“Son of a bitch,” he muttered, looking at the damage to the door and the roof. He stomped angrily around to her side and opened the driver’s door. “Come on, get out. We don’t have all day.” She took a shaky breath and climbed out, careful to keep her face turned away from him. “Here, you’d better put this away.”
He shoved something cold and hard into her hand and she stared at it uncomprehendingly. It was the Glock with its magazine still in place. Hawk pushed his way past her and dropped into the driver’s seat. He reached for the door but Trisha was in the way. “Move it! We need to get going.”
Trisha’s hand lifted, seemingly of its own accord, centering the Glock’s muzzle on Hawk’s chest. “No,” she told him. Her voice only shook a little bit.
“What?” He frowned at the pistol, just a couple of feet from his heart, but he looked more puzzled than frightened.
“I’m not going with you.”
“I just want to talk to you about what happened back there. You live there, right?”
“I don’t know anything. I just want to go home.” She needed her other hand to steady her aim now.
“Back to that therion?” he asked scornfully, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “It’s probably still there, if it hasn’t run off somewhere to lick its wounds.” She had no idea what a therion was, but she shook her head vehemently.
“I don’t live there, I was just – It doesn’t matter! I’m leaving.” She backed away from the car, still pointing her weapon at Hawk. He raised his hands in surrender.
“Fine, I won’t stop you. Thanks for your help, anyway,” he added grudgingly. “You wouldn’t happen to know if a man named Lionel was staying there, would you?”
Trisha’s eyes widened in surprise. Was he actually looking for Lionel? she wondered uncertainly. Is that why he came to my house? Did he think I knew where he was? Her aim sagged as she debated telling Hawk the truth and then her face flushed as she remembered making love to Lionel in her bedroom. I can’t do that to him. She brought the Glock up again. “I’m leaving,” she said again.
Hawk’s scowl traveled up to her face and his eyes narrowed. “Show me your face,” he demanded.
“No!” Trisha used her left hand to pull the ends of her collar together over her mouth.
“Son of a bitch, it’s you! You’re Patricia Macmillan!” Hawk started to get out of the car but he froze in place when Trisha jabbed the Glock at his face.
“Don’t come near me!” she shouted fearfully. “I’ll shoot!”
“Look, I just want to talk to you.” He held up his empty hands, still stained with blood.
“I don’t believe you!”
“Then why do you think I’ve been looking for you?”
“I – I don’t know. I don’t care! I’m leaving!” She glanced around frantically, wondering where she should go. The entrance to the plumbing store looked very far away.
“Just answer me one question, then. Why does Lucas have a picture of you on his tablet?”
“What?” That made no sense at all. “Lucas? Lucas Butler?” Hawk nodded. “What are you talking about?”
“I found his tablet in his apartment when I was trying to figure out what happened to him. There’s a picture of you that he drew, probably a few days ago.”
“That’s impossible! I only met him yesterday and he was unconscious the whole time!”
“It’s true,” Hawk insisted. “I’m trying to find out what it means.”
“Ask him, then!”
“I don’t know where he is. Do you?” Trisha shook her head and Hawk sighed. “Look, just come with me and I’ll show you. There are a bunch of other pictures as well. Maybe you can make some sense of them.”
“No, I can’t.”
“It may be the only way we can find Lucas.” She shook her head again but her resolve started to slip along with her aim. “Please,” he said softly.
“I – You’re not trying to kidnap me?”
“What?” Hawk looked surprised and offended at the same time. “Why would I want to do that?”
“Lionel said –”
“Lionel.” Hawk’s mouth worked like he wanted to spit out something vile. “He’d lie to his own mother if he had one.”
“He’s not – he –” She suddenly didn’t know who to believe. “What about Chantal? Who – what is she?”
“Who’s Chantal?” Hawk frowned.
“The – thing that attacked you.” She pointed a shaky finger at the Corvette. The paint on the roof was scraped down to the bare metal in eight parallel lines. “She was working with Lionel.”
“Fuck, I should have known,” he muttered. He hit the driver-side window with the side of his fist, making her jump. “Goddamn motherfucker. How many of the damn things does he have here?”
“There’s more of them?” Her voice squeaked embarrassingly high.
“At least two, apparently, but that’s more than enough. Fuck.” He swept his hand through his hair in frustration. “Look, are you coming or not? I have to find out what happened to Nim.”
“Nim?” She remembered the name from Lionel’s bizarre story last night. “She’s your boss?”
“One of them. We split up looking for you.” He seemed really worried now.
“Will you – Can you tell me what’s going on?”
He looked her over, looking suddenly bone tired. “It’s a long story and you probably won’t believe any of it.”
“I have to know.”
“All right. Hop in.” She stood where she was, still aiming the pistol at his heart. “Look, I’m freezing my ass out here and I need to find Nim. If she’s okay, she’ll be back at the apartment. If not, well, I don’t know. Maybe Lucas’s pictures will give us a clue. Okay?”
Trisha looked into his eyes for the longest time but all she saw there was sincerity and worry. Slowly, she nodded. “I still have the gun,” she reminded him with as much confidence as she could muster. “If you try anything –”
“It wouldn’t be the first time I got shot on the job, believe me,” he grumbled. “Get in.”
30
Lionel slowed as he neared the mansion’s gate. Chantal’s sedan sat by the side of the road, the driver’s door ajar, but she was nowhere in sight. “Damn it,” he murmured.
He turned onto the driveway, noting the churned up snow and serpentine tire tracks. Someone had left in a hurry, most likely Hawk. The question was, did he take Trisha with him?
He pulled up by the steps and grabbed his phone from the passenger seat before jumping out. He flipped through the keys on his ring as he took the steps two at a time. but he stopped in his tracks when he saw the pale-skinned body huddled by the front door. For a startled moment, he thought Chantal was dead, but then she slowly lifted her head.
“You are too late, Lionel,” she said, her voice barely audible. “Hawk has taken your woman.”
“Shit.” Smudges of blood, now frozen, showed where Chantal had crawled up the steps and tried to reach the door latch. He knelt at her side and touched her arm. It was nearly as cold as the snow. “Stay with me, Chantal,” he said urgently.
“You cannot be rid of me so easily,” she whispered, but her eyes sagged closed.
Lionel unlocked the door and threw it open before taking Chantal up in his arms, heedless of the innumerable scrapes and cuts on her arms and legs and face. She was surprisingly heavy for her size, but he managed to carry her upstairs and into his bedroom without dropping her.
He laid her on his bed and pulled the covers over her, tucking them close around her body. Then he shrugged off his coat as he hurried into the bathroom, turning on the faucets and filling the tub with steaming water before adding enough cold water to make it warm rather than scalding.
Chantal seemed to be asleep when he returned for her and he had to check to make sure she was still breathing. He stripped off her ragged bodysuit as gently as he could and carried her to the tub, lowering her in and soaking his sleeves past his elbows. Her e
yes popped open with a gasp as the heat surrounded her and she nearly scarred his cheek before she relaxed and lay back in the water. Thin clouds of brown and red drifted around her as the dried blood on her skin slowly dissolved and exposed her wounds.
Lionel rolled up his sodden sleeves before searching the cabinets for first aid supplies. There were none and he hurried downstairs to the kitchen, finally finding a kit tucked away in the pantry. By the time he returned to the bathroom, Chantal had nearly sunk beneath the water, with just her face exposed to the air. The water was an even murky brown and he opened the drain, adding clean warm water to keep her submerged. He rested his hand on her shoulder to check her temperature and her eyes slowly opened.
“Je suis désolée, Lionel,” she murmured.
“What for?” Her skin was still cool to the touch but no longer icy.
“I could not defeat him.”
“Who? Hawk?”
“Oui. She had a gun.”
“You mean he.”
“She. She shot me.” Her hand drifted to her shoulder, where a long, deep notch slowly bloodied the water. “Then he took it.” She touched a ragged hole in her abdomen, just below her ribs. “It slowed me down too much.”
“Don’t worry about it. Just rest.” She nodded and closed her eyes again. Lionel sat on the edge of the tub and tried to imagine where Trisha had gotten a gun and why she shot Chantal instead of Hawk.
What happened? he wondered. How did he talk her into going with him? She was deathly afraid of him when I left. How did he even find her in the first place? Did she call him? He shook his head bleakly. This isn’t good. We have to find her, but how? Where did they go?
When he was certain the threat of hypothermia had passed, he drained the tub and carefully wrapped towels around her to dry her and keep her warm. He carried her back to the bed, laying her down gently, and then began to treat her injuries.
He couldn’t do anything about the dark bruises on her face and chest, but most of the other wounds were superficial cuts and abrasions, already scabbing over, easily covered with a few layers of gauze. The two bullet wounds were much more serious. He was no stranger to battlefield surgery, but he didn’t have the right supplies to suture them closed. Instead, he had to make do with antiseptic ointment, pressure bandages, and a lot of gauze. By the time he was done, Chantal looked like a half-finished mummy.
She bore his ministrations stoically, only breathing in sharply as he rolled her onto her side to check the exit wound in her lower back. It looked clean, which was good news. Taking her to an emergency room would raise questions he really couldn’t answer to anyone’s satisfaction.
He collected the wrappers and bloody swabs, tossing everything into the trash can in the bathroom. When he returned, Chantal was much more alert, watching him with half-lidded eyes.
“You are very kind to us,” she told him quietly. “Not like the other Chevaliers or the Knights.” She nearly snarled the last word.
“Of course I am.” He leaned over to touch the back of his hand to her forehead. She seemed a little too warm now. “You’re valuable assets.”
“Is that all I am to you?” she pouted, although the effect was ruined by her swollen lip. “Just an asset?” She took his hand and guided it down to her bare breast. Her hard nipple pressed into his palm. “Make love to me, Lionel.” She wriggled sensuously on the bed, parting her legs for him.
“Don’t be foolish, Chantal.” He extracted his hand carefully and stepped back out of reach. “You’re injured. Just rest. I have to check in with Savard.”
“Why?” she asked suspiciously. “Is something wrong with him?”
“I left him guarding Nim.”
Chantal sat straight up in bed, heedless of the bloom of fresh blood staining her bandages. “You have the King’s witch?” she hissed. “How?”
“She was alone,” he assured her. “They were obviously trying to distract us while Hawk took Trisha, but we captured her instead.” Despite his confident tone, a nagging doubt churned in his stomach. Any of the Knights would have sufficed, he thought worriedly. Why did Nim go herself? “Lie down and rest. I need to get back there and make arrangements to move her to a safer place.” He shook out his coat and removed his phone from the pocket as Chantal lay down reluctantly. “I’ll be back later to check on you.”
He strode from the bedroom, leaving the door ajar, and dialed Savard’s number as he hurried down the stairs to the front door. The phone rang several times without an answer and a shiver ran through him. He told himself it was concern for Savard and not fear as he wrenched open the door and ran to the Range Rover.
Savard’s more than a match for Nim, he reassured himself. Isn’t he?
31
Hawk’s phone rang as he pulled into the parking garage under the Tremont apartment building. He didn’t have enough hands to shift, steer, and hold the phone all at the same time, so he activated the speaker and set the phone on the console. “Nim! Where the hell have you been?”
“Making new friends,” she said dryly, “and meeting up with old ones. Where are you now?”
“We just got back to the apartment.”
“We?”
Hawk glanced over at Trisha. She stared at him with wide, anxious eyes, the Glock still clutched in her fist and pointed in his general direction. “We have a special guest.”
“Excellent. We’ll be there in about thirty minutes.”
“We?”
Nim chuckled. “I’ll leave it as a surprise. Take care, Gavin. Lionel’s going to be upset with us.”
“Like I care what he thinks,” Hawk growled.
“As may be, but you should care about what he does. He’s still very dangerous.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Nim just sighed and hung up.
Hawk pulled into an empty slot in the darkest corner of the garage. Hopefully no one would notice the damage and the blood before they could get it taken care of. He shut off the engine, grabbed his phone, and opened his door, pausing when Trisha just stayed where she was. “You coming?”
“That was Nim on the phone?” she asked. She looked very unsure of herself.
“Yeah.”
“And she’s your boss?”
“One of them. The main one,” he admitted grudgingly.
“Lionel told me you worked for Arthur Pendragon.”
“He’s the top boss. Nim handles the day-to-day stuff.” Trisha shook her head doubtfully. “Look, can we do this upstairs? My arm hurts like a bitch.”
Trisha started and stared at his jacket sleeve in dismay. It looked like it had been slashed several times with a very sharp razor. “Oh, I’m so sorry! Do you have any medical supplies? I can take a look at that for you.”
“No, don’t bother, I’ll be fine.” She finally got out and he locked the doors with the remote, shaking his head at himself when he realized how futile that was. Anyone could just reach in through the missing rear window and take whatever they wanted.
Trisha followed him silently to the elevator, looking around nervously the entire time to see if anyone noticed the gun she held in her pocket. Despite all the cars in the garage, the building almost seemed deserted. They rode up to the twelfth floor in silence and stopped in front of apartment 1201 without encountering a single soul.
Hawk inserted his pass key into the lock and punched in his code, holding the door open for Trisha. She edged through the opening, keeping as far away from him as possible, and he just rolled his eyes as he followed her in.
He left her in the center of the living room, staring at the obviously expensive furniture and fixtures, and went into the kitchen, hunting through the cabinets for a first aid kit. Coming up empty, he tried to remember if he’d seen one when he searched the apartment earlier. He wasn’t sure, but he finally found it in the master bathroom. He brought it back into the kitchen and removed his jacket, sucking his breath between his teeth as the dried blood pulled at the wounds underneath. He tossed it over the back of a chair and carefully p
eeled the remains of his sleeve back to inspect his arm.
“Oh my God!” Trisha stood in the archway, staring aghast at the trio of long rents down his forearm. Blood oozed sluggishly from the sharp-edged gouges. “You need to get to a hospital!”
“I’ll be fine.” Hawk opened the first aid kit and rummaged through the contents, coming up with a roll of gauze. He tore it open with his teeth and started wrapping it around his arm.
“What are you doing?” Trisha sounded shocked. She rushed over and snatched the gauze from his hand. “You have to clean the wound and disinfect it first!”
“It’s fine,” he growled, reaching for the bandage, but she hid it behind her back.
“It’s not fine,” she told him firmly. She pulled out one of the chairs and pushed him into it. “Sit down, I’ll take care of this.” She tsked under her breath as she inspected the contents of the kit and then quickly looked through the cabinets, finally coming up with a large plastic bowl and a handful of dish towels. She shed her scarf and winter coat and filled the bowl with warm water from the sink. She laid one of the towels on the table in front of Hawk. “Here, put your arm on this,” she ordered. Hawk capitulated with ill grace.
Trisha worked methodically, cleaning the lacerations with another towel and warm water and wishing she had proper gloves. The water in the bowl was dark red by the time she finished but at least the cuts didn’t seem to be too deep. She used an antiseptic spray, ignoring Hawk’s sharp epithet, and then applied an antibiotic cream carefully along the wounds. She used most of the gauze roll, wrapping it as tightly as she dared to try to hold the edges of the gashes together. They really needed to be properly sutured, but she doubted she could convince Hawk of that. He was going to have an impressive set of scars when everything finally healed.
She taped the end of the gauze down firmly and Hawk flexed his fingers experimentally, grimacing at the stinging sensation all the way down his forearm. At least everything worked properly.
Gawain (Knights of Excalibur Book 1) Page 17