"Mary, we need to leave Evie in Croatia with your friends."

M. M was for Mary. Mary was the name of the leader of MI6. It was just like Bond. Damn. But that made me the bad guy. I narrowed my gaze and wiped the drool from my chin. If I was the bad guy, then this was one Bond where the bad guy won.

Mary looked familiar to me. I watched her move about the room, through the slats and suddenly it hit. She looked like Jules. Or rather, Jules looked like her. I had always thought she looked like me, but the resemblance was uncanny.

Who was Mary?

James looked around, "Mary, I have to go. I can't live like this anymore. I'm tired, and I've done everything you've asked of me. You have to kill me off and let me live my life out. Servario isn’t going to give me my money back. I want Evie in Croatia, and I want the rest of the money you owe me."

She sighed and nodded, "I just don’t understand how you never got that money back from Evie. It was half of your father's inheritance, James." She said the sentence with motherly affection and I gagged a bit. She was James' mother. Oh, sweet f**k.

My mother-in-law liked to screw guards in the ass with dildos. Oh, dear God in heaven, that couldn’t be right. No.

James walked to her, "Look, Servario has it. He isn’t giving it up, because I, technically, still owe him the Burrow. So f**k it. Evie was useless, her father is a disappointment, and the real Master Key is never going to be discovered. I want money, I want freedom, and I want this bullshit to be over with. I'm out. I'm done. I am finished and that is that. I never wanted to be CI, and I never wanted to be a husband or a dad. I did everything MI6 asked me to. You and Servario, and the Burrow, and the whole world can sod off."

He said my father is, not was.

She pulled him into her embrace, "Go kill the guard, put your wedding ring on his hand, and let this be the end then, my son. You may go to Monaco and enjoy your life. I may need you here and there."

He sneered, "I'm out. You promised."

She gripped his head back, ripping at his hair and sliding a knife, I hadn’t even seen in her hand, across his throat, "Mommy says you are in, if I need you to be."

He coughed, "Yes, fine. Whatever." She kissed his cheek and patted his ass, "Go take care of the guard. Put your wallet and everything into his pockets, tie his feet with the spare anchor in the back and turn on your cell phone and leave it in his pocket too. They'll trace him by it."

He sauntered out of the room. Mary sat there for a moment, just taking it all in or plotting her next assassination. She smiled at herself and got up. When she left the room, I stayed right where I was.

I wasn’t about to roam the boat in broad daylight and get killed or worse, f**ked in the ass. I cringed and sat there, waiting for a choice. I felt the boat stop moving. It was subtle because of the size but I felt it, nonetheless.

I pulled on some clean clothes from the closet, not really my style but better than underwear and less stinky than Michele's dirty shirt. I crawled from the porthole and looked out. I had to assume we were between Croatia and Italy in the Adriatic Sea. The colors were insane, and the beauty of the coastline was far more than I ever imagined for such a war-torn country. I lay there, wondering how it would all go down, and how I would escape when I heard it, a scream.

"SHE'S ESCAPED!"

That she was me and I was screwed. Michele might not have gotten the chance to screw me, but James and his evil mother would. I remembered the way the huge guard limped after getting big blacky in the ass and shook my head—hell no. I crawled to the railing and looked at the bright-blue seawater. We were only a few miles off of the coastline. I could jump, but then I would be a refugee in Croatia. I could also drown in the ocean. I looked back at the boat and grimaced; I could also get traumatized by Mary and then left in Croatia anyway. Just as I was about to jump, I heard something I hadn’t expected, a helicopter. It landed on the yacht, at the top. I could barely see the span of the top of it as people rushed up there. I took the chance to sneak along the wall to the closet I had hidden in before.

I pressed my back against the wall as another familiar voice started shouting, "WHAT DO YOU MEAN, YOU HAVE LOST HER? SHE WAS TO BE TRADED! WHY DID YOU EVEN BRING HER HERE? YOU WERE TO TAKE HER TO THE BROTHEL AND I WAS TO MEET YOU THERE! I GOT THERE AND YOU WERE NOT THERE!"

Servario angry was worse than any other sound. Well, except for the sounds in Mary's bedroom, those were way worse.

He hadn’t been on the boat all along?

I gripped my gun and waited for them to find me.

"Search the water. She jumped, trust me. I know her well."

He walked past the closet, slamming the door at the end of the hall.

Mary shouted, "THAT MEANS YOU!"

She stormed down the hallway, and opened and slammed the same door as Servario. That was weird.

Fuck.

Was she his mom too?

That would actually just MAKE my day.

Granted, it would never top the near rape, BO-laden clothing, running about a boat in my underwear, watching fetish p**n live like it was the BBC's Masterpiece Theatre but more aptly called Master My Piece, and discovering the dildo-wielding Brit was actually related to my children.

No, Servario and James being half-brothers was far less likely to send me over the edge, than analyzing any of the previous hours spent on the SS Twisted Sister.

I sat on a mop bucket that was turned over and waited to be discovered. There really was nothing else to do.

I could hear Servario and Mary fighting in the back room, but I couldn't hear what it was about. A pee shiver hit me. I had to go bad, bad enough that I looked at the bucket and contemplated it. Finally, in a moment of desperation for a bathroom, I opened the door to the closet and slipped out into the hallway. There was no one there. I ducked low and walked to the front room with the lounge and the kitchen. No one was there either. I could see James on the front of the boat through the window. I left the doorway, fingering the gun in the back of my pants. I needed to pee and I needed it all over with. I was done. I was never going to recover from any of it.

"James!" I called out.

He looked over at me through the window, "Where were you? You have Servario all worked up."

I nodded at the back of the boat, "Watching your mom f**k people in the ass."

He looked confused for a moment and then burst into laughter. He pointed a gun on me but kept laughing, "You saw that? That’s horrifying. Evie, of all the things you have endured in your life, I actually feel sorry for you for that one." He shook his head like we were talking like it was old times, "Mom and Sooky have always been a bit weird." He sighed, "Come out on the deck so I can strap you into a chair for Mary. She's been a real freak about you being missing." He winked at me, "Maybe you and I can die today together. ‘Course my death will be faked. After all of this nonsense, I can't imagine Mary is still going to let you go to Croatia. Not sure how Mary will convince Servario of that though, he was dead set on you ending up there."

I walked out to the front with my hands on my hips, ignoring his rambling. He really needed to do less drugs. I gave him a confused face and distracted him, "Your mom is an agent?"

He shrugged, "So is your mom, Evie. How do you think we met? When I was a boy, my parents always pushed me to join cadets. I never knew they were being pressured into doing it. Our parents are far more than you or I ever knew." He held his gun on me, "Your mom was the best of the best, but when she had kids she went quiet and my mom took her place. They were friends once, a very long time ago." He sat down with a bit of difficulty without his cane. He took a breath, motioning toward the chair, holding the gun on me, "You killed Michele?"

I nodded. He gave me a look of approval, "Nice work. I always hated him. His face was too fat, it made his accent slur almost."

I looked around at the ocean and the small boats and jet skis searching for me out on the water. I licked my lips and sat in the seat across from him.

He tapped his fingers, "This is getting weird… awkward."

"Yeah." That was an understatement.

He tapped his gun against the chair. I could see the red rim of his stoned eyes, and the way he moved as if he wasn’t in control of himself. He smiled and looked just like the boy I had met once, "I don’t hate you, you should know. I never hated you or the kids or anything. I just never saw it as my life. I always saw it as the job. You know? They asked me to join the military and CI and settle down with you, and I always saw it as a job."

I nodded, even though I didn’t know. I didn’t know how he was able to turn his love of our kids off and on. Our kids adored him. They had felt loved. I had too. And yet, there he was in front of me, no qualms about not being in love with our family in any way. It made no sense. I scowled, "I get that it has always been a job to you, but you were different before. What changed you?"

He narrowed his eyes, "What do you mean?"

"Six months before you 'died', we changed. We went from sort of happy to not at all. Not even for the kids. What changed? Did the job change?"

He licked his lips nervously, "Evie, nothing chang…"

I cut him off, "STOP LYING TO ME! YOU OWE ME THE TRUTH! I'M ABOUT TO DIE, YOU OWE ME THE TRUTH! YOU'VE TOLD ME EVERYTHING ELSE, YOU MIGHT AS WELL TELL ME THIS!"

He jerked back, "Freedom. I was finally going to be free of you all. I thought being your husband and in the CI was the job. It wasn't. I had made the best of it with you and the kids, and I assumed it was how things would always be. But when Servario was recorded going after the weapons and the Americans asked me to work for Servario, I was brought in from the cold. All this time I had no idea who I worked for, besides CI. I found out I was secretly an agent for MI6. Had been all along. I knew I was a double agent, but I never knew who for. Not until it was time to get Servario to show us where the Burrow was."

"You didn’t know any of this stuff? Really?"

He shook his head, "No. I didn’t even know I was adopted at first. When I was a kid, money always came to our family in the form of random deposits to our safe-deposit box. Someone had paid for my life, someone was always helping my parents out. I was told I had a benefactor, a rich uncle. He paid for things and made it easier for me, but he wanted things out of me. Turned out that was my father."