The Financier (Hudson Kings Book 2)

by Liz Maverick

  Her friend’s eyes narrowed. “You’re just hoping to run into him.”

  Jane tossed her hair. “He’s never there. There’s no way I’d accidentally run into him. I feel really terrible about the fish. You know who lets an animal starve out of revenge against the owner? A bad person. A bad person does that. I’m going to run over there and feed them and apologize to the frog and come right back. Nick’s not going to be there, so he won’t know the difference. What happens after this is his problem, but I need to make things right. You know how I feel about those fish.”

  “I know how you feel about Nick,” Ally said.

  “It doesn’t matter anymore, does it,” Jane said much more matter-of-factly than she felt. In fact, she felt very strange. Like something terribly wrong had happened to something terribly right. But she couldn’t change reality; Nick had done the old bait and switch. It obviously hadn’t felt so terribly right to him. Or at least not after she’d had sex with him.

  There was an awkward pause between them. Normally, Ally would have more to say about the Hudson Kings. It had become more obvious lately that she desperately missed knowing what was going on with them, and that Cecily’s relationship with Shane had been providing her with something that she couldn’t even admit she’d been missing. Until Rothgar had stripped it away again. “What do you figure timewise?” was all she asked.

  Jane glanced at the clock on her phone. “Twenty minutes . . . no, give it ten extra for subway bullshit. Maybe I should just take a car service. Honestly, I’m not going to stay. I just feel like a total ass for flouncing instead of feeding. It’s not their fault Daddy’s a douchebag.”

  “That sounds like a bad romance.”

  “A really bad one,” Jane said darkly.

  “I’ll be ready in thirty,” Ally said, and stuck a gaudy rhinestone necklace over her head.

  Jane grabbed her bag and a coat and headed for Nick’s.

  CHAPTER 36

  Chase apparently had been harboring some resentment toward Nick the entire time Rothgar was talking. When the team took a break from mission planning, Chase instantly whirled around in his chair and glared right at him. “I saw you looking at me with that sad-dog expression during breakfast, and I’m just going to preempt you right here: I’m not calling Jane again on some trumped-up BS. Shane’s on it; I’ll bet you he only leaves her side to take a piss. You know she’s fine. Screw her if she can’t see a good thing when it’s staring her right in the face. I mean, seriously, what the hell else is she looking for? You’re the complete package. I mean, you’re me, except with a massive amount of money! How is that not appealing? Who doesn’t want that? I have no more energy to waste on that shit. That was a one-time deal, you got that?”

  Nick couldn’t help but smile at Chase’s rant. The guy was a man of big expression, and when he was happy, he was big happy. When he was pissed, he was big pissed. “You need to go dance this off or however you handle it. I’m over it already. It’s in the past. I asked you to set the new tone. You did—and I thank you for that—and now I can go back to calling her only as a boss, and it will all just roll right over me.”

  Chase’s even gaze flicked across Nick’s face. “Fake it till you make it? Good luck with that.”

  Nick’s smile faded. “So right, brother,” he murmured before downing a slug of water from a bottle that he wished was holding a martini. “So right.”

  “Or you could clear the field.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “She obviously cares about you.”

  “You said she was obnoxious to you on the phone.”

  “Pretty much proved she cares about you. I mean, seriously, man. Fish. Okay? I’m sorry, but no woman is going to go ballistic over the well-being of a man’s fish if she doesn’t care deeply about the man. Take my advice. If you think she’s the one. If you think that if everything in your life was smooth you could avoid the kind of missteps you’ve been forced into by circumstance and make her feel safe and secure that you . . . you know, really care about . . . her, then do what I do.”

  Nick forced himself not to smile at Chase’s implied suggestion that he had his love life under control in any way. The man never had his love life under control. “What do you do, Chase?”

  “Whatever she says doesn’t work, you fix it. And then when she says great, but something else doesn’t work, you fix that. And you fix and you fix until there are no more excuses, and at the end of it all, it’s just, dude, does she want to be with you or not? Because when you remove all the obstacles and there aren’t any barriers, it just comes down to . . .” The man got a funny look on his face. Like his tongue literally had gotten stuck in his mouth.

  Nick stared at Chase. “That was the closest you’ve ever come to poetry. Except you seem to have a problem using the word ‘love.’”

  Chase shifted uncomfortably in his chair. “Yeah. But you knew what I meant.”

  Nick almost laughed. “You can say it out loud. It doesn’t make you less of a man.”

  “No, I know. I just, uh, you know, it’s strange. I actually find that I can’t say it.” Chase looked entirely serious, but then he shrugged and said, “You can’t go on like you’ve been going on. It’s like Romeo and that cold of his. Never lets up. You need your life back, and you need that girl with you. She pissed me off something awful, but I tell ya, I’d give my left nut for a girl who cared that much about me.”

  Nick’s cell phone rang. He frowned at the caller ID; Maksim had never called him before.

  “Nick here.”

  “The girl from the party?” Maksim asked.

  “Jane’s safe, under surveillance,” Nick said cautiously.

  “Then why did she just walk through the door of your penthouse?” Dex said from his seat at the computer.

  Nick went to Dex’s screen, but Missy suddenly barked his name and turned around in her chair to face him. “Shane’s on the line; says Ally told him Jane went to feed the fish. Took a car service so she could do it fast. He’s on his way back to the Armory.”

  “What?”

  “You told her you two were done?” Rothgar asked, from the riser at the back.

  Nick went cold. “Of course.” A flood of curse words escaped his lips as he watched his lovely Jane, still wearing her coat, smiling and laughing at the fish in the fish tank.

  “Please call her, Missy,” Nick said.

  He put Maksim back to his ear. “Is there a particular reason you’re calling?” Nick managed to ask. Of course there was. He wanted to throw the phone through a window and run to the street, run as fast as he could to his place, but Maksim’s call wasn’t a coincidence. He watched Rothgar put the Hudson Kings into motion, watched him summon Geo, watched Geo collect his weapons.

  “She’s not picking up,” Missy said, the stress evident in her voice. “Someone else try. She thinks I’m telemarketing or something.”

  Nick forced himself to focus on what the Russian merc was saying.

  “Five minutes ago, suddenly a lot of chatter, Nikolai. You called Sokolov’s bluff.”

  Nick’s breathing was coming out in fits and starts. “I thought I had a little more time.”

  “No time. They followed the girl in the car. Now chatter, chatter in Russian on the underground channels. They are on their way to meet her. That’s all,” Maks said, and hung up.

  That’s all? That’s everything.

  Nick forced himself to calmly press the buttons for Jane’s phone. On the screen he watched her turn to her purse and pick up the phone, his heart singing for a moment when she instinctively smiled at his name on her caller ID before catching herself and frowning.

  She did, however, take his call. “Yes, sir, Mr.—”

  “Jane, get out of there,” Nick blurted. “Get out of the house. Leave the building. Someone’s coming.”

  “Nick?”

  “Get out.”

  At which point the doorbell rang. On video cam, Jane’s eyes widened. She stood frozen, her
eyes on the door, the phone smashed to her cheek. Through the speaker, Nick heard pounding on the other side of the door.

  “Too late,” she whispered.

  CHAPTER 37

  “Jane,” Nick whispered. “Don’t answer. Don’t look through the peephole. They’ll see the change in the light. Pick up your bag and walk to my office. There’s a door to the panic room there. Be as quiet as you can in those shoes.”

  Nick wanted to monitor the video just to watch Jane enter the panic room. He wanted to see for himself that she was safe, but Geo’s grip on his arm was persuasive. “Let’s go,” he told the hit man.

  Rothgar tossed Geo a couple of earpieces, which he caught neatly as he passed through the door, and Nick vaguely heard him say that he’d have the entire team on call.

  He followed Geo to the garage, still talking to Jane. “I’m coming straight there. I’m coming to get you. You go into the panic room and you lock up and you stay silent. Turn off your ringer.”

  “Nick, how bad is this?” she whispered. He kept her on the phone, kept talking to her in a soft murmur, gave her the combination, listened to her enter a room he’d never had to use once in all his time in the gray area.

  And now Jane had to use it, and he’d put her in this situation. He told her to switch on the video cams from inside the panic room—he’d have done anything to have those same cams in his own sights.

  But he didn’t have the video, couldn’t see her face, and couldn’t see how scared she was beyond that calm, cool voice she always used.

  “I’m on my way. Try to stay calm.” Nick ground his teeth. Jane was supposed to be safe at Ally’s, and he was supposed to be making the Sokolov problem go away. Yet somehow the stakes were higher than ever, and time was suddenly running out.

  “So, they’ve come to kill you, but they might just find me,” Jane said so evenly, so calmly he knew she was covering. “This is it? This is the real deal?”

  “What’s real is that I’m coming to get you, and I’m ending this thing with Sokolov once and for all.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked, a slight shake in her voice.

  Kill or be killed. “You know why I wanted you to stay away, now, right? Just to be sure, while this thing was coming to a head. You know that’s the reason. The only reason in the world that would make me want to set you apart from me.”

  A sound like a sob or a laugh came through. “I didn’t know. I hoped, oh, god, I hoped it was something stupid like this. But I didn’t know. And I had to protect myself. Oh, Nick, the things I said, and the way I said them . . . if something happens to you . . . now I’m stuck in this box, and I need to explain, but I’m supposed to be quiet, and explaining what I said versus how I feel will take so many words . . .”

  Nick gently shushed her and then said quietly, “It doesn’t matter. There will be time. We’re almost home, Jane. But in case you really believed all that shit about airplanes, just know that I don’t buy it. You’re that one star I’ve been waiting for. Whether you’re ‘just Jane’ or my partner on a mission, there’s nothing ordinary about you.”

  She didn’t answer. Nick got nervous as Geo drove them into the parking garage beneath Nick’s building. His buddy parked in somebody else’s spot just in case there was a bomb trigger in Nick’s.

  “You still with me?” Nick whispered, juggling the phone against his face while he holstered the weapon Geo offered him.

  “Still with you,” Jane answered back.

  “Can you hear me?” Rothgar asked, courtesy of the earpiece in Nick’s ear.

  “Yup,” Nick said softly.

  “Ditto,” Geo said. He adjusted a rifle on his back as a complement to the two guns strapped to his thighs. If anybody was looking on the elevator camera, it would be obvious they weren’t showing up for a tea party. A nonlethal punch to the back of the doorman’s head eliminated the potential for awkward questions.

  The door to the penthouse was cracked open when they got there. The lights were out. Nothing illuminated the apartment except for the faint contribution of city lights coming through his huge window walls and the neon glow of the fish tank.

  Geo slipped night vision goggles over his eyes; Nick was stuck waiting for his vision to adjust.

  Then they both just listened. It seemed completely silent. Until Nick heard it, the faint gurgle of slightly labored breathing. Sokolov came himself, Nick thought. Thinking of how close the Russian had been to stumbling into Jane made him shiver.

  Geo finished canvassing the apartment. He held up two fingers. Sokolov and . . . ?

  Geo mouthed, “Tristan.”

  Nick nodded. But, dammit, Tristan, what made you turn?

  Geo signaled that he was going toward the breathing; Nick signaled that he was going toward Jane.

  Nick crept forward, secure in the knowledge that Geo was too good at his job to get confused and accidentally shoot him at some point. He hadn’t gone two steps before the sound of someone pounding brutally on a wall or a door came straight at him from the direction of his office—and the panic room. “I know you went in there, Nick!”

  First thought: Tristan. Second thought: Idiot.

  Nick waited several additional seconds in silence before taking a chance on moving again. He crept toward the office door, stopping abruptly when his phone vibrated at his hip.

  Jane, texting: I think they put something on door. Idk what.

  Oh, but Nick knew what it was.

  “Nick, most of your cams are dead,” Rothgar said softly into Nick’s earpiece.

  “Understood,” Nick breathed more than said. Leading with his gun, he popped around the doorjamb into his office and then back again. His chest heaving, he processed the block of explosive wrapped with duct tape and a digital remote; the blinking red light didn’t show a countdown, but it was making a thin tink tink tink sound. “Where’s Tristan?” Nick whispered into the mic.

  “Mine,” Geo said in a voice that was as gentle and deadly as anything Nick had ever heard in his life. Okay, so Tristan wasn’t in the office. And given that Sokolov wasn’t breathing nearby, neither was he. Unless there was a third party in here somewhere, the office was clear.

  “Need Flynn,” Nick said. “Panic room. Jane’s in there.”

  “He’s already on his way,” Rothgar said. “There’s a reason I never hired Tristan.”

  Get under the desk, Nick texted Jane.

  Are you okay? she texted back.

  Nick shook his head, unable to suppress a bittersweet smile. I’m fine. I can see the door from here; I’m right with you, Jane.

  What’s on the door? she texted.

  God, it was tempting to give that explosive a go, but it wasn’t his specialty, and if he nicked the wrong wire—

  “Wait!” Tristan screamed in a high-pitched voice. “I’ll give back the twenty mil. I sw—”

  Nick stared into the darkness, stunned, but couldn’t bring himself to leave Jane. Within a few seconds, it was apparent that he didn’t need to exact personal revenge for Tristan stealing the money and lying about it.

  A strange sound reverberated through the otherwise silent apartment. More of a zing than a boom. Geo’s silencer? Shit, maybe Sokolov’s. One down, but if Tristan set the bomb and someone offed him, they needed Flynn more than ever. Maybe he should have more sympathy for a fellow merc down, but maybe the fucker was lying on the explosives trigger.

  Or maybe Sokolov had the trigger.

  WHAT’S ON DOOR? Jane texted.

  Nick fingers felt slippery on his phone as he stared down at Jane going all caps on him. Hang tight, he finally answered.

  Just then, Flynn’s voice came over the earpiece: “In like Flynn,” he whispered.

  “Watch your step,” Geo murmured, ducking into the office and startling the piss out of Nick. “Still one to go. And I want to double-check there’s no third party in the shadows.”

  “They don’t know it’s not me in there. They maybe heard someone go in, know a panic room when
they see one. But they don’t know it’s Jane,” Nick hissed, trying not to lose his shit over Jane being stuck inside with a bomb on the door. “If Sokolov fucking blows up Jane thinking it’s me, I’m gonna . . .”

  Geo raised his black leather–clad palm, digits in the air, and he slowly closed his fingers into a fist. Nick nodded. Okay. Shit. Of course. Yeah, he’d stay calm. He’d stay quiet. He’d do anything as long as they got Jane out of this mess in one piece.

  Flynn slipped quietly in, looked at Nick and Geo with a frown, muttered, “Sitting ducks. Let the pro take over,” and took a knee. He pulled the massive visor sitting on his forehead down so his head was completely covered and opened up his jacket to reveal a vest that held an array of clippers, tools, wiring, adhesive, and more.

  “He’s got this,” Geo mouthed. He gestured to the gun in Nick’s hand. Go time. They were finally down to it. No more talking. No more joking. No more dodging. Just survival. And more than at any other time in his life, Nick had something to live for.

  Rothgar tuned back in. “Three brothers, tight quarters. Be sure before you shoot.”

  “Sokolov?” Nick mouthed.

  Geo hesitated, then sent Nick to the front of the apartment while he crept off to the back. And within two steps, Nick heard him. Sokolov’s watery breath. “Nikolai,” the Russian purred. “You run, I chase. Like cat toy. Is all. Remember?”

  Nick felt that same fury from the day he’d entered Sokolov’s game. But this time, he buried it far down inside, way underneath his love for Jane, and began to walk the perimeter of the circular foyer, in a wide ring, still in the shadows just beyond the neon glow from the tank. All he needed was one shot.

  Sokolov’s inhale was lost in the bubbling sound of the tank’s oxygen pump, so he’d lost his advantage. But after stalking each other for the longest minute of his life, Nick got a break. Sokolov’s size did him in. He bumped a piece of furniture; Nick recognized the sound as the rocking of the side table’s uneven feet thirty degrees to the right of where he was standing. Nick stopped moving and let Sokolov proceed. The man moved slowly. Taking one small step only every so often. But eventually, one foot in front of the other, the Russian would step into the clear.