Silvio shook his head. “You really don’t want to threaten me. You see, my boss takes threats to her employees very seriously. Some might even say deadly seriously.”
I rolled my eyes. Now he was just hamming it up.
“Oh, I think we’ll risk your boss’s wrath,” the other guard chimed in, also reaching for his gun.
Silvio looked back and forth between the two men, then shrugged. “Okay, if that’s the way you want it.”
He raised his briefcase and slammed it into the face of the closest giant. That man staggered back, howling at all the blood gushing out of his broken nose. Silvio dropped the briefcase, surged forward, and tackled the second man, driving him to the ground, then snapped his head down and buried his fangs in the giant’s throat.
The guard with the busted nose cursed and pulled out his gun, but Owen stepped in through the now-unlocked front doors and shot him three times in the back.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
Owen’s silenced gun barely made a sound as he fired, and the giant dropped to the floor like a stone. That left Bria and me to deal with the five men in front of the cash cages.
Bria rose from behind the desk and started shooting, focusing on the three men who’d been transferring the cash from the first cage into the duffel bags.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
Her gun had a silencer too, and Bria put two of the men down with head shots. The third man grabbed a couple of duffel bags full of money, ducked down behind the tellers’ counter with them, and yanked a gun from the holster on his belt. He was so focused on Bria that he never even saw me creep up behind him. I punched my knife into his back, driving the blade through his ribs and into his lungs. I yanked the blade right back out, and he died with a wheezing whimper.
That left two giants—the one with the power saw and the other with the welder’s torch.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
Bria shot the guy with the saw in the chest. Even though the tool was on a low setting, it clattered to the floor and started whirring against the marble, making a horrible grinding noise and sending silver sparks shooting up into the air. But I didn’t have time to turn it off, so I sidestepped the saw, hoping that Deirdre and Santos would think the commotion was just part of the thieves working on the cash cages.
The guy with the welder’s torch realized that I was coming for him, and he slammed his protective mask back down into place and fired up the torch, brandishing the hot, blue-white flame at me. I cursed and ducked back out of the way, but my foot snagged on something, and I tripped and fell back on my ass. Something hard and flat dug into my hands, and I realized that I’d landed on one of the duffel bags and was now literally sitting on a pile of money.
The welder pressed his advantage, stepping forward and aiming his torch at my head, even as he cranked up the flame’s intensity. My knife had slipped out of my hand when I tripped, so I grabbed the only other thing within arm’s reach—a shrink-wrapped brick of cash—and threw it at him.
The brick wasn’t even close to being a real weapon, and my aim wasn’t all that great, but I managed to bean the guy in the chest, making him jerk back in surprise.
Whoosh!
The open flame hit the wad of cash, instantly igniting it and making it explode like a bomb in the welder’s face. He yelped in surprise and dropped his torch, which clattered to the floor and kept right on burning, slowly chewing into the marble.
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
Bria and Owen both stepped up and fired at the welder, and he joined his dead friends on the floor.
As soon as the last man was down, I grabbed my knife, got back onto my feet, and sprinted to the door that led downstairs to the basement. I plastered myself against the wall next to the door, waiting for it to burst open and for giants to come pouring into the lobby from the basement.
Nothing happened.
No footsteps, no bursting door, no giants.
Behind the counter, the saw kept whining, and the welder’s torch kept hissing. The whirring machinery must have largely masked the sounds of the fight, and no one was rushing up the stairs to check on things. Good. The longer we had the element of surprise, the better our chances were of rescuing Finn.
Bria, Owen, and Silvio rushed over to me.
“Now what?” Silvio said, pulling a gun from against the small of his back.
I flashed my bloody knife at my friends. “Now we go downstairs and find Finn.”
* * *
Silvio turned off the power tools and stayed in the lobby to keep watch and make sure nobody else came into the bank and took us by surprise.
Bria, Owen, and I hurried back to the men’s bathroom. My sister and I did the same procedure as before, with me cracking the marble with my Stone magic, then her widening the cracks with her Ice power. Even though I wanted to blast the floor away as quickly as possible, I made myself work slowly and steadily, not making any more noise and not using any more magic than absolutely necessary, so that Deirdre wouldn’t sense us using our combined elemental power. But the process went much quicker this time, since Owen was here to help grab the jagged chunks of stone and move them out of the way.
As soon as we’d made a big enough hole in the floor, I dropped down to the basement level below, with Bria next and Owen bringing up the rear. Bria checked the bathroom stalls, but there were no blood and no bodies to be found. She nodded at me, and I crept up to the door, eased it open, and peered outside.
Just like on the lobby level, this bathroom also opened up into a hallway, which was deserted. Bria and Owen nodded and raised their guns. I opened the door, and we all left the bathroom.
As soon as I stepped out into the hallway, a cold gust of air swept over my face, which could only mean one thing. Someone was using Ice magic down here.
Deirdre.
We tiptoed down the hallway in a line. Once we reached an intersection, the three of us crouched down and peered around the corner. Offices branched off this corridor, but it was still a straight shot all the way down to the main vault fifty feet away.
Big Bertha more than lived up to her name. The five-foot-thick marble walls, floor, and ceiling encasing the vault were the thickest in the entire building and reinforced with silverstone rebar. The vault itself took up a large chunk of the basement, the front of it fifty feet wide and the interior more than three times as long. Big Bertha’s rectangular shape matched the hundreds of safety-deposit boxes lining her walls.
A heavy metal door about ten feet wide was set into the center of the vault. That door had already been drilled and blasted open, judging by the tools and shrapnel littering the floor, the scorch marks on the surrounding walls, and the stench of hot melted metal that filled the air.
But another door lay behind that first one.
Well, it wasn’t really so much a door as it was a thick, tight mesh of silverstone bars that covered the entrance from top to bottom and side to side. Way too much silverstone to cut your way through with a power saw or a welding torch, unlike the cash cages upstairs. A keypad was attached to the right side of the mesh, the light on the front red, indicating that the mesh was locked down tight.
Several boxes were stacked to one side of the vault, each stamped with the words Property of Briartop. Deirdre and Santos had brought all the jewelry from the museum exhibit down here. Of course they had. They wouldn’t have wanted to let any of those precious stones out of their sight, not for one second.
I didn’t see Deirdre or Santos, but they had to be here somewhere, perhaps farther down from the vault in the hallway that branched off to the right and led to the lobby stairs. But I didn’t care about them right now, just the chair off to the left side of this hallway. The chair had been partially turned toward the front of the vault, but I could still clearly see the person sitting in it.
Finn.
My brother looked like he had been wearing his usual suit before his jacket and tie had been taken from him and his white shirt had been ripped open and torn apart.
All the better to torture him.
Thick ropes bound Finn’s wrists and ankles to the chair, immobilizing him. Pale blue-white splotches dotted his skin from his forearms all the way up to his shoulders before spreading across his muscled chest, as though he had a terrible rash. But the marks were far more painful than any rash could be.
They were Ice burns.
Deirdre had used her Ice magic to torture her own son, horribly, given the number of wounds on Finn’s skin. Some of the burns were small, no bigger than a dime, as though she’d pressed the tip of her index finger against his body and let loose with her magic. Some of the wounds were much larger, like careless blasts of power. One mark right over his heart was particularly gruesome, as though she’d balled up her fist, pressed it up against his skin, and frozen that one spot over and over again.
Finn had been tortured by elemental magic much the same way Fletcher had been. Despite my best efforts, I’d failed to save the son from the fate of the father. My heart shattered, my throat closed up, and my stomach roiled. At that moment, all I wanted was to look away from his broken body, from the horrible reminder that I’d once again been too late to save someone I loved from being brutalized.
Beside me, Owen let out a whispered curse, while Bria’s fingers dug into my shoulder. But I tuned them out and forced myself to focus on my brother.
Finn’s head was hanging down, so I couldn’t see how bad the damage was to his face. But what made my heart shatter all over again was how utterly still he was. Too still. As if he were a statue sitting in that chair. As if Deirdre had frozen him in place with her Ice magic.
As if he were dead.
My gaze locked onto that blue-white, fist-shaped burn right over his heart, willing his chest to rise and fall—for him to still be alive. A second passed, then another, then another . . .
Breathe, Finn. Just breathe. Breathe, already!
And finally—finally—Finn’s chest moved up, then down, and he let out a weak, racking cough.
“Is that all you’ve got?” he snarked in a low, raspy voice. “I’ve had razor burn that hurt worse than that.”
Footsteps scuffed on the floor, and Finn slowly raised his head and glared at the person who stepped in front of him.
Deirdre fucking Shaw.
She’d put on a pair of gray coveralls over her purple pantsuit and had replaced her stilettos with heavy black boots. Despite the work clothes, she still managed to look cool and elegant, her icicle-heart rune glittering in the hollow of her throat just like always.
Deirdre moved so that she was standing between Finn and the silverstone vault door. More footsteps scuffed, and Santos appeared, still wearing his bank guard’s uniform, although he’d ditched the long black coat and gray jacket and had rolled up his shirt sleeves, revealing his snake tattoo. The giant leaned back against the wall across from Finn and crossed his arms over his chest.
Deirdre stared at Finn, her pale blue eyes chillingly empty, then shook her head. “You’re a stubborn, stupid fool, just like Fletcher was. All you had to do was give me the codes to the vault doors, and we could have avoided all this unpleasantness. But now you’re going to die just like your father did. Tortured to death in your beloved place of business.”
She circled around him. Finn turned his head, following her movements, and I finally got a good look at his face.
Deirdre hadn’t burned him there, but someone—Santos, most likely—had laid a good, old-fashioned beatdown on Finn. One of his eyes was black, blood dribbled out of his broken nose, and a deep cut slashed across his left cheekbone where someone had backhanded him. Deirdre had probably delivered that last blow, given the blood marring the heart-shaped diamond solitaire on her left hand.
Bria’s fingers dug even deeper into my shoulder, hard enough to make me wince and look at her. The rage and disgust burning in her eyes made them glow a bright, piercing blue, and I could see the matching shimmer of my own gray eyes and my own raging emotions reflected back in hers. I squeezed her hand, and she let out a breath and loosened her grip. We both turned our attention back to Finn.
“Just give me the code, and this will all be over,” Deirdre said. “There’s no need for you to suffer needlessly. I’m not a complete monster.”
“Oh, no,” Finn said. “Just a stone-cold bitch who’s A-OK with torturing her own son. Gin was right about you.”
She shrugged. “Then you should have listened to her. But that’s your mistake, not hers. She did everything but tar and feather me. Did you know that she was even spying on me in her spare time? Santos’s men took her down on the building across from my penthouse last night.”
“You captured Gin?” Finn’s entire body stilled. “What did you do to her?”
Deirdre’s lips curved into a wide, genuine smile. “I gave her to Dimitri Barkov as payment for services rendered. He was quite eager to get his hands on her. I imagine he’s still torturing her. Unless he got careless and accidentally killed her already.”
She waited, her smile growing wider, expecting the news of my kidnapping, torture, and supposed murder to demoralize Finn, perhaps even break his spirit enough to make him give up the keypad code to the vault door.
She really should have known better.
In many ways, Finn was Deirdre’s son. A flatterer, a charmer, a smooth operator, who desired and enjoyed all the finer things in life. But Finn was also Fletcher’s son, and the old man had been the toughest son of a bitch I’d ever met.
Oh, it wasn’t that Fletcher had been stronger or more resilient or more immune to pain than anyone else. He had simply been more stubborn. The more you tried to get the old man to do something he didn’t want to do, the more you tried to bend his will to yours, the more you tried to break his spirit, the harder he dug his heels in and defied you—a trait that Finn had gotten from him in spades.
So instead of being concerned or cowed by my capture, Finn actually brightened, his shoulders lifting and his face creasing into a smile, despite the blood and bruises that blackened his features.
“You gave her to Dimitri Barkov? Seriously?” He started laughing.
Deirdre frowned. “What’s so funny? Barkov had Gin well in hand when I left them.”
Finn kept laughing and laughing, his gleeful cackles so hard and loud that he doubled over from the force of them. Tears streamed down his face, and I had the feeling that he would have even slapped his thigh in amusement if his hands had been free.
“And these were your mistakes,” he said in between chortles. “First, that you didn’t kill Gin right off the bat. Second, that you left her with Barkov. The only one who’s dead is him. Trust me on that. But none of those is as bad as your third mistake. That’s the one that’s really going to come back and bite you in the ass.”
“And what would that be?”
“Thinking that you could hurt me and get away with it.” Finn smirked at her. “Gin is going to come here and slit your throat for that. I just hope I’m still alive to see her do it.”
Deirdre stared at him, her forehead wrinkling, as if she was concerned by his unshakable confidence in me. She looked at Santos. “You told me that Barkov could handle Blanco.”
“Correction. I told you that Barkov wanted to handle Blanco. Not that he actually could,” Santos snapped. “You’re the one who left her alive instead of killing her like I advised. Lane could be right. She could be on her way here right now. So either get the code out of him or get started on the door yourself. My guys are taking care of the cash cages upstairs, and I drilled through the outer door already. The only one holding us up right now is you.”
Deirdre’s hands clenched into fists. “Don’t you dare speak to me that way.”
Santos laughed, pushed away from the wall, and stepped up so that he was looming over her. “I’m the one who’s done all the hard, dirty work of planning and executing this thing. All you had to do was set up the jewelry exhibit and charm your boy so that he’d give you unrestricted access to the bank
and let you in this morning. But now you can’t even get one lousy access code out of him. So I’ll speak to you however I damn well please.”
I frowned. Back at the warehouse, I’d thought that Santos was Deirdre’s minion, but he made it seem like they were actually partners in this.
Deirdre glared at Santos, but he just smirked back at her. She stared at him another second, then turned back to Finn.
Deirdre reached for her Ice magic, and her hand began glowing an eerie blue that was so pale it was almost white. The light grew brighter and brighter, until small blue-white flames flashed to life, flickering on her fingertips like cold candles. Even from here, I could feel the intense chill of her power, icy enough to make me shiver, despite my heavy clothes. Having her actually touch her fingers to your skin even for an instant would be painful—so fucking painful. I didn’t know how Finn was so calm, resolute, and resilient after being tortured by her. I would have still been screaming.
Deirdre leaned down and waggled her fingers in front of Finn’s face, a clear threat that he should give up the code or else. But he stared right back at her, never flinching, never wavering, never showing the slightest hint of fear. He wasn’t giving up the code no matter what. Stubborn to the end, just like Fletcher would have been.
I was so damn proud of him in that moment.
“Tell me one thing,” Finn said. “Was any of it real? Did you ever feel anything for me?”
Deirdre leaned in even closer, trying to crack his calm façade. But Finn didn’t flinch, so she pulled back and stared down her nose at him. “I suppose I could lie and tell you that I felt something. That you’re my son, and some small, motherly part of me actually cares about you. But I’m just not wired that way. I never was. Fletcher was so disappointed that I didn’t feel the same way about him that he did about me. That he couldn’t wish me into the person he wanted me to be. I think that’s the reason he didn’t ever try to kill me. I think he was still hoping that I would change someday, even though he knew deep down that it was never going to happen. He was a sentimental fool that way. And so are you.”
Bitter Bite (Elemental Assassin #14) Page 24