It was after seven p.m. and she’d just flown in from the Keweenaw Peninsula, landing her little Piper at Ann Arbor Muni Airport. Marina was exhausted from the rescue and heartbroken over Matt Granger’s death—and more than a little unsettled that someone had been at her father’s place—but even that unhappy knowledge couldn’t completely squelch her burgeoning excitement.
Though she knew it would be opening her own private version of Pandora’s box, Marina couldn’t wait to compare the pictures she’d taken in Matt Granger’s cave with the contents of the package she’d tucked away in her office. Despite its implications, she could no longer ignore the package…as well as the unsettling sense that the Skaladeskas had returned to her life once more.
But first, she was going to dump her stuff on the floor, feed Boris, and then fall onto her bed for a minimum of twelve hours. Then she’d order Cottage Inn pizza, open a bottle of Malbec, look at the pictures, compare the scripts, and decide what to do. She could almost hear her bed calling her. Even a shower could wait.
“Inside,” she told Boris as she unlocked the door and flung her duffel bag onto the floor. She reached in to turn on the light, for the sun was low and the trees crowding her property kept the house dim even during the day.
The German Shepherd stepped across the threshold, just as glad to be home as she—and immediately stiffened.
A ruff of hair lifted along the back of his neck and spine. His ears went forward and then to attention. His nose was up and he was clearly scenting something. He gave a low yip of warning and looked up at his mistress.
By now, Marina had stopped in the entrance, her fingers curled around the doorknob. Her heart pounded and she wasn’t sure if she should go in or turn and run.
Boris hadn’t moved. He seemed to be waiting for her permission or direction. She knew his every mood and stance, and he didn’t appear agitated as much as on alert, although the curl of his lip indicated concern. Something was wrong, but he didn’t sense an imminent threat.
“Go,” she said, making the hand gesture that sent him off.
His nails skittering on the tile, he bolted away, leaving the woven rug she’d brought home from Thailand in a crumpled heap in the foyer.
Marina waited at the front door, half in and half out, wondering if she ought to finally purchase the handgun she swore she’d never buy. Gabe had suggested it more than once, even since things had ended with the Skaladeskas. It was as if he expected something else to happen—and he didn’t even know about the package sitting in her office. But though Marina had actually had to use a gun during their escape from them in Siberia, she was adamantly opposed to having one on hand.
Maybe that was one tendency she’d inherited from her father. Her real father.
Boris came pattering back from the depths of the house, his head up and eyes bright. He alerted as he would have done on a SAR mission, sitting directly in front of her with one paw raised. Hm.
“All right, then,” she said, more to herself than to him, and released Boris. “Show me.”
He took off through the living room toward the kitchen and office. Despite the promise of security from her dog’s teeth and claws, Marina pulled out the pepper spray she’d taken to keeping in a drawer by the front door and hurried off Boris’s wake, following him to her office.
When she came into the shadowy room, she found her dog standing at attention, his eyes fixed on the sofa, one ear straight up and the other cocked toward the door, listening for her. He wasn’t growling so much as sneering at the figure draped over the piece of furniture.
Marina’s heart surged into her throat and then dropped well below her belly as she saw a person—a man—in her office. Sleeping…or something else.
Pepper spray at the ready, she turned on the light, flooding the room with white light from environmentally correct bulbs. It wasn’t, as she’d immediately suspected, Gabe MacNeil who was sprawled on her sofa. Although the man’s face was half shielded by a throw pillow, she could see he had close-cropped dark blond hair—so unless Gabe had cut and bleached his dark locks, it was definitely not him. Aside from that, if he wanted to sleep, he’d be waiting in bed, not here on the office couch.
It was a stranger…a stranger who, she saw with rising concern, had dark splotches of blood staining the shirt over his torso and arm, and by extension, the upholstery on her sofa.
Heart pounding, Marina slipped the pepper spray into her pocket and started toward him, ignoring a warning yip from Boris. Her dog moved with her, as if to block her from getting too close, but a firm hand gesture had him stopping and staying.
She gave her canine boy a quick pat of thanks and love on the head and, leaving the dog watching her with full attention, bent over the man. He was warm, still breathing—whew—and as she touched his throat to feel for a pulse, he jolted and shifted.
A low, deep groan that was clearly pain-filled accompanied his slow, jerky movements, and he turned just enough that his head lifted from behind the pillow and she saw his face.
Marina couldn’t control a gasp of shock and she bolted upright, stumbling away from him. Boris was too well trained to move, but he gave a soft, concerned whine, his eyes going from his mistress to the man on the couch and back again.
Her hands had gone clammy and her insides were abruptly filled with butterflies. It couldn’t be him. She had to be wrong.
She probably was. She’d only seen a glimpse of his face. But it was a face she’d never forget on a dangerous man for whom she had an unwanted, unwarranted attraction.
Pulling the pepper spray back out of her pocket, just in case—for the last time she’d seen Varden, he’d shot Gabe in the arm—she crept forward again. Her palms were clammy, and as she looked down at him once more, his eyelids fluttered.
They opened, and she swallowed another sound of apprehension. It was definitely Rue Varden’s jade-green eyes that looked up at her, unfocused and filled with pain.
Marina stared down at him, fighting the gut-check warning that he was dangerous. Then, biting her lip, she tucked the pepper spray away once more. He was clearly injured and in no condition to hurt her, and she couldn’t just let him lie there, bleeding all over her couch.
But first…she groped gingerly around the waist and pockets of his jeans, and then up under the denim around his muscular calves and finally under the arm on which he lay. The limb that was bloody she didn’t touch until she was certain he didn’t have any weapons tucked away. When she lifted his arm, he stiffened and groaned, and she saw that his thumb was swollen to the size of a pickle. A break or bad sprain, but no other injury. The blood must be from somewhere—or someone—else.
His eyes fluttered again, and as she looked down at him, Varden’s vision sharpened. “You,” he muttered, as if seeing her for the first time.
Marina, who had EMS training as part of her SAR background, looked down at him. “Whom did you expect?” She wanted to demand what he was doing here—here in Michigan, here in her house, and here in the place he must know was the presence of an enemy—but she didn’t.
“Need help,” he said, and struggled to pull himself up.
“I can see that,” she replied, mostly holding back on the sarcasm. This was the man who’d helped lock her in a chamber in the mountains of Siberia, who’d taunted her when Gabe was being tortured by Roman and the other Skaladeskas, who’d sneered at her just before putting a bullet into Gabe’s arm.
Yet…either by accident or design, Varden had also given her information. Information that had ultimately helped her to avert a major disaster in Detroit, and information that had helped her and Gabe escape.
“Need stitches.” His accent was thicker than before, clouded with pain and effort.
Ignoring Boris’s high-pitched yip of warning, she helped Varden come to an upright position. “Thanks for ruining my sofa,” she muttered, looking at the stain. Then she turned her attention back to him. “Let me see what you’ve got here.”
The words were barel
y out of her mouth when she realized the blood wasn’t coming from his torso or arm, but from the back of his head, which had been pressed into the back of the sofa. It had soaked into the upholstery and all down the back of his shirt.
“What the—” she whispered, pulling a bloody hand away from the back of his scalp.
“I said…” he breathed, his eyes beginning to roll back into his head again. “Stitch me…up.” She felt him shudder and sway against her, and steadied him against the back of the sofa. He was solid and muscular—a burden for someone of her size to lift, even though she was in excellent shape.
“You need to go to a hospital,” she said.
He gave a violent jerk and forced his eyes open. “No.” They were sharp and angry and cold. “Stitch me. You.”
“Look, I’m an EMT, but I’m not equipped to do minor surgery here,” she began, even as her mind was racing. She had a big enough needle in her survival kit, and she could use the same heavy thread she had on hand to repair tears in the tarps, but—
“You. Damn it.” He lifted a wavering hand, and she saw, for the first time, the tattoo on the underside of his wrist. The mark of the Skaladeskas. The same image that was on the heel of her foot, the one her father had imposed upon her when she was a child.
The mark that branded her one of them, even though she hadn’t even known the Skaladeskas still existed until five years ago.
She understood Varden’s position. If he sought treatment in public, they’d see the mark. And since the earthquakes they’d engineered five years ago, the Skaladeskas were no longer running below the radar of Homeland Security, et al. The mark was an identifier, and Rue Varden did not want to be identified.
But why had he come here? To her?
Why would he imagine she’d help him, her enemy? He was the right-hand man of Roman Aleksandrov—the leader and brains of the ecoterrorist group…and her biological father.
“Wipe it away,” he said, feebly gesturing to the back of his head.
Marina realized she didn’t have time to question or to argue. He was obviously weak and quickly losing blood. His pulse was too faint, and the cast of his skin ugly. Of course she had to help him.
And then she could call the authorities.
“All right,” she said. “You’ll need to lie down.”
He made a grimace, but allowed her to help him shift prone so the back of his head faced her. That was when she saw the congealed mass of blood clinging to his hair, right at the back of his skull.
“I need to sterilize and—”
“Just…stitch the blood…dy thing…up.” He pushed the words from his lungs as if it were his last breath, his face muffled by the back of the couch. “Wasting…time.”
She ignored him and ran back to the front hall to grab her duffel bag. As she hurried back to the office, she unzipped it and pulled out her first-aid kit. It was woefully inadequate for this situation, but at least she could pull out a few bandages and pour some alcohol on his wound. Find a pair of gloves, even.
“I have to ask this,” she said, digging for something to wipe away the blood. “Do you have any history of Hepatitis C or AIDS?”
He made a sound that was something between a laugh and groan and a curse.
“No, really,” she said. “I need to know. You’re a doctor, you know that.” She pulled a clean tank top from her duffel and wiped at the wound. A gelatinous mass of blood clots came with it, and a moment later, something wet shot her in the face. “Shit. You’ve got a damned pumper,” she muttered, ignoring the blood coursing down her own cheek. She’d only seen something like this once before, but that was what the ER doc had called it. So much for medical terminology.
Another geyser from the arterial bleed squirted out, splashing her again, and she understood why Varden was so insistent for her to get the job done. The congealing blood had slowed it to an ooze, but now that she’d wiped it clean, it was going to surge crazily with each beat of his heart until she sewed it up.
She pushed a hand against the wound and used her other to wipe away the last of the clot so she could see the gash. Too late for gloves.
The injury was three inches long, and she suspected if there wasn’t so much blood still pumping out, she’d even see a bit of skull. Shit. Damn. This was way out of her league.
And then she noticed a needle dangling from a piece of string off to one side of the cut. “What the hell?” she asked, pulling the skin together, pushing on it to stop the pressure. She could feel the surge of blood pulsing beneath her slippery palm. “Did you run the doctor off in the middle of stitching you up?”
“Couldn’t…do it myself,” he said, and shifted with the arm that was wet with blood.
“You were trying to stitch yourself up?” she said, and noticed his swollen thumb again. Broken or sprained or something. Oh, that explained it. She looked at the two sutures he’d managed. “Not bad for being handicapped and unable to see anything,” she muttered, pulling the skin together. “But I’d better sterilize this.”
“No,” he said from between unmoving jaws. “Just…finish. Now.”
The needle was slippery with blood, but there was enough red-stained fishing line—fishing line?—attached that she’d be able to finish closing the gash.
“Tight,” he breathed. “Pull hard…and close. Go.”
“You didn’t answer my question,” she said, gritting her teeth, trying not to think about all the blood. It streamed over her hand, covered the back of his head, and now soaked through her shirt and dripped down her face. She was a damned caver, not a freaking surgeon. She’d seen blood before, lots of it, many times, but she’d never been swimming in it like this. “Hep C? AIDS?”
He muttered something she didn’t understand then said, “I’m clean.”
Well, that was good, because she’d already been doused in his bodily fluids and any damage would have been done by now.
She made the sutures as tight as she could, pulling the skin together with fingers that ended up cramped from the stress and tension of holding it hard and close. Occasionally, she felt him wince, or a hitch in his rough breathing. But by the time she was done, his eyes had closed and his breathing had eased into something regular. He’d passed out.
She had to grab scissors from her desk to snip the fishing line after she tied it up. Then she looked down at her bloody hands and clothes—not to mention the floor, sofa, and her patient—and swore under her breath.
It looked like a crime scene.
Despite her antipathy for Varden, she wasn’t going to let him lie there encrusted in blood. So she went off to get a bowl of hot water and a clean rag. He hadn’t wanted her to take the time to sterilize the wound, but at least she could wash him up a bit.
Despite his current weakness and vulnerability, this man was a member of an ecoterrorist cell. He was dangerous and wanted by the CIA and probably a variety of other law enforcement agencies. He’d shot a CIA operative. At close range.
But he hadn’t killed him. He hadn’t killed him.
Why not?
She’d asked herself that many times since then.
“Why did you come here?” she said, more to herself than to him, as she soaked away the blood from his hair.
His breathing changed and he made a soft sound, almost as if he’d heard her and wanted to respond…then he relaxed again and his breathing slowed.
Five years ago, Gabe and his boss, Colin Bergstrom, had shown up out of the blue and told Marina about the Skaladeskas. They were looking for her father, Victor Alexander, from whom she was estranged. That was when she learned his real name was Viktor Aleksandrov. Marina had done her best to blow them off, but they were CIA and not quite as easy to blow off as Bruce and his inappropriate attentions.
Still, Marina hadn’t truly believed what Gabe and Bergstrom were telling her until a man broke into the house and tried to abduct her. Dannen Fridkov had been following Roman Aleksandrov’s orders to bring Marina—the last “Out-World” member of
the Skaladeska tribe—back to them. She’d narrowly escaped him by climbing out the upstairs window and clambering off through the high branches of close, leafy trees.
Was that why Rue Varden had come here now? Or did it have to do with the package she’d received four months ago?
Marina couldn’t help but glance toward what her Pandora’s box—the package that sat on the top of her tall bookshelf. After opening it, she’d kept it out of reach, away from temptation, until now—until Matt Granger’s discovery.
“I’m not going back,” she said, unbuttoning Varden’s blood-soaked shirt and carefully pulling it from beneath his torso. His muscular arms and chest were bruised and scraped, and there was a long, shallow gash down one side of his torso past the hip. That cut had stopped bleeding and didn’t need much attention, although she wiped it clean with an alcohol pad.
Then, her nose filled with the smell of too much blood, her clothes soaked with it, and remnants still under her fingernails, beginning to dry on her hands, Marina stood. She needed a shower and she needed to call Gabe.
ELEVEN
Marina woke slowly, her brain mushy and groggy, and pulled herself upright. Boris lunged to his feet from where he’d been sleeping on the floor next to her bed.
There was something…something she had to do.
Then, as she peeled away the scattered pieces of memory, she remembered stepping into the shower, washing away the blood…sitting down on the edge of the bed, closing her eyes for just a minute, just one minute…and then nothing.
Varden.
She leapt off the bed and felt the towel she still had around her loosen and slip to the floor. Boris was prancing about in response to her agitation, but a glance at the clock told Marina she’d only been asleep for a little more than an hour.
Her hair was still damp, and swung in choppy strands around her face, clinging to her neck as she yanked on a tank top and loose shorts in a scramble to get downstairs and check on her patient. Before getting in the shower, she’d texted Gabe to call her ASAP, but with no further details. She didn’t want to put specifics in a text in case…well, in case someone was monitoring her.
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