expensive rent-a-cops. They gave Kocher the illusion of safety, like his public office gave him the illusion of control. A dangerous combination – for Kocher.

“Irina couldn’t join us?” Kocher, lounging in his chair across a small round table from Sark, looked around as if he expected her to leap out of hiding and shout, Surprise!

“Ms. Derevko is still reluctant to enter the United States. Otherwise I’m sure she would have wanted to say hello.” Sark took his time opening his briefcase, allowing Kocher to size him up. And how did he look? Sark wondered this so often. Too young, too cocky, too poised – some yuppie lawyer-type, non-threatening, afraid to muss his hair, he supposed. The man actually sneered at him. Sark cut him some slack because he didn’t realize who he was dealing with. The stump-necks formed a semi-circle behind their boss, arms folded.

Kocher broke the silence before it became awkward. “Well, that’s too bad. Guess I’ll have to lose this five million to her in poker another day.”

So the man still thought he was negotiating a pay-off for his role in Irina’s extraction. What a chump. Feigning polite confusion, Sark echoed, “Five million?”

Kocher’s look said, Don’t get cute with me, kid. “I assume you asked me here to pay up what your employer owes me.”

“Ms. Derevko is of the understanding that her debt with you was already settled.”

Shaking his head in disbelief, Kocher sneered, “You’re fucking joking me, right? You brought me all the way out here to play some little fucking game?” He jabbed a finger across the table toward Sark, stabbing the air. Sark’s eyes dared him to take it further; Kocher was too thick to pick up on the threatening, almost predatory, stare. “Listen, my time is valuable. I didn’t come here to fuck around, kid. Ms. Derevko,” he said the name mockingly, “wants her secrets kept, then there’s a price.” He turned to the stump-necks, seething. “If she sent somebody other than a fucking preschooler to deal with me, I wouldn’t have to explain this.” The stump-necks smirked.

“You have a – daughter, yes? Seventeen?” Sark countered, no trace of annoyance or impatience in his voice, producing a yearbook photo of a surprisingly attractive young blonde from his suitcase. A society-page newspaper photo of an older and equally attractive blonde woman followed. “And your lovely wife, of course.”

“Don’t threaten my family, you little cunt.” Kocher’s eyes were steely, the first real sign of a spine he’d shown all night.

“I see. Well, while we’re on the subject of cunts…” Sark slipped the damning photos out of his briefcase and slid them across the table to Kocher. The man actually turned purple with rage, stunned into silence. Sark flooded his voice with mock sympathy, goading his prey. “I only mentioned them, your wife and daughter, you see, because I can’t imagine the pain these would cause them. How would you ever explain these to them? The tabloids would run them, I’m sure. Probably too graphic for mainstream media, but, you never know these days. Then there are the voters, of course.” He paused, letting the repercussions sink in. “You appreciate the barrel we have you over now, I’m sure, Senator.” He made the title just as mocking as Kocher had Irina’s name.

Kocher swore. “How did you get these?” he demanded, still somewhat dumbstruck. He regarded Sark warily now, sensing he had seriously underestimated his opponent. Sark took a sadistic pleasure in watching the false bravado tumble down, revealing the weak, inadequate man underneath. “Nobody’s ever gotten anything like this on me before…”

“Do you really not know?” Sark’s menacing hiss made Kocher start and recoil. He was really in his element now – no conflictions over Sydney, no doubts about the mission. This was Sark doing what he did best: ruthlessly tearing apart someone’s life, mercilessly extracting what he wanted regardless of the pain it caused. “This isn’t some local mob boss you’re up against, Mr. Kocher. This is Irina Derevko. She can dig up your dirtiest little secrets, snatch away your precious little daughter, get to you anywhere, anytime. She is not a woman that you blackmail, Senator. She is not a woman you fuck around with.”

Kocher considered this for a moment, thinking up a new game plan, then met Sark’s eyes coolly. “I could just have you killed, you know,” he observed dryly.

Before he could ask if Kocher really thought he was green enough to have only one copy of the photos, a stump-neck stepped forward and Sark, lightning-fast, took him out. Upper-cut to the jaw, iron-fisted punch to the diaphragm, bone-snapping kick to the knee, and the massive man went down in a sputtering heap, his own .9 millimeter semi-automatic resting lightly in Sark’s palm. Sark turned a questioning gaze on the remaining three – Anybody else want some of this? – and they backed up, leaving their comrade hunkered on the floor, whimpering.

Kocher needlessly waved his men off, trying hard to maintain a pretense of control. Sark sat back down, completely composed, settled the gun on the table so it pointed at Kocher. Let him look at it for a moment, wonder how far this would go. The stump-necks shifted but lacked the courage to act. Sark picked a tiny scrap of lint off his lapel while Kocher debated his next move. “They could be fake,” he suggested lamely, tapping the photos, trying not to stare at the gun. “I could tell people they’re fake. Digitally made.”

Grasping at straws. “Ah, you see, Ms. Derevko has a copy of these she’s fully prepared to send to the FBI. Molestation and child pornography are serious crimes, you know. I’m sure their lab could sort out the real from the fake.”

His adversary was beaten, and Sark was almost disappointed by how easy it had been. The felled stump-neck crawled over to the couch and nursed his wounds. His friends waited tensely, sensing their boss caving in. “What happens now?” Kocher sounded weary, pathetic. A pathetic old man with a pathetic little life. Sark nearly felt sorry for him.

Nearly.

“Ms. Derevko has no desire to use these pictures.” Sark gestured at the photos as if they were some harmless scrap of paper he’d found lying around. “She would like to continue her association with you. And she would like a favor.” Kocher nodded resignedly, knowing he had no choice but to comply, as Sark went on, “I have a letter I need you to sign.”

Kocher’s eyes flicked over the fabricated letter, reading warily at first and then with greater interest. When he reached the end, he looked up and eyed Sark suspiciously. “So that’s it? I piss this big bad woman off, and all I’ve got to do is sign this bullshit letter?”

“Naturally, should you tell anyone about this conversation or the letter, or attempt to blackmail us again, we’ll use the pictures.” Sark shrugged, intimating that this was unnecessary, that Kocher should have known it. Then he leaned forward, suddenly intense, enjoying how the abrupt change threw Kocher off-guard. Before he had been a harmless kid to this man; now, he was a loose canon, and God only knew what was coming from him next. “I don’t think you appreciate the scope of my employer’s ambitions, Mr. Kocher. My sources tell me you have aspirations for the White House.” Kocher nodded, his curiosity piqued. “Ms. Derevko has many connections, Senator. She would be a good friend to have in such a competitive race.”

It pained Sark to offer this much power to such a feeble man, but those were Irina’s instructions – appease him, dangle the carrot in front of his nose, keep him quiet until it wouldn’t look suspicious for him to be assassinated.

After a moment, Kocher drained his wine glass, abruptly scrawled his signature across the bottom of the letter, then stood and offered his hand to Sark, who shook it with the condescending air of a champion handing out the consolation prize. “Please give Irina my apologies for the misunderstanding, and let her know if there’s anything else I can do for her, don’t hesitate to ask,” Kocher said, the perfunctory concession speech.

“Of course. You should stay, Senator,” Sark said, sliding the pictures back into his briefcase. “They have some beautiful women as entertainment here at this club. They might be a bit old for your tastes, of course.” His eyes danced devilishly, daring Kocher to rise to the bait, but the senator’s eyes were fixed on a much bigger prize now. He just smiled sheepishly, having the audacity to look chastised, and took his leave. Sark shook his head ruefully, imagining with a grim satisfaction the day he could clean up this loose end and put a bullet in the senator’s brain. No wonder the man made such a damn good politician.

For now, he had to dash the last of Sydney’s hopes for her father’s innocence. Time to jerk the world out from under her feet and catch her as she fell. Again.

Chapter Twelve: Conspiracy Theories

Sark said that Freddie Suratto, the biggest conspiracy theorist Sydney would ever meet, knew him as Connor O’Bannon, British secret agent.

The unlikely pair had met three summers ago in the library of the National University of Ireland in Galway, Sark explained to her as they drove down the moonlit L.A. freeway. Sark was there posing as a student to access a Rambaldi document hidden in the special collections room, and Suratto was a student librarian, an American exchange student researching his political science dissertation on militant Irish anarchist groups.

It so happened that Suratto, a certifiable genius, also held a doctorate in computer engineering and, owing to his firm belief in government corruption, specialized in analyzing computer files to determine if they had been tampered with. Never one to pass up a perfectly good asset, Sark had convinced Suratto that he worked as a spy for British Intelligence, and ever since had kept him on retainer for jobs he didn’t want to go through usual channels for. Like checking the intel on Jack Bristow.

Sydney already believed Senator Kocher’s letter was the real deal, but Sark insisted she needed to be one-hundred-percent certain about all of the intel before going any further. She adored him for that.

In the bathroom of an all-night gas station, she repaired the make-up she’d cried off when he presented the letter to her. Direct orders from a senator to Jack authorizing him to move Rikkets to a secure location where he could continue his work – all but indisputable evidence of her father’s betrayal. Once again she witnessed that pain in Sark’s eyes, that haunted look, that desire to protect her from all of this. At least while her world was falling apart she had him to fall into.

She stuffed the blonde-bob wig into a black backpack and traded in the leather jumpsuit for the dark low-rider jeans and brown tank-top she had begun this adventure in. Her hair needed washing from being tucked up under the wig, but she didn’t have time, so she just wound it up into a bun and secured it with two chopstick-like clips.

Your name, she told her reflection, going a bit heavy on the eyeliner to disguise the puffiness brought on by crying, is Sarah Morgan. You work in British Intelligence with Connor – a.k.a. Sark – and you are investigating a possible conspiracy inside the CIA. You are not madly in love with your partner.

That last part would be a challenge to pull off, particularly in her fragile emotional state.

It would take less than an hour for Suratto to examine the disk. After that, she would have to contact her father. And after that she would have to face him, and Vaughn, and Will, and all those other suddenly-mysterious people in her life, like Marshall and Dixon. Once she survived that (assuming she could, of course), then naturally Kendall would insist on having her debriefed so she could account for her whereabouts over the last few days. Boy, wasn’t that something to look forward to, being grilled by people who were desperate to hide their own secrets from her?

At least she still had Francie – or did she? Not like she spent much time actually talking to her alleged best friend these days. Not much time that didn’t involve concocting elaborate lies to protect her double-life, that was. Given Francie’s odd behavior over the past months, Sydney suspected she was on the brink of losing that friendship entirely.

Sydney braced herself against the bathroom sink and shut her eyes, offering up a quick prayer that she would be able to contact Jack with a clear conscience because Suratto would vindicate him. Eternal optimism, she chided herself.

Or should she be hoping for that, after all? Because even that blessed turn of events would lead to another – and possibly even more horrifying – scenario: What if it turned out this was all a set-up, that the intel was false, and Sark refused to help them bring Irina down? And what if Jack wouldn’t agree to work with him, even if he was willing?

What would happen if it turned out that she and Sark really were on opposite sides of this steadily escalating war?

Back in the car, Sydney pushed her concerns away and concentrated on the task at hand: determining her father’s guilt or innocence. Suratto rented a tiny apartment in a very rough neighborhood under the name Gene Smith. After a curt one-minute cell phone call (to avoid wire taps, Sark told her, Suratto kept all phone conversations under sixty seconds) Sark explained that Suratto used different names for everything: credit cards, utilities, checking accounts, magazine subscriptions. He believed it made it harder for the government to track him that way.

Sydney forced herself to put faith in a person who was sounding more and more like a mental patient. If Sark trusted him, so would she. Perhaps a healthy dose of paranoia wouldn’t hurt any of them – hadn’t she seen first-hand the scope of the government’s power?

Paranoia or not, for a man with two doctoral degrees, Suratto lived just above the poverty line. They stashed the Mercedes in a hospital parking garage and walked the two blocks to his building through a slum that even Sydney, who kicked in skulls on a regular basis, felt a bit nervous in. Fortunately, Sark had exchanged the Armani for well-worn jeans and a black leather jacket, so they drew hardly any stares. Just two kids, probably college students, out looking to make a drug buy, most likely.

A few homeless drunks milled around in the alley behind Suratto’s building; for some reason, and Sydney didn’t ask why, Suratto never accepted visitors through the front lobby, so they waited in the back for him to let them in.

Sark rested his hand lightly on her hip, shooting his notorious menacing glare at three young thugs who ogled her but wisely kept on walking. “Are you all right?” he asked softly. Sydney gritted her teeth as she nodded; he’d asked her that three times since showing her Kocher’s letter, and it was beginning to remind her unpleasantly of Vaughn. Still, she supposed she couldn’t blame him for being concerned. She needed to stop having breakdowns around him, poor guy.

After a small eternity, the back door creaked open. A pudgy hand emerged and waved them frantically inside. “I’m sorry,” a coarse voice behind the door hissed. “I had to be certain they didn’t have a surveillance team out here. You’re clean, but hurry.”

Not sure she wanted to know who “they” were, Sydney followed Sark inside wordlessly.

Her first impression of Suratto – a short, balding, pot-bellied man in his early thirties, who moved awkwardly and incessantly – was of a hyperactive kangaroo. She couldn’t decide if he suffered from some medical condition that involved nervous tics or was simply incapable of standing still. And he talked as quickly and jerkily as he moved, a constant stream of conspiracy babble that made absolutely no sense to her at all.

As he led them up the cement spiral staircase to his dingy apartment, he whispered hoarsely about the hidden cameras in the building and the people in 9C who he was fairly certain were Muslim extremists. Sark grunted at appropriate intervals, but Sydney just kept quiet, afraid anything she said might be so sarcastic it would blow their cover.

At the sixth floor, they finally reached Suratto’s apartment, where an impressive collection of state-of-the-art computer equipment – the answer to the question of where his money went – was secured behind no less than seven locks. The problem was, the door was so flimsy that a solidly-placed kick would have caved it in.

“There’s tea in the fridge. Just help yourself. Made from bottled water. Never drink tap water. It has tracers in it,” Suratto barked at Sydney as she followed him and Sark into the equipment-packed living room.

She smiled with what she hoped looked more like gratitude than pity and poured herself a glass of tea, curiously watching Sark’s interaction with this strange little man. He solemnly answered Suratto’s every wild question, thanked him profusely for helping them, vowed to look into every implausible scenario that was thrown out. In spite of herself, she found it endearing, although he was lying through his teeth about working for British Intelligence.

He could just be so damn appealing when he was being bad.

Suratto shoved the disk containing Rikkets’ downloaded hard-drive into his computer and typed away furiously while prattling on about his latest discoveries in the Australian plot to murder Princess Diana. Perched on a metal folding chair beside his desk, Sydney smiled at how much he reminded her of Marshall. And he clearly hero-worshipped Sark, which struck her as incredibly adorable.

As his printer spewed out the analysis of the disk, Suratto plugged the tape of Jack’s cell phone call to Rikkets into a computer that was built right into his living room wall. “Okay, so, see here, this cell phone intercept? Yup, yup, that’s totally legit. Uh-huh. No voice capture or sound alteration.”

Sark, seated on the other side of him, frowned with a mixture of concern and sympathy at Sydney as tears pricked her eyes and her heart dropped into her shoes. She looked away, unable to bear the pain in his expression, which she knew reflected her own.

Could this be real? Could her father really have set her up to die in order to protect his secrets?

Without warning, Suratto whipped around to the other computer and glared at the screen, shoving his face so close to it that his nose bumped the monitor. Sydney clenched her fingers around her glass to hide the tremors in her hands, avoiding Sark’s gaze. She willed herself to focus on Suratto’s crazy theories as he lectured them, “Oh yes. Yup. Yup, genetics. Uh-huh. They have an archive of all our genetic material at Fort Knox. Uh-huh. No gold. DNA samples. Uh-huh. Making a master race, that’s what they want. Nobody with any flaws gets to reproduce. Nope. Nope, they’re gonna sterilize us through the drinking water. Uh-huh. Through the water system.”

He whirled on Sark so suddenly that Sydney jumped, but Sark just regarded him evenly, apparently accustomed to his outbursts. “Connor, will you find me a water filtration system that cleans out biological weapons?”

“I believe I have an associate in Brazil who makes them. I’ll send you one,” Sark replied automatically.

Bemused enough to be a bit more under control, Sydney looked at Sark again and arched an eyebrow at him over Suratto’s head. He just smiled innocently. She bit her lip to contain a giggle.

“Okay, okay. Here we go,” Suratto announced, actually pausing for breath as he studied the eight-page print-out the computer had finally finished spitting out at him. “Uh-huh. Yup. Yup, this is real too. No tampering. Uh-uh. Original encryption. Matching data signatures. Very straightforward. Yup, yup.”

Sark placed a hand on Suratto’s shoulder, stared hard into his eyes. Sydney felt light-headed, as if the air was being sucked out of the room. She fought to steady herself as Sark pressed, “You’re sure? You’re absolutely certain no one has altered those files?”

Suratto nodded so vigorously he nearly dislodged his owl-like glasses. “Absolutely certain, Connor. Absolutely certain. Uh-huh. Absolutely.”

Sydney heard him begin an elaborate explanation of how the computer performed the analysis, but a strange ringing in her ears obscured his words, and her throat became so dry and sticky she couldn’t ask the millions of questions lodged there. She startled Suratto into silence when she stood abruptly, overturning her chair, realizing she couldn’t stay in that dirty, hot little room for another minute. She needed to escape, to run out into the warm night and keep running until all of this was miles behind her and she could think of nothing but the rhythm of her feet falling on the pavement.

She started for the front door, ignoring Sark when he rose, aware that she was crying again and desperate all at once for a soft bed in a private room where she could just melt away into oblivion. He caught up to her in the hallway, drug her into a dark corner near the stairwell and trapped her against him, his grip so tight it made her ribs ache.

“I have to stop doing this,” she heard herself saying, her voice flooded with tears, unaware until she spoke that she retained the power to do so. Sobs caught in her throat; she swallowed furiously against them, suddenly enraged with herself for going to pieces for the second time in one night. “I have to stop falling apart like this. Goddammit, Sark, I have to…!”

“It’s all right, Sydney. You’re allowed to feel.” He spoke into her hair, his lips moving against her forehead. She concentrated on his words, felt the room gradually stop spinning and her breathing slowly return to normal. “You just need a moment. It’s all right.”

She allowed herself a long, shuddering sigh, finding strength in the smooth assurance of his voice, the warmth of his shoulder against her cheek. “You can do this, Sydney. We’ll do it together.”

Together.

She shut her eyes for a moment, picturing the sunlight dancing across his face in the shower on Marinus’s yacht, the laughter in his eyes when he slipped his sunglasses off that day in the cafe before she recognized him. Her tears dried up, her racing heart slowed down, her mind cleared.

In place of the overwhelming sadness, a tingle of rage coursed down her spine, plunging into her fingers and toes, as she considered how deeply her father had betrayed her. Soon enough she would have time to weep for all the ways life had done her wrong. Right now, she needed to put it right, to stop him from hurting anyone else. The anger gave her clarity, determination, focus.

Stepping back slightly, she smiled up at Sark to show him she was all right – she was better now, she could do this – and was startled to find his amazing blue eyes glistening with what she could have sworn were unshed tears. In the next instant he blinked and they were gone, if they had ever been there in the first place.

He kissed the tip of her nose. “I need to go finish things up with Freddie,” he told her, jerking his head toward the half-open apartment door. “Just wait here on me, okay?” She nodded, pushing out a shaky sigh as the last of the sorrow seeped out of her, leaving her with enough rage to carry on.

* * * *

They walked in silence back to the Mercedes, each occupied with their own thoughts, both dreading the next few minutes. Time to say good-bye, Sydney reflected darkly.

If someone had told her three weeks ago that she would be desperately searching for a way to spend more time in Sark’s company, she would have recommended therapy for them. But now, she couldn’t deny that her mind kept rifling through a thousand reasons why they should just walk away from all of this madness, go find a nice secluded stretch of beach somewhere and live off coconuts and pineapples for the rest of their lives. She sensed that right then, he would have agreed to walk away from all of it with her.

And truthfully, at the moment Sydney was desperate for a distraction from tomorrow’s oh-so-dangerous mission and her mind-numbing grief at her father’s betrayal. She didn’t have to look far to find one: Sark in a black leather and faded denim was too damn sexy not to be distracting.

There was something to be said, Sydney had learned, for the comfort of a man’s body, for the refuge of all-consuming passion, for the oblivion of absolute physical surrender to another. She had sensed it with Danny, searched for it with Vaughn, discovered it with Sark. She supposed it might trivialize the enormity of what had just been revealed for her to allow herself to want him right now, but it was there nonetheless, the primal urge to lose herself and all of this agony in the rush of pleasure he was so adept at giving her. She practically ached for him.

What if she just let go and let her body take over, took him by surprise, set that ice-blue gaze on fire, transformed his serenity into white-hot passion? Would he understand what she needed from him right now?

The parking garage where they had left the car was almost completely dark and entirely deserted. A familiar tickle started in Sydney’s stomach as she made up her mind.

When they reached the car, she pinned him against it with her body, nibbling on his earlobe. “You look so amazing,” she whispered.

His hands slid down below her waist in the back. “I wear Armani and you don’t give me a single compliment,” he retorted, his voice instantly rough with desire. She loved how his body immediately responded to hers, how her lightest touch could so completely inflame him. Did he know he had the exact same effect on her?

“I’m more of a tee-shirt-and-jeans kind of girl,” Sydney admitted. She ran her hands down the sleeves of his jacket. “And the leather works for me, too.”

Their words were playful, but it all changed when they kissed, mouths open and pressing hard. As usual when she was in his arms, Sydney felt the world sliding away until all that was real, all that mattered, was his skin against hers, his breath on her face, his body molding with hers.

Aware that this was mostly a stalling tactic, a way to avoid the inevitable confrontation with her father and Vaughn and Will and everyone else she wasn’t certain she could trust anymore, she still couldn’t help but want to prolong this time with him, to re-explore all those sexy spots she’d charted on his body in the last few days, to hear him cry out her name when she moved beneath him. To just lose herself again – it was so easy just to blur into him, to let the calm, controlled, collected Sydney fall away and forget about her worries and her responsibilities and her sense of duty. And that backseat looked roomy enough for –

“Syd.” Sark pulled back, shaking his head to clear it. Perhaps it was the intensity of her grief that made everything seem heightened, but she couldn’t recall ever seeing his eyes so hazy, hearing his voice quite so charged with desire. “We have to go,” he said. “Now.”

He was trying to be Mr. Hard-Ass-Super-Spy, trying to be all-business, and it was turning her on. She liked making him squirm – that part of their relationship definitely hadn’t changed.

“C’mon,” she purred, cutting her eyes toward the backseat. His breathing increased sharply when she hooked her fingers in the waistband of his jeans, unbuttoning them. She spoke against his mouth, kissing him lightly between words. “What’s five minutes in the grand scheme of things?”

“That’s very,” he paused, his breathing ragged as he tried to turn his head away from her kisses and found himself trapped, “that’s very tempting, Sydney. But,” he tilted his head back, pulling his mouth free at last, but to no avail; she just started on his neck. He finished in a breathless whisper, “I need a little more than five minutes.”

“Really?” she pressed her hips into his, heard him stifle a moan, sensed the weakening of his resolve. Scenting victory, she stepped away from him and grinned coyly, thrusting out her lower lip in a playful pout. “You’re no fun.”

He drug a hand through his hair, composing himself, glowering at her. “And you,” he retorted, “are absolutely evil.”

She giggled, didn’t resist when he spun her around and kissed her so forcefully their teeth knocked together. They stayed that way for a few minutes, groping as wildly as two teenagers on Lover’s Lane, until suddenly he stepped back and looked at her, his passion mingled with something else – something quite unreadable.

“What is it?” A trace of fear crept into her voice. That look was too akin to the expression he’d worn when he shoved a knife through Rikkets’ sternum.

“There’s – Sydney, there’s something – I haven’t told you something.”

Oh god. What now?

Her throat constricted so fiercely she nearly choked when she tried to swallow. Her heartbeat quickened and her bowels twisted cruelly. She was surprised by how normal she sounded when she prompted, “Go on.”

Sark kept his eyes on hers, but she knew he wanted to look away. He was scaring her to death; she felt on the verge of another breakdown. Surely, surely, this hadn’t all been a lie. Surely he hadn’t been holding back some vital truth all this time – how could things ever be the same if he…

“I love you.”

Sydney’s thoughts were racing so fast that she almost didn’t hear him half-whisper those three incredibly important words. For a moment she just stared at him, uncomprehending. Well, she knew that, of course he’d told her –

Wait a second. No, actually, he hadn’t. And she hadn’t told him. It had just been understood. Like she understood that he couldn’t completely open up about his past yet, and he understood that she needed more proof before she trusted her mother again.

Now Sark looked uncomfortable, embarrassed even, and Sydney realized he was interpreting her stunned silence the wrong way.

“Sark,” she caught his hand when he started to turn from her, pulling him close again and resting her forehead against his, “thank you. For telling me.”

She licked her suddenly-dry lips, berating herself for finding it so difficult to say it back to him. She felt it; why couldn’t she say it?

Perhaps, her inner voice snapped, because he’s a mass murderer and a terrorist, and try as you might, you don’t completely trust him yet.

She briefly plotted ways to assassinate her inner voice. Perhaps, she shot back to it - recognizing the insanity in having conversations with herself - it’s because every time I love someone, they hurt me. They betray me. They pound my heart and my trust into a fine powder and spit in it.

“We should go.” The note of sadness in his voice, the hurt in his eyes, stung Sydney to the core.

She held on when he pulled away, refused to let go of his hands even when he tugged a bit roughly. He spoke harshly. “Sydney, we need to get on with this.”

“And I need to be with you, just for another minute,” she said.

That stopped him. He went quiet, sighing slightly when she drug her lips across his. Sydney felt herself going quiet, too, the inner turmoil relinquishing her to a calm acceptance of how deeply she cared for him.

“Would you tell me something else?” she asked. He nodded. “What’s your name?”

He hesitated, and she added, “Because I can say, ‘I love you, too, Sark,’ but I’d rather use your real name.”

The tension in his muscles relaxed instantly at that, and his smile stretched so widely that she laughed again, the pleasure at making him that happy rippling right down into her toes.

He opened his mouth to answer, but suddenly Sydney thought better of it – suppose they were caught tomorrow? Suppose she was asked – and asked hard – about him, about his secrets, about his past? Or, at the very least, suppose tonight, during that inevitable debrief, she was questioned about who he was, about how much she’d learned about him? She could withstand torture, she believed, but wouldn’t it be easier if she simply didn’t have the answers to give?

So she cut him off with a kiss, swallowing his words, saying as her mouth drifted over to his ear, “On second thought, tell me tomorrow. When all of this is finished.”

She snuggled closer to him, closing her eyes and memorizing the feel of him, praying with all of her might that, by this time tomorrow, it really would all be finished, and they would be free to just be in love.

* * * *

Well, damn it all to hell.

Just couldn’t keep his mouth shut, could he? Just had to go and blurt it out like that. Couldn’t leave well enough alone. So now, if things went badly tomorrow – as he strongly suspected they would, this was the CIA they were ripping off, after all – he was well and truly fucked.

Not like he could play it off as some big sham after he’d told her he loved her.

Watching from the cover of a flowering shrub as Sydney ascended the porch steps to Jack’s apartment, Sark berated himself for that admission. When it came down to it, the woman simply overcame every ounce of self-control and common sense he possessed. He had even been willing to come right out with his name, a secret he coveted fiercely, when by this time tomorrow she could uncover all of his lies and use that information to take her revenge.

Yes, he was worried. Irina might not be, but what the hell did Irina have to lose in this? Sydney already detested her. And they could find another way to complete Rambaldi’s work if this fell through. Didn’t they always?

He watched her hesitate before she knocked, saw Jack open the door and envelope her in a hug so full of fatherly love that, even if Sark had believed Jack Bristow was a traitor, he wouldn’t have doubted.

Willing her to stick to the story they’d concocted, to not be thrown off by all the love and heart-felt relief she would find in that room, he waited until the door closed before walking briskly back to the Mercedes and heading out onto the freeway once more.

He phoned Paris on his cell. “Everything is in place,” he reported, unable to mask the irritation in his voice. “All she has to do now is convince them she’s still on their side.”

“Sydney is very good at what she does. She’ll be fine. Jack wants to believe in her. He won’t push too hard,” Irina consoled him, apparently mistaking his irritation for concern.

“And the rest of the CIA? You think she can survive the debrief?”

“Jack will insist they treat her gently. He’s still in charge since Kendall bungled my escape.”

As usual, Irina had everything planned out. Sark told himself to stop feeling bitter about that and appreciate it, yet he couldn’t help but sound grudging as he admitted, “I suppose that’s true. We’ll know for certain in the morning if she doesn’t contact me as scheduled.”

“Sark.” That hard edge to her voice warned him to be totally honest. “Did something happen that you’re not telling me about? You sound – strained.”

Turning down a dark alley, Sark killed the engine, laid his head back against the seat, shut his eyes, and released a troubled sigh, ordering himself to relax. If he imagined victory for them, if he planned for every contingency, if he simply refused to accept failure, then it could work. He could, as he so often did, pull off the impossible: get Irina what she wanted, get himself out of L.A. without ending up dead or imprisoned, and get the girl.

Focus, focus, focus – eyes on the prize.

“I’m tired,” he responded at length, and his voice was so utterly weary that she had no choice but to believe him.

“Perhaps,” Irina sounded somewhat hesitant, “after this you should take some time for yourself. You and Sydney, I mean. You’ve both earned a vacation.”

Oh, if she had any idea – once he found a way out of this mess, he and Sydney would be taking a permanent vacation. His sanity couldn’t handle these close encounters with the truth, these agonizing hours of waiting to find out if the elaborate hoax had been unraveled. “Perhaps,” he agreed, hoping she couldn’t discern the smugness in his voice. “I’ll contact you tomorrow when we’re on our way to the airfield.”

“Everything will be fine,” she assured him. “There’s no one I trust more than you and Sydney to make this happen.”

Well, wasn’t that lovely. Sark did his best to sound grateful for the praise as he said good-bye, surprised by how much he was beginning to dislike Irina. Not that he’d ever harbored a deep affection for her. Yet he had always respected her, admired her even, and certainly enjoyed her company when they had occasion to be together.

Of course, up until now he had never been on the receiving end of her schemes; quite possibly, finding himself the pawn in one of her twisted games contributed to this new-found contempt for her. And regretting this next step in the mission didn’t improve his mood.

Like fear, regret was something Sark normally wouldn’t consider part of his emotional repertoire. The occasional twinge of remorse served to remind him that he was human, but rarely, if ever, did he dread some act of brutality even before he committed it.

He reminded himself of his vow in Australia, that he would do anything, no matter how despicable, to protect Sydney’s love for him. That meant cleaning up all of the loose ends on this mission, leaving no one besides himself and Irina that would be able to tell her the truth.

Suratto did a double-take when Sark knocked on his apartment door. “How’d you get in here without me letting you in, Connor?” he asked, fumbling with the locks before inching the door open a crack and peering out nervously into the hallway. Then he laughed, stepped aside to let Sark in and motioned for him to have a seat at the kitchen table, where he’d been eating warmed-up store-bought pizza. “Right, right, you’re a spy, you can do that sort of thing, right.”

The locks clicked back into place. “So she was Russian Mafia, huh? Man, you could just never tell, nope. Nope, I couldn’t tell. Seemed perfectly legit.” He waved Sark toward a chair, but Sark stayed standing, pressing one thigh into the corner of the table. “Did she buy it? Did she buy that all that stuff was real?”

“Completely.” Sark waited until Suratto turned his back to retrieve two cans of soda from the fridge before he slipped his hand inside his jacket and produced the .9 millimeter. He swiftly screwed on the silencer.

“Well, all I can say is, they must not train them very well in Russia, because that intel was all so obviously fake - ”

The bullet spun noiselessly through the air, punctured Suratto’s skull just behind his ear, and silenced him. He stumbled forward into the refrigerator, crashing into it so loudly that Sark jumped. Suratto’s hands clutched briefly at the air, flailing as he tried to hold himself upright, tried to turn himself around to face his killer. But he couldn’t. He slid face-first along the refrigerator door to the cracked linoleum floor, blood flowing freely from his head. His legs twitched momentarily, and then, with a soft groan, he finally went still.

Sark stood motionless for a full five minutes, his heart thudding woodenly in his chest, waiting for the squeal of sirens that would indicate some nosy neighbor had heard something suspicious and called the police. Nothing – either they hadn’t heard or they didn’t care.

He shifted into his normal clean-up routine; after the kill, it was important to be all-business. It was imperative not to think of the victim as a person, to wonder if he had family or if she had plans for the weekend, to consider the things he or she hoped to do with the tomorrows that had just been taken away from them.

It was vital to shut himself off, and he had learned how to do it well.

He removed the silencer and returned both it and the gun to his shoulder holster. In ten minutes, he had disabled Suratto’s complex electronic station, erasing from the hard-drives all but the most ridiculous conspiracy nonsense. Any ordinary cop would have disregarded it as fanatical crap anyway, but, Sark mused, there was a Mulder for every Scully, so he wouldn’t take any chances.

Next he searched the filthy, cluttered apartment, careful to make the rifling inconspicuous, for anything that might link back to him or any of the work Suratto had performed for him over the past three years. All he found was a tattered, mostly-full journal, its pages filled with wild theories and crazy speculations and absolute adoration for the ultimate hero-agent and protector of humanity, Connor O’Bannon.

He pocketed the journal, telling himself it wouldn’t do to leave even that implausible connection for some over-achieving investigator to stumble across.

Wiping down every surface he might have touched, Sark finally crossed to the table and placed a small package of heroine beside the cold pizza. Even though it would be days, possibly weeks, before anyone missed the reclusive man – plenty of time for him and Sydney to be long gone, so news of the death never needed to reach her ears and arouse her suspicions – he had to leave the cops some motive, didn’t he? Anybody who knew Suratto would confirm that he had been addicted to the stuff for years, that he had started spinning his conspiracy theories while in state prison for possession with intent to distribute nine years ago.

Not that anyone would ask too many questions, Sark reflected, pausing in the doorway to check that the hall was empty. Suratto had no family, no real friends aside from a few Internet buddies who bought into all of his wild theories.

No one to mourn him; no one to care about his passing; no one to remember his life.

Sark allowed himself one last glance back at the bloody corpse, at the only person who had ever believed it possible for Mr. Sark to be one of the good guys.

And he hoped it was some sort of atonement that he, at least, would miss him.

Chapter Thirteen: The Capture

Somehow, Sydney survived the next ten hours.

The moment he opened the door, Jack wrapped her in a bone-crushing hug that took Sydney so completely by surprise she almost burst into tears. When he pulled back, she suffered a moment of gut-wrenching doubt at his absolute joy to see her.

Odd behavior for someone who had intended for her to die in Rome, her inner voice piped up.

Never an expressive man, Jack simply took her hand and led her gently into the living room, where Vaughn, Will and Dixon – there anxiously awaiting word and desperately plotting rescue missions – leapt up and smothered her with hugs and pats and kisses. By that time, she was crying.

Coffee cups and pizza boxes littered Jack’s normally immaculate living room, testimony to the hours spent agonizing over where she might be and how they might get her back. Just as the men were stepping back to give her some breathing room, Dixon’s wife, Diane, emerged from the kitchen, wiping her hands on an apron, and pulled Sydney into such a motherly embrace that her tears started up again.

“Thank goodness you’re home,” Diane whispered into her ear. “We have all been so worried.”

Sydney fought hard against the overwhelming guilt for making everyone so frantic with worry. Her eyes met Jack’s across the room, and as if he sensed that she couldn’t handle lengthy explanations in that emotionally-charged room, he suggested that they head to the Operations Center. “You’ll need to be debriefed,” Jack told her, “and it will be easier if you just have to go through it all once.”

Grateful for the reprieve, she followed him out to his car, catching Vaughn’s eye on the way and smiling with what she hoped was tenderness rather than guilt. Will, Vaughn and Dixon piled into Vaughn’s car – Diane said she would clean up the house and then head for home, since civilians weren’t allowed in the Operations Center, of course – and Sydney suddenly found herself alone with Jack, the weight of the lies she needed to start telling pressing her down into the bucket-style seat.

Jack drove slowly, giving her time to sort out what had happened for him. Sydney took a deep breath as she launched into the fabricated story she and Sark had rehearsed: “I’m sorry I was out of touch. Once we made contact with Derevko,” careful there to sound distant and angry, no hint that she might care for her mother even the littlest bit again, “I did what you said. I let her believe I was coming to trust her again. And calling you everyday wasn’t a very good way to do that.”

So far, so good. He nodded, though, she noted, he kept his eyes straight ahead on the road.

“Somebody tipped Rikkets’ off that we were coming. Derevko insists Sloane didn’t know anything about what we were doing, but I wouldn’t put it past him. Anyway, I escaped, but I didn’t get the files off of his computer.”

She watched him carefully for signs of relief, for clues that he had double-crossed her, but he remained, as always, inscrutable. “Were you able to get inside of her organization at all?”

Sydney relayed the information on the Tenth Plague, omitting, of course, that Irina planned to steal Rambaldi artifacts out of the CIA vault. “She claims,” Sydney concluded, punctuating the words with her sincere doubt of Irina’s intentions, “that her partnership with Sloane is only to keep him from completing Rambaldi’s work. She said she hoped to achieve that by aiding the CIA, until Sark discovered the connection between Will and Rikkets and Sloane and she decided the Agency couldn’t be trusted.”

Jack typically looked even more sour than usual when discussing his ex-wife, yet she detected a trace of guardedness when he countered, “And she gave you no clue as to who this ‘Master’ might be?”

“She alluded to some suspicions. Specifically that it would have to be someone very high-ranking, of course, to extract Rikkets from federal custody without leaving behind a scrap of evidence. But she wouldn’t name names.” Sydney quelled the urge to twirl her hair, praying she didn’t have a tell that was giving away the game. If he suspected that she knew, would he just turn off the freeway and shoot her?

How horribly sick and twisted to be so frightened of her father.

Jack turned into the Center’s parking garage and circled twice, buying them a few more minutes. “Why did she send you back?”

“To spy on the Agency from the inside. She thinks that together we can figure out who the mole is. And she’s probably hoping I’ll leak a lot of classified information in the process.”

He parked and shut off the engine. The silence suddenly seemed oppressive; Sydney swallowed audibly, her heartbeat loud in the stillness, forced what she hoped was a natural-looking smile at him and asked, “Any new developments on your end?”

“I have a possible lead on Tippin’s role in this, but I’d prefer to wait until I’ve confirmed it before I say more.” Jack paused, and his stony expression sent Sydney’s stomach into spasms of fear. God, she wasn’t even close to pulling this off, was she? He knew –

“Sydney, in the time that we’ve worked together I like to think that we’ve come to know each other quite well. I realize that in the past I have done things that could be construed as devious, but I hope that I have at least earned your respect as a colleague. And as your partner in this mission, if there is something that you are holding back, it’s imperative that it comes out now, with me, and not during your debrief with Kendall.”

What was that old adage – the most convincing lies came wrapped in a screen of truth. Sydney averted her gaze, studying the polished-leather dashboard as she wrestled with herself, deciding how much to tell him. Then she blew out a breath and met his searching gaze head-on, unflinching. “Part of her recruitment plan was for Sark to seduce me.”

Jack’s jaw tightened painfully, clenched so firmly he could barely spit out, “And?”

“And...” She dropped her eyes again, cut them out the window, loathed herself for consciously being as convincingly earnest as Irina when she set out to deceive. “Like I said, I thought it was important that I play along.”

Whatever his betrayal of her and their country, Sydney was moved by the raw horror in her father’s face when she chanced a sideways glance at him. I would never do that to you, he seemed to say. I would protect you from her – from all of this – if I could.

And she wanted to believe it. But she couldn’t, because she had seen the proof of who he really was.

“We should get inside,” he said, at length, then stopped her when she moved to go. “You and I are the only ones who know that you went with Mr. Sark willingly. What are you going to tell Kendall about where you’ve been?”

Her cover story in place, ten minutes later Sydney settled in at a long conference table with Jack, Kendall, and a few nameless people in lab coats; Will, Vaughn and Dixon gathered in an adjoining room behind a two-way mirror to listen. Kendall’s “welcome back” was frostily reserved. Apparently, he was saving the homecoming party for when she convinced him she wasn’t a traitor.

The debrief was grueling, not surprisingly, but her story held up under scrutiny. She pictured Vaughn grimacing as she described being kidnapped from her home by Sark and transported to a warehouse in L.A., where she was held while he attempted to recruit her to work as a double-agent against the CIA in the new organization her mother was forming. Careful to measure her breathing and heart rate to fool the polygraph, Sydney answered every question with the perfect amount of hesitation and readiness – never too automatic, never as if she needed time to formulate a response, always natural.

When talking about Sark, she conjured up her worst and most nightmarish memories to keep a dreamy love-sickness out of her voice.

Even the escape story, which Sydney considered the most tenuous part of the lie, worked well. She reported that when she realized she couldn’t fight her way out, she pretended to slowly break down. And once she had earned a small amount of Sark’s trust, she told them, she used it to catch him off-guard, overpower him, and break free.

After four hours, the lab coats huddled to study their print-outs, and Kendall conferred first with Jack and then with them before announcing that he was satisfied. Jack concurred. “Welcome back, Agent Bristow,” Kendall said, warmly this time, shaking her hand. “Tomorrow I’d like you to write up a full report on this, and anything you can tell us about what you might have seen or overheard while you were in Sark’s custody. But tonight I think you should go home and get some rest. You’ve been through quite an ordeal these last few days.”

Sydney’s face threatened to crack when she returned his smile. What, like she was going to march down to her desk and type all that up tonight? Of course she was taking the night off. What an asshole.

In the hallway, Sydney faced her next challenge – Will.

“God, we were so worried!” he exclaimed, holding her so tight she feared her ribs might crack. She looked over his shoulder at Vaughn, smiling as she rested her cheek on his suede jacket, closed her eyes as a wave of sadness washed over her. Poor Will. Sweet, unsuspecting Will. She wished she could protect him from all of this, from learning that he had been somehow mind-controlled into working for the enemy.

He finally released her and planted a friendly kiss on her nose. “Thank god he didn’t hurt you,” he added, horrific recollections of his time in Sark’s custody flashing across his face.

Sydney squeezed his arms, willing the memories away from herself as much as from him. “I’m fine,” she insisted.

“Do you want a ride home? We told Francie you were just called away on business and forgot to call us, so she won’t have questions or anything.”

“Actually,” Vaughn spoke up behind Will, moving around him to drape an arm across Sydney’s shoulders, “I’m keeping her all to myself tonight, Will.”

“Oh. Right. Of course. Sorry.” Will actually blushed as he leaned in to drop a quick good-bye kiss on Sydney’s cheek. She promised to call him the next day as he hurried off.

So. Alone with Vaughn.

Sydney ordered herself to act natural, to be happy to see him, but now that he was right in front of her, all she felt was guilty. And low. And dirty. Not for being with Sark – she didn’t care if it made no sense to anyone else, she saw a side of him that they hadn’t – but for continuing to deceive Vaughn, for not breaking it all off here and now. She wanted to blurt out the truth, to spare him any more of this deception. Yet for all she knew, he was working with her father – and even if he wasn’t, she couldn’t imagine him not marching her straight down to Kendall’s office if she admitted to some big love affair with Sark.

Possibly the problems between them before her alleged abduction would be grounds enough for her to tell him it was over. Although, considering how many of those problems were Sark-related, she couldn’t justify the risk to tomorrow’s mission. So she lied and said, “I missed you.”

Well, she didn’t expect him to break down. She didn’t even realize what was happening until his face crumpled and he pulled her to him, crying quietly into her shoulder.

If he had slit her belly open inch by inch with a butter knife, he couldn’t have hurt her more.

“Oh, Vaughn,” Sydney murmured, smoothing his hair, hating herself for scaring him so badly. But more than that – she hated herself for not returning the love that shown out of his eyes when he moved back, cuffing tears off of his cheeks. She was crying again, too, as she said, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t.” He wiped her tears away gently with his thumbs, tilting her chin up and brushing his lips across hers. She steeled herself, refusing to recoil. “Syd, all of that, before you left, it doesn’t matter. When you were gone – I thought,” he choked on the words, shook it off and went on, “I realized I couldn’t stand to lose you. I love you.”

Life rarely offered up moments when turning points were so absolutely clear; usually those oh-so-important choices snuck up in the guise of everyday decisions, and only years later could someone look back and say, Oh yes, that was the moment when all of this began. But just occasionally, the divergent paths were laid out with undeniable clarity, and the future hinged on turning to the left or the right. This was one of those times: the moment when she either became her mother or remained Sydney.

She could tell Vaughn she loved him, go to his bed tonight knowing full well he was a means to an end, let him find out the cold hard truth in the morning when she and all of the Rambaldi artifacts disappeared. That was what Irina would have done – nothing to jeopardize the mission, nothing to draw suspicion to her motives.

Or, she could do what her heart told her was right: Tell him she needed time, that things weren’t the same between them anymore, that right now she couldn’t think clearly and she wanted some space. That was what Sydney would have done – nothing to betray the people she loved, nothing to deceive someone anymore than was absolutely necessary.

Or, she could do what she did – kiss him softly, once, and ask him to just take her home, to just let her sleep next to him, to just be there for her as he had so many times in the past. That landed her somewhere in the gray area between who she had been and who she found herself becoming, in the shadows between the black-and-white good and bad.

* * * *

Ten minutes into the op, Sark realized it was all going just a little too well. Then he started to get nervous.

Okay, more nervous.

Surely it couldn’t be this easy to break into the CIA.

Well, not that this had exactly been a cake-walk. He had some serious inside help. Thanks to the bug planted on an unsuspecting Tippin by his Francie-clone L.A. asset – who hadn’t been in touch since the day before yesterday, which was a bit troubling – he had the vault codes for Sydney; amazing what a relay device posing as a cell phone battery could accomplish next to a CIA computer. When Sydney called his cell from a deli payphone that morning, she assumed, of course, that he’d hacked into the CIA system for the codes, and he didn’t correct her.

She had spent the night at Agent Vaughn’s, and Sark tried valiantly not to be jealous. After today, she would be his forever, so what did it matter if the underwear model handler had her for one last night?

But he was grumpy anyway. Grumpy and edgy. Seated in a rented Chevy Malibu – the Mercedes was simply too recognizable – six blocks from the Operations Center, Sark waited impatiently for Sydney to slip away from her desk and make her way inconspicuously down to the vault, hidden in the basement about thirty feet from where Irina had been held. Luckily none of the CIA scanners had picked up on the comm that doubled as her earring, so he could at least listen in as she reunited with her colleagues, handed in her full report on the fictitious kidnapping to Kendall, and then, finally, snuck into the vault.

Usually, Sark was totally in the moment during a mission, absolutely focused on the here-and-now. But today, all he wanted to do was fast-forward six hours, when they could hand the artifacts over to Irina and head off into the proverbial sunset.

Again using codes stolen from the unwitting Tippin’s computer, Sark hacked into the video surveillance system and looped the feed so that when Sydney took down the vault’s two guards with tranquilizer darts no one in the Operations Center was any more the wiser.

“I’m in,” Sydney had reported exactly six minutes ago, her voice smooth and calm in his earpiece. “There’s all kinds of stuff in here. What am I looking for?”

Sark had steered her to the correct boxes based on intel again downloaded through Tippin’s computer. “I missed you last night,” she told him as she filled a large black briefcase with a dozen Rambaldi artifacts.

“You can make up for it in a few hours,” Sark had promised her, picturing them on a secluded stretch of beach somewhere in the Caribbean. He knew the islands well; he supposed they could disappear there, at least for a few weeks while he planned their next move. Naturally she would want somewhere permanent at some point, but they would need to stay mobile for a while, until the search – both Irina’s and Jack’s – died down, so he might as well shoot for exotic locations where he could keep her in a bikini round the clock.

The memory of their cold shower on Marinus’s yacht had brought a quick smirk to his lips, but at that moment his spider-sense had tingled and he realized something had to be wrong. No mission ever went perfectly. Granted, she wasn’t out of the Center yet, but he was suddenly beset by the overpowering belief that they were being led into a trap.

A well-dressed man in a non-descript car typing away on a laptop was hardly cause for alarm in L.A.; most of the people who passed by, if they gave him a second thought at all, probably assumed he was having a working lunch before braving the freeways again. Years of training had taught Sark to be aware of his surroundings, only until that moment it hadn’t occurred to him that he might be under surveillance, so now he sat up a bit straighter and casually glanced around.

Well, fuck it. How did CIA operatives ever sneak up on a collar? The man on the bus stop bench, the woman peering into a floral shop window, the meter maid across the street – they were all obviously part of a tactical team. Every few seconds their eyes darted over to him, and now and again Bus Stop Man not-so-subtly spoke into a vest-mike stapled to his tie.

Apparently, their clever little plan had backfired, in a very big way.

The only option now was survival. And, normally, it wouldn’t have been a problem – he would gun the engine, rip out into traffic, roar down a secluded alley, leap out of the car and disappear into a maze of people and buildings. Just get lost and stay lost until they gave up searching for him. Only now, of course, his life came with complications. Complications by the name of Sydney Bristow.

“Sydney,” Sark said, as calmly as he could with his heart fluttering in his throat, “we’ve been made. Get out of there.”

“What?”

He heard the note of panic in her voice, willed her to stay calm, to focus. Snapping the laptop shut, he inserted the key in the ignition and instructed her, “Just walk away. Leave the briefcase and head down the back corridor to the extraction point, just like we planned. I’ll meet you there in three minutes.”

“Copy,” she replied, and the sudden curtness reassured him that she was in total Sydney-Bristow-Super-Spy mode and could take care of herself.

Sark chanced one last look at his three tails. At the moment, they were all busying themselves trying to look inconspicuous. It was now or never. He prayed Sydney was already sprinting up those back stairs into the warm California sunshine –

“Good morning, Mr. Sark,” a surprisingly congenial male voice beside his window said. With a sinking feeling, Sark looked up into the muzzle of a gun held by Marcus Dixon.

* * * *

Holy shit, they’d been caught.

For less than a second, the fear paralyzed Sydney. Then she jerked into action, let her training and her instincts kick in; she dropped the briefcase, ripped open the vault door –

And ran smack into her father and Kendall.

Perhaps the only thing that could have astonished her more than that was Jack suddenly beaming and declaring, “Excellent work, Sydney. Excellent.”

Her mouth fell open, adding, she knew, to her deer-in-the-headlight look, but the stern crease to her father’s brow made her close it quickly and settle a neutral expression in place. Kendall was frowning. She looked to Jack for explanations, and her eyes were drawn to his finger, tapping lightly against his leg – Morse code. She deciphered it in seconds:

‘Play along.’

“I realize this isn’t exactly what we discussed,” Jack went on, completely relaxed and urging her with his eyes to mirror that assuredness, “but I decided to change the plan. Given Derevko’s track record for anticipating our next move, I didn’t feel it was safe to even let the artifacts leave the vault.”

“Of course,” Sydney heard herself saying. How could she possibly sound that composed when her thoughts were spinning so fast she felt faint?

Where was Sark? What the hell was going on?

“We have Mr. Sark in custody,” Jack announced, and by a sheer force of will Sydney stifled a cry of protest. Jack leveled a cautionary glare on her, warning her to hold it in, to stay with him on this. “I sent out a team to pick him up five minutes ago. They should be back anytime.”

Kendall cleared his throat. Sydney couldn’t recall ever seeing such barely-controlled rage in his eyes, not even when Jack had tricked him into trusting Irina for the op that resulted in her extraction. “So you’re telling me that this whole thing was an elaborate ruse you and your daughter cooked up? Something else you felt inclined to leave me out of the loop on?”

Drawing himself up to his full height, Jack stared the taller man down. “Until I receive orders to the contrary, I am still in charge of any missions involving either Irina Derevko or Arvin Sloane. When it enhances my operations for you to be included, I will inform you of what I feel you need to know. Otherwise,” he paused for effect, “my decisions are none of your concern.”

Briefly, Sydney pondered what might happen if Kendall took that swing at Jack he looked so eager to make. Instead, he fixed them both with a furious go-to-hell glare and stalked off down the hallway, waving in two EMS workers to look after the guards she had sedated.

Sydney allowed Jack to steer her down the hallway, up the back stairs and out into the alley, where a warm breeze helped settle her stomach somewhat. But not much.

“What the hell is going on?” she snarled, the moment the door closed behind him.

“I might ask you the same thing,” Jack retorted, his voice flinty, his eyes snapping. “If I’m not mistaken, I just saved you from a long stint in federal prison.”

“Oh, please. Do not play the victim with me,” she spat at him, fists clenched at her sides. How could he stand there looking so – damn – well, violated? Her bottled-up rage spilled over, much the way it had the day a victorious and Alliance-free Sloane called her at home to thank her for her unwitting assistance in freeing him to complete his master plan. “I know all about your involvement in this. With Rikkets, and Will, and Sloane. I did download those files off of Rikkets computer. I’ve got the letter from Senator Kocher authorizing you to remove him from federal custody seven years ago. I heard the cell phone call you placed to him. You nearly got me killed, you son of a bitch! So don’t stand here and demand explanations from me.”

Jack had never, so far as Sydney remembered, struck her. Even when she was a child, he had never spanked her. Now she watched him fighting to control the urge to slap her across the face. She dared him to with her eyes, challenged him to pit his fury against her own.

As usual, he controlled himself, which only infuriated her more. “Do you know this man?” he demanded, producing a photo from his jacket-pocket.

At first, Sydney started to shake her head. The picture was a head-shot of a man in his late-twenties, balding, wearing thick black-rimmed glasses. When she took a second look, however, she recognized him. “Freddie Suratto,” she answered.

“That was one of his aliases. His real name is – or, I should say, was – Dereke Holtz.” Jack pinned her down with a cold, accusatory stare, and Sydney’s heart shifted into a fast, thready rhythm at his next words. “He was CIA.”

Oh. Oh fuck. Oh sweet Jesus.

Sydney closed her eyes, as if that would protect her from the truth.

Jack continued, his voice brittle with anger, “Three years ago we received a tip that an associate of The Man’s would be at the National University of Ireland in Galway searching for a Rambaldi document. Agent Holtz was sent in undercover to make contact with an enigmatic man known only as Mr. Sark. Since that time he has discovered more about him than any other agent. When Sark contacted him last night, Holtz called me. I told him to play along, because I had no idea what was happening since you hadn’t contacted me in days. He called me again after you and Mr. Sark left. He seemed convinced that you truly believed I was a traitor.”

Jack paused, and Sydney turned away, hot tears spilling down her cheeks no matter how fiercely she fought them back. She leaned her forehead against the warm brick, vomit rising in her throat as he finished, “This morning Agent Holtz was found murdered in his apartment.”

No. No, no, no, no, no. Sark’s face – rigid with desire, soft with laughter, taut with concentration – stared up at her out of the blackness of despair. Oh, she loved him. She loved him and it had all been a lie.

O ye of little faith, her heart suddenly chastised her. Wasn’t it entirely possible that Sark was just as much a victim in all of this as she was? That Irina had him just as fooled? Or, at the very least, that she had somehow trapped him into helping her?

She summoned her courage to face Jack again. His jaw was still set in a hard, unforgiving line. “I’m sorry,” was all she could find to say, her voice cracking over a half-sob. She took a moment to steady herself, to battle away the last of the tears. Then she looked him in the eye. “I’m sorry I believed that about you. But I was presented with overwhelming evidence.”

“Evidence,” Jack snapped, “provided by two known terrorists.” She opened her mouth to protest, but he cut her off, each word biting into her with its steely accusation. “If you had made any attempt to authenticate the intel through your own channels, I might be inclined to understand how you could believe it. But you relied on their sources. And I find it difficult to imagine you trusting anything your mother said about me, or anything else for that matter, given how often she has betrayed you in the past.”

Sydney dropped her gaze, staring at her shoes, waiting for what she knew was coming next. “So that leaves me to wonder, Sydney, just how much of what you said last night about Mr. Sark was true.”

How foolish she felt. There she’d sat, spinning dozens of lies in his car last night, and Jack had already known the truth; he’d already spoken to Suratto – Holtz, whatever – and he had known she was lying through her teeth. She was so ashamed that it took a real effort to bring her eyes back up to his. Only her desperation to save Sark could have prompted her to say, “You don’t know him, Dad.”

Jack’s cheek twitched. He was restraining himself, but just barely. “Enlighten me.”

“Has it ever occurred to you what they might have done to him? Could you even allow for the possibility that he might be a victim of Irina Derevko’s schemes just as much as you or I are?” Warming to her topic, unable to accept that Jack could have no compassion for Sark once he heard his story, she rushed on. “They used him as a guinea pig for Project Christmas, Dad. In England, when he was just a little boy. They never gave him a chance to be anything other than exactly what Derevko wanted him to be.”

Jack looked away. Sydney, sensing victory, pulled out all the stops to persuade him. “What if Mom had taken me when she left, Dad? Have you ever thought about that? What if she had run away with me the night she faked her death? Would you write me off as a lost cause just because she indoctrinated me into her sick world from the time I was a child?”

The outburst left her exhausted. It was her one and only shot to save Sark from a lifetime in prison – or worse, an execution – and now the ball was in Jack’s court.

She slumped against the building, dragging her fingers through her hair and working the tension out of her shoulders. Jack studied her, the blazing anger in his eyes melting slowly into something more akin to compassion. Or was it pity?

He spoke carefully, pausing now and again to find the right words. “Sydney, if your mother had taken you – if she’d had all of those years to program you into a remorseless killer – then, even as much as I love you, I wouldn’t kid myself now that I could ever change you.”

That hit like a sucker-punch to the gut. Tears sprang into her eyes again. “If you would just let me talk to him,” she pleaded, her lips trembling around the words. “Dad, please, if I can just see him, I could get him to - ”

“Before you make any further gestures on Mr. Sark’s behalf, there’s something you should know,” Jack interrupted. The unreadable mask he pulled over his features sent a shiver of dread down Sydney’s spine. She was going blessedly numb, at least – anyway, what else could he say that would hurt any worse than knowing Sark had betrayed her, than Jack refusing to even consider clemency for the man she loved?

“Do you remember in Poland, when you and Agent Lennox were destroying the Helix prototype?” Puzzled – what the hell did that have to do with anything – Sydney nodded. “And Agent Lennox said that the program had been used twice – once on him, and once on someone else.”

A knot of fear lodged in Sydney’s chest. “He said there was no indication of who else had been doubled.”

“That’s right. When you came back, I gave the disk he downloaded to Marshall. The encryption was incredibly complex. It was only two days ago that he began to make any progress with decoding it at all. And this morning,” Jack hesitated, “he finally succeeded in opening the files.”

“And?” Sydney heard the dread in her voice, saw it reflected in Jack’s eyes. This had to be bad, because, angry as he was with her, he didn’t want to say it.

“It didn’t give the name of the person who underwent the process, unfortunately. But it did have the name of the person who was doubled.”

“And?” Sydney repeated. Her nerves were so taut she had to restrain herself from shaking it out of him. Just get it over with, for Christ’s sake!

Oh, but she wasn’t ready for it when it came. Not even close.

“It was Francie, Sydney. Francie Calfo.”

*Author’s Note: Part Two of Salvation continues at https://www.angelfire.com/poetry/fanfiction4/Salvation_Part_2.htm