A Conspiracy of Whispers Read online




  Desires and loyalties clash when a sensual assassin and an intriguing enemy agent must fight together in this exciting debut by Ada Harper.

  For Olivia Shaw, the danger of her assignments as a deadly Whisper agent is matched only by that of her hidden status: Liv is one of the caricae, extremely rare women capable of bearing children and therefore controlled by the Syndicate’s government. When her handler sends her into the Quillian Empire, her mission is complicated by stumbling upon a kidnapping in progress.

  Liv is drawn deep into political upheaval when her hostage is revealed to be the infamous Red Wolf, Galen De Corvus, brother of the Quillian Empress. Worse yet, he is an altus, more sensitive than most to the pheromones of caricae. If he realizes what she is, he could expose her secret to either government and doom her to a life as breeding stock.

  Quillian nobleman turned operative Galen never planned to involve himself with a citizen of the cold, cruel Syn, but Olivia entices him more than she should. As they work together to protect his royal sister from a violent coup, the passionate bond between them proves to be more than mere biology. And Liv must decide if that bond is worth dropping her guard for both an enemy and an altus.

  This book is approximately 122,000 words

  One-click with confidence. This title is part of the Carina Press Romance Promise: all the romance you’re looking for with an HEA/HFN. It’s a promise!

  Carina Press acknowledges the editorial services of Deborah Nemeth

  Available from Ada Harper and Carina Press

  A Conspiracy of Whispers

  And watch for the next book in the series, coming soon!

  For the ones who had to write their own love story first.

  A Conspiracy of Whispers

  Ada Harper

  Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  Of the things she owned, her blood, her cat, and three lonely barstools at the Glitch, the barstools meant the most to Olivia Shaw. They wobbled, they creaked, and they were at the dingiest end of the bar, huddled around the chipped sink where Yoshi heaped dirty barware. But they were hers and asked nothing of her. A metaphorical ownership, at least until she slunk through the door to find fresh laser plate stapled on the back of the barstool that said Reserved for Shaw. The same sign claimed the stool on either side.

  She chose the seat in the middle. “This is your idea of a joke, Yoshi?”

  Yoshi scuttled his heavily inked arms up in front of him like a shield. When he lowered them again, he gave her his best bartender smile, liquor-sharp and potent. “My idea of self-preservation. Maybe you’ll take better care of your possessions?”

  “Not my fault if your patrons don’t understand that I prefer to drink alone.”

  “Thus the signs.” He slid a tumbler into her hands and brightened. “I don’t suppose I should ask if you want to take off that rag and stay awhile.”

  “I like my coat. It’s a nice coat.” Olivia tugged the collar of her not-actually-nice coat. The grubby canvas was patched and smelled a bit too much of cheap cloves and cheaper smoke. It lay over an even higher stiff-collared shirt and complicated scarf. Olivia’s style was chosen for complications. Combined with her shoulder-length tangle of pale hair, there wasn’t a chance of skin showing. The securing action was self-soothing, a check. Olivia paused and sniffed the drink to verify its contents. Yoshi gave her an insulted huff as he passed her the limes for her fizzy water. Something stronger sounded good right now. Her grip tightened on the glass.

  The way Yoshi’s dark eyes narrowed said he read all those little movements for what they were. His eyes gave a proprietary scan of the night’s clientele before he leaned across the bar, dropping his voice. “So what brings you in to take up three of my seats, disturb my customers, and drink all my fine artisanal tap water?”

  Olivia leaned back an inch. Yoshi was her closest friend, but she didn’t let anybody into arm’s reach, let alone scenting range. She settled for letting her fingertips count up and down the buttons of her coat. “I’m going out of town. I was hoping that you could watch B for a while.”

  “A job? You don’t usually take jobs out of the Cauldron.”

  Olivia shrugged. “I don’t usually get offered them.”

  “How long you gonna be gone?”

  Olivia consulted the ice in her drink. “Maybe two weeks.”

  “Weeks? What, are you vacationing? There’s nowhere in the Syn that—” Yoshi stilled. His hands twitched up as he put it together. “Not inside the Syndicate then. You took a military chit?”

  She needed less observant friends. Yoshi was too smart, too perceptive, too kind to make it far in the Syndicate corp races. But it was those same qualities that made the Glitch the safest, almost-legal basement dive in the Cauldron quarter. Genta and altus laborers from all over the Cauldron frequented the bar, even altus tempers expertly corralled by Yoshi, so the Glitch had a reputation for being safe and discreet. Olivia was familiar with most of the regulars who came by after third shift, but she still dropped her voice. “It’s just a ways out of town.”

  “Well, that’s a lie,” Yoshi said.

  The first lie you tell someone has power, her mother had said. Tell the truth, always tell the truth, up until you can’t. Because the first lie you tell someone is the one they’ll believe. It’s got magic, that first lie, the magic of all that sacrificed honesty cashed in. So make it a good one. Olivia always spent her first lie on just one thing. But she’d wasted her first lie upon meeting Yoshi.

  You’ll be okay, I promise, she’d told him over the body of the dead altus man. His boyfriend. He’d been an asshole, but that hadn’t been what had earned the altus a bounty with the Whispers—that crime had been politics, a rabble-rouser for those altus supremacy losers. Still, one look at Yoshi’s face back then, bruised with resignation more than pain...there were things you did, and not because someone paid you.

  When a Whisper quiets your loved one in front of you, the proper response is normally not to show up on their stoop, three months later, with an invitation. Yet Yoshi had founded a bar, then had found her, and Olivia found herself unable to stay away. Yoshi had a new life now, a family even, with Emeric, a genta tech who annoyed the hell out of Olivia but made Yoshi happy. An introduction of dead bodies and lies hadn’t been enough to sway Yoshi’s quiet optimism in Olivia’s ability to not go entirely feral.

  She hated to disappoint him. “It’s an easy job. I’ll be in and out before you know it. Will you do it?”

  “Where�
��s your rogue? Vas region?” When Olivia studied her drink, Yoshi’s eyes widened. “The Empire?”

  Olivia drained her glass. “A week and a half tops.”

  “Liv, sweet hell—you’ve heard what the Empire does to...how they treat their—”

  Olivia stopped him with a look. The ice ticked in her glass, and color drained from Yoshi’s face. Yoshi probably knew what she was. Olivia probably knew that he probably knew. But the truce that kept her coming back here was that neither of them ever removed the probably from their relationship.

  To never admit that Olivia was an unregistered caricae.

  “...their criminals,” Yoshi finished weakly. He swiped her glass into a dishpan. “Well. You’ll be careful, yeah? Come back.”

  Olivia gave that the eyeroll it deserved. “Trust me, the Empire is not my idea of a vacation spot.”

  “Fair. Go bag your naughty altus then. And bring me back a souvenir.” Yoshi’s face lit up. “Oh, one of those psychic guard dog things!”

  “I am not bringing you back a puppy.” Olivia couldn’t quite keep the fondness out of her voice. “So you’ll take B?”

  “Sure. Drop him by the bar on your way out.” Yoshi wiggled his fingers, still not quite meeting her eyes. “B is still a rotten name for a cat.”

  Olivia hopped off the bar, tension bleeding out as she straightened her coat. “Plan A is to live like fat cats...?”

  “And Plan B is eat the cat.” Yoshi waved her off as another customer down the bar caught his eye.

  Olivia picked her way to the station by neon and memory. The sister moons were hiding tonight, and the Cauldron didn’t believe in streetlights. Olivia normally avoided the train during the day—too many strangers, pressed too close. All it would take was a sweaty, crowded train and an observant altus to give her away. But it was late in the evening, she was tired. Scattered passengers clumped here and there at the station, drowsy with sleep or drink. She found a mostly deserted car. A young couple to her left wound into each other in their sleep. A red-cloaked temple cultist at her right, kohl-darkened lips moving airless through prayers. Olivia took the seat near the doors, tugged her coat tighter, and sank into her scarf.

  She’d been a late bloomer as a teenager, and that’d been her only salvation. All Syndicate kids underwent the disposition screen when they turned thirteen. The schools made it like a festival, a rite of passage, as if the handful of kids who disappeared from school the day after the results were being sent off on a patriotic adventure, not indoctrinated into mandated government programs. Most kids classed as gentas, the sterile majority, happy to start prep for university exams. Newly identified altusii got pulled for vocational training, encouraged toward military and labor positions, while also being immediately enrolled in the donor registry. It was kids screened as caricae who disappeared.

  The enrichment program, as the current government described it, was intended to provide governmental support to caricae citizens, nurture their “sensitive” natures, and prevent targeting and abuse by systemically housing caricaes in comfortable, shiny white compounds. If many caricaes coincidentally “chose”—because inevitably all did—to participate in the ministry’s Plenty Futures maternity program, it was commended as a patriotic contribution, a sympathetic service to the majority of the population unable to reproduce. Everyone’s health was guaranteed by the program, and the resulting children were then quietly assigned to families across the Syndicate, raised by genta and genta-altus couples approved by the state. Equality for all, and more important to the post-Crisis Syndicate, survival of the genetic pool.

  When Olivia’d received the genta stamp on her school ID, she’d expected nothing less. She already had her eyes on her life, how it would be. Early acceptance to the capital performance arts program. Study the classics. Probably give up and become a marketing drone for some holo-corp, but hey. It got her out of the Cauldron. A job, a flat of her own: high-rise dreams. She had a plan.

  Until she turned fourteen and had her first menses.

  It’d happened during summer break, thank gods. It was her mother who found her, and even a genta woman knew what blood in your underthings meant. Olivia had been sick, shaking, until her mother had taken her, firm grip, firm voice, and asked one thing: “Is this what you want?”

  When Olivia shook her head, her mother spoke, surgical and calm. “Then this didn’t happen.”

  And then her mother sat her down and told the new story of how her life would be.

  Olivia got off at her stop. The buildings of the Cauldron were old. Shored-up shells from foundations laid before the Crisis, layered with warty retro-fitting and secondhand neon. It made the pale walls of the enrichment compound, built just thirty years ago when the new party took the ministry, even more noticeable. Living in a flat in spitting distance of a caricae residence was less a concealment tactic and more because the rent was cheap and the landlord absent.

  She kept her eyes turned away as she stomped up the crooked stairwell and shook the Syn’s filth from her feet. Slamming the door closed behind her was the only thing that shut out the faint tinkle of classical music that drifted over from the campus.

  Whisper pay was good, but irregular. It paid for a tidy studio where noise carried but scents didn’t, and at least the water was hot. It wasn’t as if Olivia entertained much. She shucked off her outermost layers and dug around the closet for her workbag and began throwing things in for her trip.

  Several shirts went in first. For defense, not fashion. The greatest risk of detection for a caricae—one who didn’t enroll like a proper citizen—was their skin. Everyone born since the genetic tinkering of the Crisis had a personal layer of detectable pheromone, but caricae and altus scents were stronger, distinct, products of their purpose. Gentas posed little risk, but if an altus got close enough to smell her sweat, they’d recognize the particular cocktail of pheromones every caricae had.

  So: clothing. Layers helped. Fastidious hygiene helped. A paranoid sense of personal space helped. Olivia had honed all three. And there were pills that could dampen skin scent and the effects of others’ pheromones. It was a military formula—designed for altus soldiers in the field—but if you knew what corrupt parts of the pulse feed to check, anything was for sale. She packed double the pills she expected to need and swigged down an evening dose as she checked the feeds.

  She had to keep her arm held aloft at an awkward angle as she watched the state news on the misty projection. Her pulseband was going buggy again, but it was getting harder and harder to find affordable replacements. Only kids still used pulsebands to access the feed. Any adult with two chits to rub together got the implant now, a chip interface embedded in the arm. But medical treatment was another thing Olivia had learned to go without. She might have been able to bribe a modder, someone deep in the pockets of one of the local Skin Princes to do it, but it wasn’t a gamble she was willing to take yet.

  A knotted heap of ginger and white yowled across the bed. Plan B was a monster of a cat and practically filled her go-bag as he stomped around. He hunkered down when Olivia reached for him, as if to impart one more assault of fur to her things before she could deposit him on the floor.

  Olivia gave him a skritch. “Don’t be rotten. You’re still Plan B.”

  The cat blinked sourly at her before finding a zipper pull to attack. Olivia hummed as she finished packing. Not that she would ever actually eat him. Animals were practically the only physical affection she could afford. Animals always liked her; they instinctively tolerated all caricaes. Something about the pheromones and genetics. Shit that ruined her life but hadn’t seemed important when she was in school.

  With everything else she had to deal with, she deserved to at least be a cat whisperer.

  * * *

  It took a full day on the train to reach the edge of the Syndicate. The border was sparsely populated and densely regulated. The secretive Sy
n hadn’t had open borders with the Empire for decades, since before the current ministry took control. Only government workers got authorization to cross. Olivia kept a disinterested smile in place as a cranky-looking soldier rifled through her forms and reached her temporary permit.

  “A Whisper?” The woman’s eyes swept over her skeptically. “They let anyone in that organization now?”

  “Gosh, I hope so.” Olivia twisted a finger in her hair. “Temporary permit—I’m on trial basis, you see.”

  It was a believable enough lie. Only trial recruits and criminals worked Whisper jobs on temporary credentials, but Olivia had kept her temporary paperwork up and renewed. Olivia had been a Whisper for three years now, but without a government ID, she couldn’t get a permanent license. Renewing her government registration required blood work, which would give her away. She was lucky that she was tall despite her caricae genes—still short compared to altusii, but she could pass for a short-to-average genta.

  “They’re sending a newbie into the Empire? Godsdamn savages.” The woman’s frown softened into something more approaching pity. “You’re a small one, too.”

  “I take the very smallest jobs,” Olivia said.

  The Whispers were the private government authority that claimed to protect civic prosperity. Quietly, efficiently, and usually lethally—admired characteristics in the Syndicate. If authorities identified a source of unrest—terrorist, serial killer, or rabble-rouser—a Whisper was sent to settle them. Sometimes that involved just persuading a disaffected voice that life wasn’t so bad, or removing their ability to cause harm.

  And sometimes it involved a Quiet order, usually on rogues who were violent or inciting violence in others. Those were Olivia’s specialty: angry altusii. Taking out her opposites, those who threatened her exposure the most—some wounded part of her relished it. It was probably unhealthy; Olivia didn’t care.

  Her job wasn’t far across the border, but there was no such thing as a short distance in the Quillian Empire. It was another day of travel once she crossed the border, this time on a series of foreign aetheric shuttles. Most of the time, Olivia was able to find an empty window seat and pass the time watching the scenery slowly shift, becoming more ancient, more florid, more Imperial. Ornamentation sprouted in the Empire like mushrooms. In the Syndicate, anything old would be plowed over, salvaged, making space for improved models. The Empire seemed to revel in their past. Old buildings with decorative crenellations. Detailed wolf heads clinging like barnacles to everything. New satellite arrays perched on clay roof tiles and copper domes aged to a chalky green. Even the aetheric shuttle Olivia rode was probably older than the Syndicate’s own capitol building.