Two things happened in quick succession then.
I swung around to douse the pan in the sink.
And saw two men standing in my living room.
Both wore black suits and blank expressions. One was completely bald, the other well on his way.
The banal and useless questions forming in my mind—Who are you? How did you get in here?—didn’t have time to breach my lips.
It wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
The men worked in complete silence. One launching himself over the counter as if it were the hood of a car. The other darting around the side. I backed myself against the fridge, reaching behind me for the butcher’s block, trying and failing to lay hold of a weapon, not wanting to give them my back.
The one who had gone Dukes of Hazzard over my meager kitchen island grabbed me by the shoulders despite my ineffectual protests and spun me, driving me face-first into the fridge’s black enamel surface. A cold blade bit into the flesh beneath my chin.
One of mine, I thought idly.
If it had been concealed on his body, it would have been warm.
He didn’t bother threatening me. Didn’t instruct me not to move. The knife said all that needed to be said. If I moved, he’d cut me. It was all very simple, really.
His partner pulled something long and white from a pocket. Shapes I could see only from the corner of my eye. In the next moment I felt serrated pressure around my wrists.
Zip ties. Far more effective than the panty hose I’d used on Valentine’s driver.
Was this retribution then? Had Valentine set me free only so he could pay me back tenfold in his own time? Had my mother paid for her meeting with him in this same currency?
I’d find out soon enough.
The smoke alarm emitted a dying wail as one of the men pushed the override button.
I saw the bag coming. Velvet. I knew by the way it refused to reflect the light.
In those last few seconds before the fabric came down over my head, my attention shrank to a blurred edge beneath my cheek. A picture. Stuck to the fridge with some pizza place’s magnet.
Mom smiling, sitting on the side of the tub, a cup of water poised to rinse the shampoo from my hair. Me squatting like a little frog amid clouds of bubbles.
I’d looked at it at least twice a day for the last three years but never actually saw it. Not until I had a knife to my throat had it occurred to me to ask myself one simple question.
Who took the picture?
Chapter Six
Time.
There’s never quite enough of it, is there?
One minute you can be contemplating the golden-brown perfection of a toasty grilled cheese sandwich, and the next, you’ve got a bondage hood over your head and a knife at your neck that you were going to use to cut the aforementioned sandwich into triangles, not rectangles, because you are a right-thinking human being and shit.
If I lived through this, I fully intended to take more time to stop and smell the browned butter.
Because roses were for basic bitches.
As were groveling and begging, candy-assed behavior my mother had long ago trained me against. Just as she had trained me on the finer points of breathing through cloth.
It was a little game my mother and I used to play called “what to do in a hostage situation.” Okay, so it wasn’t exactly “the floor is lava,” but it had kept me entertained on long Sunday afternoons. I could hear her voice as clearly now as I had then, muffled through the cloth.
Panic is what gets most people killed, Janey.
When someone attacks you, they’ve probably had adrenaline in their system longer than you have. They’ll be twitchy. Edgy. Twitchy, edgy fingers on triggers can be a very bad thing. Breathe slowly. Think calmly. Then decide.
Breathe slowly.
Think calmly.
I kept these two mantras in my head as I warred against the vertigo swarming through me.
The counter bit into my hip as I was marched past it into the living room, where I was guided down onto my knees on the carpet, knife still at my throat. The breath trapped beneath the velvet made my small dark world humid.
Breathe.
Think.
Shepard.
The name rang through my head like the tolling of a brass bell.
If he had really been in the alley at the bottom of the back stairwell, he could be at my front door within three minutes.
Not to say I could have been up four flights of stairs that quickly, but I thought it was only polite to give him credit for a better cardio routine than mine.
Three minutes.
If I could just stay alive that long . . .
“How are we going to do it?” a nasally male voice asked from behind me.
“We’ll shoot her.” His partner was a lifelong smoker judging by the tar-phlegmy wheeze. I heard a snapping sound like a briefcase opening.
“Wait,” I mumbled through the cloth. “Why are we shooting me?”
They paid no more attention to my question than they would to a child squawking at a nearby restaurant table.
“But before we shoot her,” said Wheezy, “I thought maybe we could have a little fun first.”
Somehow I doubted that what qualified as fun for him would be fun for me, but close enough to fuck is close enough to fight. If I could manage to get my legs around his neck, I had a solid chance of sending him to Satan’s waiting room pretty damn quick.
“Fun sounds good. I’m lots of fun,” I said. “You guys don’t even know how much fun I can be.”
“But our instructions were to do her right away.” The guy behind me had begun to loosen his grip on the knife at my neck, distracted by this unforeseen divergence in whatever plan they’d cobbled together.
“Instructions from whom?” I asked.
“From Val—” grunted the man behind me. Air whooshed out of his mouth like he’d been punched in the gut.
Val, he’d said. As in . . . Valentine?
“You want to watch your idiot mouth?” Wheezy asked.
“What? If we’re going to splatter her brain across the wall anyway, what does it matter if she knows who ordered the hit?”
There were literally so many disturbing parts to that sentence, I didn’t even know where to begin.
“It’s exactly that kind of attitude that’s kept you from promotions.” Wheezy’s voice was closer now. He might have been kneeling, sifting through the contents of his suitcase. “You have no appreciation for the details of the craft.”
Breathe slowly.
Think calmly.
Decide.
“I really can’t endorse any part of this plan,” I said. “Particularly the brain splattering. But if I’m going to die anyway, I’d just as soon not die a virgin.”
Now, I hadn’t been a virgin since the tenth grade, but the word was enough to drag a spell of silence in its wake. I could practically hear the saliva flooding their mouths.
“I don’t know,” the knife wielder said, his thinning resolve pitching his voice higher. “They’ll be expecting us back before too long.”
“Come on,” Wheezy cajoled. “We can both take a turn and still be done in less than ten minutes.”
“I wouldn’t brag about that.” A gloved hand wandered up the naked curve of my calf, and I regretted my choice of plaid lady boxers and a tank top for dinner wear. If only they’d broken in in winter, they would have found me in baggy sweats I’d have defied any man to try and get a stiffy over.
“Oh, all right.” The knife slackened at my throat. “But you can’t look when it’s my turn. I have a shy prostate.”
When I heard a grunt and felt something warm spurt across the back of my thigh, I thought for one horrifying moment that someone’s prostate wasn’t shy at all.
This was followed by the unmistakable sound of a body crumpling to the floor. A gasp. Another thud.
My wrists were suddenly free, my hands stinging from the rush of blood into numb fingers. The dark
ness around my head evaporated, leaving me squinting, scrambling backward like a spastic crab until I backed into the coffee table. I blinked against the blinding influx of light, making out the shape of one large dark figure and two dark blobs on the floor.
“Miss Avery?”
Shepard.
Though I’d only heard a handful of words spoken by this voice, I recognized it immediately from the imagery of army fatigues and dog tags it conjured. A voice for which “drop and give me twenty” wasn’t an altogether unpleasant prospect.
“That would be me.” I pushed damp tendrils off my cheeks, my eyes finally beginning to focus.
“I’m Shepard.”
Yeah he was.
I may have thought I was being facetious earlier when I’d conjectured about the man’s call sign being derived from some self-styled hero complex, but this was precisely the image that Shepard’s face evoked. He had a jaw made for offsetting the bold slopes of a fireman’s helmet. Hazel eyes made to search smoky rooms for stranded puppies or hanky-waving women. Biceps that could have easily carried a score of orphans. That these biceps were also branded by all manner of military tattoo did nothing to lessen the effect.
“Are you hurt?” he asked.
Good question.
I glanced down at my body, newly liberated from its bonds, and that’s when I saw it.
Blood.
All over my legs. Soaking my socks.
“Oh my God.” I instinctively searched myself for the wound, my fingers quickly slick and red as they slid up and down my legs. “I’m bleeding. I’m—”
“No, you’re not,” Shepard said. “He is.”
I followed his casual glance to the pair of legs sticking out from behind the coffee table. Peering over the top, I found one of the assassins staring glassily at the ceiling, tongue protruding from the side of his mouth in a comically stereotypical rendering of death. His chrome-domed partner lay at a perpendicular angle, blood gushing through the fingers clutching his throat.
“What the fuuuuuu . . .” My vision shrank to a pinprick as the sound of my own voice went muffled. My heartbeat was a distant drum.
Darkness erased all.
I must have been ovulating.
This was the only explanation I could come up with for how it came to be that, upon waking to Shepard’s mouth upon mine, my legs scissored themselves around his waist while my hand anchored itself in the short silky hair at the nape of his neck.
In my defense, grunts of surprise and alarm did sound almost exactly like groans of unrestrained passion and fathomless desire to my ears, which were muffled by carpenter-rough palms fastened to either side of my head.
Also, seeing as the only action in my bed for the last two years had been of the battery-operated variety, it was possible I may have been the tiniest bit out of practice in identifying signs of male arousal.
Shepard managed to peel my grabby paws away from the soft, well-worn T-shirt fabric covering his Captain America pectoral muscles and pin them to the floor above my head. A move that did nothing to quell the vivid fantasies already unspooling in my sex-deprived brain.
He too was gasping. Not because of a fainting spell like mine, but because I’d sort of sucked all the air from his lungs while I was going after his tongue like a baby bird.
“What was that about?” he panted.
“You tell me,” I said. “Why did you kiss me?”
“I was giving you mouth-to-mouth,” he stated matter-of-factly. “You stopped breathing.”
“Oh,” I said. Then, seeing my bloody socks locked together behind his narrow hips, “Ohhhhh.”
Several facts crashed through my brain at once.
One quick glance toward the coffee table confirmed the hastily sketched memory. One bald fucker, very dead, marinating in a spreading halo of blood on my area rug. Additional fucker lying at his feet like a dog.
I disengaged myself from Shepard and shot to my feet, unsure of what to do, but sure I ought to be doing something. “What the fuck is wrong with you? You can’t just storm into someone’s apartment and start killing people on their antique Persian rugs!”
Shepard executed a perfect kip-up, transitioning from the flat of his back to his boots without the aid of hands. “That rug is from Ikea.”
“But it could have been antique,” I insisted. “Did you even think about that before getting all stab-happy?”
“Mostly I was thinking about keeping them from killing you. Which they were definitely going to do, by the way.” Shepard slid a wicked-looking blade back into the leather holster strapped to his leg above his boot.
“You don’t know that.” Of course, I knew that, but then, I’d been there while they debated in what order to perform their heinous to-do list on my general person.
“Pretty sure I do. What do you think that stuff is for?”
We both looked down at the briefcase lying on the carpet, two halves opened like a book, the wicked instruments contained therein looking like a portable tool kit for recreational vivisection.
“Still,” I said. “Next time, I’d prefer you do the killing somewhere I’ve had the chance to Scotchgard. Blood never comes out of berber.”
“And you know this how?” he asked.
“None of your fucking business, Rambo.” Disappointment deflated my chest as I lifted the frying pan from the sink and shook the blackened sandwich into the trash. “Oh, grilled cheese,” I sighed. “You’re the real casualty here.”
Shepard wandered over from the living room to watch me through the cutout rectangle above the breakfast bar.
“Has it ever occurred to you that your priorities are seriously fucked up? Two guys busted in here ready to torture and kill you, and you’re bitching about your rug and a burned-ass grilled cheese sandwich?”
“I’ll have you know that until you called me, that sandwich was on its way to golden-brown perfection.” I peeled the damp socks from my feet, padded over to the nonbloodied assassin, and grabbed him by the ankles.
It only seemed fair to let Shepard have the wet one.
“All right, Carl,” I said, dragging him toward the bathroom. “Time to go.”
“What are you doing?” Shepard asked. “And how do you know his name?”
“I don’t. But he looks like a Carl, doesn’t he?” I stopped to snatch a breath as I maneuvered Carl around a tight corner. “Also, these bodies aren’t going to hide themselves. Are you going to help me or what?”
“Hold the fuck up.” Shepard insinuated himself between me and the kitchen entryway. “I don’t hide bodies.”
“No? And how do you usually deal with dead guys in your apartment?”
“By calling the cops like any normal person. In fact, they’re already on their way.”
Something about this revelation set my still-stingy eye to twitching.
“One could take issue with the word normal being inserted into a conversation about proper protocol for dealing with the inconveniently deceased.” The dead man’s arm caught on a stool at the end of the kitchen island as I attempted to drag him around Shepard. I reached down to disengage the limp hand. “Goddamn it, work with me here, Carl.”
“Are you saying you’ve done this before?” Shepard asked. I tried not to notice how the entryway volunteered itself for a comparison to his proportions. How the walls seemed just barely wide enough to accommodate his broad shoulders. How the ceiling’s height would almost certainly be at the extreme reach of his long arm. How boyish his face looked among the modern angles. Nose and cheeks that would go pink with cold. Pillowy lips that would go red with kissing.
“No,” I said. “But I might as well tell you that even if I were saying that, which I’m not, it wouldn’t matter if you told a jury that I had, which I didn’t, because your testimony would qualify as hearsay, and be therefore inadmissible in any court of law.” Sweat had begun to bloom on my forehead and chin.
Turns out dragging dead weight is great cardio.
“P-Ripple said
you were a law student.” The acknowledgment felt, no doubt unintentionally, like a pat on the head. Magnanimous animal that I am, I opted to offer one in return.
“And he said you were his best surveillance guy. How come you’re watching me and not Valentine?”
“I was watching Valentine,” he said. “Until you kidnapped him.”
The heels of Carl’s shoes clunked on the kitchen floor as I dropped them.
Shit.
“Kidnapping is a rather strong word.” But already my brain was churning out bad news. What had he seen? Me squeezing myself unceremoniously through the window separating the driver’s compartment? Me threatening Valentine with a pellet gun. Please, I prayed to the gods of retail and all else that was holy, please don’t let him have seen the—
“A pellet gun?” He chuckled. “You seriously took on Archard Everett Valentine with a motherfucking pellet gun?”
Ye gods be damned.
“Don’t get me wrong.” Shepard wrenched open the fridge door and stooped to help himself to a beer. “It was a gutsy move.” He knocked the top off using the counter’s edge, took a swallow, and thumbed foam from his lip. The carbonation lowered his already deep baritone. “Stupid. Sloppy. But gutsy.”
“Stupid?” I demanded. “Sloppy? I got to Valentine even though he’s surrounded by an entire team of security guys, and—”
“And now they all know exactly what you look like. Stupid,” he repeated. “Sloppy.” His Adam’s apple bobbed as he took another pull on the bottle.
“And what would you have done?”
“Exactly what I was doing. Watching him. Without letting him know he was being watched.”
“So how come you’re not doing it now?” I folded my arms across my tank top, conscious of the cleavage Shepard seemed to be watching now.
“Because I’m also P-Ripple’s best security guy, and you seemed to need that more than Valentine needed watching.”
“Says who?”
“Says Carl.” Shepard glanced down at the dead man on the floor between us. “And his buddy. They were following you even before the parking garage. And they weren’t the only ones.”
Private Lies (Jane Avery Mysteries Book 1) Page 6