Hot Mercy (Affairs of State Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

little, allowing more information into her brain. Another familiar voice spoke to her: “Story like this…a career maker, Talia. Good for the magazine, too.” Harold, her editor. “But I don’t like putting you and Mark in harm’s way.” Mark, her lover, the man in the wheelchair. His image opened a floodgate, and the rest of the conversation in the magazine’s New York office came back to her in a wave.
    “He’s not going with me,” she’d told Harold. “Anyway, I’ll be back in three days. Four tops. Piece a cake.” She’d winked at him.
    Had she really believed it would be that easy?
    She should never have come. If only she had listened to her Belarus contact’s warnings. She should have told the research team at the London Conservation Union that they’d need to send their own people. Should have…should…should...
    But if her plan had succeeded, her photographs would have provided irrefutable evidence to add to the LCU’s report, revealing gross corruption since the nuclear disaster decades ago at Chernobyl, resulting in a terrible peril even today. Thousands of innocents around the world were in jeopardy!
    Talia tensed the muscles of her lower back and delicately shifted her hips, letting their weight, along with gravity, roll her body to its other side. That small effort set her head spinning and brought on another wave of nausea. She had to lie very still and put the tangle of events out of her mind until the worst of the spell went away.
    Despite the queasiness, she felt hungry, desperately so. She tried not to think about food. If only she could create a reliable timeline for what had happened to her, maybe then she’d understand where she was, find a way to free herself and go home.
    Tiny details slipped, one by one, into place in her fuzzed brain—like folders into a file drawer. She’d arrived in Kiev on a Thursday. That same afternoon she paid a driver to take her out of the city and drive her toward the Belarus border. “As close to the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone as you can get,” she instructed him. She had to pay him triple to do as she requested, then more to let her out and wait while she shot photographs. From a considerable distance away, with a telephoto lens, she’d focused on what remained of the Chernobyl RBMK reactors. She’d e-mailed digitals to Harold that night. He was ecstatic.
    The next day she joined a small, chatty group of German and Japanese tourists for the bus tour that wound through stunningly beautiful Ukrainian forests, past security barriers after suitable bribes passed hands. They’d arrived at Pripyat, the village that had been the closest to the nuclear compound where most of the residents had worked as managers, scientists, technicians, clerical staff and maintenance crew. 
    Since the nuclear disaster, trees and flowers had grown back. Wild animals and birds returned and, strangely enough, seemed to thrive. Perhaps this was because they had little or no competition from humans in the Exclusion Zone, only recently reopened by the government to brief, escorted tours. She saw delicate, sweet-eyed deer grazing. Energetic black squirrels scampered up and down elegantly straight tree trunks. If the forest had once burned, there was no sign of that destruction now. At least, not from where she’d stood that day.
    “You see,” the tour guide said cheerfully, “the animals are perfectly healthy and happy in their home.”
    One of the German men turned to her, winked, then said in English, “But they do glow at night.”
    She laughed along with him, but felt her gut tighten.
    Again Talia’s thoughts clouded frustratingly. Memories, like the surface of a puddle, blurred as she tossed thought pebbles into it. She tried again to open her eyes and managed to crack them just wide enough to tell it was dark. But whether she lay on a bed, the floor, or outside on bare ground she couldn’t have said. Every nerve synapse seemed to have shut down, except as a receptor