Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue
Midnight Fever Chapter 1
Other Books by Lisa Marie Rice
Copyright
About The Author
The foothills of Mount Hood, Oregon
June 12
She can barely see, barely breathe, barely control the vehicle as she drives up the cliff road. The road has loose gravel that makes her vehicle slip and slide. Where she lives, it’s not like that. Roads are smooth, not gravelly.
Where is that? Where does she live? It’s gone, the only thing in her head is fog and pain and determination.
Matt Walker. That is her goal. A who not a what, she has to remind herself. Everything in her head is gone except for the name and the numbers. She can’t even remember what the numbers are for — just that they need to match the numbers on the screen on the dashboard of the vehicle.
GPS numbers, she suddenly realizes in a flash of clarity. GPS numbers mean something, no … mean somewhere.
It’s too hard to grasp, too hard to hold on to. All she knows is the gusts of wind on a blustery day, the pockets of loose gravel, the hairpin bends in the road. All she knows is that there’s somewhere she must get to, someone she has to see. Someone who maybe can help.
Because she needs help desperately.
She is driving too fast, is barely in control. Her head is pounding, her vision is clouded, her wrists hurt. They kept her in shackles and the skin of her wrists is torn and bleeding and bruised.
The fog in her head billows and thickens, she cannot hold on to any thoughts.
The road makes a sudden bend and she takes the curve at the last second, back of the vehicle fishtailing. A rainstorm is coming, a slanting gray sweep of it visible in the hills. Tendrils of rain are already reaching the road. Soon, visibility will be down to a few feet. The road is incredibly dangerous. There is sheer rock to the right of her and a steep cliff edge to the left.
Slow down, she tells herself. But they might be following her. Probably are. Whoever held her was smart and tech-savvy. She remembers almost nothing but she does remember being in a room that required retinal scanning, remembers an IV pumping something into her veins, something that made her brain as foggy as the sky.
Maybe even now there is a drone overhead.
She bends forwards, looks up at the sky, but all she can see is black thunderhead clouds. If there’s a drone, it’s invisible.
She checks the number written on her biceps, then the number on the GPS. Close. She is close. She shakes her head sharply, as if waking herself up, as if she can clear her mind with the motion.
When she gets to … whoa … she can’t remember his name any more. To … him. When she gets to him she will be safe. For now, all she can think about is those GPS numbers and how she is getting closer, closer …
Damn! Something dark and big at the corner of her eye and she slams on the brakes and twists the wheel. A deer. She feels the thump of the right front fender, the back wheels hit loose gravel and the vehicle starts sliding, moving in a horrible kind of slow motion.
She’s a good driver but her reflexes are slowed by the drugs, by her ordeal. She tries to get back onto the road, but the back of the vehicle juts out over the cliff edge. She guns the accelerator but it’s too late. In a horrifying slow motion that is in reality just a few seconds, the vehicle tips backward into the abyss.
There is nothing she can do but hold on to the seat belt as the vehicle picks up speed down the cliff toward the rushing river at the bottom, rolling over and over, the sounds of grinding metal and shattering glass loud in the cabin. Over and over and over, rolling down the hillside, each roll a bone-jarring crash, gashing her forehead, her arms against jagged metal.
After what feels like hours, the roll comes to a halt, the sudden silence disorienting. Her senses slowly start coming back online. She can hear the sound of rushing water and there is a terrible smell.
The sky is on the ground.
It takes her long moments to realize that she is upside down, hanging from the seat belt, looking at the ceiling. She watches, dazed, as red drops collect on the ceiling. Blood. Her blood. Not gushing, dripping. So she hasn’t severed an artery. But it is a lot of blood, nonetheless. She has to get out, has to staunch the blood before she passes out.
And that smell … the memory of that smell tickles her brain. It reeks of danger, invokes fear.
She beats back the air bag, powder misting the air, unclasps her seat belt and falls to the roof, lying crumpled there for a long moment, dazed. It’s the smell more than the pain that makes her move. The vehicle’s roof is strong, only slightly dented. The window has shattered with shards inside and outside. She winces as she crawls through the window. The cuts are minor, without much bleeding. Her head, however, is dripping blood. She has to clear her eyes with her hand to look around.
She’s in a valley, cliffs rising steeply to either side of a rushing river, steel gray and in full spate. The water is loud as it rushes over boulders, spray rising high. She rolls over several times toward the water, too weak to stand up.
The river runs high and fast. Scary, but not as scary as the vehicle. Too stunned to think it through, she acts on instinct, rolling into the water. She’s a strong swimmer, but she’s so weak she can only manage a few strokes, then starts tumbling in the water, half unconscious. Not strong enough to swim, but thanks to some powerful instinct for survival, she keeps her face out of the water.
The rushing river bends and just as it sweeps her away from the bank she hears the massive boom of an explosion, black and red flames soaring to the sky, heat searing the side of her face.
An explosion so big it feels like the end of the world.
And then the river carries her away.
Bogdan Yelchin watched from the road at the top of the cliff as the SUV burned, until there was only the smoking, charred husk remaining of the $40,000 vehicle. It had a gas tank holding almost seventy liters and it had been full.
He should know, because he’d filled it just yesterday and according to his odometer, the bitch that had stolen the vehicle had driven only 34.3 miles.
How Honor Thomas had gotten past the guards, drugged and disoriented, was something Bugayev and Gribkov were going to have to explain to their boss, Ivan Antonov. Yelchin had volunteered to follow the woman but he didn’t want to have to be the one to explain any kind of failure to Antonov, who had been known to shoot subordinates reporting failure.
Yelchin didn’t care, he wasn’t the one who’d let her escape. He’d spent the night at their headquarters in Los Angeles, readying for the shipment that would be offloaded from the Maria Cristina in a week’s time . He’d flown up early this morning to check on the woman, only to find that she’d escaped.
The woman was simply a tool to keep her father in line. She’d been kept drugged and shackled and they’d filmed her and shown the film to her father. That’s all it took. No threats were necessary because she was clearly in their power. The father had to do what they said or else something would happen to his young daughter.
Perfect. In Yelchin’s experience, a threat to loved ones worked better than a direct threat.
But now she was dead.
/> The vehicle down in the gorge was lit up like a bonfire, the sound of the crackling flames rising up the steep canyon. No human shape could be discerned through the black smoke and flames.
Pulling up his powerful binoculars, he studied the terrain down to the riverbank carefully. At times there was a path down, but it was interrupted by a long scree of moraine, then by a line of thorny bushes, then a ridge with a slope so steep it would require gear to navigate.
A sudden squall of rain swept across the river from the sullen black clouds overhead.
He let the binoculars fall down to his chest, thinking hard.
Walking down there was suicide. Glancing up at the dark sky he saw that a big downpour was coming, which would make part of that descent unnavigable mud.
No. He’d report what had happened, and that the woman was dead, burned to a crisp. There probably wouldn’t even be DNA left. Certainly the vehicle itself would provide no information to the authorities. If and when they ever discovered the burned husk deep in the valley.
The daughter was gone. What they would have to do was run the recordings they had over the past days on a loop so her father would be convinced she was still alive.
Maybe it was even better this way because holding the woman, drugged and shackled, was always going to be a slight risk. This was perfect. She was dead and untraceable.
The area was isolated. Perhaps days would go by before the wreckage was discovered and more days, even weeks, before they could identify the body, if they ever did. The vehicle itself was paid for by a shell company that existed only on paper. Not even forensic economists could track down ownership.
Lightning flashed, forking down to the earth on the other side of the river. Thunder rolled. He watched the slanting gray streaks of a rainstorm in the distance that was coming closer.
Standing here in the cold rain wouldn’t do any good to anyone and the weather forecast was for dropping temperatures.
The woman was dead. It was unfortunate that she died before the end of her usefulness but shit happened, as the Americans said.
It was a good expression. Almost Russian in its bleakness.
He turned and got back into his vehicle, backed up and drove off.
The dead woman was a glitch but not a disaster.
Matt Walker cast the line into the water. He’d already caught two salmon, now lying in a basket at his feet. Maybe he could catch a third.
Or not.
He didn’t really care. He was living at the Grange, his new company’s mountain retreat and it had enough food stocks to last years. Super good food, too. Catching a third salmon wasn’t going to change anything.
His teammates kept asking when he was coming down from the mountain to begin his job. Actually, his best friend, Metal, kept asking when the fuck are you going to stop brooding?
He wasn’t brooding. He was … reflecting. Hard.
He didn’t feel any sense of urgency to come down off the mountain. At times he felt like a 19th-century trapper, only he shaved. Occasionally. There was a Matt Walker-shaped job just waiting for him at ASI, a security company of good guys, most of whom were friends. He had accepted, but he wasn’t ready to start yet, and refused any notion of pay.
In exasperation, the Big Boss, John Huntington, decided to just deposit Matt’s salary in his bank account so he’d be shamed into coming down and mixing with people. But then Matt had given instructions to his bank not to accept any payments from ASI.
Stalemate.
They ended up compromising. Matt lived at the Grange and in return acted as caretaker. He’d helped his good buddy Nick Mancino out of a scrape a while back. The scrape had been serious stuff and the Grange had been blasted by a drone missile. Matt had overseen and helped with the repair work, donning his toolbelt with relish, grateful for the hard work that took his mind off other things.
He hadn’t wanted to be paid a cent, which had annoyed both John and the other Big Boss, former Senior Chief Douglas Kowalski. They gave him a promotion before he even started the job, which he rejected.
Tough shit. They were tough guys, they could live with the frustration. For the moment, Matt was content to live like a hermit in a super luxurious mountain hideaway and nurse his fury.
Every once in a while a buddy from ASI would make it up to the Grange for a beer and a talk. They got the beer.
Seeing people was way down on the list of things Matt wanted to do. He was about done with people.
The outside world didn’t hold much appeal. And hell, he had more than enough money in the bank. He didn’t have to hurry back to work. His old man had left him a surprisingly large amount. Added to his savings and a few investments, it made him, technically, a millionaire a couple of times over, not that he gave a shit. He’d rather have his old man back. Charlie Walker had known right from wrong and couldn’t be bullshitted into mistaking one for the other.
Several freezing cold raindrops fell on his head. He watched as the rain swept down the mountain on the other side of the river, a gray slanting curtain descending from black clouds, the leading edge reaching the river. A few drops spattered his face.
Yeah. Time to get to shelter. Only a crazy man would continue standing out here in the cold and in the rain.
But … damn. The cool rain felt good.
He’d spent his military life as a SEAL — ten years — in hot, sandy hellholes that smelled of dust and shit, first in Iraq then Afghanistan. This was as far away from that as you could get.
He loved it up here, amazingly grateful for the clean air without the stench of the open sewers of Iraq, surrounded by lush greenery after years of the sere rocky landscape of Afghanistan. The foothills of Mount Hood were paradise and he loved it. Even the rain — so fresh and clean — was welcome.
The patter of drops falling hard on the rocks lining the riverbank grew louder, became a drumbeat. He was getting drenched, nature’s way of telling him to cut this shit out, get inside, get dry, get outside a nice tumbler of Talisker .
He lifted his face up to the cold rain for a moment, enjoying the fresh wind, the moment of calm after so many years of back-to-back deployments.
Okay, time to go.
Lifting the rod, he felt resistance. He’d caught something at the last minute. Something big, to judge from the reel spinning out. Huh.
The water boiled white in spots where it rushed over underwater rocks. He pulled hard on the rod but still felt major resistance in the line. Something appeared then disappeared in the river. Something big, pale. What kind of fish was that big and that color?
Then he saw it — a slender arm and a hand. Just a second before it tumbled out of sight.
Fuck, he’d caught a person, not a fish! Somehow his hook had ripped into human flesh.
There it was again! Pale gray skin against gray water, caught on a boulder for a moment, water boiling around it. Matt sprang into action without thinking. The part of his mind that had been altered by combat already had a plan by his next breath.
He whipped out his boot knife, sliced the fishing line and dove straight into the water, swimming fast. It was a race against time. Anyone who wasn’t a SEAL or an Olympic-level swimmer was going to drown in this water. And he hadn’t seen the person actually swim, just be carried along by the rushing water.
He swam in a powerful crawl, keeping his eyes peeled for that pale flash of human flesh. The river took a bend and he swam curving around, keeping to the center of the river where there was a deeper channel and the churning waters were calmer.
A squall pelted his face with icy water and he had to close his eyes for a moment. In BUDS they’d swim ten miles a day using the combat sidestroke but that kept him underwater most of the time. Right now, he had to stay above the water with his eyes open to keep track of the person.
Maybe the body.
The river was snowmelt and freezing cold. How long had the person been in the water? If it was more than twenty minutes, Matt was searching for a corpse, not a living pers
on.
A pale curve of flesh within a white wave … there! Drifting toward the left-hand bank where a small eddy captured it, spinning it. Matt caught a glimpse of long red hair, a delicate profile, before a wave washed over it.
A woman! This was a woman he’d hooked. Someone who’d fallen into the river and had been tumbling through the rapids for who knew how long.
She was probably dead, but he had to bring her in. Absolutely had to. Something in him couldn’t bear the idea of a woman floating down the river to the ocean two hundred miles away. Scraping against rocks and tree roots all the way, she’d be unrecognizable as a human being — just a battered and bloody piece of meat.
Matt lengthened his strokes. In Coronado they’d mostly trained for endurance, not speed, but he pushed for speed now. He angled left toward her, away from the relative calm of the middle of the river, battling the current, swimming hard.
She spun, disappeared underwater for a second, emerged, and was whisked away by the river again. Matt tried to assess the situation while swimming as hard as he’d ever swum in BUDS. He couldn’t see if she was breathing, but her face was often underwater. Jesus, if she was alive, she wouldn’t be for long. He put on another sprint, the cold water slowing his muscles. His arms felt like deadweight, like moving boulders instead of limbs.
He pushed again, coming closer. He reached out with one hand, grabbed a piece of fabric, but a strong crosscurrent bore her away again. But just before she spun around he saw her eyes slowly blink. God, she was alive!
SEALs had reserves, deep reserves that had been beaten into them, and he bit into his reserves, finding that place where you can push when there’s no more push in you. They were almost half a mile downriver from where he’d been fishing and he knew that very strong rapids were ahead and stretched for a mile or two. Only serious white-water rafters attempted those rapids. If she reached them, she’d be gone, bashed against the rocks. No one in the water could survive those rapids, certainly not someone semi- conscious.
He dug in, pushed for more speed and moments later caught her by the sleeve, then his hand bit into her upper arm, grasping flesh not material. She wasn’t conscious any more. Her head lolled on her shoulders as he trod water for just an instant, hooking an arm around her shoulders.
Midnight Renegade (Men of Midnight Book 7) Page 1