by Camilla Monk
He took my hand and dragged me down the hallway. I couldn’t keep up with his pace, and most of the time, it felt like my feet were hovering over the floor. We passed a few worried employees whispering to one another while hurrying in the direction of the elevator. Once the floor appeared to be deserted, March pushed open the heavy door leading to an emergency staircase.
As soon as the door had slammed behind us, he handed me the case. “I’m going to need you to carry this.” Then, he removed his bulletproof jacket and offered it to me.
I tried to push it away and back into his hands. “March, it’s a bad idea—”
Ignoring my plea, he retrieved his cell phone from the jacket’s inner pocket, slid it into his own jeans’ back pocket, and helped me put the oversized garment on. He then placed a hand on my shoulder, locking his blue gaze with mine. “Listen to me, Island. We have to exit this building. We don’t have much time, and the men in those cars are going to shoot at us. Do you trust me?”
I nodded, my throat tight.
“Good. You stay behind me, move only when I tell you to, and hold on to that case. I’ll take care of the rest.”
I wanted to nod again but, instead, gasped when I heard the sound of a door blasting open eleven floors below. Those guys weren’t stupid. They were going to check the stairs first. March flattened against the concrete wall while climbing footsteps echoed all the way up to our floor. “Stay here and wait.”
I fought tears of anguish when I watched him proceed downward until I couldn’t see him anymore. For a while, all I could hear were those men’s footsteps getting closer and closer . . .
Until there was a loud thud. I registered swearing in English and Japanese, and I heard gunshots two, maybe three floors below. I covered my ears in terror and huddled against the wall, trembling like a leaf. Growls and brief screams echoed as someone got slammed several times against the staircase’s railing, sending ominous vibrations through the cheap metal all the way to where I stood.
The footsteps resumed, except this time it seemed to be only one pair of feet. Terrified by the prospect that they might not be March’s, I flattened myself against the wall and raised the case above my head with trembling hands. Whoever was coming up would get a two-billion-dollar nose job if he tried to get me.
A tall silhouette emerged from the staircase. I lunged forward, but the case was stopped by a steady hand before it could do any damage.
“Come here, biscuit.”
My heart skipped a beat. March flashed me a reassuring smile and extended his hand to me.
I couldn’t help but steal a worried glance at the blood on his shirt. He caught the direction of my gaze as we ran down the stairs and said, “Not mine.”
Not his, indeed. Two floors below, we passed the bodies of three men. Two Asian-looking guys lying on the floor with their necks twisted at an odd angle, and a third one whose short blond hair was covered in blood—probably the same blood that was smeared on the railing’s metal and all over March’s shirt. I gathered that those terrible vibrations I had heard were the product of his skull hitting the railing over and over . . .
When we reached the second floor, March stopped me and leaned against the heavy fire door connecting the staircase to the rest of the floor, whispering to me. “They’re all waiting on the first floor for their reconnaissance team to return.” He checked his watch. “It’s been almost five minutes. They’re going to send more men in less than a minute. For a couple of seconds, they’ll be entirely focused on the first floor door. That’s when we’ll go.”
I gasped. “But how will we leave the second floor?” I asked, my hands tightening on the metal case I needed to hold on to at any cost.
“Did you notice the mezzanine when we entered?”
To be honest, I hadn’t taken the time to scan for all possible exits when we had first entered the building—which is probably why March was a professional killer and I wasn’t—but as he mentioned it, I pictured that huge spaceship lobby again. I nodded, remembering a long mezzanine with a nice glass floor that overlooked the hall and allowed direct access to the building’s second floor via a spiral staircase.
“This emergency exit opens on the mezzanine. On my signal, you go in and run to the spiral staircase on your left. Don’t go down into the lobby. Hide behind the coffee machine near the stairs until I’m done.”
Damn, I hadn’t noticed the coffee machine either. March got up, squeezed my shoulders, and racked the slide of his gun, the sharp clicking sound causing a painful shiver to course down my back.
His guess had been correct.
Beneath our feet, the first floor lobby’s fire door slammed open with a loud noise, and March shoved me through the second floor door at the same time. I landed on the glass mezzanine, but I was too petrified to run as he had ordered me to. He dragged me across the translucent floor and sent me sliding across the mezzanine and toward the coffee machine like a hockey puck, before the remaining men in the lobby realized we were no longer in the stairs and started shooting at us.
I screamed as several bullets hit the glass structure. It didn’t break, but delicate flowers made of cracked glass appeared on the underside of the thick transparent slabs. Under any other circumstances I would have found them beautiful, but people were shooting at me, and one such flower had just bloomed a few feet away from the coffee machine with a sinister cracking sound.
I could see everything through the mezzanine, and it made the ordeal much worse than it had been back in the stairs. Their priority appeared to be killing March—something easier said than done, as our assailants soon discovered. He had shot two guys while running down the spiral staircase, and below me, I could see that he was now hiding behind the white desk. Three men remained, along with that treacherous receptionist, who was cowering in a corner of the hall, much like me. Near the elevator, the bodies of two security guards lay still. I gathered that Sakai had tried to call them, only to have those poor guys killed upon reaching the lobby.
I looked down to see that one of the three men, a bald Japanese guy, was holding an automatic rifle. He aimed at the desk and fired several rounds, perhaps in hope that a few bullets would make it through. I closed my eyes and begged Murphy’s law to cut March some slack, because I was wearing the bulletproof jacket and he wasn’t. March seemed to be still alive, waiting for an opening, but I was getting worried that the damn desk wouldn’t resist much longer.
I came up with an idea.
Opening the case with trembling fingers, I grabbed the fake Cullinan and started crawling away from the vending machine. I kept whispering to myself that I was going to be okay: The bullets those guys had fired obviously couldn’t make it through those thick glass slabs, and as long as I stayed close to the wall, they wouldn’t have the right angle to fire at me with a direct shot.
Except I was already halfway across the mezzanine, now perfectly visible to all of our friends, when I started to rethink the shortcomings of my plan to throw the fake stone at them so they would try to catch it and leave March alone.
“Island, go back and do not move from there!” March’s roar was answered by another round of bullets in the white material of the desk. Another guy moved under the mezzanine to fire a few more bullets at the glass, creating ominous flowers underneath my hands and knees. My legs were trembling so badly I could hardly move, be it either to go ahead with my crappy plan or back the hell away as March had ordered me to.
I recoiled in horror as the young black-haired man who had just shot into the mezzanine’s glass ran up the flight of stairs and toward me. March seized a moment of inattention from the man’s colleagues as they watched me crawl backward frantically through the glass, and moved away from the desk to shoot one of them. The bald guy with the automatic rifle was still standing, however, and March had to run for cover again behind a pillar as yet another round was fired in his direction.
Despite the situation, I still trusted we would somehow manage to escape, since March was n
ow closer to the spiral staircase than ever. All that was left to do was to take on these two guys, and perhaps bitch-slap that receptionist who was still whimpering in fear behind another white pillar at the other end of the lobby.
I heard more gunshots, and I realized that March was trying to stop the asshole coming for me from reaching the top of the stairs, but he couldn’t get any closer because that Cue Ball guy with the rifle was still waiting for an opportunity to kill him.
I thought that young man with the gun was my biggest problem . . . until it became clear that even though the glass I was crawling on was super thick, too many flowers had bloomed across it already, and they were too close to each other. Way too close. That flower under my right hand and the ones near my feet were already spreading, and sharp cracking sounds announced that the glass mezzanine had taken all the shooting it could.
Crack.
Crack . . .
Fuck.
I felt several tiles of the transparent floor give way under me with a terrible noise, and I fell through the mezzanine. Brilliant shards were flying around me, and for a fleeting second, I anticipated the contact of my body with the white tiling of the ground floor, pictured my bones shattering in the fall. Panic raced through my veins, but the pain itself never came: that Cue Ball guy momentarily abandoned his quest to kill March and lunged to catch me—and what he believed to be the real Ghost Cullinan—in his arms.
I crashed face-first into his gray jacket, smelling tobacco and detergent in the fabric. There was glass in my hair, some minor cuts on my hands and on my neck, and a bloody gash on Cue Ball’s forehead—which I assumed was the result of a bigger shard of glass cutting him. I was in a state of shock, still clutching the fake stone, and I saw March running toward us in the debris of the half-destroyed mezzanine. Cue Ball dropped me like a rag doll to fire at him again, and all the sounds around me were replaced by a loud buzzing in my ears. It was all too much: too much noise, too much fear. My chest constricted violently as I saw March dive to the floor just in time to avoid ending his career right there and then, a few feet away from me.
I gathered March had to be out of ammo, since he hadn’t fired his gun in a while and seemed to be looking for cover instead. The young Asian guy who had been trying to catch me had joined us, and he dragged me kicking and screaming toward the white van while Cue Ball finished emptying his magazine in an attempt to kill March, or at least keep him at bay. I screamed my lungs out as the younger man threw me brutally into the back of the van, and the last thing I saw before the door slammed shut was March running toward us.
As soon as the van had started, that young guy gave me a resounding slap before tearing the stone from my hands. Dizzy from the blow, I scrambled away, and he watched me as we drove through Tokyo in the dark, cramped space.
The vehicle appeared to be moving fast, and it shook a lot, as if the driver were being chased. I had nothing to steady myself and kept rolling from one side of van to the other every time we turned. Meanwhile, the young guy’s smooth features contorted in an anxious snarl as he leaned against the van’s back door, gun still in hand. There, he moved one of the black plastic panels covering the doors’ windows to look at the street.
I focused on the way his bony fingers tightened around the handle of his gun, the sweat on his temple, the deep frown wrinkling his brow, and assumed that whatever he was looking at displeased him. The vehicle took a series of violent turns at some point, which sent my head slamming against the van’s metallic wall so hard that I nearly passed out, until it seemed to slow down somewhat: we now seemed to be driving smoothly to wherever these guys were taking me.
That bitchy youth with the frown relaxed; his fingers loosened their iron grip on his gun. We were no longer being followed . . . and, dammit, I had just been kidnapped for the third time in four days!
TWENTY-EIGHT
The Master
“Dayne was so powerful, so perfect and intimidating, Chelsee thought as she was led through his humongous mansion, entirely decorated with black marble.”
—Muffin Thorpe, Slave to the Rich and Sexy Vampire
The van eventually stopped and my captors dragged me out, but I lost my balance and fell to the ground. The feeling of the hard pavement under my palms and the sight of blood on my fingers helped me focus. I had earned a few cuts during the mezzanine’s collapse, but I was otherwise okay. The glass skyscrapers and the cold atmosphere of the street felt familiar. We were somewhere in Tokyo’s business district, Ōtemachi, probably on the Eita Dori. Still carrying the stone, Cue Ball hauled me back up, and I noticed for the first time that he shaved his head to conceal a receding hairline. Bitchy-youth seemed to be more fortunate, with his mop of thick black hair, but those angular features were anything but inviting.
We entered an impressive stone building that was a strange mix of modern and gothic architecture. The first floors seemed rather ancient, with a sculpted facade that reminded me a little of the Doge’s Palace in Venice, and a pair of nineteenth-century-style lanterns flanking a wide entrance. The rest of the structure, however, was more recent, made up of pure, straight lines and a sea of glass that reached too high for me to make out the top of the building from where I stood. We made our way across what looked more like a stone-and-glass cathedral than a lobby, and once in the elevator, the youngest of my captors used a key to lift us to the twenty-sixth and last floor. The elevator’s steel doors opened to reveal a dozen tough-looking guys guarding a long hallway.
Cue Ball shoved me forward as one the guards opened a set of large doors, revealing a double staircase plunging down into a bright and vast living room. I realized that there was, in fact, no twenty-fifth floor. It had been merged with the twenty-sixth to create a penthouse of epic proportions. The windows I had seen from outside formed an invisible wall that gave me the impression I was standing inside a giant cube, one side of which showcased a breathtaking view of the city. I was led down the minimalist black staircase and into the room, where more guards awaited.
There, waiting for us near a white sofa that seemed straight out of Star Trek, was a tall man in an elegant gray suit. He walked to me, his lips stretching to reveal a carnivorous grin. Now, I know it’s a stupid idea, but I’ve always assumed that everyone who possesses the same type of gap-tooth I have is a nice person, like we all belonged to a secret gap-tooth club presided over by Lauren Hutton. That guy’s smile, however, was challenging this theory. I recoiled, but Cue Ball stood behind me, blocking any possible escape.
“Pleased to meet you again, Island. People call me—”
“Dries,” I murmured before he had the time to serve me the same introduction March had days ago, down to the intonation.
His deep voice petrified me. For a moment I was fifteen again, huddled under the covers of my bed while he left my mom’s room, bidding her goodnight with the same posh accent that spoke of a privileged Afrikaner background.
“You’re the man from Pretoria . . . the one who used to visit at night,” I said, suddenly struggling for air.
He let out a dry laugh. “I see you remember me. We’re practically family after all.”
I stared at him, my mind conjuring memories of a broad-shouldered shadow. He was still buff, and his sharp features were easy enough on the eyes, but his brown hair was graying, and the lines on his tanned face and hands were proof that even powerful assholes couldn’t cheat time. Now a grown woman myself, I could see what my mother had found so attractive, but those eyes . . . How had she ever been able to trust them? They were almost the same hazel as mine, but the golden flecks in their center made them seem yellow, and somehow, they made me physically ill.
“Are you going to kill me?” I was amazed at how calm I sounded, given the situation.
My host took a few steps forward until he was standing too close. He smelled spicy, like sandalwood maybe. His scent stirred the same kind of unpleasant feeling inside me that his eyes did, so I tried to focus on his hands instead and counted the tiny mole
s there. Much like me, Dries was probably constantly wondering if—or when—he would develop skin cancer.
“I was in fact hoping to have a pleasant meal and, who knows, perhaps get to know you better.” He had tucked a strand of hair behind my ear as he said this. I felt a chill travel from the nape of my neck all the way down to my back.
“I doubt you really want to spend quality time with me,” I muttered, squirming away from his touch.
A deep baritone laugh filled the room. “God, you’re exactly like your dear mother. Why wouldn’t I enjoy your company?”
I pointed my chin in Cue Ball’s direction. “Tell him to give me the bag. I’m gonna show you why.”
Raising an eyebrow, he nodded for his henchman to hand me the black satchel he had been carrying. As I pulled out the heavy stone from the bag, I wondered if it was the same feeling people got before jumping in front of a train—the feeling that it’s game over anyway, that it no longer matters if they live or die.
I looked at Dries as I raised the Cullinan over my head. His eyes lit up, and he moved to stop me, but I jumped back before he could touch me and hurled the fake diamond to the ground with all my strength. It hit the smooth concrete with a loud crash, shattering in thousands of shimmering shards.
I saw the bare hate in his eyes.
“Checkmate. Looks like she didn’t want anyone to have it, not even me!”
He might have been an asshole, but he did possess some serious self-control, I had to give him that. He didn’t even blink. He merely took a deep breath and let out a low chuckle. “Oh . . . you’re quite something, little Miss Chaptal.”
As he said this, he cracked his knuckles, and I thought he was getting ready to beat the crap out of me—I mostly worried about my teeth—but he didn’t. He pulled out a phone from his pocket and dialed a number. Someone answered, and he spoke in an icy voice. “Transfer me to him. No questions. Now.” Whoever was on the other end of the line seemed unimpressed by Dries’s display of virile authority, which prompted him to switch to hateful baboon mode. “Listen to me, bitch, pass him to me immediately if you don’t want to find your son’s heart on your doorstep tomorrow.”