by J. R. Ward
“Time’s wasting. And it goes without saying that you come alone. Don’t keep me waiting, or I’m likely to get bored and have to fill my time. You won’t like that, I promise. Be here in thirty.”
The light went out, the transmission ending sharply.
When Isaac wheeled around to leave, he jumped back. Jim had somehow made it up the stairs and through the closed door to stand right behind him.
“He has her,” Jim said flatly. “Doesn’t he.”
“I’m going solo or he’ll kill her.”
Shoving the man out of the way, Isaac jogged downstairs. The body in the front hall had been frisked for weapons before it had been gift wrapped, but car keys were another thing.
Bingo. Front pocket. Ford.
Now to find the bastard’s ride.
When Isaac stood up, he realized everything was totally silent and nobody was in the front hall. Glancing around, he had the feeling he was alone in the house even though he hadn’t a clue how they’d moved out so fast.
Whatever—fuck it. And fuck them.
Isaac lit for the door—but at the last minute, he pivoted in the archway and went back to the body to strip it some more. Then he shot out into the darkness.
The unmarked that he’d watched from the Pinckney Street house the day before was parked a block up, and the dead guy’s key got him in. Engine started just fine and the GPS was functional, so he quickly plugged in the address Grier’s father had given them all.
“Bat out of hell” described the trip.
He went flat-out on the Mass Pike, pushing the speed limit until he busted the fucker into pieces. Even still, it felt like he was moving in slow motion—and that got worse when he left the highway and tried to get through some town that was filled with stop signs and curvy roads.
Fortunately, the GPS took him exactly where he needed to go, his destination fronted by a pair of stone markers that sat on either side of a pale, glowing drive.
He canned the headlights and hung a right, downshifting from rush, rush, rush to slow, slow, slow. Cracking his window so he could hear better, he inched along, hating the sound of the tires crunching over a million seashells. The only good news was that the perma-glow of the city didn’t exist out here in the semi-sticks, and the moon was covered by clouds. But how much you want to bet they had motion-activated exteriors on the house and/ or trees?
Isaac rolled up behind another unmarked that had to be Matthias’s car. A K-turn later and he was facing out. Taking the keys with him, he jogged along the fringes of the lawn, his senses alive, his rage an inferno in his blood.
Matthias would die if he laid even a finger on Grier. One hair out of place on that woman and that bastard was going to get slaughtered.
As he approached the house, he searched out the doors. The front was open and he couldn’t see the back.
But then what did it matter—he was expected. And on that note, he should just fuck the DL ninja shit and announce himself.
Coming up to the farmhouse’s entrance, he kept his guns hidden and his eyes sharp as he curled up a fist and beat at the wooden jamb.
“Matthias,” he called out.
As he stepped inside, the resounding silence was more terrifying than any scream or pool of blood. Because God only knew what he was walking into.
Jim had had a plan as he and the angels had flashed to Grier’s father’s place. He hadn’t wanted to leave Isaac on his own back in town, but all they would have done was argue, and God knew the canny bastard could take care of himself.
Bottom line, Devina was playing deadly games, and that was something only Jim could deal with. And having a delay before Isaac arrived might not be a bad thing: If Matthias had done anything to that Grier woman, the soldier was going to be impossible to control.
Yup, as Jim landed and went gunning for the open door of the farmhouse with his wingmen in tow, he was prepared to take care of things.
Nigel, however, derailed him.
The archangel appeared right in his path, and this time he wasn’t in his tuxedo or his croquet whites or a nice little dapper-ass seersucker: He was nothing but a glowing form, a wavy silhouette of rippling light.
And he spoke only one word: “No.”
As Jim hauled up on his momentum, he would have punched the fucker if there had been anything solid to aim for. “What the fuck is the matter with you!” First the mislead over Isaac and now this?
“The die is cast.” Nigel lifted his barely-there hand. “And if you intervene now, you will ultimately lose.”
Jim pointed through the open door. “There’s a man’s soul at risk.”
File that under: No, really, you supercilious little prick.
Nigel’s voice got dark. “As if I was unaware of that.”
“If I can get to Matthias—”
“You had the chance—”
“I didn’t know it was him! This is bullshit!”
“That is nothing I can change. But I tell you, let the ending happen—”
“Oh, you can’t change anything, but you can get in the way now? Great fucking timing!” Jim was damned well aware that his voice was blaring, but he had no trouble announcing his presence to Devina or anybody else.
“Fuck this, I’m going in—”
On a quick shimmer, Nigel’s form blanketed him from head to foot, the illumination acting as a kind of glue that held him in place. And then that English voice was not just in his ear but through his whole brain.
“What is the truer course? The passionate or the rational? Think, Jim. Think. If one breaks the rules, a punishment flows. Think this through. If one breaks the rules, punishment flows. Think, damn you!”
Rage clouded his mind and shook his body until he thought he would come apart . . . but then suddenly, lightning hit marble head and he realized what the archangel was trying to tell him.
If one breaks the rules . . . punishment flows.
“That’s right, Jim. Take this to its natural conclusion—beyond this night. And know that you shall go farther in this game if you use your head rather than your anger. Please, I implore you, trust in me in this regard.”
Easing up his muscles, Jim felt a curious calm overtake him and he turned his head through the molasses Nigel had created.
Looking at Adrian and Eddie as they ran up, he saw that they were every bit as pissed off as he was. Which given what Nigel was saying wasn’t a value add.
“Trust me, Jim,” Nigel said. “I want to win as badly as you do. I am not without my own burdens of lost loved ones. I too would do aught that it takes to render them a peaceful eternity. Think not that I would e’er steer you upon a wrong course.”
Jim shook his head at his boys.
“Let it go,” Jim said to them. “We’re going to stay on the sidelines. We stay out here.”
As his comrades looked at him like he was out of his cocksucking head, he couldn’t agree more. It was going to kill him to not go in there, but he got the picture . . . and he was ultimately glad the archangel intervened. Thanks to Devina’s making fast and loose with the rules, the best shot Matthias had was Jim staying the fuck out of this.
Even though it went against every instinct he had.
After a moment, Nigel slowly extricated himself, and his magical illumination gradually dispersed. In its absence, Jim fell to his knees on the grass, his eyes locked on the open door of the clapboard house as Adrian and Eddie started to go off on him, demanding an explanation for the halt order.
Around the fringes of his mind and emotions, the urge to fly into the path of whatever Devina had engineered still tantalized him.
Especially as he thought of Isaac’s woman in the hands of Matthias—
Oh, God . . . Rothe was going to be sacrificed, wasn’t he.
Jim’s hands sought out the earth and he dug into the lawn with his fingers, holding his body in place.
Bowing his head, he prayed that his faith was well placed and good would, eventually, prevail. But the sad fact was, doing the right th
ing was going to be the death of a man who didn’t deserve to die tonight.
CHAPTER 48
Matthias had things with the Childes all tied up well before he expected Isaac to come tooling through the front door.
After he’d stun-gunned her, he’d discovered that picking Grier off the floor and putting her into a chair required more strength than he had—so he left her where she lay, tying her legs and wrists up with some duct tape he found in Alistair’s pantry.
And as for her father?
No clue what had made the man open the way in and stand there in a trance, but the distraction and space-cadet routine had been perfectly timed. Matthias had been able to walk up right behind the guy and put a gun to his head.
So yeah, getting him to sit in a chair in the kitchen had been a piece of cake; he’d all but bound his own hands and feet.
Which had been helpful, given that Matthias’s chest hurt so badly he could barely breathe.
And now, it was just a case of waiting for Isaac, all three of them together in this house with the door wide open.
There was a groan and then a shift on the floor as Grier Childe started to come around. She had a moment of confusion, as if trying to figure out why she was lying on the hardwood and why she couldn’t open her mouth. And then she jerked in a full-body spasm, her eyes peeling wide and locking on him.
“Wakey-wakey,” he said gruffly, giving her a nod as her father started to fight against his bonds and make muffled noises under the duct tape across his mouth.
Matthias leveled his gun muzzle at the guy’s head. “Shut it.”
There wasn’t anyone around to hear, but the distress and the struggle pricked Matthias’s nerves. In fact, as he stood between the two, he was far from the calm, master-of-all-he-surveyed guy he’d always been in the past: He was in great pain. He was exhausted. And he felt that what was about to happen next was predestined, but not something he would have chosen.
He was utterly out of control and totally locked in at the same time.
With the eyes of both Childes on him and everyone quiet again, he braced himself against the counter, his creaky body protesting at the shift in position.
“You know what pisses me off about you,” he said to Alistair. “I saved the good one.” He nodded down at Grier. “I could have left you with that son of yours. But no, I took the broken one—put your dear Danny boy out of his misery and yours.”
He could remember being surprised at his own thought process at the time. It was much more characteristic of him to take the one that would have hurt worse, but he’d gone a different way at that crossroads.
Maybe he’d started to change before he’d ordered the death. Who knew.
Who cared.
He was too far down for saving, and his conversation with Jim over the phone had shown him, instead of the possibilities for his redemption, the reality of his condemnation. It was time to end this . . . and go out with a bang.
Only this time, get it right.
At that moment, Isaac Rothe appeared in the archway of the kitchen. His eyes went to Grier first, and not even his stoic self-possession could hide his stark fear.
He loved that woman.
Well, good for him, the poor bastard.
“Welcome to the party,” Matthias said numbly, as he brought up his gun and pointed it at her.
“Don’t do it,” Isaac bit out. “Take me, not her.”
Matthias stared at the woman’s wide, terrified eyes and the way she seemed to be mouthing something along the lines of, Oh, God, no . . .
“I’m really sorry about all this,” Matthias said to her. And he meant it. He wasn’t sure what was crueler: to kill her in front of Isaac . . . or leave her to survive the man’s death—assuming that love of his was reciprocated.
Too bad one of them was going to die now—so that Jim Heron would be forced to come in and shoot Matthias—thus evening their score. The soldier had saved him two years ago against his wishes and now . . . tonight . . . he was going to do what he should have back in the desert.
“Matthias,” Isaac said sharply. “I’ll put my gun down.”
“Don’t bother,” he murmured, still focused on Grier. “You know, Ms. Childe, he turned himself in to me to save you. Twice. It was all about you.”
“Matthias, look at me.”
But he didn’t. Instead, he glanced at Alistair’s face and that was what made up his mind.
He shifted the weapon around.
Isaac was ready—and he’d expected nothing less.
Both of them pulled their triggers at the same time.
CHAPTER 49
Grier screamed against the tape that covered her mouth as the gunshots exploded in the kitchen, their echoing blasts making her ears ring and her eyes sting.
She heard two bodies hit the floor, but from her vantage point, she didn’t know who had been hurt.
Someone was moaning.
With her heart thundering, she lifted her head and craned her neck. Matthias was no longer in sight—so he must have been hit. . . . She prayed he’d been hit.
Isaac . . .? Her father . . . ?
Caterpillaring along the floorboards, she inched around the island. The first thing she saw was her father upright in the chair. And he was the one moaning as he fought furiously against the tape around his hands and feet.
Where was Isaac?
Ice-cold dread replaced every ounce of blood in her veins, and she knew the answer to the question even before she saw him lying flat on his back just inside the room.
He wasn’t moving, his gun lying in his lax, open palm, his eyes staring sightlessly up to the ceiling.
Grier screamed again, her body contracting, her cheek squeaking on the varnished floor, her whole soul and everything in her mind denying what was inescapable. Flailing around, she inched toward him, hoping to help, struggling to cross the distance—
Suddenly her hands were free.
With all her thrashing, she’d ripped them out of their bindings. Exploding into unexpected coordination, she tore the tape from her mouth and dragged herself with her arms to Isaac.
The bullet had gone right into his heart.
It was such a small hole through the sweatshirt, nothing but a relative pinprick with a sooty stain around the edges. Except it was more than enough to kill him.
“Isaac,” she said, touching his cold face. “Oh, God . . . don’t go. . . .”
His mouth was slightly open, his pupils fixed and dilated, his breathing shallow to the point of nearly stopping.
He had done it all to save her, the change in plans, the turning himself in. After all, that crazed, evil man had had no reason to lie.
“Isaac . . . I love you. . . . I’m sorry . . .”
His head slowly turned toward her, his eyes struggling to focus. As he appeared to lock on her face, tears licked over that frosty stare, one escaping out of the corner and rolling down his temple to fall onto the floor.
“I . . .”
“I’ll call nine-one-one,” she said in a rush.
Except as she went to jump up for the phone, he caught her arm in a surprisingly strong grip. “No . . .”
“You’re dying—”
“No.” With his free hand, he reached up to the zipper on his sweatshirt. Even though his fingers were trembling, he managed to grasp the toggle and pull it down. . . .
To reveal the bulletproof vest he was wearing.
“Breath . . . just . . . knocked . . . out of me.” With that he took a proper inhale, one that expanded his chest fully and was expelled evenly and cleanly. “Took it off . . . dead soldier . . .”
Grier blinked. Then shoved his hands out of the way and probed the hole . . . where the bullet had been caught and held in the tensile fibers of the Kevlar.
Her body reacted on its own, a bizarre superstrength overtaking her as she yanked him up off the floor and held him to her heart.
“You’re a . . .” She started to cry properly as horror and terro
r gave way to sweeping relief. “You’re a brilliant man. You’re a brilliant . . . stupid man . . .”
And then his arms were around her and he was, against all odds, holding her back.
All too soon he was separating them, though, and picking up his gun.
“Stay here.”
With a grunt, he got up and shuffled around to check on Matthias, and as he went over, she unbound her feet and scrambled to her father.
“Are you okay,” she asked as she went to work freeing his arms.
He nodded furiously, his eyes not on her but on Isaac as if he couldn’t believe the guy had survived either. And the instant his hands were free, he took over undoing his ankles.
Grier looked around, and then as a precaution in case anyone else showed up or was in the house, she went for the nine-millimeter she’d been given when Jim Heron had appeared.
Assuming that actually had been the man.
Something told her that perhaps what she and her father had seen hadn’t really been there at all.
Matthias knew it was a mortal hit and he was glad. Yeah, he’d wanted Jim Heron’s gun to do the deed, but Isaac’s had worked just fine—and Rothe had been part of the whole survivor problem, hadn’t he.
At least he’d gotten even with one of them.
As the arterial tear in his heart started to leak into his chest cavity, breathing became difficult and his blood pressure dropped, his body going numb and cold. Which was nice. No more pain.
Well, not exactly. That stinging, left-sided agony stuck with him . . . and it was as he lay dying that he figured out what it was: He’d been wrong. It wasn’t his heart preparing for a coronary. It was—shock of all shocks—his conscience. And the way he knew that was because as he thought of the fact that he’d killed a relatively innocent man, in front of a woman who loved him, the pain got exponentially worse.
Wasn’t this ironic. Somehow, in the depths of his sin, the sociopath had found his soul.
Too late.
Ah, hell, that was okay, though. He was going to be dead soon, and after that nothing mattered. The white light that had come for him before, when he’d coded on the operating table a couple of times, was going to stick around this time. He didn’t think it was Heaven. The shit was probably a figment of some ocular malfunction, just another part of the mechanics of dying—