Ripped: A Blood Money Novel

by Edie Harris

  The man nodded frantically, panting, his arms raised in surrender from his position next to Lefty’s body.

  “Good, because I can’t remember any Russian at the moment.” Cocking the weapon, he switched his aim to the man’s forehead. The scuffle behind him was slowing, but Tobias couldn’t risk adjusting his attention. “This is a personal matter, between me and Kedrov, and if you leave now, it will remain as such.” Though he’d vowed to kill everyone involved, wanton destruction would not serve the needs of those under his protection. His inner control won out, the animal in him raging at being denied a slaughter. “Do you understand?”

  Again, the man nodded, stumbling to his feet as he fled the room.

  Wincing, Tobias shifted to his knees in time to see Kuznetsov and Gavin weaving on their feet, their faces bruised and bleeding. Gavin held his head between both hands, groaning faintly, as Kuznetsov appeared to sink toward the ground.

  Too late, he realized what was about to happen. Kuznetsov snagged the gun Gavin had dropped during their fight and straightened, shifting his aim to where Chandler held Kedrov hostage.

  “No!” Tobias roared, terror choking his cry as he leaped to his feet, just as Gavin launched himself between Kuznetsov and Chandler.

  The gun went off.

  Gavin staggered, then fell to his knees, his eyes wide as he looked from his bleeding stomach to the Priest, shock written across his battered face before collapsing onto his back. His tattooed hands shook as he felt at his grisly wound, groaning in pain.

  One glance at Kuznetsov showed the same shock on the enforcer’s normally expressionless visage. Immediately, the Priest dropped the gun, ignoring Kedrov’s enraged shouts in garbled English to pick the weapon back up and “shoot the bitch,” and landed heavily on his knees next to the Faraday operative.

  Russian fell from his lips in a broken stream. Brat, he said. Brother.

  Tearing his gaze from where Kuznetsov bent over Gavin, the Priest’s giant hands pressed brutally over where he’d shot Gavin, Tobias turned to where Chandler held Kedrov immobile with the muzzle of the bastard’s own gun. Her hands were steady, her expression fierce, and despite the horrific nature of their current situation, he felt awe for this woman, his woman, bloom within his chest.

  He walked to her, the Makarov semiautomatic comfortable in his grip. His hands didn’t shake. His breath didn’t shorten. He knew precisely what he was going to do, and his regrets numbered zero.

  This was for the Faraday employees with whose well-being he was charged. This was for the family he vowed to protect against the evil they encountered because of the Faraday legacy. This was for the sister who’d saved herself weeks ago, and for the lover who had saved them both today.

  This was his offensive move.

  Within his twisted face, Kedrov’s eyes narrowed and gleamed as Chandler stepped aside and Tobias took her place. “You Faradays think you own the world,” Kedrov sneered. “You think you can buy your power, but power is earned. Power is taken. Power—”

  Tobias put a bullet in his brain.

  And, when Kedrov’s body crumpled, he shot him twice more in the chest. For the sake of thoroughness.

  Silently, he handed the gun to Chandler, pausing only briefly to cup her soft cheek and drop a kiss onto her forehead. Words battled for dominance in his throat, but he swallowed them down, as this was neither the time nor the place for what he wanted to say to her.

  The pile of his belongings in the corner of the room beckoned, and Tobias rapidly donned his shoes and unbuttoned dress shirt, pocketing his wallet and leaving the rest behind. Moving to where Gavin lay groaning on the ground, Tobias speared the Priest with his iciest glare. “You’re going to help us get him out of here alive.” Not a request.

  With a jerky nod, the enforcer lifted his hands from the bleeding wound in Gavin’s torso and hauled him to his feet, then indicated Tobias should put pressure on the injury himself. After doing so, Kuznetsov grabbed one of Gavin’s arms, slung the other toward Tobias, and nodded toward the exit. “There are others here,” the Priest bit out in English. “We have to go, now.” Gun in hand, Chandler hurried ahead of them, clearing their path to freedom. Tobias barely noticed their surroundings as they hustled out of the warehouse and toward the chain-link fence, his shoulders on fire beneath the scraping weight of Gavin’s arm.

  Casey, Finn and Henry waited on the other side of the fence, their SUVs idling on the dry docks. The three of them turned as one with weapons raised as Tobias and company hurried through the gap in the fencing.

  Chandler froze, gun aimed at Casey’s forehead, squinting in the dark. “Identify,” she demanded.

  “Faradays,” Casey bit out, before his sharp gaze moved past her to the bleeding, gut-shot Gavin. “What the hell happened, man?”

  As he ran toward them, Kuznetsov relinquished his hold on Gavin and quickly made the sign of the cross, murmuring roughly in Latin before meeting Tobias’s eyes. Then, without another word, the Priest disappeared into the freezing rain.

  A mystery for another time. Casey took Kuznetsov’s place under Gavin’s other arm, and together, they carried him into the backseat of one of the waiting vehicles, Tobias crawling in after him. “He needs surgery, immediately, but it can’t be in Moscow.” Given the breadth of Polnoch’ Pulya’s reach in this city, Tobias didn’t trust the hospital doctors not to be on bratva payroll and botch the procedure.

  As Casey climbed into the driver’s seat, the passenger door opened and in hopped Chandler. “There’s an American hospital in Saint Petersburg,” she told them. “Get a helicopter to the airfield, and get your friend on it.” After shooting her an assessing look, Casey pulled out his cell phone and made a call, peeling away from the warehouse with screeching tires, Henry and Finn following fast in the second vehicle.

  Gavin thrashed abruptly on the seat, grappling for consciousness. Keeping pressure on the wound, Tobias leaned over his employee, placing a quelling hand on the man’s burly shoulder. “Bok. Bok, it’s all right. You’re safe. You’re with Faraday now.”

  A string of garbled Russian, too fast for Tobias to comprehend, poured from Gavin. He looked to Chandler.

  She was frowning. “He says, ‘There’s more. More to know. I don’t know it all yet.’” She paused, listening intently to Gavin’s gasping words. “He wants to be taken to—” Chandler met Tobias’s gaze, confused. “Does he know your sister?”

  “They were partners for years. He’s her best friend.” Tobias squeezed the man’s shoulder. “We’ll take you to Beth, Gavin. I promise.”

  His words must have penetrated, because Gavin slipped back into unconsciousness just as Casey hung up the phone. “We’ve got a chopper prepping by the jet but a limited window in which to leave. Police have been alerted to shots fired at the warehouse—” Casey’s cell pinged with a message “—and Finn says there are three suspicious SUVs tailing us, roughly half a mile back.” The gates to the airfield popped into view. “Once we get onto the airfield, I’ll have Henry disable the electrical for the gate. That should buy us enough time to get in the air.”

  As Casey relayed his orders, Tobias glanced at Chandler, taking in her tangled hair and flushed face, the worry sharpening her expression. “Your passport is with your belongings on the plane. Our people will get you back to London.”

  “What about you?”

  “Casey and I will go with Gavin to the hospital. He’s a friend,” he added, compelled to explain further and unable to take his eyes off her.

  Alive. She was alive, and in his keeping once more.

  She nodded but said nothing as they sped through the open gates toward the tarmac where the jet and helicopter waited. The jet’s engines were already humming when Casey threw the Jeep into Park, and together Tobias and Casey hauled Gavin’s heavy body to the compact chopper. By the time they had Gavin secured and Cas
ey started triaging the seeping gut wound as best he could, Finn and Henry had abandoned their own vehicle and hustled up the stairs through the plane’s open hatch.

  Chandler stood on the bottom step, staring at him through the steady rain. Determination hardened his resolve, and he strode toward her, watching her eyes widen at his approach. His fingers gripped her wrist when he reached her, smearing her fair skin with Gavin’s blood. “Run with me this time.”

  Her brow furrowed. “What?”

  “Twice now, I’ve let you run when you needed to.” He barely knew what he was asking of her, only that he couldn’t not say something, when he could already see the back of her in his mind’s eye as she made her final escape. “Now I’m running, just for a short while, but...you should run with me.”

  “Are you asking me to go to hospital with you and your injured man?” She had to shout to be heard over the roar of the engines.

  Frustration mounted swiftly as he heard the chopper’s blades begin to pump through the air, making it even more difficult to hear, to speak. “I want more time, Chandler.” More time with her, uninterrupted, to learn what it was like to be with her without the imminent threat of death hanging over their heads.

  Sorrow—because sorrow was all that mixture of regret and longing could be—softened her features, and she laid her hand over his. “There is no more time, Toby.”

  “There could be.” There was a clenching sensation tightening his chest, stealing his breath and sending his pulse racing until his head pounded painfully in time to the helicopter’s whirring blades. He heard the faint shouts of the chopper’s pilot, saying they needed to leave, and a shadow appeared at the plane’s door, waving Chandler up the stairs. “Sweetheart—”

  “No.” Her position on the steps put them on even footing, and she brought her hands to his face, eyes searching his. “And it’s not that I don’t want more time, baby, because I do. Oh, I do.” Pressing her forehead to his, she shuddered against him. He banded his arms around her as she laid her lips over his in a sweet, searing kiss. “I hurt you.”

  His back stung viciously at the reminder, but he shrugged off the pain. It didn’t matter. It didn’t compare to what had been done to her, nor what was going on within him. “I’ll heal.”

  “You don’t understand.” Shaking her head, she attempted to pull away from him, stopped short when he didn’t release her. “Toby, I hurt you. I hurt your sister, your family. If you had done the same to Pip, I...I don’t know if I could forgive you, and I certainly wouldn’t expect her to.” She pushed at his shoulders, gently. “My presence in your life hurts your family. Just look at what happened tonight.” When he didn’t saying anything, Chandler sighed. “I have to go. You have to go.”

  Arms falling away, he swiped at the moisture the chilly rain had left on his face, sensing everything in him slowly freezing to that icy temperature he’d once embraced wholeheartedly. His job, his goddamn life was so much easier, if he could just stay frozen. Too bad she made it impossible. “You upheld your end of our agreement, Ms. McCallister,” he said without inflection, unable to meet her gaze any longer as he died inside, knowing he couldn’t chain her to him...no matter how much he felt as though his very existence depended on him doing so. “I’ll alert MI6 of your imminent return.”

  For too long, they stood there, silent and stilted until Chandler’s fleet feet got the better of her. Without so much as a goodbye, she turned and dashed up the stairs and into the cabin of the plane, where Finn and Henry waited to accompany her safely back to London.

  Spinning on his heel, he strode for the helicopter, for Gavin and Casey and the loyalties he’d never betray, and tried to ignore his certainty that the blonde on his family jet had just run away with his still-beating heart.

  Chapter Seventeen

  One week later

  Beth hovered in the second-floor hallway of the Lincoln Square home she and Vick had closed on little more than two weeks earlier, staring at the closed guest bedroom door. Her bottom lip caught between her teeth, she hesitated with her hand on the doorknob, afraid to enter.

  Which was stupid. She’d experienced real fear in the bunker with her torturer. There was no reason for her to be scared of talking to the man lying in bed just beyond the door.

  Except she hadn’t talked to Gavin Bok since before her capture. When Casey and two other Faraday employees delivered him to Beth’s Chicago doorstep a few days ago, Gavin had been unconscious, not exactly in any condition for a heart-to-heart on what the fuck he’d been up to in Moscow—or why, apparently, he had demanded to be taken directly to Beth.

  “Dumbass,” she muttered under her breath, not sure whether she was naming Gavin or herself with the epithet, and entered.

  The room was dark, the furniture minimal, as she and Vick had needed to buy 90-percent new in terms of belongings; not much had been salvageable from Beth’s former apartment, given it had been trashed by MI6 as part of their blackmail efforts. The guest room held only a bed, a side table and a chair that Beth pulled up before flicking on the lamp atop the table, casting the room in soft light and highlighting the sizable lump beneath the blankets.

  The lump groaned at the sudden light, murmured something in Russian.

  A knot formed in Beth’s throat at the foreign words, at the complete lack of an American accent bleeding through; it indicated more than anything how deeply embedded her former field partner had been in the Polnoch’ Pulya. Born and raised in the south, the son of a Russian immigrant working an oil rig and an Atlanta NICU nurse, Gavin was a Georgia boy to his core who’d joined the Navy instead of going to college and, after two tours piloting helicopters in Afghanistan and Iraq, left the military for private sector work.

  Beth had first met Gavin when their paths crossed on an assignment in Indonesia, Casey recruiting him shortly thereafter, but it was with Beth whom Gavin had clicked. Apparently, when her brother had asked about his partner preference, Gavin had answered resoundingly with, “Beth. Y’all need to give that crazy girl some proper backup.” Three years as partners had bred a deep and abiding friendship between them. Cutting him out of her life when she moved to Chicago last year had been akin to chopping off a limb—not that she’d truly noticed the loss until he’d popped back into her life two months ago like a slap in the face.

  Come to think of it, Gavin was a pretty annoying limb. If she didn’t love the dumbass so much, she’d kick him to the curb. “Gavin.” She pitched her voice low, propping her elbows on her knees, hands clasped loosely in front of her. “Gavin, you awake?”

  “Nyet.” Arms pushed weakly at the bedcovers until his scruffy, battered face came into view. One closed eye was blackened, cuts healing on his cheekbone and upper lip, his brown hair sleep-matted but clean. Then his long lashes flicked up and bleary blue eyes the color of rinsed denim locked on her. “B, that you, darlin’?”

  Tears stung at the sheer relief in his rasping drawl. “Yeah, it’s me. You know where you are?”

  “Better be Chicago or I’m gonna have to file a complaint with your brother.”

  Knowing he meant Tobias, Beth’s hands turned to fists. A single text was all she had received from Tobias since he’d left Moscow for London.

  The threat to you is eradicated. Take care of G.

  If Tobias sent Gavin to her, it meant he trusted her former partner, when only days before it had been up in the air whether or not Gavin remained loyal to the Faradays. In her heart, Beth wanted to trust Gavin, too—had, in fact, kept his undercover identity from Nash during his...interrogation. She had protected him then and would protect him now. But first she needed an answer to one vitally important question. “Did you know about Nash?” she blurted out, unable to keep the words from quivering.

  “Nash.” Gavin’s head turned on the pillow to face her fully, sheets shifting further down to reveal his heavily muscled chest and
thick upper arms covered in the tattoos he’d collected during his military service and time abroad. “Nash who?” Concern clouded his blue eyes. “Beth, where is your hair?”

  She scrubbed a hand over the short strands covering her scalp. The cast had come off her broken arm two days ago, her hair now the most obvious outward indicator of her previous trauma. “Something happened.”

  “Something...like what?” One big hand bearing busted knuckles and Cyrillic characters lifted from the bed, reaching toward her, and Beth took his warm palm between both of hers. “You’re hurting. I can see it.”

  “No more than you are.” Gut-shot and beaten to a pulp, Gavin would be a mess for weeks yet, whereas Beth was nearly healed. “A British spy named John Nash—” saying her tormentor’s full name aloud had nausea roiling “—took me hostage for four days and interrogated me on the orders of Karlin Kedrov. He was...thorough in his techniques.” Her fingers clenched around Gavin’s. “Did you know?”

  “Are you telling me you were tortured?” When she nodded, he closed his eyes on a shaky exhalation. “Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He struggled to sit, groaning, but Beth placed her hands on his shoulders to keep him down before perching on the edge of the bed. After a few moments, he settled with a pained sigh, sweat beading his brow, piercing her with his direct gaze. “B, I didn’t know. I swear, if I thought Kedrov planned to target you, I would’ve killed the bastard before he had the chance.”

  “Then...what did you try to tell me, the last time I saw you?” Because Gavin had tried to tell her something about Kedrov, and Beth had shut him down, hard, too wrapped up in the terrible memories of what she—and Gavin—had experienced in Kabul last year to listen.

  He gently stroked her cheek. “Just that Kedrov was alive. And...”

  “And?” Please don’t say you knew Nash. Please. Her heart couldn’t bear it if her best friend had known of Nash’s sadistic inclinations and his plan to practice that sadism upon her person.