Crave fa-2

by J. R. Ward

  Unless . . . twins?

  Shit . . . yes. That had to be it. And what a tool for Matthias to fuck with people’s minds. No wonder he’d picked the SOB to be second in command.

  As Jim cursed again and took up wearing a path in the hall’s runner, Isaac bent down and quickly unbuttoned the second in command’s sleeve. No trace of anything on that forearm in the form of a surgical repair, no evidence the skin or bone had ever been broken.

  Twins. Had to be.

  With a quick rip, he tore open the black shirt, buttons popping off and bouncing on the floor. The bulletproof vest that was revealed was a surprise. Yeah, they were standard-issue, but why would you bother with one if you were going to turn your skull into a piñata?

  Unsure exactly what he was looking for, he stripped the Velcro straps off the vest—

  “Holy . . . crap . . .” He leaned in to make sure he was seeing right.

  All down the guy’s stomach there were deep scars that formed a pattern, and as Jim took a looksee and started in on another round of cursing, Isaac kept going with a fast pat-down. Cell phone, which he put aside. Wallet with a hundred in cash and no ID. Ammo. Nothing in the boots except socks and soles.

  Stepping over the body, he headed for the kitchen to get a trash bin. As he was pulling the thing out of its cabinet and wondering how many arms and legs would fit in it, he heard footsteps behind him. Obviously, the peanut gallery had followed, but come on, people. No more talk; they needed action. Grier was locked in the damn closet upstairs and he had to get the shit cleaned up before he let her out—

  “You lied.”

  Isaac froze and cranked his head around. Grier was standing on the far side of the island with the cellar door just shutting behind her. How in the hell had she . . . Crap, there must be a hidden stairwell that linked to the basement. He should have guessed there would be multiple escape routes.

  As she stared at him, she was white as Kleenex and shaking in her shoes. “You never intended to come forward. Did you.”

  He shook his head, not knowing what to say and all too aware of what was in her front hall. This situation was totally out of control. “Grier—”

  “You bastard. You lying b—” Abruptly, she focused over his shoulder. “You . . .” She pointed at Jim, who’d come to stand in the archway. “You were the one in my room the other night. Weren’t you.”

  An odd expression filtered across Jim’s features, kind of a fuck-me, but then he just shrugged and looked at Isaac. “I will not allow you to turn yourself in.”

  “Your new theme song is getting on my nerves,” Isaac bit out as he decided to bag the bin and go unstructured with some of Hefty’s best.

  Chatter, a lot of chatter from just about everyone—and all of it directed at him. But whatever. Selective deafness was something he had excelled at as a kid, and what do you know, the skill set came back to him without a hint of rust.

  Isaac bent down under the sink and prayed that the most logical place for more trash bags was in fact—bingo. He took out two of them along with a broom and dustpan that were not going to survive this particular job.

  God, he wished he had a hacksaw. But maybe with some rope, they could fold the bastard up tight and carry him out like a sloppy suitcase.

  “Stay with her,” he said to her father. “And keep her in here—”

  “I saw it happen.” As Isaac froze, she glared at him. “I watched him do it.”

  There was a long, silent pause, as if she had snapped all the chains of the men in the room.

  She shook her head. “Why did you even pretend to go along with it, Isaac?”

  As she stared at him, the trust was gone from her eyes. And in its place, there was a cold regard that he imagined people in laboratories wore as they watched the results of petri-dish cultures.

  There would be no talking to her, no denying the shift he’d made. And maybe that was for the best. They had no business being together anyway—and that was before he layered on his professional pursuit of excellence in the field of deading up people.

  Isaac got his Merry Maid on and headed for hall. “I need to move the body.”

  “Don’t you turn away from me,” she barked out.

  He heard Grier coming behind him as if she had every intention of yelling at him some more, so he stopped short and pivoted around just as he got to the archway. As she pinwheeled to keep from running into his body, he pegged her in the eyes.

  “Stay here. You don’t want to see—”

  “Fuck. You.” She shoved past him, marching by until—“Oh . . . God . . .” She choked off the word, her hand coming up to her mouth.

  Bingo, he thought grimly.

  Fortunately, her father was on it, going over to her and gently maneuvering her out of eyeshot.

  Cursing himself and everything about his life, Isaac continued down the hall, more determined than ever to take care of the problem . . . except his urgency took a time-out as he came up to the body.

  A cell phone was in the corpse’s hand and the thing was sending a message; the little screen on the phone was glowing with a picture of an envelope going into a mailbox over and over again.

  Okay. Time to back the bus up, here: Guys who had no frontal lobe geeeenerally speaking didn’t reach out and touch something with their T-Mobile.

  A little glowing check mark appeared, indicating success.

  “Isaac, you’re going to need more than a dustpan to handle that.”

  At the sound of Jim’s voice, he looked over his shoulder. And had to blink a couple of times. The man was standing in the dark part of the hall, well away from the light that came through the arches of the study and library . . . but he was illuminated, a glow surrounding him from head to foot.

  Isaac’s heart did a couple of jumping jacks in his chest cavity. Then seemed to take a little breather.

  There had been a number of times when he’d been out in the field, in the middle of an assignment, and things had gone tits-up on him: You thought you knew your target’s patterns and resources, weaknesses and protective covers, but just as you were about to move on him, the landscape changed sure as if someone dropped a bomb in the middle of the town square of your perfect plan. Weapon malfunctioned. A potential witness fucked your timing up. The target stepped out of range.

  What you had to do was a fast recalibration of the situation, and Isaac had always excelled at that. Hell, that video game he’d unwittingly trained himself on had made his mind totally open to the lickety-split.

  But this shit was out of his expertise. Big-time.

  And that was before Jim took out a long dagger . . . that was made of crystal. “You’re going to let me handle this now. Step away from the body, Isaac.”

  CHAPTER 40

  Matthias spent way too much time in the stone embrace of that church. And when he finally forced himself to leave, he assumed he’d been there a good hour or so, but the instant he looked at the sun’s position in the sky, he realized he’d wasted all of the morning and most of the afternoon.

  Yet he would have stayed longer if he could have.

  He was hardly a religious man, but he’d found a shocking and rare peacefulness beneath the stained glass gallery and before the glorious altar. Even now, as his mind told him that it was all bullshit, that the place had been just another building, and that he was so tired you could have put him on a Disney ride and he would have fallen asleep, his heart knew better.

  The pain had stopped. Shortly after he’d sat down, the pain in his left arm and chest had disappeared.

  “Whatever,” he said out loud as he got in his car. “Whatever, whatever . . .”

  Getting back in the game was something he felt compelled to do, and there was a pleasurable, needling sting to it, as if he were picking a scab. On some level, he was captivated by what he’d found in the church, but his job, his deeds, his very way of life was a whirlpool that sucked him in and kept him down and he just didn’t have the energy to fight it.

 
Still . . . maybe there was a middle way, he thought, when it came to Isaac Rothe. Maybe he could get the guy to keep working only in a different capacity. The soldier had obviously responded well to the threats against Grier Childe—that could be enough to keep him in line.

  Or . . . he could let the guy go.

  The instant the thought crossed his mind, some inner part of him slammed it down as if it was an utter blasphemy.

  Annoyed with himself and the situation, he started the engine and checked his phone. Nothing from his number two. Where the hell was the bastard?

  He sent a text demanding an update and giving his ETA, which would be well after dark at this point. Out of state his ass. That fucker had better be there with Isaac Rothe duct taped to a chair before Matthias rolled up—and God help him if he’d killed Rothe.

  As impatience cranked his hands down on the wheel, Matthias eased away from the curb and headed for the highway thanks to the GPS screen on the dash. He’d gone less than a mile before the pain underneath his sternum came back, but it was like a familiar suit of clothes after he’d been trying on someone else’s wardrobe: easy and comfortable in a fucked-up kind of way.

  His phone went off. Picture message. From his number two.

  As he accepted the thing, he was relieved. A little visual confirmation that Isaac was alive and in custody was a good thing—

  It was not a picture of Isaac.

  It was the remnants of his second in command’s face. And that snake tattoo that ran around the man’s throat was the only way he was sure who it was.

  Underneath the picture: Come and get me—I.

  Matthias’s first and only thought was . . . the fucking nerve. The goddamn cocksucking nerve. What the hell was Rothe thinking? And shit, if threats against dear sweet lovely Grier Childe didn’t work, Isaac was utterly uncontrollable and therefore he had to be put down.

  Raw fury cast aside the last lingering remnants of his time in that church, a wellspring of vengeance letting loose to roar. As it hit him, in the back of his mind, he had a thought that this wasn’t him, that the cool, knifelike precision of thought and action that had always been his hall-mark would have precluded this white-hot burn. He was, however, incapable of turning away from the need to act—and act personally.

  Fuck delegation. . . . There were countless operatives he could have called in, but this he would handle himself.

  In the same way he’d had to see Jim Heron’s body with his own eyes, he was going to go and take down Rothe himself.

  The man had to die.

  CHAPTER 41

  As Grier sat on the couch in the corner of the kitchen, she revisited her choice to go into law instead of medicine and knew she’d made the right decision: She’d never had the stomach to be a doctor.

  Her grades and test scores could have gotten her into either graduate school, but the tipping factor had been Gross Human Anatomy, that first-year med-school staple: one look at those muslin-covered dead bodies on all those tables during her pre-admission tour and she’d had to put her head between her knees and try to breathe like she was in yoga class.

  And what do you know. The fact that there was someone in an even juicier condition in her front hall was so much worse.

  Surprise, surprise.

  Another shocker at the moment—not that she needed one—was her father’s hand making slow, calming circles on her back. The times he had done something like this were few and far between, as he was not the kind of man who handled shows of emotion well. And yet when she’d really needed it, he’d always been there: her mother’s death. Daniel’s. That horrible breakup with the guy she’d almost married right out of law school.

  This was the father she had known and loved all her life. In spite of the shadows that surrounded him.

  “Thank you,” she said without looking at him.

  He cleared his throat. “I don’t believe I deserve that. This all is because of me.”

  She couldn’t argue the point, but she didn’t have the strength to condemn him; especially given that terrible ache in his voice.

  Now that her rage had passed, she realized that his conscience was going to haunt him to the day he died, and that was the punishment he’d earned and was going to carry out. Plus, he’d already had to bury one child, an imperfect son who he had loved in his own way and had lost in a horrible manner. And although Grier could have spent the rest of her days alienating him and hating him for Daniel’s death . . . was that really a burden she wanted to carry around?

  She thought of the body in the front hall and how life could be snatched away between one breath and the next.

  No, she decided. She would not allow the hurt and anger she felt to cheat her out of what was left of her family. It would take time, but she and her father would rebuild their relationship.

  At least that was one thing Isaac had been right and truthful about.

  “We can’t call the police, can we,” she said. Because surely anyone in a uniform who showed up would be hunted as well.

  “Isaac and Jim will handle the body. That’s what they do.”

  Grier winced at the idea. “Won’t he be missed by someone? Anyone?”

  “He doesn’t exist. Not really. Whatever family he had thinks he’s dead—that’s the requirement for men in that branch of XOps.”

  God, morally, she had twelve kinds of problems not saying something or doing something about the death. But she wasn’t going to put her own life at risk for the guy who had been sent to kill Isaac and maybe herself.

  Except . . . well, apparently, he’d come to commit suicide with witnesses.

  “What are we going to do,” she said, talking out loud and not expecting an answer.

  And the we in that was her and her father. The we did not include Isaac.

  He’d lied. To her face. He had in fact had contact with those evil people—and meanwhile, she’d been thinking that they’d had a plan. Sure, he hadn’t betrayed her father, but that was only a measure of comfort because obviously, he’d decided to turn himself in—or at least appear to. A man like him, who fought like he did and was as comfortable as he was with weapons? It was far more likely that he’d decided to kill whoever took him into custody and bolt out of the country free and clear.

  Fine. She was letting him go.

  He was nothing but sexual attraction packaged in a ticking box—and that sound was the timer running out on the bomb underneath all the hard-bodied bows and ribbons. As for the I-love-you stuff? The thing with liars was that you believed anything they said to you at your own risk—not just the stuff you knew to be false. She wasn’t sure where that “admission” got him, but she knew better than to view it as anything other than more hot air.

  Her mind made up, she was too tired to be anything but numb. Well, numb and feeling stupid. But come on, like that “rare combination” of raw and gentle really existed?

  “Wait here,” her father said.

  As he got up, she realized two large men had come into her kitchen. The pair of them were cut from the same mold as Isaac and the very-definitely-not-dead Jim Heron—and the sight of them was yet another reminder of what was going on in the front hall.

  Like she needed the help, though?

  “We’re friends of Jim’s,” the one with the braid said.

  “In here,” Heron called out from down the corridor.

  As the pair headed for the body along with her father, she got annoyed with herself and pulled up her mental big-girl pants. When she stood up, her head spun, but that whirling-dervish stuff receded as she went over to the coffee machine and went through the motions of making a fresh pot.

  Filter. Check.

  Water. Check.

  Coffee grinds. Check.

  Button to on. Check.

  Normalcy helped stitch her back together a little more tightly, and by the time she had a steaming mug in her palms, she was ready to deal.

  Good thing, too. It was time to think about the future . . . of what lay beyond
this ugly night and these gut-wrenching past three days.

  Unfortunately, her mind was like a spectator at a car accident, loitering around the twisted wreckage and the bodies on the pavement, tangling up in memories of her and Isaac together. Eventually, however, she cut that unhealthy focus off, her rational side playing cop and forcing her thoughts to move along, just move along now.

  The thing was, Isaac had come into her life for a good reason: Thanks to him, she had finally learned the lesson that Daniel’s death had failed to teach her. Bottom line? As much as you wanted someone to change and believed they could, they were in control of their life. Not you. And you could throw yourself against the wall of their choices until you were black-and-blue and dizzy as hell, but unless they decided to take a different road, the outcome wasn’t going to be what you wanted.

  The realization wasn’t going to keep her from helping down at the jail or doing pro bono cases. But it was time to put some limits on how much she had to give . . . and how far she was willing to go. In all her peripatetic, Good Samaritan scramblings, she had been trying to resurrect Daniel—even though talking to his ghost should have been her first clue he wasn’t coming back. In discovering the truth about what had happened to him, however, and in trying to find some balance for herself, maybe she could finally put him to rest and move on.

  Taking another sip from her mug, she felt a measure of peace in spite of the bizarre circumstances—

  Which was when another gunshot went off in the front of the house.

  Out in the hall, Jim had just been approaching the body with his crystal knife when he’d felt Eddie and Adrian’s presence in the kitchen. God, they’d timed their entrance perfectly. He’d been prepared to act on his own, but backup was never a bad idea.

  “I’m in here,” he called out.

  The pair came right along and neither seemed surprised at what was on the floor.