Crazy Sweet by Tara Janzen

standing there, willing and able—obviously very able—and ready to put his life on the line for five hundred dollars, she was safer than she’d been since she’d left the family mansion in Washington, D.C., with a quarter of a million in cold cash hidden in the lining of her Louis Vuitton luggage.
    Kip knew what she’d brought with her. He was the only one who knew, and to his credit, he’d done more than warn her off El Salvador . He’d begged her not to go, especially smuggling contraband, and she wouldn’t have, not in a quarter of a million years, except for Julia Ann-Marie York, the black sheep of the York family and the only sister she had.
    CHAPTER
    7

    G ILLIAN STOOD NAKED in the shadows behind the open set of French doors in her loft, looking out over the garage’s second-floor garden. Lush greenery and the kaleidoscopic colors and sweet scents of hundreds of flowers in full bloom filled the rooftop.
    The sun was sliding behind the mountains, the air cooling and blowing gently across her skin, the quiet before the storm. Sometimes, every now and then, when she least expected it, all the jumbled-up pieces of her past would streak like a bolt of lightning across her brain, frying synapses and circuits, and throwing her into an abyss of chaos.
    Tonight that was not going to happen, because something else was. She felt it. There was blood on the wind.
    She took a long, steady breath, letting it spiral into her body, lazy and gentle, and fill her lungs. Tonight there would be death. Here.
    Before…before the night in the white room, she didn’t think she’d known things, not the way she knew things now. XT7, the drug she’d been given, was complicated, its effect on women untested and undocumented except on her, and it had fucked her up good. Her memories had been wiped clean. Other portions of her brain were walled off. She could feel the walls, but she couldn’t get around them.
    And another part of her brain had been opened up, unblocked, let loose: prescience, a stream of it, not always good for anything, but sometimes good for what she needed. Like tonight.
    She let her breath out, slow and easy, and softened her gaze. The EI Salvador mission had been flawless. She’d been like a cat in the dark, and before she’d been a cat slipping over Royce’s walls, she’d been the bad bitch Red Dog. Those poor little mareros, the gang-bangers, in Mara Plata had never imagined anyone like her. They’d never imagined the promise of their lousy lives getting even worse.
    She wasn’t a social worker. She wasn’t out to save tattooed teenage boys with ink on their faces, and ink on their arms, and no prospects beyond the trinity of dots they wore like a badge on their skin: hospital, prison, and the grave. Anyone who dealt with Royce was her enemy.
    Everyone who dealt with Royce was her enemy.
    The Central American gangs were violent in the extreme. Those boys expected to die badly. She couldn’t scare them with death—so she’d found the one gangster at the top of the San Luis heap with the pull to make a decision, and she’d given him the name of a buyer he would want to deal with more than Royce, the buyer she’d given to everyone she’d wanted to take away from the ex-CIA agent.
    Fuck . She knew some bad people. She’d killed some, manipulated others, and did business with one: Sir Arthur Kendryk, Lord Weymouth. Kendryk ate gangs like Mara Plata for his noon luncheon. In the month he’d held her captive, she’d seen him do it, wipe a Third World network and power base right off the map with a sweep of his hand.
    The San Luis mara would never know what hit them, if they screwed with Kendryk, or if they didn’t meet their quotas, or if he simply decided he no longer needed them. The Lord of Weymouth did not leave loose ends—except for her.
    For her, he would take the Mara Plata deal, the way he’d taken the other four deals she’d ruined for Royce. In the realities of Kendryk’s world, Mara