by Morgan Black
There’s no time. My brain shifts into autopilot.
I shift my center of mass lower, using the briefcase as a shield, and slip my hand beneath my coat. I whip the Sig out and shoot Voss through the forehead before my brain has a chance to try to talk me out of it. His body jerks backwards as he goes lifeless in his chair.
I ignore the mess and turn on Martinsen.
In that moment, I am certain of one thing: they know. The men I came here to kill knew I was coming. Because Martinsen has his piece half-fished out of his own holster, and I find it hard to believe these two would come armed to a meeting with a fucking software developer.
Before Martinsen can free his weapon, I drop down low, beneath the edge of the table. I shoot Martinsen through the kneecap, crippling him.
Silencers on pistols don’t work like they do in the movies. All they do is muffle and distort, so that hopefully the gunshot doesn’t sound like a gunshot. If there was anyone in rooms adjacent to us, they’d know exactly what it was. But further down the hallways, or above or below a floor, there is a chance the shooting might not sound like a shooting.
Martinsen’s screaming however still sounds very much like human screaming.
He tumbles out of the chair and I stomp over to him, kicking his gun away. I roll him over onto his back and press a shiny black boot to his throat, just enough to cut off his air supply.
“No more yelling,” I say. I don’t remove the boot until he nods in compliance.
“You know who I am. You know what I did in La Jolla. You saw what I did to Voss just now.”
He nods again, his chin wobbling.
“I’m only here for one thing,” I say. “And surprisingly enough, it isn’t even to kill you. I just need information.”
I’m not being entirely truthful, but Martinsen is lying to himself if he thinks he’s going to live through his encounter anyway.
“Nod if you understand me.”
I wait for him to nod, then nod down at him once myself, trying to build a tiny bit of a rapport, just enough to convince him I may not murder him after all.
“Alain Ference. The accountant. I don’t give a shit who killed him, but I need to know what happened to his assets.”
The man who pulled the trigger on my brother is irrelevant to me. I know who ordered the hit, and that’s what matters. The guy who pulled the trigger, he’s just like me: just doing his job.
Certain valuables were stolen from my brother’s home before the Császár family set fire to it. Martinsen will know where these things were taken.
More importantly, the bastards also took my brother’s six-year-old daughter.
And I know what the Császár family does with girls, once they’re old enough.
When I take my boot off Martinsen’s throat, he wibbles unstoppably, his face red and contorted with pain, tears leaking from the corners of his beady eyes.
You know, there’s a simpler way of doing this.
“Sorry,” I say. “I figured out a way to do this without you.”
I mutter a curse in soft-spoken Hungarian, then shoot Martinsen through the head just like Voss.
Mindful of the mess, I lean down and slip Martinsen’s phone out of his pocket. I heft up one of his hands and press the dead man’s index finger to the fingerprint unlock screen, slide it across.
“Thanks Luka,” I say, letting his arm fall down again. I reset the lock screen from the phone’s settings, then secure it away into my pocket. My brother cooked the Császár family books for several years. I know all their code words and slang.
If Martinsen himself wasn’t involved in kidnapping Elise, I’ll just kill my way up the food chain until I find who was.
Now to get out.
6
~ Alicia ~
It’s been so long since anyone kissed me that I forgot how good it could feel.
Or maybe I’ve just never been kissed quite like this.
His mouth is on mine, so hot it burns and so hard it feels like he’s crushing me, like he’s trying to steal my breath right out of my lungs. His hands--big hands with strong fingers--hold my shoulders, pressing me down. He pins me in place while he drags his teeth along my bottom lip, nipping hard enough that it almost hurts, and then he kisses his way further down...
I arch up into his hands, my body alive with the sensation of just how badly I want him. I gasp as he latches his mouth onto the side of my neck, trailing kisses down my bare shoulder, before his tongue brushes lightly over one of my nipples, which stiffens instantly under his touch.
He sinks down atop me, his heavy weight a reminder of just how much I belong to him. I’m so much smaller than him, there’s no way I’d be able to wrestle free even if I wanted to.
He devours my skin, teeth raking over my breast, one of his hands migrating to cup the other one, squeezing gently at first, then harder. I’m almost ashamed of the sounds coming out of my mouth: light, heady gasps and moans, like my body is reacting so strongly to his touch that it can’t even keep itself quiet.
Heat rising under my skin, I throw my head back, opening my eyes. The ceiling of the Maybach has a mirror atop it, so I can watch us both in sharp detail: his muscular, tanned body atop mine, the way his shoulders shift under his tattooed skin.
He wanders two fingers down my stomach, skimming them over my navel, along my inner thigh, teasing me.
I murmur something incoherent that ends with, “please.”
A shudder runs through me when his fingers finally reach their destination. He brushes two of them over my sex, just the outside, not teasing his way inside just yet. God, he’s taking his time with it.
Whining impatiently, I rock my body against his, slitting my eyes nearly closed as he finally sweeps one finger along my lower lips.
He tilts his face up toward mine for another kiss, and I catch a hint of a smirk, of something possessive and naughty gleaming in those dark liquor-colored eyes.
It’s Jake Hawthorne. My client.
I promised myself I’d never do this.
My cheeks burning, I squirm uncomfortably when I remember that I told myself I couldn’t. Even if he offered. Even if he looks like the content of my dreams distilled into something so tantalizingly real.
He slips a finger inside me. I cry out in surprise and pleasure both.
And then I wake up.
I jerk awake and find myself in the driver’s seat of the Maybach, reclined as far back as it will go.
I check the time on my phone. Jake’s been gone for less than an hour. I drifted off in no time at all.
Normally I’d feel refreshed and relaxed after a nap, but shit, not after a dream like that. Apart from the fact that I’m still awkwardly horny, I can’t shake this strange feeling of being unclean, like dreaming about a client was somehow just as bad as actually sleeping with one.
Relax. I try to calm myself down. A dream is just a dream. And it’s not like it was some great revelation that you’d like to sleep with him. You knew that already.
But still, my heart beats a little quicker. My skin feels flushed. When I peer at my face in the rear-view mirror, my pupils are just a little dilated.
I’m still trying to sort out exactly how I feel when the fire alarm goes off.
It sounds like a school bell, but given our location it can’t be.
I’ve never actually been in a building during a fire evacuation before. Weirdly, I always assumed it would be more dramatic. But there aren’t any flashing red lights or any warning signs, at least not yet. Just that school0-bell ringing.
I move to start the Maybach up, but then a sinking feeling develops in my stomach: what about Jake? Even if moving the car is the sensible company-driven priority, I don’t want to just leave him. What if he shows up only to find I’ve vacated the premises?
I try to call him, but of course, in the parking garage my phone doesn’t get any service.
Climbing out of the Maybach and locking it, I head for the closest stairwell. As soon as I
can get a signal, I’ll call Jake and tell him to meet me outside. I’ll get the car out, then head to wherever the evacuation point is, wherever he ended up.
It sounds so simple in theory.
Calm but hurried, my heels clacking on the concrete, I make my way into the stairwell and let the door swing shut behind me. No signal. But I’m only one floor down from the roof, so I turn and start hiking my way up the steps.
A man falls down the steps toward me. I sidestep him on reflex, then gasp as I realize he’s headed for the concrete floor below.
When I turn to see if he’s okay, he isn’t moving. There’s a crown of blood seeping out from around his head on the floor.
Dizziness at the edges of my eyes, I turn away, horror rising in my throat. I make it to the landing, more determined to call someone now than ever, and that’s when I see Jake.
Jake Hawthorne--my client, my client who is a software developer--is wrestling with a man in a navy blue suit. They don’t have much room, grappling awkwardly on the stairs, footsteps thudding on the cement. The man grabs Jake from behind, so Jake backs into a wall, crashing him back into it.
“Jake!”
I can’t help but cry out. It’s reflex at this point. I don’t even know what to do or say.
Both men snap their heads up at the sound of my voice. Jake uses this opportunity to elbow his assailant in the temple, which results in a horrible crack. The man drops limp, like a sack of potatoes.
Then Jake rises to a crouch, pulls a gun from his suit jacket, and shoots the man through an eye socket.
My client is not who he says he is.
He wasn’t being attacked by that man. He was trying to kill him.
Horrified by both this truth and the blood, I begin to back away. My chest feels tight, like breathing is suddenly a lot harder than it should be.
My head is spinning. My mouth feels dry. For the first time in my professional life, I feel completely at a loss. I have no idea what to do.
I don’t even notice that I’m backing up toward the staircase until I take an awkward, shuffling step into thin air.
Then I fall.
7
~ Jake ~
It would have been so easy to just let her fall. One less witness. One less responsibility. One less distraction on my march of revenge.
But for some reason, I lurch forward and grab her. I snag a handful of Alicia’s dress and haul her forward, keep her from going backwards over the staircase. I shoved one of Martinsen’s security goons down there earlier, heard the sounds he made on the way down. She might have been severely hurt. Or worse.
The second her shoes find the floor, she’s batting at my hands, trying to shove me free, her eyes wild with terror.
Like I said, it would have been so much easier...
I pry her little hands off my wrist with ease, then grab her by the upper arms, holding her in place. She kicks out at me, one of her black pumps aimed at my shin, and though it stings, I just let her do it. I’m all business right now. The pain of a bruised shin barely registers on my radar.
I hold her in place and seek out eye contact. Up close, her eyes are dazzling. A strange hybrid of hazel and green, darker around the outsides, bright on the inside. But right now she’s staring at me like she isn’t sure if she’d rather set me on fire or run away screaming.
“You’re going to do as I say.” I tell her this calmly, no hint of compromise. I still have a gun in my other hand, after all.
Instead, she throws back her head and screams for help, the sound of it echoing off the stairwell walls.
She, like Martinsen, is insisting on doing things the hard way.
Growling, I clamp a hand over her mouth and decide to finish this in the car. I drag her down the steps, kicking and screaming, the sounds of her protest muffled by my hand. She claws at my arm and kicks off a shoe, which I patiently retrieve. Can’t have that lying around as evidence.
We make it to the Maybach without encountering another soul. Which is fortunate for everyone else in this building.
I try to yank the door open, but of course she’s locked it. So I jam the barrel of my pistol into her ribs and order her to open up. Rather than losing it--which a lot of people would in her situation--she complies, clicking the button on the remote.
I yank the door open and shove her into the car, then climb into the passenger’s seat.
I throw the keys into her lap, then level the gun at her.
“Drive.”
Something in her expression has changed. She’s less wild with fear now, more resigned. But she’s a cunning one, I can tell. She stares at me with resentment, like she knows exactly what to do with me once she gets an opportunity.
I force her at gunpoint to drive the Maybach down and out of the garage. The attendant isn’t there due to the fire evacuation, but he’s left the barriers up so we can exit freely.
Perfect.
After my disastrous exit from Martinsen’s office, it’s nice to have something go right.
We pull out onto the broad street and I squint against the sun. Alicia stares straight ahead. She doesn’t so much as look at me.
Well, may as well get back to work. I pull Martinsen’s phone from my pocket and start thumbing through his text messages and emails. There’s a lot of perfectly innocuous shit in here. Part of what makes the Császár machine operate as smoothly as it does is that so much of their business is legitimate. They weave the narcotics and guns and girls in with agricultural logistics and importing hard drives from China or whatever.
I know all this because they hired my brother’s accounting firm to cook their books. Alain, my brother, he was a good man. He wouldn’t have ever worked for assholes like that. Maybe if he’d worked for them directly they wouldn’t have been so quick to cut ties and pull the trigger as soon as the IRS started sniffing around their shell corporations.
I’ll never know.
Alicia is talking to me, but I wasn’t paying attention.
“Where?” she asks again.
“Where what?”
“You held a gun to me and said ‘drive’ but I don’t know where I’m taking you.”
I focus on the present for a moment, setting my plans of revenge aside. I could have her take me to my next destination, commit more murders. But hopefully, having access to Martinsen’s phone negates all that. If he’s got Eloise’s location, fuck going after the others. I’d rather not waste my time.
I consider some options. Somewhere private, that’s what I need. Somewhere I can go over Martinsen’s phone in peace without having to worry about my newfound hostage whining for a rescue. Dockweiler Beach? No, could be crowded. Some random parking garage in some mall somewhere? No, might not be a signal on the phone there...
“Up to the Observatory.” I settle back in the seat, the Sig still resting across my thigh, pointing vaguely in Alicia’s direction.
“Seriously?”
“You’ve got an awful big mouth on you for someone with a gun trained on her.”
She guides the Maybach smoothly into a turning lane, preparing for a u-turn. It’ll be about forty minutes to the Griffith Park Observatory. Longer if there’s a concert on or something. That gives me time to think. And a convenient, confusing location to ditch Martinsen’s phone when I’m finished.
For a moment, I pretend to browse through the phone while I consider my hostage. Alicia is a different creature now. Her posture--formerly flirty, relaxed, albeit professional--has gone entirely closed off. She looks ahead like a soldier on a death march, her full pink lips pressed into a hard line, her jaw set.
She’s even more beautiful than she was when I first set eyes on her.
That dreamy, far-off look in her eye was flattering, but her face suits her newfound seriousness well.
All that considered, I still can’t figure out why I didn’t let her fall. Sure there would have been complications if I’d had to steal the Maybach, but they were complications I could deal with.
&nbs
p; My job has never involved hostage taking. I’m making it up as I go along here.
My little brother and I made a great pair, him the brains and me the muscle. I cracked a few skulls, put a few bullets in kneecaps, put a select few bullets in the back of heads. But I wasn’t some goon for hire. I always saw myself as Alain’s protector. Be it cleaning up messes that could come back to bite him or dealing with problem debtors before they grew out of control, all my work in the past centered around containment.
Alicia is new territory for me.
There’s a certain excitement to that.
8
~ Alicia ~
My brain seems to flit through all the stages of grief in a split second: surprise, anger, denial, acceptance, whatever the other stages are. I go from this can’t be happening to this won’t be what kills me in record time.
I suppose it’s because I’ve always been a survivor. Be it my asshole step-dad knocking me and Mom around or wading through my submerging business when my ex stole our biggest contract and left me in the lurch.
Jake Hawthorne is a lying son of a bitch. And I’m going to get through this.
Or at least that’s what I tell myself in between the stretches where I’m too terrified to think or speak. Driving aimlessly until he demanded I drive him up to the Observatory at Griffith Park, I just keep my eyes on the road.
I’ve never had a gun pointed at me before.
Then again, I’ve never seen someone die either. Not until today.
If it weren’t for what I’d witnessed in the parking garage, I’d wonder if this wasn’t some cruel joke. Or maybe a robbery gone bad. I’d wonder if maybe the gun wasn’t a fake. But I know how real it was. And I know that this supposed software developer in my car didn’t blink when he shot a man point blank through the face.
Maybe it’s the oldest strategy in the book, but I don’t care. I try to bargain my way out.