Fanning The Fire Marshal's Flame

A Place in Bellona

She took her breakfast up to her room, stepped inside, and closed the door behind her. She groaned when she realized she left her cellphone down on the counter. She could go back down and get it but then it would ruin the perfect exit she’d just executed. Being a woman was hard.

Shoving another mouthful of food in, she sighed and forced herself to remember she was far stronger than she believed. She had grown and healed from her trauma and would continue to do so. Just because Diarmid Clooney was in her house bringing up all kinds of s**t memories didn’t mean she hadn’t healed or made progress. She was a fierce warrior, an assassin and now the head of a specialized clean-up task force for Bellona. She had purpose and pride and not the memory of an insane childhood crush being stomped on causing her to react like a foolish brat and landing her into heaps of trouble was going to diminish her strength.

She finished her plate of food and set it on the nightstand and lay back on her bed and stared at the ceiling. She’d had a very good time out last night with the girls. She had done everything she could to forget she’d walked into her kitchen to find Diarmid and heaps too many memories in her kitchen. She had already told herself after the last time Stavros chased her following their hookup, she wasn’t going home with him but then her dad had sent her a selfie of him and Diarmid at the pub and she had found herself agreeing to go with him.

As a kid, if Diarmid had known she had a crush it would have been a miracle. Her dad had two friends who had come around, Diarmid and Baker. Baker was somewhere between Diarmid and her dad’s age. Usually, they were around when she was out but if they were visiting, she would pop down and join in a card came. Often times she would sneak down and sit on the stairs and listen to the three men talk about the dates Diarmid or Baker had been on. Her eyes would get wide with their stories.

She had been a terribly shy child. She’d gone to a private school completely on scholarship and it required an extra curricular activity. She’d started dancing at five and so it continued while she was in school. She still danced at a local studio and Artemis had once questioned whether she wanted to teach a class to the recruits to improve flexibility, so she did this too.

She considered her time with Bellona. A secret organization of female assassins who took the role of protecting women very seriously. They hunted predators and destroyed them. Just before her nineteenth birthday, she had been invited to a strange meeting after a few odd emails had come to her. She’d gone out of curiosity and had been stunned to find Clara sitting at a desk with monitors of women flashing on and off. She’d offered her the chance to become an assassin working for the organization who murdered s****l predators. She had agreed on the spot.

Then they had given her the option of assisting in punishing Reardon and she’d immediately voiced her dream of how she’d wanted to do it. At their stunned silences she had been embarrassed and then Clara and Naomi had started planning. They’d gotten a team from the Bellona sciences division in, and they’d had her participate in every step of the way. She hadn’t wanted him to die. She wanted him to live but to live in misery, pain, and agony for the rest of his long, miserable life. Clara had exclaimed with glee how much she loved her and then she had been part of the team to make Reardon pay for r****g her.

The movies always make out revenge always leaves you wanting more and feeling empty but not for her. She had gone to see him in the burn unit one night and stood over his bed while he slept hooked up to machines and felt pride and satisfaction at knowing he was never going to hurt anyone again. She was grateful to know she was getting her life back but his was forever ruined.

After her initiation and six-month programming, she had stuck with a training team under the leadership of a woman named Sasha Ramirez, one of the hardest leaders she could imagine. She was by the book, unyielding and unforgiving. Even Clara didn’t like her, and she usually was intensely pro-woman and liked everyone. Technically, Artemis used Sacha’s team as a back-up only and for smaller situations but every girl who left the team, left it happily. Artemis had done much revising of the teams, made Clara her own team just before Lita had finished her training and had given Lita the option to join Clara’s team or stick with the training team.

Lita had decided she didn’t want to do either. She enjoyed the work in the labs and the research. She enjoyed the innovation part of Bellona but at the time, she wasn’t ready for the day-to-day debriefs which came with shooting pervs in the face. She liked the rush and adrenaline she got from a kill, but she wasn’t quite as comfortable with the teams as the other girls had been. Being the only introvert in a team of angry hostile extraverts was not a lot of fun. She hadn’t joined in their banter, and it left her feeling excluded.

Artemis’ solution was to make her a personal assistant. Provided her a place to continue her education, kept her on payroll and allowed her to work with the leading experts on the clean-up team. There was one chemist from Germany with whom she had become really close to and they had started discussing multiple ways to get rid a corpse using compounds. After one conversation, she had been talking to Artemis about what they had come up with and Artemis had asked her why she didn’t just use her God-given talent for fire.

How Artemis had known she had a l**t for the way fire burned when she’d been recruited at nineteen escaped her, but she had called her out on her very first debrief for setting small fires and then putting them out. To her there was something sensual and erotic in the way flames moved. Like ballet, choreographed but wild. It was a sickness, and she knew it, but Psych-One and Artemis had helped her take her illness and hone it into a craft. Then with the help of the science team, they had started to develop ways to make fire part of the clean up. It would erase any of the agent’s DNA which may have inadvertently been left behind, though the way the cleaning crew worked, it was unlikely.

Frankly, she thought Artemis just liked watching fire like she did. She didn’t care. It gave her an outlet for her need. Controlled chaos. She didn’t get to stick around and watch it burn but Artemis always made sure she had the satellite video to watch.

The science crews latest project was one near and dear to her heart and as she considered the way she and Arwen had recently imploded an entire compound in the middle of the jungle she couldn’t help but giggle. She could still hear the way Arwen had mocked her husband after and covered her mouth with her hand to stifle her laugh. It had taken her a long time to be relaxed and open with the girls on the three local teams.

Artemis had done tweaking and reassigning and now the way the teams ran, Clara ran team one, Jesse ran team two and Naomi team three. Naomi’s team was a backup team. Bliss only wanted to engage part time, just like she and Chyna. Naomi was happy to step back and lead the team who would have less missions than the other two if it meant she got to work with Bliss again.

She rolled to her tummy and wondered what it would be like to have someone love you the way they loved each other. They both had shitty tempers and were the first to admit they sucked on an emotional level but their love for one another was deep and true. Bliss had told her once they were two of the most damaged people in the world who just made it work.

Perhaps it was what she needed. A person as damaged as she was. She considered the man who’s bed she had tiptoed out of while she had heard him whistling happily while making breakfast. He was definitely emotionally damaged. You couldn’t be a mob boss if you weren’t, but she was never herself with him. She was loud and exuberant and channelled the way the girls were. If he knew how quiet she really was, how much she preferred to just stay home, read a book on chemical compositions or to go to the ballet every week, he’d probably run in the opposite direction. The s*x was great, better than great. The man was on a mission as if being in his forties gave him something to prove. She felt a great s****l connection with him but admitted she hadn’t allowed herself to consider more than s*x with him. Was she so psychologically damaged from eight years ago she would never be able to have more than just hookups?

“Ugh!” she pulled her pillow over her face and screamed into it frustratedly.

A knock on her bedroom door made her sit up in surprise, “yeah?”

The door opened a c***k, “you’re not n***d or anything?”

“No,” she frowned at Diarmid’s question.

“Your phone was going off like mad downstairs.” He stepped into the room and held it out to her. “I also wanted to say thanks for breakfast. It was great.”

She looked at the watch on her wrist and knew it wasn’t work-related. She accepted the phone and grimaced. Stavros again. Eight missed calls. She groaned and flopped back on the bed. Chavez’ encouragement of her going home with the guy was biting her in the a*s. f**k.