by Ronie Kendig
“Leif!”
The ground rushed up at him. Too late he recalled her instructions. Saw his position. Knew he was dangerously low. He canted his arms, and tree limbs snatched and clawed at him, slicing through his suit. He growled but focused on aiming his feet at the ground, ready to run.
He touched down but still had too much momentum. He pitched forward, the wind flipping him over, ticked at him for tempting her power. He tumbled and rolled, tangled in his glider. Slammed into a tree. Air punched from his lungs. He tried to suck in a breath—but couldn’t. He slid to the side and coughed, forcing air back into his lungs.
“Runt!” Iskra flew at him, forest litter dusting around them. “Are you okay?”
Holding his ribs, he gritted through the pain.
“What were you thinking? You never—”
“I know,” he bit out, not wanting a lecture. Or her pity. “I’m fine.” He struggled to stand.
“You sure?” Breathless, her face flushed and eyes black with worry, she assisted him, unzipping the suit and freeing him.
“Admit it, you’ve always wanted to undress me.” If he’d wet his pants, he wouldn’t be more humiliated than right now. He climbed out of the suit. Mad at himself. One hand held his aching side, the other rubbed the knot forming on the back of his head.
Iskra rolled her eyes, then slapped his shoulder. “You idiot. You scared me. Do you realize what—”
“I just wanted you to worry about me.” It was a bald-faced lie, but it broke the tension.
“Worry? I am furious!”
“Does that mean you’ll kiss me now?”
She glowered, but there was a glimmer of a smile in her tight expression. “Seriously, how is your side?”
“Healing.”
“You always say that.”
“It’s always true.” In more ways than one.
She grabbed his shirt and jerked up the hem, baring his abs and side.
“Hey, I was kidding about undressing m—”
She probed the injury, and he nearly headbutted her when she pressed his ribs. “You may be the bravest idiot I know, but you are an injured one, too. It’s possibly fractured.”
“It’s not,” he argued. “I can breathe and move. Bruised.”
“You cannot kn—”
“C’mon. We’re on a tight schedule.” He nodded toward the structure at the base of the incline. “Let’s get this done.”
But instead she cupped his face and planted a kiss on his lips.
Leif had no brains when it came to Iskra and leaned into the kiss.
She broke off. “See?” She held up her hands. “Idiot.”
“For you, yeah.”
She gave him a wide smile. “Then I will let you live this time, even though you nearly got yourself killed and ruined this mission.”
After burying their gear, they shouldered into their rucks and hiked down the hill to the property. The perimeter security here was nothing like China, and Leif bypassed it without a problem. Guarding his side, he hustled behind her to the stone wall that embraced the estate of gray slate with decades of ivy twining through its mortar. Near a heavily treed part of the wall, they climbed over and dropped into shadows. Four yards separated them from the side entrance of the garage. Thankfully, the guards didn’t seem worried about this side of the estate, apparently.
Leif and Iskra sprinted to the garage. Iskra went to work on the keypad while he monitored the patrolling guards. When minutes ticked by and they still hadn’t moved, he glanced back at her. “Mercy’s hacking would’ve been helpful here,” he said, referring to the keypad that’d get them inside the detached garage.
Iskra’s expression darkened. “I am more than capable of handling this.”
“Didn’t mean anything by it.”
Rolling her eyes, she arched a brow as the lock disengaged. She slipped into the darkened interior. She held the door for him to follow, then eased it closed. Leif shook his head, realizing there was no smell of oil or exhaust. Instead, this was more a showroom for six vehicles, including an antique Rolls holding court in the middle.
They hurried through a barely shoulder-width wooden door and descended a dozen or so steps. Dank, the hidden tunnel probably had rats and other vermin scampering through it—just like Leif and Iskra. It snaked under the driveway and gardens and up into hidden servant corridors of the centuries-old estate. Thick stone walls made for a cold, musty experience. He had memorized the floor plan Iskra secured of the main structure. She navigated the passages as if she’d been here a dozen times, turning with confidence from one to another. Her lack of hesitation at each turn made him more hesitant.
A glimpse of light between wooden slats—a door, he guessed—stopped him. “Iskra.” He strained to see through the gap. Based off research photographs of that unique inlaid floor and the massive stained glass window that framed the door, he guessed they’d reached the far end of the main foyer. They were headed to the main library, which sat off Hermanns’ study.
“What are you doing?” she breathed. “We must hurry.” She tugged his arm. “Come on.”
Since she’d gotten them this far, Leif shut down his paranoia and followed. It wasn’t that he was afraid they’d get caught. Hermanns and even her brother, Mitre, were in The Hague, possibly en route back—it was why he and Iskra had hurried into the night, to beat them to Germany.
What’re you afraid of, then?
That she was betraying him. The realization told him to go back, but voices on the other side of the wall shoved him forward.
“The security measures are ridiculous,” Iskra had said as they plotted their insertion on the flight over. But she’d vowed she’d long been working on a way to defy those measures.
“Why?”
“He infuriated me the first and only time I was there—on business for Hristoff. He had this casual candor about his ability to keep out any burglar and how he so effortlessly beat me to the Cellini. I’ve wanted to break into that library ever since—to show him I could.”
“Where?” came a stern voice.
“The garage. A door was open.”
Iskra flashed wide eyes at him, filled with accusation. But hadn’t she closed it?
“Shut it down and walk it,” a voice ordered.
“Yes, sir.”
Was she setting him up? He hated the thought but couldn’t shake it. Knowing he had no other options now and that their timeline had just been cut shorter, Leif hurried on. Boots scratching against the concrete floor, they turned a corner—right into a stone wall. Ambush, his paranoia accused.
“Here,” she whispered, hand tracing the surface.
It was hard to believe they could get anywhere in this concrete coffin, but he told himself to chill. Wait it out. Iskra wasn’t going to sacrifice herself, her career, or her chance of seeing Taissia again by screwing this up.
Unless that was her price—him for her and Taissia’s freedom.
At the seamless gray wall, Leif’s misgivings thickened. He skidded a glance at her, but she wasn’t looking at the wall. She was staring at the floor.
“What’re you doing?” he asked.
She ignored him, tapping her toe against the slabs. Which made Leif step back and study the ground, half expecting it to fall out from under him. It struck him how clean it was back here. Someone tended this. Regularly.
“Ah,” she said, and hopped onto one square.
His breath stuck in his throat, waiting for something to happen. But . . . nothing. “Wh—”
“Here.” Eyes alive with mischief and deduction, Iskra caught his sleeve and tugged him. “Stand there.”
Disconcerted, Leif stilled on the spot she indicated.
Again, nothing.
“Over one,” she said, assessing the wall, then him. “Yeah, one more.”
“Are you—”
“Do it.”
Irritated, he adjusted to the right.
With barely a whisper of noise, the floor dropped an inch.
Then rotated like the well-oiled hidden door it was. The entire wall moved with it, switching them from the interior of the passage to . . .
The floor hoisted, sealing the gap as if the mechanism hadn’t changed sides of the wall.
Now they were surrounded by a wall of black boxes with numbers and different shapes. The lighting was low and strained the eyes, likely to preserve the paintings that hung in what he guessed to be hermetically sealed boxes. Originals were labeled with the artists’ names—Van Gogh, Leighton, Matisse.
“Holy wow,” he whispered, scanning the room.
“Now,” Iskra said, her voice a mixture of awe and frustration, “to find where he stored the book.”
Yeah, he got why she expected it to be here. Were these treasures stolen? Or had Hermanns bought them? Maybe both? Wouldn’t he want to display them? Maybe some nice ones graced the walls. Perhaps his staff rotated them out. He had enough to do that each week for a year.
Looking around for the Book of the Wars, which Leif reasoned would not be on display but hidden away, he went to the wall of boxes.
“They’re touch activated,” Iskra explained. “Just the warmth of a fingertip will add light so you can see what’s inside. But once we find it, getting the box open will be a different story.”
“As long as we can take it,” Leif said as he tested her instructions and tapped a box. The black faded to gray then clear, revealing a heavily bejeweled diadem. Mentally, he whistled, recalling the mission with Tox and the team when they’d found those gems near the lamassu.
“Taking it will pretty much happen,” she promised. “Hurry.”
“You’d think with pieces worth millions, Hermanns would go to greater lengths to protect them.” Coming in through the garage, then the passages. It had been easy. “Too easy,” he murmured, nerves jangling as he turned a slow circle.
“Don’t be paranoid,” Iskra muttered.
“I’m usually the one saying that.” No, this was too easy. Way too easy. He studied the vault door that—according to their research—was at least two feet thick.
Two feet thick there, but not at the passage?
Leif glanced back to the swiveling door. His heart stuttered. “We have to get out—now.”
Iskra scowled. “What?”
He nodded to the wall. Flanking the swiveling door were dual two-foot-thick steel doors. They were slid back. Closed, they would have prevented the door from swiveling. But they were open. Someone was already here.
Iskra cursed.
A gust of air drew Leif around. Two men emerged from behind curtains on either side of a Van Gogh. They lifted weapons at Leif and Iskra and fired.
CHAPTER 29
STUTTGART, GERMANY
“Sir, they are secured in the library as instructed.”
Rutger Hermanns nodded as his head of security ducked out of the solar where he was working on the final assault. When he shifted back and found the young man shooting daggers at him, he could not help but smile. “Relax, Andreas.”
“It is too dangerous!”
“It is necessary,” Rutger countered.
“She is too close—”
“She knows, Andreas. Iskra already knows who you are. No more pretense. You must face this. Accept her wrath,” he insisted with a quiet laugh, “because we all know well the wrath of Viorica.” He lifted an eyebrow at him. “Do we not?”
“Veratti—”
“Will be informed.” Rutger glanced at the schematics spread over the table. “For now”—he thumped the paperwork—“this is our priority. And they are our puppets.”
“What if they won’t cooperate?”
Rutger snickered, nodding at the monitor where the security feeds had been accessed. It was really too brilliant, having Iskra and Metcalfe think they were pulling one over on him. “They have bitten into the rotten apple like greedy children.” He shrugged when uncertainty slid across the young man’s brow. “They want what we have. What else will they do but cooperate?”
Andreas eyed the feed and his tenacious, sharp-tongued, sharp-witted sister. If only she had gone back to Bulgaria. Perhaps she would have a chance to live. But as it was, Rutger knew Andreas feared for her.
“They know we have the book.”
“Yes, Veratti did just as expected,” Rutger murmured as he indicated the plans. “I have told you, it is not foolproof, this method. I cannot guarantee—”
“What of Huber?”
Rutger lifted a shoulder. “One must hope.”
“It is not enough!”
With an upheld palm, Rutger nodded. “It is all we have, my young friend.” His gaze flicked to the monitor. “Ah, good. It’s time.”
Emerging from the dregs of the drug that he and Iskra had been shot with, Leif prowled the library, looking for a way to remove the metal cuffs that zapped him with angry darts of electricity when he got too close to the door and window sensors. He paced to the door, testing the current again. Fiery pain snaked around his wrist and up his arm, nearly sending him to a knee. He growled and jerked back. Shifted to the window and felt the cuffs zap him. There must be a way. . . .
“Just stop. It’s useless.” Also cuffed, Iskra sagged in a chair, holding her head. “They set us up. Now we wait to see what the monster wants.”
The cuffs were steel, so he couldn’t break them. But what if he found something to interrupt the current? At a bookcase, Leif searched for something to short-circuit it.
On both cuffs?
He rotated his forearms, eyeing his inner wrist where the cuffs had zapped him. A thin red welt stared angrily back. His gaze hopped past his burnt flesh to the small telephone table. On it was a bifold painting, both panels no bigger than his hand from heel to fingertip and painted into three rows with different depictions in each section. He lifted it from the table, eyeing the macabre images.
Shrieks and screams stabbed his brain as he stared at the middle image on the left panel—a king surrounded by eight or ten other kings, all laid out and bloody. Sick.
He set it down, unsettled. Turned to the bookcase.
“We can do this, Chief.”
I will rise.
I will rise.
His skull ached from the leftover drug and the assault of words rushing in, luring his attention back to the diptych. He reached toward it but hesitated. Squinted.
“You’re pushing too hard.”
“It’s what I do.”
Not sure where the words came from, Leif grunted, feeling as if someone had just poured lemon juice on a cut. He cocked his head, trying to fight off the burning. To sort the chaotic messages his brain was digging up and throwing at him in no specific order.
“Ah, Miss Todorova.”
At the voice of Hermanns, Leif snatched up the painting. Not sure why, except that he felt this compulsion to study the panels more, better. He slipped it into the pocket of his tactical jacket.
When he turned, he found Iskra rising. Color infused her cheeks as she glowered at Hermanns. No, not at Hermanns—the person behind him.
“How dare you,” she growled at the younger man.
Startled, Leif recognized him from the Meteoroi confrontation in Angola.
Iskra trembled with anger. “You defile our name by working with this . . . this demon!”
“Are you talking to me?” Hermanns asked with a laugh. “Or your brother?”
“This is not my brother,” she spat.
Before he could react, she flew at Andrew. Punched him. Kicked him.
Leif rushed forward, trying to grab her cuffed hands as she beat her brother. It was not the precise, focused violence of an assassin, but the wild, angry rage of a sister betrayed. Leif caught her arm and drew her back, but her elbow connected with his jaw. Sent daggers of pain down his neck and shoulders. Though he stumbled, he maintained his hold.
“Get off me,” she demanded.
“Now, now, Miss Todorova,” Rutger said, all too patronizing as he crossed the room and sat in one of the leather
high-backed chairs. “This is not what I expected from such a skilled operative as Viorica.”
“She died with Hristoff.” She shrugged off Leif’s hold and straightened her shirt.
Hermanns lifted a pipe and tapped it against his palm. “Quite right,” he said, as if he were a proper gentleman. “In fact”—he pointed the mouthpiece of the pipe at her—“it is said you have gone soft since he died, that you have lost your chutzpah, as they say.”
“Wrong tack,” Leif warned, seeing the fire hit Iskra’s gaze.
“Oh, that’s right,” Hermanns said, eyeing him. “You’re the lover now, aren’t you? Did you find a ring among the items in my vault to give her?”
Leif gritted his teeth. “Why are you trying to tick us off? You want us to splatter your gray matter?”
Hermanns guffawed, then stuffed his pipe. “I would like to see you try, but we will defer that pleasure until later.”
“Why?” Iskra growled, molten hatred pouring off the iron gaze she aimed at her brother. “You were so smart, so good!”
“So good at what, Iskra?” Andrew asked, and his accent was different than it had been in Angola. “You don’t know me. You haven’t seen me—”
“I know the real you,” she asserted. “The boy who brought me chocolate for my birthday.”
“You were ten! And it wasn’t for you,” he said, his voice losing its potency.
The little girl she’d once been appeared in her fragile expression. “What?”
Andrew looked miserable. “I was home, trying to get our father to join a business venture. It could have solved . . . so much. But he—” A leaden breath drew him up sharp. His gaze fled hers and, apparently, the truth. “He told me what he planned . . . for you.” He heaved a sigh. “I argued. Tried to stop him. But he wouldn’t listen. He said there was no other way. That’s when I saw you in the back room.”
“I remember,” Iskra said hollowly, her gaze distant.
“No,” he argued, shaking his head. “You remember a romanticized version. I gave you the chocolate to keep you quiet, but it was supposed to be for Father’s paramour.”