Right Through Me (The Obsidian Files #1)

by Shannon McKenna

  “More than that.”

  “Chump change,” Noah said. “You call that money?”

  “Yeah. With benefits. Like this.” He squeezed Caro’s breast. She gasped sharply.

  Noah’s hands clenched. “I need her alive and functional. She set the biometric parameters on the vault. Only her brainwaves can open it. The safe is programmed to destroy anything you try to extract by force. Kill her, and you kill the money.”

  “Hmmm.” The thug ran a meaty, bloodcaked hand over Caro’s tangled hair, and cupped her head. “Brain waves, huh? You could just shave off all this pretty hair, stick on some electrodes. Record the brainwaves. Crack the safe with a playback. Beats hauling this whiny bitch around.” He yanked hard at her hair. “Then you’d look like me,” he crooned, licking her throat. “Only scared.”

  The rage almost ran him over. Noah forced it down. He’d make that piece of shit pay in blood for every humiliation. Later. When Caro was safe.

  “Won’t work,” he said. “The sensors pick up body heat, blood flow and electrical fields, all keyed to her. Not my preference. I like to eliminate all witnesses. But shit happened, and I had to improvise.”

  “Big fail, fuckface. Right now, everything belongs to me. The girl, the safe, the bonds. You.”

  “Only until Mark Olund gets here,” Noah said. “I’m telling you I can help you flatten him like the piece of shit that he is. Then you and I get to split some serious money.”

  The doubt on the guy’s face was reflected in the frantic fluctuations of color around his head.

  “One thing at a time,” the guy said. “To start with, I want you restrained. You make me tense.” He extended a hand without taking his eyes off Noah, feeling around for a canvas bag next to the bed. He pulled out thick zip ties and put them in Caro’s hand. “First, take off your jacket and throw it toward me,” he said to Noah. “Then turn around. Kneel. Put your hands behind your back. She puts the cuffs on you. I hold the gun to her head while she does it. Then she cuffs your ankles. One wrong move and she dies. Bye bye brainwaves. You follow me?”

  “Yes,” Caro said, when he prodded her with the gun barrel. “I hear you.”

  Noah shrugged off his jacket and tossed it. It landed halfway between them. His smartphone slid out of the pocket and onto the floor.

  “Turn around!” the man barked. “Get down! Cross your wrists and keep them crossed!”

  Noah sank to his knees. Echolocation formed an exact picture of where Caro and her captor were in space, as if he had eyes in the back of his head. Caro was moving. A masculine grunt and a sharp hiss of pain showed that her captor was on his feet as well.

  Muted sounds. Zip ties scattered on the floor. A thud of a gun butt connecting with Caro’s head again. A stifled grunt of pain.

  He hung on to himself. Patience. Wait for it, goddamnit. Wait.

  “Pick them up, you dumb cow, and don’t drop them again,” the guy snarled.

  “You won’t have to split the take with anyone but me, once Mark is dead,” Noah said. “There’s no one else to pay off. No witnesses but me. And her,” he added, like an afterthought.

  The other man hesitated. “What about my men?”

  Noah shrugged.

  “Shit!” He sounded irritated. “All of them?”

  “You need a better crew,” Noah remarked.

  “So do you. And why did you stash her in that flophouse dump if she’s the key to all that money?”

  Noah stared straight ahead. “I was keeping an eye on her there. Neither one of us has a crew, but together we could take Mark. Are you in?”

  There was a long silence as the man thought it over. “Ninety percent for me, ten for you,” he said slowly. “Since I’m the one holding the gun.”

  “Get real,” Noah said. “Fifty-fifty. You can’t take down Olund without me.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. That guy is one hard son of a bitch.”

  “So am I. Just keep in mind that it’s him I want to kill and not you.” Noah eased around to look at him. “Just look outside, if you want proof. I’m good at killing.”

  The thug was holding the gun to the back of Caro’s neck and clutching a bedpost with the other hand. He studied Noah through slitted eyes. “Who the fuck are you, man?”

  “Does it matter?”

  “That’s not an answer. Tie him up.” He shoved Caro forward. “Move!”

  She stumbled forward. He felt her cold fingers fumbling at his wrists, her hair swinging, brushing his forearms.

  “Tighter,” the man barked. “I want it to hurt. Now the feet.”

  Caro kneeled and struggled at his ankles with the zip tie until the guy was satisfied.

  The guy pulled her roughly back against himself, his arm pressing down on her throat, the gun pressed to her temple. Noah turned his head.

  “So?” Noah asked. “How about that forty million? Do we have a deal?”

  “I didn’t say that you could look at me, dickhead. I should just give you to Mark as a bonus. Bet he’d be happy to have you to play with.”

  “Put the gun down,” Noah coaxed. “I’m restrained, and she’s harmless.”

  “Don’t tell me what to do,” the man replied.

  “We need her alive and functioning,” Noah insisted.

  “You keep saying that.”

  “Look at her,” Noah said. “She’s a basket case. The gun is overkill.”

  “Yeah,” the other guy said, with a harsh laugh. “Right. Funny.”

  “She’ll do whatever you say. Right?” Noah looked at Caro.

  She drew in a hitching breath. “Yes,” she whispered, through bluish lips.

  “See?” Noah said. “She’ll cooperate. I’m restrained. She and I both want to live. And all of us want that money.”

  Caro nodded.

  Slowly, the guy lifted the gun barrel from her head.

  Noah snapped the zip tie effortlessly and sprang up, twisting in the air. “Dive!” he yelled.

  Caro hit the ground. Mark’s thug opened fire. Bullets whizzed past Noah’s cheek, but he evaded them, with his combat reflexes and his AVP. One barely clipped his ear. Others pocked the walls.

  He landed, slamming the man to the ground. The guy’s gun skittered under the bed. He rammed his knee up toward Noah’s groin.

  Noah twisted to protect himself as the guy snatched up the bloodied knife he’d dropped on the floor earlier. He whipped it up.

  Noah blocked the stabbing blow to his face, but his opponent’s blade sliced through his sleeve and carved a gash in his arm. Noah yanked the knife from his pants pocket. With a yell, drove the notched blade down through his opponent’s hand, pinning it to the floor.

  The knife bit deep into the damp plywood.

  The guy screamed, convulsing. Blood spread beneath his hand. He stabbed at Noah with his knife, but his wild, slashing strokes didn’t reach, not with his other hand pinned to the ground.

  Noah snagged the man’s knife hand, torqued it . . . and crushed it. The knife fell.

  Noah straddled the guy. That fuckhead had hit Caro. Cut her. Now he paid.

  He started in on the guy’s face. Then his ribs. Instinct and training took over, and he let it roar on through him like a flash flood—

  . . . Noah . . . Noah! Stop! It’s enough! Stop it, goddamnit!

  The words came from faraway. Caro’s voice. He fought his way back.

  Those strange, rhythmic rasps were his own panting breaths. His throat was raw. He had a vague memory of screaming.

  He stared down at the broken, unrecognizable man beneath him. Mark’s bald, goateed thug was a gory mess. Blood gushed from his nose, his jaw was askew, his eye socket was crushed, trapping his eyelid so that it could not blink. His other eye watered, rolling frantically.

  His own knuckles looked like raw meat.

  “Noah?” Caro’s voice was barely a whisper. “Are you OK?”

  He nodded, struggling off the guy. Feeling weak. Just when he needed to be strong for her.

&n
bsp; She grabbed him. His forehead pressed the cool skin of her belly, but just for a second. He had work to do. He heaved himself off the guy. Reached to touch his carotid artery.

  There was a pulse, barely. He was shutting down. He saw it in the man’s sig, too. No tears when this one went down the drain. “Dying,” he said.

  “Good.” Her voice hardened. “Wish I’d done it myself.”

  “I killed the ones outside,” he said. “Three more out there.”

  Caro got to her feet and swayed for a moment, clutching the bedpost for balance. Her eyes looked glassy, but he could see her fighting the drop in blood pressure by sheer force of will. “What now?” she asked. “I assume you don’t want to involve the police.”

  “That’s right,” he said. “My DNA would confuse the living shit out of a crime lab. But Mark won’t call the cops either when he shows up. This is his mess. Let him deal with it. We just need to get you away before he shows up.”

  Noah looked around and spotted a crumpled wrapper from a breakfast sandwich on the floor. He retrieved it, fished a pen from a pocket of his own jacket and smoothed the grease-stained paper out onto the window sill. “You write this,” he said.

  “Write what? Why me?”

  “Mark might recognize my handwriting, even if I try to disguise it. I don’t want to identify myself to him yet.” He pushed the pen into her hand.

  “OK.” She poised it over the crumpled wrapper. “So?”

  “Write, ‘Oblio.chat. You’re the Keyseeker. I’m the Keyholder. When I find you, we’ll talk terms.’ Just that. Nothing else.”

  She looked up, eyes wide and wary. “Terms? With Mark? Are you nuts?”

  “We have to establish a point of contact. I’d finish this right now, if I could, but I’m not prepared. And I don’t want you anywhere near him.” They stared at each other. Finally, he made an impatient gesture. “Write it. Now. So we can get out of here.”

  She wrote it, asking him what was capped and what was not along the way. Noah crumpled it, bent down, and shoved the ball of paper into the dying man’s mouth.

  Caro turned her gaze away, shuddering.

  His own jacket lay stuck to a thick smear of blood. Too bad. He would have liked to use it for Caro. He scooped it up anyway, along with his phone.

  Her coat caught his eye in the corridor, crumpled and forgotten in a corner. He picked it up and draped the ugly thing over her shoulders. Her bare, bloodied feet looked so vulnerable, poking out from the frayed hems of her blood-spattered jeans. He hated that she had no shoes on. “Come on,” he said shortly, tugging on her hand.

  She followed him out the door, stopping short when she saw the bodies. The one by the door lay in the dirt, face turned to the side, mouth gaping. Buzzcut swayed from his tree, his rope creaking in the rising wind. She gazed at them without flinching, her face pale and stiff.

  “There’s another one behind their Jeep,” he told her.

  Noah dug car keys out of his jacket pocket, vaguely surprised they were still there. He pulled out his phone, and immediately called Sisko.

  “Hey,” Sisko’s usually mellow voice had an edge to it. “So?”

  “You can turn around,” he said. “Go on home. It’s handled.”

  He could hear Sisko sigh. “Ah. OK. How many did you have to take down?”

  “There were only four. Mark wasn’t there yet. He’s on his way. I left him a note. Pointed him to a chatroom. We’ll talk with him soon.”

  “Only four, huh?” Sisko grunted. “You’re getting soft. You need challenge.”

  Noah glanced at Caro. “I have enough.”

  “By the way,” Sisko said. “Don’t go home. It’s compromised. Use the Kirkland house. Someone found you. I swung by to pick up your guns, and the place was trashed.”

  “Oh. Yeah,” Noah said. “About that. That wasn’t, uh, Mark.”

  Sisko was silent for a moment, bewildered “Holy shit. You did that? To your own property? What the fuck? What happened? Did you have a combat program freakout? But you were the one who taught us to beat those! You wrote the book!”

  Noah was too exhausted to tell him to shut the fuck up. “It ran me over.”

  “Do we need to do any clean-up?” Sisko asked. “Body bagging? Floor bleaching? Anything?”

  “No, don’t get near it. I don’t know when Mark is coming.”

  “OK,” Sisko said. “We’ll meet you in Kirkland. Later.”

  Sisko hung up before Noah had a chance to tell the guy that he didn’t need a welcoming committee. He looked into Caro’s set face and bluish lips, and lifted her up into his arms. “I know you have a thing about this,” he said. “But you need make an exception to your rule today.”

  She wrapped an arm around his shoulder. “I can walk,” she told him. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re barefoot,” he said. “It’ll take us five times as long to get to the car through those woods if you walk. We need to move fast.”

  “But aren’t you tired?”

  “It’s what I’m made for,” he said. “It’s easy to carry you.”

  She sighed, and shifted in his arms, arranging herself more comfortably. “Whatever. Put me down if you get tired. Please.”

  Not likely. It took a while to bushwhack through the gullies and the thicker undergrowth, but he ate up the clear ground in a swift, easy lope on his way back to the clearing where he’d hidden the Mercedes. He opened the back seat, nudging her inside, and got in after her.

  He sagged against the car seat. Smelling blood, the trees, his own sweat. Hearing only wind, and the rustling trees, and the loud galloping thuds of their heartbeats.

  Caro put her hand on his, looking down when she felt the rough, torn skin and dried blood on his knuckles. “Noah.” She sounded exhausted.

  “Yeah,” he said, taking her hand in his. “It was bad. But now it’s over.”

  They sat for a moment, staring mutely down at the blood caked on their clasped hands. But she wasn’t done. She looked up, wide green eyes meeting his.

  “Why did you come for me?” she asked. “After what I did.”

  He was at a loss for a long moment. The part of him that could process a question like that was not working right now. AVP and his combat program and all his many mods could not help him with complicated shit like this.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I just did it. Without thinking. I had to.”

  “You didn’t have to,” she said. “You had the footage already. You had all that you needed from me.”

  He shook his head. “No,” he said. “Not all.”

  Her gaze dropped, but she looked up at him again after a minute. “I still can’t believe you did that for me.”

  There was an awkward pause. He shrugged. “The AVP is fucking my impulse control,” he said. “I no longer give a shit if what I want is bad for me.”

  “But I’m not . . .” Her words trailed off, and her eyes flicked away, abashed.

  He squeezed her hand. He’d been so angry at her before, but the fighting and killing burned all that away. He felt empty and hollow now.

  “Well, you were crazy, to do that,” she said, her voice muted. “But I’m glad.”

  He nodded, hoping she was done. No such luck.

  “Mark’s going to be all over your ass now,” she said. “You know that, right?”

  “Good,” he said. “Bring him on. I cannot fucking wait to deal with him.”

  She looked startled. “Seriously?”

  “Fuck, yeah. He has Luke. He hurt you. It’s war, and he is going down.”

  He stared her down, his eyes full of challenge. His AVP sputtered along, the processor mostly burned out and needing rest and fuel to rev up again, but he could still see her sig a little bit.

  That soft golden glow, filling up the car.

  Like sunrise come early.

  Chapter 23

  It couldn’t be real. Being alive at all was improbable. Let alone having been rescued by a gorgeous, valiant, more or less s
uperhuman guy.

  But here she was. Bloody, exhausted, and amazingly, alive.

  Caro smelled the salt tang of his battle sweat, stared at his scabbed, battered fingers on the steering wheel. He’d come to her rescue. Saved her from her worst nightmares. And the sun had come up.

  Noah gave her a quick, assessing glance. His face was pale, cheek scraped and bruised, shadowy eyes still reddened from the pepper spray. A red stain soaked his gray, torn-open sweatshirt sleeve.

  “Noah! What happened to your arm?”

  He glanced at it. “I got stabbed.”

  A modified man was still just a man, she thought. Pretending he wasn’t hurt to look tough. “What if you need stitches?”

  Noah shook his head. “It won’t. It’s clotting. Rapid cell repair is built in. And I’m pretty much immune to most pathogens and toxins. Even radiation is no biggie.”

  “Oh.” She shook her head. “I don’t want to watch you put that to the test.”

  “I fucking hope not.” He started the car and maneuvered out over the bumpy terrain until he got onto the narrow road, handling the wheel stiffly and wincing as he shifted lightly in his seat. “Guns and knives are about all I can handle right now.”

  She looked closely at the dark, wet stain, making sure it wasn’t spreading. “How did you find me?”

  He stared straight out at the dirt road that wound through the trees. “Later for that.”

  She reached across the console and laid her hand on his thigh. The denim was damp with sweat and stiff with blood, but her fingers gripped the steely bulge of his thigh muscles. “Noah,” she said. “We have to talk to each other. No more secrets.”

  His mouth tightened. “You’ll be angry.”

  She sighed. “Please. At this moment, you can do no wrong. Just tell me.”

  “OK. If you insist. I geotagged you,” he admitted. “With the tile that fell off the painting you liked. I stuck it in your coat pocket in your apartment. After we made love.”

  She stared at him, astonished.

  “Look in your pockets.”

  She did. Both of them. Finding a bus ticket, a laundromat token, a button that had been missing in action, a couple receipts, a pack of spearmint gum . . . and something small, square and hard. She held it up.