She changed out of her desi clothes, tossing on a T-shirt and cargo pants from her duffel and tying back her hair. Her burner phones and iPod went into an oversized pocket. She slipped on her holster and a jacket, too. It was amazing how one presidential election had set her on the path to becoming Lara Croft or one of the X-Men. Neha Ahluwalia, action hero. She’d always tried to be careful, hypervigilant. But now…all that care and all of that vigilance was crystallized, focused. Driving her as she locked up the studio and headed out.
There was no sign of Joe in the immediate vicinity. Nothing about that was comforting. Especially when she picked up on the signs that did exist. The neighborhood was teeming with people from all walks of life, all cultures and faiths. But even so, one particular white guy didn’t quite fit in. He stood a head taller than most of the people making their way down Thirty-Seventh Avenue, and his posture was predatory. He wore all black, but there was no mistaking him for waitstaff getting ready to go on shift or a trendy Manhattanite about to hit up an art gallery. Aggression rolled off of him in waves. If you see something, say something, the MTA’s old ad campaign had urged. This was the kind of person who made you want to say something. No. To change subway cars or cross the street to avoid him.
He was here for her and Joe. She knew that as surely as she knew her own name. Somehow, Vasiliev had found them. Maybe the goons had started out on McDonald Avenue first, searching all the brown parts of central Brooklyn, but they’d eventually made their way here to Jackson Heights. And maybe they’d already grabbed Joe. Maybe he hadn’t just left her. Maybe, like he said, he’d had no choice. Fuck. She ducked into a sari shop, digging into a pocket for her burner and the iTouch app where Joe had logged his emergency number. “If I’m not back…if something happens…I want you to call this line.” Joe had filed the number under Donovan’s. She took two seconds to appreciate the private joke as she dialed it and waited for the line to connect.
“Yes?” It was a low, masculine voice. Clipped. Polite. “Can I help you?”
Neha felt suddenly ridiculous. What did one say to a mysterious voice on a phone line connected to god-only-knew-where? “I have a problem. I’ve heard you can solve it.”
“Potentially.” The reply was pleasant, with no trace of regional accent. “What’s the nature of this problem? Pest control? Search and rescue?” Whoever these people were, they were good.
She peered out the shop’s display windows, toward the sidewalk. “Approximately six foot four. Two hundred and ten pounds of solid muscle. Russian gang tattoos visible on his neck. Sound familiar?”
“Intimately.” The pleasant tone hardened a little. Just enough that Neha could detect frustration. “We have operatives in transit already. Can you evade the problem until then, or has the situation already escalated?”
Operatives in transit already? Had they been monitoring Nate’s phone? Been in the room with him? Somehow traced the call that Joe had made the other night? Or had she and Joe managed to land on drone footage despite their efforts to duck the surveillance? The thought would be creepy as hell, except that Neha had bigger things to worry about than Big Brother. She couldn’t hide out in the sari store forever. The clerks were already giving her hard looks.
“I don’t think I’ve been spotted, but I can’t say that will stay the case for long,” she admitted, pretending to look at a rack of colorful lehengas.
“Understood. Your friend gave us a pickup location. Can you meet us there?”
When the man rattled off the meeting spot, Neha was surprised to realize she knew it all too well—one of the Woodside parks, easily walkable from where she currently was. “Sure. I can do that.”
“Good. Keep this line clear. Keep your head down. We will find you.”
The line went dead before she could end the call. She didn’t know whether to be reassured by the efficiency or chilled by the ominousness. But Neha did know that she had to be prepared. So she carefully made her way back to Aishneet Auntie’s apartment, packed up her and Joe’s stuff, and then hurried away from the safe haven of Jackson Heights.
Chapter 23
3S HQ was buzzing even before Jack ended the call from Neha Ahluwalia. The monitors that lined one wall were already cued up with CCTV and drone footage from around the Jackson Heights subway hub on Seventy-Fourth Street. Various angles. Crowd coverage. The six-foot-four Russian gunman that Neha had mentioned on the phone was easy to pick out. Worse yet, cycling back through the footage showed the same man and a few of his pals getting the jump on Joe Peluso and hustling him into a dark van.
Fuck. In a matter of hours, everything they’d been monitoring had gone from status quo to clusterfuck. Third Shift’s contacts on the street in Brighton Beach had fallen just a half step behind Vasiliev’s flunkies…and that half step was enough to put Anton Sokolov in Queens before they could set a tail on him. And Yuri Medvedev—arguably the most dangerous of the crew—was off the grid, too. Leaving 3S chasing their tails while Peluso was grabbed and taken off to parts unknown.
Danny’s first instinct was to contact Yulia. Text. Twitter DM. Even carrier pigeon. The spider he’d planted hadn’t picked up anything specific to her in hours. Fuck. Though it had given up some valuable intel for Elijah’s mission. A few phone calls between Aleksei and upper-level mobsters about an upcoming VIP party and some sort of big-deal weapons auction after that. Lije had already handed off oversight of current events to Jackson so he could dig deep into Phase one of his project. No time for the little fishes like Vasiliev when you had your eye on the sharks, right? It made Danny feel small and powerless, even with all the resources at their disposal.
His phone buzzed before he could even touch it. Rattling on the table like a wakeup alarm. Number unknown. He swiped across his screen without even second-guessing it. We have a guest. Yulia. Every fiber of his being knew it was Yulia. Using a new burner phone. Contacting him before he could reach out to her. Jesus. Christ. Vasiliev had Peluso. Or Neha Ahluwalia. There was no other way to interpret the message. His fingers flew across the tiny smartphone keyboard ahead of his brain cells.
Hope you’re treating them hospitably.
Amenities are not the best. The client should book new accommodations as soon as possible.
Oh, shit. Whoever the Vasiliev organization had in custody was in grave danger. Danny wasted no time saying that aloud…and received dark, knowing stares in response.
“It’s Peluso,” Jack confirmed crisply. “The timeline matches up from when he was snatched off the street. So this situation is officially off the rails. I’ve sent Finn and Grace to bring Neha Ahluwalia in.”
“And then what?” Danny glanced around the busy conference room turned command center. Joaquin was bent over their laptop, monitoring the spider hack and sifting through the archived drone footage from the last hour. Elijah was pulling up hotel plans on his own computer, no doubt working out something for his impending undercover operation. The bulk of the active team was out living their first-shift lives. Nothing about the office tonight telegraphed that some big takedown op was in motion. “We have a tea party?”
“Danny.” Jack sighed. It wasn’t quite chiding. More weary than anything else. “It might not look like it to you, but we have just as much investment in this as you do. We will protect Yulia Vasilieva and Neha Ahluwalia, and even Joe Peluso, to the best of our ability. You know that. You wouldn’t be here if you didn’t believe that.”
The list of things he wouldn’t be doing if he didn’t believe was as long as his arm. Danny looked down at his phone and inhaled. A steadying breath. Let us know if we can upgrade your guest’s rooms, he typed.
He waited for the three dots signifying a reply was imminent. He hoped he wasn’t waiting in vain.
* * *
He was probably only in the hole for a half hour when he started losing his mind. His head was pounding like a motherfucker. His whole body, really—he coul
d check “how it feels to be tased” off his Shit I Never Needed to Know list—and he couldn’t see more than a few inches in front of him. They’d tossed him somewhere dark. Cold. Damp, too. Right out of the gulag playbook. There was a faint smell of oil. Like a refinery or a machine shop. He’d explore, but he couldn’t move. Not just because everything hurt, but because they’d cuffed him to a damn pipe. They. The Russians. Vasiliev’s men, he assumed. There were no introductions made. Except between his face and a couple fists. And his arm and a wicked needle. They’d shot him full of something that had him sluggish, that was keeping the beast out of commission.
He flexed his wrists. Felt the tension all the way up in his shoulders. And a tingle, too. Like the cuffs and chains had been charmed or hexed or whatever. Nope. There was no getting out of his restraints. Or this room. Not anytime soon. So, of course, that was when his company arrived. Not the goons again. He wasn’t that lucky. Instead, it was ghosts. Every man he’d ever shot. Kenny’s body on the slab. Those four guys in the back of the club, clinking their ice-cold vodka before he iced them. The corpses piled up in the darkness.
It was like this at Apex. Exactly like this. His first month in the program. When they’d pumped him full of their supernatural juice and sat back to watch the results. Leather restraints, not cuffs. But the room was tiny. Dark. And haunted. There hadn’t been any physical pain from the initial changes. No, it was all in his head. That was where it hurt the most.
The door rattled then, shaking him out of his circular thoughts. He expected a couple of the goons who’d tossed him into the holding room. Fucking extras from central casting who stank of unwashed fur and cheap cologne. But when the reinforced steel door opened inward, it was a woman. A girl, really. Dark-blond hair, rail thin in her fancy formfitting cocktail dress. Pretty. At least from what he could tell with his enhanced vision in this shitty light. Not human. He could tell that, too. There was a musky smell rolling off her skin—probably undetectable to nonsupes—and it reminded him of the men who’d jumped him and dragged him into a van. She was some kind of shifter. The sense memory hit him as she shut the door behind her, moving in slowly and carefully, holding something in her hands. Meat. Meat to feed his beast. The motherfuckers at the club. Falling facedown into their soup course. They stink of the wild. Whatever they were, she was, too.
“You need to keep your strength up,” she murmured as she dropped something a few feet from him. “Eat.” The tray clattered, echoing off the four walls. The sound grated on his ears. Not like her accent, which was so fucking beautifully New York to him. Faint Russian plus heavy Brooklyn.
“Why? Ain’t they gonna just fuckin’ kill me?” When captors wanted to feed you, it was shady shit. No point in wasting resources on someone you were going to off, right?
The woman actually laughed…and not at his expense. Her shoulders slumped just the tiniest bit. Her gaze flicked up toward the corners of the room, confirming his suspicion that there were probably cameras or bugs. “Oh, no. Death…death is too easy,” she assured him. “We are a practical clan. We have plans for you, Mr. Peluso.”
Yup. Shady shit. Joe tested his cuffs again. Shifted along the pipe. There was no give. No possibility of escape. Until he looked into her eyes. Pale blue. Despairing. Determined. There. There was the escape. He didn’t dare voice it aloud. He was smarter than that. She was smarter than that, too. She didn’t keep the conversation going. She just fiddled with his shackles long enough to undo one of his hands and wrap the short chain so tightly around his other one that there was no chance of undoing it or breaking it. He could’ve fought her in that span of seconds. Bucked her off him. Strangled her with the chain. But he didn’t. Because of her quiet whisper, the barest sound against his ear. “Don’t. Not yet.” Then, she backed toward the door, not falling into that rookie mistake of turning away from him. She may have looked like a human woman, but she was a predator like he was. A prisoner like he was.
“I will return shortly for the plate. Keep your strength up,” she repeated. “You must prepare for what lies ahead.”
Torture? He could handle that. He’d been trained for that. Getting his ass kicked? Yeah, he’d been trained for that, too. Joe waited until she was gone before he reached out for the food tray. He hooked it with his foot and then pulled it the rest of the way with his free hand. Beef. Cabbage. Solid basics. Energy and farts. Just call him silent but deadly.
Joe shoveled the nutrients in as fast as possible…tasting the underlying tang of some sort of sedative and not giving a damn. So they wanted him incapacitated, unable to fight back, unable to change. Being knocked out for a while was the least of his problems. On the bright side, when he was forced into another bout of shut-eye, the nightmares were quieter. His head hurt less. The Taser effects were all but gone. The danger…? Still there. Always there. Never going away.
Christ, Neha. Stay away. Don’t get anywhere near me. Please be as far from this as possible.
He wasn’t deluded enough to think that was going to happen.
Chapter 24
When she’d plotted out her life’s trajectory over stale nachos and tequila one night in law school, it hadn’t included getting shot at in a courthouse. Or going on the run with a shape-shifter. Or meeting up with mysterious operatives at a community park. Really, it had been more along the lines of the old Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie: “All I want to do is graduate from high school, go to Europe, marry Christian Slater, and die.” Swapping in L-school for high school and George Clooney for Christian Slater. But here she was. One hand on the snub-nose pistol in her bag. Dread crawling up her spine. Two people in dark clothes walking up to her. Europe and Clooney were off the table. Dying was still very much an option.
Neha shivered even though it was nowhere near cold…and then she shoved the fear deep down inside her. Joe was missing. He needed her. He didn’t think he did—didn’t think he deserved her or had any kind of future—and here was her chance to prove him utterly and completely wrong. By pulling his stubborn ass out of the fire. So, she put her analytical skills to work, cataloging all the surface details about the new arrivals. A movie-star handsome white man and an equally striking woman of color. They both wore suits with detectable bulges under the jackets and kept their hands at their sides as they stopped just a few steps away. As wary of her as she was of them. Not inclined to shoot first and ask questions later.
“Ms. Ahluwalia? We’re here to help.”
She blinked, rocking back a little at the woman’s words. That they knew her name shouldn’t have shocked her, but it did. She’d given so little information over the phone…and they probably already knew everything about her, didn’t they? Whoever these people were, they’d likely gathered all the intel they needed about her and Joe. Down to the contents of her underwear drawer. “Wh-who are you?” It was a silly question, but the only one she could manage at the moment, the only thing that would give her back a measure of power.
Sympathy flickered in the woman’s dark eyes, quickly replaced by a cool detachment that matched her voice. She was the kind of beautiful that wouldn’t look out of place on a Paris runway…tall, her thick, black hair barely tamed by a bun, with warm brown skin a shade or two darker than Neha’s own. “I’m Grace,” she said. “My partner is Finn. I know you have no reason to trust us, but I recommend you do so anyway.”
Did Neha have a choice? Probably not. But she’d known that when she made the call to that mysterious number, when she’d spoken to the equally mysterious man on the line. Bringing other people into this meant having to trust someone besides herself. “Okay.” She nodded wearily. “Okay, I guess that’s the best offer I’m going to get right now,” she said before following the duo back the way they’d come, past the doughboy statue that loomed over the park’s entrance and toward the street, where a huge, black SUV sat waiting.
The man, Finn, opened the back door for her. “Only the best for our gentlewoman call
ers,” he said in a lilting Irish accent, capping the words with an impertinent little bow before he gestured her inside.
Grace made an all-too-relatable sound that telegraphed her impatience with her flirtatious coworker as she slid into the front passenger seat. It seemed to rein him in as much as was probably possible, and he hopped into the driver’s side without any further flourishes.
As the vehicle pulled away from the curb, taking her to god-only-knew-where, Neha couldn’t help herself. “No blindfold?” she asked while buckling her seat belt.
Finn chuckled. The sound was rich and deep, almost annoying in its blatant appeal. “Someone’s been watching too many movies.”
A strange echo of what she’d once said to Joe—that he’d watched too many prison movies. And funny, considering she suddenly felt like she hadn’t watched enough movies to get a proper feel for this whole clusterfuck. Maybe, like Joe and his unit, she needed to marathon a bunch of werewolf flicks and horror films? And spy movies, too. Neha scowled at the bright-blue eyes that met her gaze in the rearview mirror. “Pardon me for not knowing proper secret-agent protocol.”
“The improper protocol’s far more fun.” He waggled his eyebrows at her, back in full-wattage charmer mode and not the least bit contrite.
The memory hit her fast, without warning, and she clutched the handle above the door to steady herself. “Sorry, Doc. Blame all the time in jail if you want. It’s not like the social scene here’s anything special. A man’s mind gets a little one-track, you know?”
“I’m trying to help your defense, not improve your love life.”
This agent was nothing like Joe—stylish, suave, aware of his own beauty—but they sure had impropriety in common.
“Behave, Finn.” Grace twisted in her seat, shooting a scowl of her own at her colleague before she weighed in. “We don’t have a secret lair, Ms. Ahluwalia,” she assured. “We’re just taking you to the offices of our private security firm. It’s public record. You can even google us. ‘Third Shift, here for your personal security and investigative needs at any hour.’”
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