“Okay, I—” Grace turned at the sound of the bell over the door. Customers. She drifted away. Customers meant sales for Harold. They could have their tea afterward.
Only…they didn’t look like possible buyers of art. As a matter of fact, they looked dangerous.
Grace moved back to Harold’s side.
Grace lived alone in New York and she knew the look of dangerous men, enough so that she’d never been in trouble because she knew enough to avoid the dangerous places they congregated. The Feinstein Art Gallery was the last place on earth she’d think of in terms of trouble.
But trouble was walking through the door, right now.
Three men, one tall, broad, with bad skin, dressed in a long black leather coat, the other two short and wiry, one dressed in an expensive fleece track suit, the other in jeans and a bomber jacket. They came into the gallery in single file, footsteps echoing on the hardwood floor, then fanned out, as if covering territory. They didn’t look alike but they shared a look of cold menace, staring at her and Harold like sharks eyeing minnows.
Something cold and nasty had just entered Harold’s bright and civilized gallery.
In here, both she and Harold could forget for a moment what was out there, cocooned in art and hot tea.
But now the outside world was in here, lined up in front of them like gunslingers awaiting the signal to shoot. There was a moment of utter and complete silence as the three men stared at them, menace coming off them in almost visible waves. Fear made her senses diamond bright. Her heart kicked up its beat, sounding loud in her ears, like a drumbeat.
Grace moved closer to Harold in an instinctive attempt to protect him, though there was nothing she could do against three tough-looking men. But Harold was so vulnerable, so fragile. He was elderly and had a heart condition. Her shoulder touched his and she could feel that he was trembling.
At least she was young and strong. And had a can of Mace in her purse. She clutched the strap of her purse, surreptitiously fingering the clasp. She kept the Mace handy, in a side pocket. No sense in having a weapon if you had to dig down to the bottom of a purse to find it.
With a strong indrawn breath, Harold drew himself up and looked the men in the face. “May I help you gentlemen?” he said. She was so proud of him for his firm voice.
It happened so fast, she had no time to react.
Subconsciously, she was waiting for them to respond. Centuries of civilization had drummed it into her DNA that a query requires a response. Whatever bad thing the men might be bringing into the gallery, it would be after answering a question posed to them.
What happened next had nothing to do with civilization. It came straight out of the caves. Not a word was spoken. Shockingly, Leather Coat stepped forward, punched Harold in the face, then stepped to the side, hooking a big, beefy arm around her neck in one smooth motion.
Harold fell to the floor like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Blood lined his mouth and his nose spattered blood with each heaving breath.
With a cry, Grace lunged toward him, but was brutally restrained by the huge arm around her neck, holding her so tightly he was cutting off her air. She brought her hands up to claw at his sleeve but could find no purchase against the sleek leather and the hard, ropy forearm muscles underneath.
The man shifted, lifting her until her toes could barely reach the ground, tightening his arm until she saw stars dancing in front of her eyes. Inside she was screaming, scrabbling madly to get to Harold, but she was held as contemptuously as a doll off the ground, and only a high-pitched mewling sound escaped her lips.
An icy metallic ring dug into her temple. She shifted her eyes to the right to understand what it was.
A gun. A huge, black, terrifying gun, held against her head.
“Stop,” the man said simply. His voice was deep, guttural, inhuman, the tone one of utter command. There was nothing Grace could do. In another thirty seconds, she’d be unconscious anyway from lack of oxygen.
Resistance was not only useless, but any hope she had of helping Harold required her to be conscious and upright.
She stilled instantly.
“Good,” the man grunted, rewarding her by letting up a little on the pressure against her throat. Her feet hit the floor at the same moment her throat spasmed, wheezing as air burned its way back into her lungs. If she’d been free, she would have bent forward in an effort to breathe better, but the man maintained his hold around her neck, letting her know exactly who was boss.
The rim of the gun tightened against her temple until the skin broke. A trickle of warm blood dripped down the side of her face.
With every choked breath, she breathed in a nauseous combination of rank sweat overlaid by an expensive men’s cologne. The combination was so horrible she was almost sorry she could breathe again.
Outside the window, a businessman hurried by, coat whipping in the wind. A few heavy drops fell to the sidewalk and he put a burgundy leather briefcase over his head to shield himself from the rain that was beginning to pelt down.
He could have been on the moon for all the help he was.
Fleece Track Suit checked his watch, then looked at Leather Coat. “It’s time.”
The man simply lifted her off her feet again and, as compact and disciplined as a phalanx, the three men—Leather Coat holding her as if she were a doll being carried to another part of the playground—walked together quickly to a side door, the one that Grace knew gave onto an alleyway flanking the gallery. She’d once helped Harold dump cartons in the alleyway, a dank, dark cul de sac, the feral urban counterpoint to the airy grace and light of the gallery.
There was one small window set in the gallery’s north wall, overlooking the alley. She looked through it and gasped. There were two men there, one aiming a big black gun at the back of the other. The man holding the gun was tall, heavy, with long reddish-brown hair, his victim shorter, broader, with close-cropped dark hair.
The long-haired man with the gun tightened his grip on the trigger. Grace was horrified to think that she was about to witness a cold-blooded murder. If she could have, she’d have screamed a warning to the victim, but she barely had enough air to breathe. And even if she could scream, not much sound bled out through Harold’s thick windows.
Instinctively, though, she fought against the man holding her, trying to get some kind of sound out. Maybe if she kicked the wall…
The dark-haired victim suddenly dropped from sight and Grace stilled, stunned. He was there and then…he wasn’t. He’d just disappeared.
The goon holding her moved forward, together with the other two thugs, to the small window. There was a clear view of the alleyway and she could see that the man hadn’t disappeared. He had simply dropped to the ground like a stone. Grace would have thought that he’d been shot, but it looked like he was…
Oh my God, yes. He wasn’t down for the count. He was fighting. From the ground. And winning, too, from the looks of it. He had his attacker in some kind of complicated hold, completely paralyzed.
The victim’s legs tightened around his attacker’s middle and he held the attacker’s neck in the bend of his elbow, squeezing. One hand was squeezing the gun out of the attacker’s hand. The attacker was kicking madly, like a pig in a slaughterhouse, but nothing he did could dislodge the dark-haired man. The gun clattered to the ground and the dark-haired man snatched it up, handling it with familiarity.
One of the thugs in the gallery kicked open the door to the alleyway and the man holding Grace moved forward until they were spotlit in the doorway.
The two men on the ground looked up, both breathing hard, muscles straining.
“Drop the gun. Now.” Leather’s Coat’s voice was hoarse, as if he didn’t talk much, with a heavy Hispanic accent. He lifted his arm until her feet dangled again. The gun barrel cruelly ground into the skin of her temple. The entire right side of her face was covered in blood now. She could smell her own blood—a dark metallic smell. “Drop it or I pop her one
right in the head.”
God. Watching the attack in the alley, she had, for a second, completely forgotten about the man holding her tightly against him with a gun to her head. She started trembling. She had no idea who the victim of the attack was. How could using her as a threat possibly work? It hit her like a sledgehammer to the heart that she was one second away from dying.
She twisted in her captor’s hold, trying to kick him, suddenly desperate now to get away. There wasn’t enough oxygen in her head to make plans, she only knew she didn’t want to die without putting up some kind of fight.
The arm around her neck was like steel, the muscles she could feel against her side and back thick and hard. He probably outweighed her by over a hundred pounds. Fighting was insane.
But the animal part of her refused to die without a struggle. Grimly, she clawed again at the arm around her neck and kicked as hard as she could at his shins, but all she encountered was something stiff and unyielding. The man was wearing boots that went to his knees.
Her tormentor growled low in his throat and squeezed. Tight, tighter.
Oh God, she was going to die. Right here, right now. All the things she had left to do with her life, all the paintings she wanted to create, the music she wanted to listen to, the walks she wanted to take—it was too late.
“Throw it,” her tormentor rasped.
The dark-haired man kept his gaze fixed on Leather Coat, unblinking in the rain that threw a scrim over the scene in the alleyway.
Her vision was failing, spots revolving in front of her eyes. There was a dull blackness at the edges of her vision. “Throw it,” her tormentor said again.
Throw what? What was he talking about?
A clatter on the ground. Her tormentor hadn’t been talking to her. He had addressed the dark-haired man, who had thrown the gun he’d wrested from his would-be assassin onto the oily, pebble-strewn ground. He slowly stood up.
“Let up on her,” the man said quietly. He had a deep, calm voice with a hint of accent. “You’re choking her to death.”
“Your other weapons first.”
The dark-haired man reached inside his parka and pulled a gun out. He held it carefully by the muzzle. “Safety’s on, as you can see. Now let her breathe.”
Amazingly, that quiet voice held enough command to make the arm around her throat loosen. Her feet scrabbled, touched the ground for the first time in what felt like hours. Grace took in a big wheezing breath, hoping it wouldn’t be her last. Though the chokehold had loosened, the gun was still rock-solid against her head. She was still so close to the man who held her that she could feel the vibrations in his chest as he spoke.
“The rest of your weapons,” he said to the dark-haired man.
The gun came away from her head, the cold barrel sliding horribly down her neck, trailing down over her arm to stop at her elbow. “Or I blow a hole in her elbow. Then shoulder. Blow her arm right off. First one, then the other. Then I kneecap her. She’ll die piece by piece.”
Grace was shaking so hard her teeth rattled. The man’s low tone was matter-of-fact, not menacing, which made it even more horrible. He could have been ordering a drink in a bar, not threatening to kill her by slow degrees.
Fear set up a keening whine in her head. She looked around wildly, wondering if this would be her last sight on this earth.
A filthy alleyway in the rain, cloudy light at one end, dank darkness at the other. One of her few friends, Harold, lying behind her on the floor, wounded, if he hadn’t already died from the blow. And four men, all violent, all dangerous, all armed. They wanted something from the dark-haired man and, crazily, were using her to get it.
Though she felt danger to her coming from the four attackers, she didn’t feel that at all coming from the man who’d been attacked. The menace he radiated was tightly focused on the man holding her.
“Go on,” Leather Coat growled. The gun tapped horribly against her elbow. “Give me an excuse to shoot.”
Grace looked up at the man holding her. He was grinning at the dark-haired man. He never looked at her. She had a horrible feeling she barely existed for him. She was like a tool dangling from his arm, useful to get something he wanted, of no intrinsic importance. “I’m waiting. I hope you give me the excuse to blow her away bit by bit. I’ll enjoy it.”
No doubt he would. Cruelty was etched in every line of his face.
The dark-haired man reached around his waist, pulling a gun from behind him. Moving slowly, he placed it on the ground.
“Knives,” her tormentor rasped. “And don’t tell me you don’t have any.”
In a second, two sharp, gleaming knives clattered to the ground.
“I hear you carry a karambit. Out with it.”
A wicked-looking curved knife that came to a surgically sharp point fell to the ground in a flash of steel. The man holding her grunted.
The attacker on the ground stood up, wincing, with a sneer of victory. He’d been bested in a fight, but now the odds were in his favor.
“Turn around,” Leather Coat growled to the dark-haired man.
Grace’s gasp was loud in the alleyway. The dark-haired man was unarmed and helpless. They’d already tried to kill him once and now they were going to finish the job.
She had no idea who he was, but she felt connected to him somehow. He had let himself be disarmed to spare her. She had no idea if he could have prevailed against four men, but the way he fought proved that he wouldn’t die easily, not without inflicting a great deal of harm. The dark-haired man knew how to defend himself, not to mention the fact that he walked around with a small arsenal on his person.
Maybe he was a bad guy, too, just like the other four. Maybe she had stumbled onto some kind of turf war of drug dealers or something. Maybe this was a mob shakeout.
She could believe that, absolutely, of the other four but found it hard to believe of the dark-haired man, for no special reason her oxygen-deprived brain could conjure up, except that he had a different look.
Whoever he was, he’d pissed off the four criminals greatly and on the theory that your enemy’s enemy is your friend, she was on his side. As he was on hers. He’d allowed himself to be disarmed and was probably going to die, right now, to spare her.
No. Every cell in her body rejected the notion. He wasn’t going to die, slaughtered like an animal. She wouldn’t let him. Apart from anything else, the instant he was gone, she would be dead, too. She’d seen the goons’ faces. They weren’t the kind to leave witnesses behind.
Together with some oxygen, an electric pulse ran through her, grounding her, giving her strength. She wasn’t ready to die. Not here, in this filthy alley, and not now, two months from her twenty-eighth birthday.
And neither was he going to die. She met his eyes, the deepest brown she’d ever seen. His gaze was clear, direct and sad. Grace caught his gaze, willing him to look at her, to follow her thoughts, darting her eyes to her purse. He could see that the clasp was open. She looked deliberately at her purse, at him, at the man holding her. Over and over again.
He understood. The slight aura of resignation and defeat was gone. Grace watched as he turned back into a warrior, right before her eyes. His broad chest expanded as he took in deep breaths, like swimmers do before going a distance underwater. His stance changed, became springy as he balanced on the balls of his feet. The other men seemed oblivious to the change. They were gloating, sure that they’d won this battle, and weren’t paying attention.
Which was perfect.
Grace had no idea how good a fighter this man was, but she was willing to risk everything to find out. And if he couldn’t overwhelm four men, she’d rather die by a shot to the head trying to get away than by slow torture.
“Hey!” Leather Coat bellowed to him. “You heard me! Turn around right now, you fuckhead, or I’m blowing a piece of her away.”
Leather Coat was distracted by the drama. Like all bullies, he relished control, imagining victory before victory was his, si
mply because it was unthinkable that he lose. She’d known people like that, who loved wielding overwhelming power over others because it fed their ego. And Leather Coat’s ego must be really pumped right now, holding a gun on a woman, facing an unarmed man four to one. The kind of odds bullies loved.
Grace could feel him relaxing, letting down his guard, ready to enjoy the next couple of minutes. It was a done deal, as far as he was concerned.
Over her dead body.
She waited a beat, allowing Leather Coat’s grip to loosen further, gave a sharp nod to the man, hoping he understood, reached into her purse with a lightning fast move, brought the Mace canister up to Leather Coat’s face and sprayed him full in the eyes.
His bellow could be heard in New Jersey. The big black gun clattered to the ground as he brought both hands to his eyes, roaring with pain and rage.
What she saw next defied belief. Dark Hair had moved almost too fast for her to track. Before her hand was in front of Leather Coat’s face, he was in the air, twirling, foot lashing out, striking his adversaries with meaty thunks! Barely landing lightly on his feet before twirling again.
Grace staggered back, hoping the dark-haired man knew what he was doing, because she’d just put her life in his hands. Leather Coat would surely shoot to kill just like he said he would if he caught back up with her.
They went down like felled trees: one-two-three-four. She still hadn’t registered what she’d seen when the man straightened, and—completely non-winded, completely in control—pulled out something sleek and black from his pocket and spoke into it quietly in a language she didn’t understand, then flipped it closed.
Leather Coat lay on the ground in a fetal position, his desperate gasps for breath echoing off the walls of the alley. The man who had attacked Dark Hair was on his side, eyes rolled up in his head. The man in the fleece track suit lay still, unconscious, his arm bent at an unnatural angle. The man in the bomber jacket had gleaming white bone showing through his jeans, blood pooling under him. The kick had smashed his femur. He was bleeding profusely, the rain sluicing the blood-red water under him into the drains.
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