eleven | prague
the capital city of the Czech Republic; nicknamed the 'City of a Hundred Spires' due to the hundreds of large towers and steeples spiking into the skyline
RAYNA
May 7th, 7:09 (GMT +2)
8 days until it happens
FORGET MEN. FORGET strong hands and nice butts and monster penises. Prague is fricking gorgeous – I think I'm in love.
Yeah, my Czech is practically non-existent, but I'm fluent in six other languages and proficient in another three, so I can get by just fine.
Stunning gothic buttresses, trembling kaleidoscopes of stained glass, lofty copper domes burnt aquamarine by the elements.
Oh, speaking of monster penises—actually, you know what, nevermind.
My phone rings. I instantly regret answering it. "So you're telling me he nailed you." Howling laughter blasts through my headset. "Like, literally pounded your ass into the chair."
"Shut up, Sam." I'm strolling across a medieval stone bridge on a mild, overcast morning, fighting exhaustion with a latte in hand. It's early; the sun is still just a foggy amber smear on the horizon. Grey whorls of the Vltava river foam against the piers. The colour reminds me of a pair of stormy flint irises, and my coffee stales on my tongue.
"Girl! You were hammered by a tall, sexy British spy. Lucky bitch."
My body is disloyal; the memory of last night makes me throb. "Don't fucking remind me." Ya kalb. I'm not subtle about switching the subject. "Any word about what Morgan found on those hard-drives from Sidorov's desk?"
"None, babe. Sorry." He sniffs, annoyed. "Those fuckeroos at MI6 are making my life hell. They sent us an army of viruses. Our servers are swamped! So rude." Then he goes on to mumble something I can't understand about a hairy ass? Or maybe a person named... Harriett? Henry? Harry? Hanson? I genuinely have no clue.
After disconnecting the line, I stare out at the roiling water, processing. Cassidy was last seen six days ago at her family's summer mansion in Tofino, with not a photo or video or eye-witness of her since. With each second that passes, her odds get grimmer and grimmer.
I'm still holding onto a sprig of hope that she's alive. Sidorov as good as confirmed it to his guests yesterday, and then there were the meagre scraps I managed to tear from him when I got him alone.
He was delirious from whatever the cook had used to poison him, so he could barely string together three words. Eventually, after I forced a knife to his throat and asked him so very nicely, he admitted to me that he actually had no clue where Cassidy was. (Great. Just fucking perfect, hey?)
Apparently his associates were all being very hush-hush about the whole thing. Last he'd heard, she was in Prague. And then before I could find out anything else, that fucking bitch burst his skull like a ripe watermelon.
Listening to the news this morning, another inconsistency occurred to me. Elias Dalton is the head of a multi-billion dollar weapons-manufacturing corp. Why the fuck would he rely on our inefficatious, beaurocratic government to find his daughter when he has the resources and technology to do it himself? I fiddle with my tiny golden bracelet, thinking through the mess of it all.
I mean, yeah, he's a total nut, like every other billionaire on the planet. He says pretty words about strengthening our public institutions, but if he truly believed in the common good, he'd give all his money away. And! Even if he somehow was an altruistic, pro-democracy kinda guy, it wouldn't fucking matter – no matter how principled you are, it all hurdles out the window when someone you love is in danger. That's how the universe works.
If he really wanted to find Cassidy, she'd already be home. The realization sends a chilling squirm down my spine.
Where are you, Cassidy? And why does your daddy not care if you live or die?
***
In the movies, the spies are always these sexy, gunslinging, blood-thirsty, ass-whopping sadists who travel the globe killing bad guys and getting laid. What they never show is the paperwork.
Rustling pages, towering shelves crammed with musty books, coughs muffled into sleeves. I sit in a secluded corner of a public library, connected to my secure VPN, filing an incident report about last night's casualties. One dead; three wounded; two subdued via chemical sedation; lethal shot by Russian national; Canadian and British agents as witness; two rounds discharged from standard issue sidearm.
Then, I get to work sorting through all the photos I took of the files from Jake's room yesterday. From the looks of things, he doesn't actually have much more to go off of than I do – I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. Rifling into the bottom of my bag for some gum, my fingertips clink plastic. Huh.
I lift out a USB stick that I one-hundred percent do not remember swiping from Jake's hotel, or from anywhere else. It must have been buried in the documents I shoved into my backpack from Jake's desk. Bingo.
I inject it into my computer's port and wait for the contents to download. Maybe Jake has an ID on Cassidy's captives. Maybe he knows more about the mob's enigmatic plans for May fifteenth. Every little detail helps.
Just as I click the shortcut with my cursor, my entire screen blips to black.
My mouth opens. I watch as strings of white code drip across the display.
No. No! Shit, shit, shit...
The screen glitches again, and then bold red letters blare across it: We musn't touch what isn't ours, darling.
Oh, you petty, slimy, cocksucking motherfucker! I watch futilely as the malware savages my laptop's software to smithereens.
Urgently, I dial Sam's number. Seven minutes of panic and chaos later, he sighs into the phone like a trauma surgeon to a freshly-bereaved widow, "I'm sorry, babes. There's nothing more we can do."
Oh yeah? Mentally, I launch neurotoxic darts at Jake's smirking mugshot.
I can think of a few things.
***
Over the next few hours, the historic city of Prague becomes a torrid battleground of mutual sabotage.
Sam hacks into airline databases and discovers a one-way ticket in Jake's name from Warsaw to Václav Havel Airport, scheduled to land at nine-eighteen AM. I leave an anonymous tip with Czech customs enforcement, accusing him of carrying contraband firearms in his check-in luggage. They probably won't arrest him, but he'll have to waste precious time straightening it out with the authorities.
I try to buy myself a strudl for a quick mid-morning snack; after three separate payment attempts, the machine insists my credit card is being declined. My four other cards refuse to work too, and then I'm put on hold for forty-five minutes with three different banks because they all received fraud notifications and froze my accounts.
With Sam's loving assistance, I send a very sexy photo of myself to Jake's cell-phone. Of course he'll open it. Of course he'll click on it to zoom in. We lace it with spyware to SIM-jack him so we can spy on his location and calls and messages. (It doesn't work. He texts me back: do you think I'm an idiot, luv? next time you want me to admire your tits, pop by my hotel instead.)
Just for that, I call his hotel and cancel his room booking.
He sends a henchman to mug me; I dropkick him in a back alleyway so hard that he shrieks for his mommy.
Sam digs around the MI6 servers for Jake's personnel file and learns that he's allergic to passion-fruit, of all things. (White people. Like seriously.) I UberEats him a diverse selection of mouth-watering passion-fruit desserts delectable enough to send him into a coma.
He debugs the photo I sent and posts it with my phone-number to Craigslist, listing out a trove of niche fetishes I'm supposedly into (furries, golden showers, scat-play, urethral sounding, anal fisting, genitorture, just to name a few). My messages are bombarded with random dick-pics and vivid descriptions of the weird things strange men want to do with my body.
I order him a male hooker with a specialty in CBT. (No, not cognitive-behavioural therapy. Google it, I dare you.)
By three in the afternoon, I am frazzled and drained and disgusted and hangry and restless and frustrated beyond sanity. I snag a chair at a dim, quiet bar and order a glass of wine and a heaping plate of fries, crossing my arms on the wooden counter and burying my face in the dark, warm fold of them.
I want to destroy him. I want to claw those dusky silver eyes out of his pompous, stupidly handsome face.
I want him on his knees. I want him begging.
***
Author's Note [Oct. 28th, 2022]:
Yasssss girl! Make him beg... 😩💅
Also! Any guesses which languages Rayna is fluent and proficient in? Drop em in the comments!
xoxo Ami