Best Kept Lies Read online

  Karim didn’t cry out, but his indignant hitch of breath almost made up for it.

  Grigory used his forearm to brush off an attempt to dislodge him. Another followed. He didn’t expect Karim to give up that easily and he wasn’t disappointed.

  They grabbed at each other, wrestling in the thin spill of moonlight until Grigory caught a fistful of Karim’s hair and pulled. He relished the victory as Karim’s eyes narrowed to slits, yet victory was short-lived.

  Karim wrapped an arm around his waist and reversed them. He wasn’t much more agile, but his upper body presented a challenge. And, once he caught Grigory’s wrists, not much of that, either.

  Jamming one knee between their bodies was Grigory’s only option. He struggled in Karim’s hold, wriggling and squirming like a fish on a line. The last time he’d roughhoused with another boy, he’d been fifteen. He’d been so flushed and dizzy with want he’d got an elbow to the face. His bleeding nose took some of the romance out of the experience.

  “Say uncle,” Karim panted, leaning all of his weight onto Grigory.

  “No.”

  “Say it.” The words were fervent, but a chiaroscuro portrait of laugh lines and shiny, all even teeth snagged onto Karim’s features. He must’ve thought this was all a great lark.

  It took everything Grigory had to stop fighting.

  “No,” he rasped, more winded from their brief scuffle than a thirty-year-old man perhaps ought to have been. He licked suddenly dry lips.

  Karim’s gaze ticked to his mouth, the impulse Pavlovian. His hold around Grigory’s wrists had been unshakable before. It lessened now as Karim eased back, as his throat bobbed.

  Grigory freed his bent knee and dug his heel into Karim’s spine. Stay. He wasn’t about to beg, but if he wasn’t barking up the wrong tree, if Karim was up for another go, then why not?

  The stiff line of Karim’s bare cock against his thigh went a long way toward banishing his doubts.

  Karim hovered uncertainly until Grigory brushed their lips together. A switch flipped somewhere behind his eyes. Their shivery, fruitless scrap translated instantly to fumbling holds, lids fluttering low over flushed cheeks. He drove his hips forward, using Grigory’s arms to lower himself down into a deep, ardent kiss.

  Had he ever been shy about this or was Grigory’s memory playing tricks again?

  He had a hard time reconciling the man who rutted against him now with Karim going still and stunned beneath his hands, refusing to take what Grigory offered. Refusing to stay the night as if afraid he might not be able to resist.

  Pressed between the couch and Karim’s furnace-hot body, Grigory could barely breathe beneath the ferocity of his kisses. He submitted willingly, lapping at Karim’s tongue when he was allowed, mouthing at the shelf of his jaw when he wasn’t. He relished the sharp sting of stubble against his lips. His first lover had been an instructor at the academy. Maybe that was why he’d never warmed to clean-shaven boys his own age.

  “Let me get the—”

  “I haven’t showered,” Grigory panted. He had pulled his underwear on furtively, afraid of waking Karim. He had thought better of running the water too long for the same reason.

  Karim made a sound halfway between a slur and a moan, and sucked a bite into Grigory’s pectoral. He pulled off so fast that Grigory’s flesh burned for the absence of him. He started to reach up, but Karim had other ideas.

  His cock sprang free as soon as Karim tugged his underwear down. He was too impatient to yank them all the way off, so the fabric slid down to mid-thigh, then bunched behind Grigory’s knees, the elastic cutting into his skin.

  Karim curled a hand in the scrap of fabric and pushed his palm flat to Grigory’s chest, raising his hips by the same token.

  The sense of vulnerability, of being laid bare beneath Karim’s eyes, fleeted through Grigory’s thoughts, quickly subsumed by the breathless pleasure of Karim pressing inside him. Pre-cum and what was left of the slick they’d used in the bedroom eased the way.

  Grigory breathed through his mouth, exhaling lungfuls of oxygen before they’d traveled more than an inch into his throat.

  Karim had been rough at the hotel and he didn’t exactly coddle Grigory when they had both trembled with anger earlier. Tender, sweet love-making was probably not in his repertoire.

  Grigory thought he’d made his peace with that. He bottled up his futile desires and braced for a ragged, panting tryst, digging his fingers into the couch cushion to keep from testifying how much he wanted it by grabbing at Karim.

  It was a pointless exercise.

  The first thrust slammed neatly into his prostate. Fireworks exploded behind his eyes. A dreadful, keening sound echoed around him. It wasn’t immediately obvious to Grigory that he was its source.

  “That’s it,” Karim purred above him, knee-walking closer, shifting more of Grigory’s weight onto his shoulders. “That’s right, let me hear you…”

  His eyes screwed shut, Grigory only saw Karim in flashes. Sheened golden skin. Click. A nimbus of inky hair in his eyes. Click. Muscles rippling in his belly as he pumped his hips in slow, delicious circles. Click, click, click.

  Grigory slapped his hands to Karim’s thighs, pushing ineffectually against him. “Stop, stop, I—”

  “Am I hurting you?”

  A shaky toss of the head. I’d like to see you try. “I’m gonna come,” Grigory blurted out, his emotions spiraling. He felt simultaneously on the brink of tears and ready to tear Karim apart if he didn’t drive him over the edge. “It’s so good. Fuck. I can’t, I can’t…” He didn’t know what language he was speaking anymore and he couldn’t seem to make himself stop.

  Sex was common in their line of work, but it was just a performance. Pleasure ebbed back as soon as orgasm struck. There was always something more important to work for.

  Not here. Not now.

  Karim wrapped a hand around the head of his erection, giving him something to thrust into, and resumed his rhythm. Faster, this time.

  “Come on. That’s it…”

  Grigory cried out as he climaxed, shaking with it, mewling for more.

  He forgot all about his self-imposed moratorium on begging by the time Karim pushed inside him deep and ferocious, and came. His features slackened instead of scrunching up. His eyes widened in a simulacrum of surprise.

  God, you’re beautiful. Grigory pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth to keep the thought from materializing into speech.

  He winced as Karim pulled out only a few moments later, a gentle throb racing down the backs of his thighs.

  Karim noticed. “Too rough?” Even winded, he still sounded like he’d just exited the halls of some posh private school.

  “Nothing I can’t handle… Think the underpants may be done for, though.”

  With extraordinarily gentle hands, Karim helped him lower the scrap of cotton down his thighs and toss it to the floor. Grigory wrinkled his nose. He’d never been with anyone this slovenly before outside of work.

  He’d never been with a man who could make him come that hard twice a night, either.

  There wasn’t much room for two people to lie side by side on the couch, but Karim’s lethargy seemed to get the better of him. He remained stretched out along the crease between cushion and backrest, his head awkwardly pillowed on Grigory’s shoulder.

  Every thud of his pulse seemed to ricochet through his ribs into the cavernous depths of Grigory’s chest in a discordant echo.

  “Now will you come back to bed?” Karim muttered, words slurred with exhaustion and garbled by the pinch of his lips against Grigory’s shoulder.

  Willingly sharing a bed with an enemy agent hadn’t been covered at the academy, but Grigory figured it was a bad idea. A terrible idea.

  It was no worse than everything they’d already done.

  When Karim stood and held out a clammy, warm palm, he took it.

  * * * *

  Grigory resisted as long as he could, tracing patterns between K
arim’s shoulder blades with his fingers, playing with the curling strands of hair at his nape. The topography of Karim’s body had to be committed to memory. The slow rise and fall of his breaths almost lulled Grigory back to sleep again. He couldn’t afford it.

  He fought the urge to move until his bladder threatened to explode. Once out of bed, it was as though the spell had broken.

  Cold crept through his bare soles and seeped into his body via the thin trickle of the shower. It assailed him as he tugged on a clean shirt and underwear, and did up his shoelaces.

  He lingered for a cup of coffee and a slice of buttered bread, but Karim didn’t wake. He must have been exhausted. Grigory tamped down the whorl of delight that rose within him at the thought.

  I tired you out, huh? Me, the pencil pusher.

  It was far likelier that Karim was merely feigning sleep to avoid the awkwardness of the morning after. They hadn’t indulged in one of those yet. It wasn’t today they broke new ground.

  Grigory rinsed his cup in the sink, swept the breadcrumbs off the kitchen table and into the trash bin, and left the apartment. Karim had found his way in uninvited and he could find his way back out. He wasn’t a stray. He didn’t need taking care of.

  If Grigory was a little more careful in tugging the front door shut behind him, there was no one around to notice.

  The apartment would be vacant by the time he came back. Their lives depended on it.

  Chapter Seven

  “I still can’t believe you’re a father,” Grigory admitted, speaking more to his vodka martini than Sergei.

  The bar throbbed around them with a mixture of loud music and raised voices, like a bruise Grigory couldn’t stop prodding. They should’ve gone to Strelka, as Dmitri had suggested, but after a day’s worth of typing reports and answering requests for clarification—there was no paperwork when he was abroad, for security reasons—he’d pleaded for something closer to the office.

  The alternative turned out to be a noisy hole-in-the-wall with delusions of grandeur two streets and some four kilometers away. Fortunately, Grigory had spotted a metro sign just as they went in. That would make getting home a little easier than if he had to wait around for a taxi.

  He was not getting in the car with Sergei after he’d guzzled two Trans-Siberians. The man couldn’t hold his liquor.

  “You can’t believe it?” Sergei scoffed. “I can’t believe it. All I know is, I buy flowers one day and the next, there’s a baby crying in the living room. Don’t know how we went from A to B.”

  “That’s the best part,” Dmitri snorted.

  If Dmitri was wide-eyed and innocent, the spitting image of Grigory ten years back, then Sergei was the cautionary tale. He wasn’t much older than Dmitri, but he’d started losing his hair sometime in his twenties and by the ripe age of thirty-two, he was almost completely bald. He wore black-framed glasses, not unlike Grigory, because without them he was virtually blind.

  He hadn’t worked a day outside the SVR headquarters since he’d finished university. He never would.

  He narrowed his beady eyes at Dmitri. “What would you know? Got a wife?”

  “Don’t need a wife to know how babies are made. Isn’t that right, Grisha?”

  Grigory nodded, but absently. The to and fro of the crowd had captured his gaze.

  “Oh, I see.” Dmitri followed his gaze. “You know exactly what I mean… Blonde and big in the— Oh, shit, they’re coming over.” He flailed a little in his seat, nudging Grigory in the flank with his elbow.

  The jab found one of the fast-fading bruises Karim had left in his wake. Grigory winced more with the memory than the pain. His scowl was ignored. Dmitri had already ducked his head.

  When Grigory glanced back, it was straight into a generous cleavage spilling out of a tube top two sizes too small.

  “I’m Anna,” said the owner of the tube top. She nodded to her companion. “That’s Katya.”

  A mousy redhead with a heart-shaped mouth hung back, eying them warily. She looked about Dmitri’s age, maybe a little younger.

  “Saw you checking us out,” Anna ventured.

  Heat radiated from Grigory’s nape. “I wasn’t—”

  “That’s okay. We don’t mind…” Sequins sewn into tube top sparkled in the dim light of the bar. “You boys looking for some company?” Anna wondered.

  Well, I like men, Sergei’s married and Dmitri’s hoping to be sent overseas to play spies, so no, but thank you for the generous offer.

  Grigory swallowed back the arch reply. He was tipsy, but he wasn’t that tipsy.

  “I think I’m actually going to turn in,” he said, reaching for his wallet.

  “Put that away,” Sergei scoffed.

  “Yeah,” said Dmitri, “we invited you, remember?” He spoke to Grigory, but his gaze was tethered to Anna’s impressive assets. “Go home and rest, old man.”

  “Sergei?”

  “Hmm?” New father or not, Sergei seemed just as willing to enjoy Moscow’s finer sights.

  Grigory shook his head. If anyone asked tomorrow, he’d say he left because there were only two girls and three of them. He’d claim he sacrificed himself on the altar of letting Dmitri find himself a fiancée—and Sergei, a mistress.

  If he felt up to toeing the line, he’d tell the office gossips that he preferred brunettes.

  The stubborn, minute hope that his apartment would not be dark and cold when he pushed open the door curdled in his gut as he squeezed out of the bar between idle patrons.

  Karim wasn’t that stupid.

  * * * *

  No note. Obviously, it was the sensible thing when the goal was to erase one’s tracks, but the lasagna in the fridge somewhat confused the matter.

  Grigory towed out the ceramic pan he had forgotten he owned, examined the contents and slotted it back onto the rack. He repeated the process twice more before he was satisfied he wasn’t having a stroke.

  He tried to imagine Karim sautéing onions and stirring the filling on the gas cooker. There were pots and pans drying on a dishcloth by the sink, handles barnacled with stubborn droplets, even a container of cheese in the trash. Evidence of Karim’s culinary feats studded the kitchen.

  Window dressing.

  People in their line of business were particularly skilled at fashioning a convincing crime scene. But what was the point? Grigory wasn’t about to touch food prepared for him by an SIS agent. Granted, poison had never been the British weapon of choice, but he wouldn’t put it past Section to take a page out of the SVR handbook. They had a healthy sense of poetic justice.

  Grigory shivered and promptly realized he had yet to close the fridge door. He placed the lasagna on the kitchen table, pulled up a chair, and sat. Maybe the dish was a message.

  Karim must’ve dug around the kitchen for the oven dish. Did that mean he’d also gone through Grigory’s other cupboards in search of hidden treasure? Grigory didn’t keep secret files in his apartment. If Karim had found the cache under the bed, that might be a problem, but the phones were useless without the right protocols to get in touch to whoever knew each respective number. The SIM cards wouldn’t tell him anything.

  He might have gone through Grigory’s things in order to plant incriminating evidence—or a bug. Neither was a particular threat. Listening devices were par for the course and Grigory knew how to neutralize them.

  Evidence would be useless at this juncture. Karim already had all the damning photography he could wish for.

  “Or,” Grigory mused aloud, “he simply made me dinner.”

  Again the vision of Karim standing before the stove materialized before him. He hadn’t even known Karim liked to cook, let alone that he was any good at it.

  They didn’t know anything about each other. It should have been a comfort. Instead, Grigory felt oddly disgruntled.

  He jumped when his briefcase buzzed in the hall. At first he suspected it was his work phone, but when he opened the lid, he discovered the little green burner vibra
ting around between two pens and a leather-bound diary he had yet to open.

  “Ciao, darling.” Oksana’s voice came through loud and clear, without interference. She stuck to Italian, which meant she had privacy enough to place the call but not to risk someone overhearing her speaking another language—least of all her mother tongue. “I’m not disturbing you, am I?”

  A vise seized Grigory’s heart and would not let go.

  “Go ahead.”

  “About our little trip to Oppenheim Memorial Park…”

  The clock above the kitchen door was a kitschy little thing he’d received as a housewarming gift from the director’s former secretary. It featured a salmon on a pink and white polka dot field. Its fins pointed the hour.

  Ten past midnight in Moscow made it ten o’clock in Italy.

  Grigory pictured Oksana in a chaotic kitchen where the counters nevertheless gleamed and the spill of LEGOs and dolls on every surface was more endearing than bothersome. Every time he thought of Oksana’s life—or that of any other agent in his purview, but mostly her—he imagined an IKEA catalog life.

  He had nothing to base his fantasy on. He’d never seen the inside of Oksana’s home.

  If all went well, he never would.

  “Go ahead,” he forced out, willing his pulse to slow so he could make out her next words.

  “Just wanted you to let you know I had a lovely time this afternoon. So good to catch up.”

  There was no Oppenheim Memorial Park in Rome or anywhere else. Those three words were code for the fabled retirement spot of surviving spies. Over the last few days, Oksana herself had busted that myth once.

  Now twice.

  “This afternoon,” Grigory repeated. He brushed his knuckles to the casserole. It had been in the fridge long enough to leach off any heat.

  It was perfectly possible for Karim to have cooked it this morning before he left for the airport to fly back to Rome. He had handlers of his own to answer to.