Free Blood and Bone: (Royal Blood #6) by Amity Cross

slammed against my wrist, disarming me…then her fist came back and landed a blow to my face with surprising force.
    I stumbled once and pulled myself back, but the split second it took to realign myself was more than enough for her to slip away. There was only one way out of the alley, so I rushed forward and glanced around the corner, trying to spot her retreating form, but the street was empty.
    Fuck! It was a cold day in hell when I was bested, and right now, I was fucking freezing.
    Deciding I had nothing to lose by canvassing the streets for a sign of the mystery woman, I began walking, conscious of the city at my back. There was no doubt a lot of people would be out hunting the same man we were, but the look in the woman’s eyes suggested her stake had a personal flair to it. Either that or she was so ingrained in the job she took everything to heart.
    I didn’t know how long I’d been searching and not finding a fucking thing when I finally heard from Jackson.
    “Mr. Blood?” His voice came over the com, breaking through my brewing rage at having lost Bateman and the woman.
    “What is it?” I snapped.
    He hesitated a moment before saying, “Gruber is dead.”
    I straightened up and began to move back through the streets, retreating from my position. “What? Mercy…”
    “He locked himself in with the device,” he explained. “The chemical deployed…”
    “Mercy?” If anything had happened to her…
    “He was locked in a containment chamber, and the biohazard protocol sealed him inside. She’s fine.”
    I blew out a relieved breath. Mercy was okay, but Gruber was toast. I’d lost Bateman, and any leads we had were dissolving faster than we could find them. Moltke was slipping through our fingers.
    “We have intel from the facility,” Jackson went on.
    “Good,” I said. “We’re going to need it.”

Chapter 10

Folsom
    I remember the day I first met Mei Akiyama with perfect clarity.
    It involved four million pounds worth of blood diamonds, a deep cover operation, and a pooling of resources… in more ways than one .
    I’d pegged her as Intelligence early on in the piece but not British. When she and my true allegiance came out, she was furious. The shit we’d gone through could’ve all been avoided and the blood diamonds acquired much earlier, but that was the risk we ran in our business. Secrets, subterfuge, violence…sacrifice. It all came with the package.
    I’d been recruited by MI6 out of the ranks of the London Police when I was still on the beat. Like everyone who’d been interred into this life, my profile had many of the markers the agency used to find its field agents.
    MI5 handled domestic threats, and MI6 took care of the international ones. If we were talking in analogies, we were the cool kids at the back of the bus while those other guys were the nerds down the front.
    Driving through the dark London streets, I pulled into the parking garage underneath the small block of modern apartments in Bayswater. A stone’s throw away from Paddington Station, it was prime real estate in a pocket of the city that was still affordable on an agent’s salary.
    I was going to ask her to move in with me.
    Killing the engine, I sat for a moment, grief beginning to overwhelm my usually solid exterior. Agent Mei Akiyama had entered my life in a blaze of gunfire, saved my ass from a bullet to the heart, and had imbedded herself in there instead.
    She’d denied herself happiness for so long in the wake of Agent Cassel’s disappearance. She’d carried the weight of blame and hope on her shoulders like a reminder of the things she’d lost, but she’d never stopped to allow herself to move forward. She’d just stood still…until the night I’d forced her to face her future as her past collided with her present.
    I was fairly certain I’d loved her from the first moment we’d clashed, but I didn’t realize just how much until the morning of the explosion at Section Seven, and by then,