Excerpt: Precious Mettle

Anya laughed; she was used to Nathan's sense of humor—and his driving, which, frankly, took about the same amount of time to get used to.

“No, just preserving one of your esteemed colleagues for her next mission. Wouldn't want a decade of training flying through your window and into some unsuspecting cow.”

Nathan laughed then, his eyes just slightly crinkling at the corners.

For forty-three, Nathan Tobias was as fit and as agile as he'd been at twenty-three, when she'd first met him—with the brains of twenty years experience to sweeten the deal. Anya remembered when she'd first met Nathan, almost seventeen years ago; after the car crash that had taken their parents' lives, Johnny and she had been passed off to the custody of Nathan's uncle, the elder Mr. Tobias, who ran “the business.'

The business, of course, was Tobias Efficiency Solutions, the public face of one of the most sought-after special agencies in the world, consisting of a half-dozen hand-picked marksmen, trained assassins, and, in more recent years, computer experts. And their parents had been two of Mr. Tobias' best agents—her father, a well-respected computer expert, managed a dry-cleaning business while her mother tutored kids at the local elementary school, when she wasn't sharpening her throwing daggers in the basement. Anya never really thought she'd had a strange childhood, just the kind of thing that made 'Take your daughter to work day' extra special.

Her parents had been good people, decent people; they'd known more about right and wrong than most people had even imagined. They had no qualms about what they did, because they'd believed they were doing it for the right side. They believed the knew what the 'right side' was—they believed so hard in that delicate balance between good and evil, they hadn't seen their fate heading to them, even when it happened in the form of a semi-truck one fateful August evening.

She'd been only fourteen when it happened, all gangly legs and awkwardness, the kind of puberty-induced bad attitude and an even worse fashion sense. Something in her heart told her that the car accident was no accident, but there was no way of proving that. Her father's blood-alcohol content had been twice the legal limit, and no amount of protesting from either Anya or her brother would change that medical fact—not even the truth that she'd never seen her father drink in her entire life.

Her mind snapped back to the present; Nathan must have known the real reason she was uneasy in fast-moving cars. She caught him looking at her, just briefly, out of the corner of his eye, then down-shifted, taking the next merger onto the freeway back at a normal speed.