“Very well. I will expect you tomorrow at three.” Ana gave her a sugary smile. “I assume you prefer cash?”
“If possible. And you might consider dismissing the domestic staff for the day,” Tam said. “So we can have privacy to speak freely.”
“I’ll see to it,” Ana assured her.
They exchanged bright, glittering fuck-you smiles once again.
Donatella broke in. “And when can we meet to arm mine?” she demanded petulantly. “I need my jewelry armed soon.” Her voice dropped, and her eyes flicked toward Val. “I will need them, to keep a certain tall, dark, and handsome lover in his proper place. In Paris.”
Paris? What the fuck was that about?
Tam made an appointment with the woman for the following week, but such was her feeling of unreality, she did not even note the time or date they agreed upon. The information just came out of her mouth and then floated out of her head. Who knew if the appointment would take place? She could die a horrible death by that day.
But who knew from one minute to the next when death would pounce? It was always a rude surprise. Who could have imagined that hot August morning that her family had gotten up. A morning like any other. Breakfast like any other. Laughing and teasing and squabbling.
But that had been it. The last day. The last morning. The last breakfast. Who knew?
The high-pitched, empty-headed chatter of the two women faded in her mind. The sound of hens clucking. Faraway dogs barking. The distance between herself and the rest of the world widened into a vast buffer of awful silence. She was utterly alone, sealed inside it.
Tomorrow she was going to find out once and for all if revenge could make any difference. Ghosts clustered around her: Mamma, her father, and Irina standing next to her, clutching Tam’s knee with her chubby, dimpled ghost hand. Her liquid dark eyes so uncannily like Rachel’s eyes. She’d been barely two when—
No. Not now. No fits. Not in front of Ana and Donatella.
Tam shut her eyes and saw the dirt scattering into their wide-open eyes. Her ears were starting to roar, her heart to pound.
She tried to tune into the hens clucking, dogs barking, just to grab onto something else. Focus on anything else. Anything at all.
“. . . so we can eat late,” Donatella was cooing into Val’s ear, in a tone Tam was not meant to overhear. “The cook at La Cantinola will be happy to cook for us, even after eleven o’clock. I’m a special client. And there’s a lovely room above La Cantinola, with a sea view . . .”
Listen to that. Brazen slut. Trying to coax Val into meeting her for dinner and a quickie.
Val, to his credit, was wiggling like an eel, vacillating between lavish compliments and careful excuses. But the bitch’s hands were all over him. And he was not pushing them off.
The anger helped. It made that sick, sinking feeling back off.
Good. Anger worked, so she embraced it. Bastard. Dog. Porcone.
He would pay for that, later. In blood.
The atmosphere in the car for the drive back to San Vito was subzero. Tam did not even look at him, she just stared straight ahead, radiating a bone-chilling cold with more vicious intensity than he’d ever felt from a woman. Or at least, that he’d ever bothered to notice.
“Would you tell me my crime?” he demanded finally, when they were approaching the San Vito exit.
“No crime,” she said, her voice cool, toneless. “I just can’t imagine how you actually managed to go through with it, that’s all.”
“With what?” he demanded. Although he knew.
She shot him a glance that indicated that she knew that he knew and did not appreciate his dissembling.
He sighed and offered it up. “It was some years ago. I was undercover. Investigating a smuggling ring. Her husband was involved. She was angry at him. I needed info. It was unavoidable.”
“Oh, really? I suppose you fought, tooth and claw,” she said.
“No. I did my job,” he said stiffly. “Just as you have always done.”
“Oh, so now we’re throwing whore darts, are we?”
He shook his head. “It was not particularly memorable,” he said flatly. “Nor was it altogether unpleasant. I have no burning desire to repeat the experience. It did facilitate my job.”
“Works with me, too, eh? Smooth, Val. Fucking your targets into boneless submission. What a trick.”
“Bullshit,” he spat out. “After this morning, you know that is not true.”
“How do I know that? With a man as slick and smooth and pretty as you, how could I possibly know that for sure? Gigolo Janos. So you have a date to meet her in Paris, hmm? If you want to go meet her for dinner and cunnilingus tonight at La Cantinola, please feel free.”
He pulled into the hotel parking, muttering obscenities, and grabbed her jewelry case. “Come,” he snarled. “I will walk you to the hotel, and then I must go to Salerno.” He had planned to keep her close to him, but not in this mood. They would end up killing each other.
She jerked the jewelry case out of his hand. “You remember my shopping list?”
“Of course.”
“Then there’s no need to escort me through a crowded parking lot.” She slammed out of the car. “I can escort myself.”
He loped after her and jerked her shoulder around. “Do not be an idiot.”
“Why not? Seems like it hasn’t put you off before.”
He seized her shoulders. “You are playing games, Tamar. Stop it.”
“Don’t maul me, you oaf—”
“It is stupid and out of character for you to be so angry about my past professional dealings with a woman like that. You are using this as an excuse, no? You would rather be angry at me and jealous about Donatella than feel whatever it is you are really feeling. No? About your past, your family? Ana or Stengl?”
The fight went out of her, and the color drained out of her face. “No,” she whispered. “Don’t try to psychoanalyze me.”
“Then do not cry out for a fucking diagnosis. You are acting like a child. If you need distraction from the way you are feeling, I will come to the room with you now and give you one that you will never forget.”
She stumbled away, grabbing the stonework railing that led up to the hotel entrance. “No,” she said unsteadily. “We have work to do.”
“Then go do it,” he said harshly. “I will distract you when I get back. At great length. Count upon it.”
She scurried up the stairs, disappearing into the lobby of the hotel. Val stared after her, his face hot. He was half tempted to follow her up and make good on his promise, here and now. She would protest and fight and scratch and bite, like always . . . but then . . . ah, Dio.
He went back to the car, clenching and unclenching his hands to unload the tension. And the guilt.
He had to edit and send another piece of footage, the one from that morning, to Novak. This was killing him. It got worse every day.
He got into the car, booted up, attached the thin cable. Downloaded the footage. He watched it and relived it. The way she moved, the light shining off her body. Her hands, touching his hair, his face. Her back to the camera, slender and straight as a blade, the perfect curve of her hips swelling out as she straddled him.
His own face to the camera, his feelings revealed. Transfixed by her beauty.
He cut out as much of it as he could and still satisfy the filthy old satyr, and was trying to connect to the Web when the split second realization came to him. Air moved in the car that should not move. Tiny movements, plays of light and shadow, out of place. He froze.
A small sound. No. He reached for a gun that was not there.
Too late. A cold circle of metal pressed against the nape of his neck.
“Hello, Janos,” Hegel said.
Chapter 18
Tam stood by the door, people swirling around her, and watched Val’s tall, broad shouldered form stride briskly back to the parking lot.
Anxiety clawed at her. A presentiment of d
oom. She wanted to run after him, grab his hand, beg him to stay close.
Grow the fuck up. He’d been right to call her on that silly tantrum about Donatella. He’d nailed her right to the wall. His specialty.
God knows, what he’d done with Donatella was nothing she hadn’t done herself. Get-it-over-with sex to further whatever other agenda she might have. Like staying alive, for instance.
But she had to pull herself together, get back to work. She needed to organize her poison and drug supplies for tomorrow’s charade with Ana. Devise a plan for getting into the clinic and decide what she would do once she got there. She had to be smart, focused, ruthless.
She ran up the stairs. When she turned out of the staircase into the corridor, two men waited. Guns appeared suddenly in their hands.
“Don’t move,” one of them said.
They flanked her, seized her by both arms. A pistol jabbed, brutally hard, into the small of her back. She refused to gasp at the pain. The faces of the two men were unreadable. “Who—”
“Quiet,” one of them hissed.
They dragged her to the end of the corridor and into the emergency stairwell, then up two flights. They stopped outside the first door in the hall. One of them rapped on it.
“Come in,” said a familiar voice. The door opened.
Georg sat on the bed facing her, his legs wide, his hands on his knees. His ruined teeth had been capped. Their bright, unnatural whiteness gave his predatory grin a surreal effect.
Georg barked out orders in Hungarian for his men to leave. Tam was left standing before him, clutching her briefcase and purse. Forcing herself to smile. She hid her fear with the ease of long, hard practice.
He looked better than he had four years ago. He’d been a bald, scarred monstrosity during her nightmare sojourn with Kurt Novak. Since then, the scars on his face had been smoothed out with surgery and time. Instead of the twisting, ropy red worms crawling over his face, the scars were thin, silvery irregularities in his pallid skin. He looked like a man whose face had been taken apart and put back together not quite straight. One side of his mouth pulled up in a permanent smirk; one of his eye sockets was smaller than the other, the eyelid pulled too tight. His hair was buzz cut very short. He was thin, his prominent cheekbones blade sharp. His electric blue eyes glowed hot in deep eye sockets, like the headlights of a car in the dark.
A car that was about to run her down.
She sensed the vicious strength of his madness. She saw it in his eyes, his smile. It had started before she met him, and it had ripened to fullness since then. Her skin crawled. Her mouth was dry.
“Georg,” she said warmly. “What an unexpected pleasure. I had no idea you were still alive.”
Right. Such a delightful surprise. As if she hadn’t been dragged at gunpoint to his door. Whatever.
“I almost wasn’t,” he said. “I was confined to a prison hospital for almost a year. Old Novak got me out.”
“That was good of him,” she said. “And I never knew.”
His smile widened. “You couldn’t have known. You would have found a way to come to me. After what we shared, I was sure of that.”
She funneled her shudder of disgust expertly into another burst of projected warmth. “And how did you know that?”
“Because of what you did for me.” He said the words as if it should be obvious.
Hmm. This was a puzzle. As far as Tam knew, she had tried with every effort at her disposal to kill his scrawny, milk white ass. Under the circumstances, however, it seemed unwise to say so. Bursting his mad fantasy bubble would seal her doom. She was in no rush for that.
“And what exactly did I do?” She ventured a secret smile, as if they were playing a flirtatious game.
Georg smiled back. “You did for me what I was too weak to do for myself. Kurt was so strong, I could not see past his strength to realize my own. But you saw it. You saw my potential.”
“Yes,” she said obediently. “Yes, I did.”
“It was meant for me!” Georg waved his arm around. “The money, the power, the whole empire! But I would never have been anything but Kurt’s servant if you had not freed me.”
A deep breath. She took the plunge. “It was a huge risk,” she said slowly. “But in the end, it was worth it. Look what you have become.”
“I am grateful,” he said solemnly. “I nearly died for it, but thanks to you, it was Kurt that died. And you are like his widow. You were born to rule at the emperor’s side, but instead of being Kurt’s consort, you were meant to be mine, Tamara. Do you see? Do you feel it?”
She widened her eyes, as if in wondering realization. Her destiny revealed. “Ah. Yes. Now I understand.”
He got up and walked slowly toward her, circling her. “You did not know, but I have been protecting you for years,” he said.
Her knees weakened as she thought of Rachel. “Me? Really?”
“I told old Novak you died. That I had seen your bleeding body.”
She let her jaw drop in theatrical amazement. That would explain why she had survived for so long. It had always seemed improbable to her. Too good to be true that the old man had ignored her for so long.
“I didn’t know,” she whispered. “I thought no one knew where I was. But I might have known I could never hide from you.”
“I hear you have an adopted child,” he said. “This is of some concern to me. I hope you understand what a commitment of time and energy it will be to stand at my side and help run the global organization that I have in hand. To say nothing of how much it is about to expand.”
Tam gave him a supremely casual shrug. “Don’t worry about my priorities,” she assured him. “I’ll make arrangements for the child. There will be no conflicts at all.”
Georg’s smile widened. “I knew you would understand. And now, Tamara . . . give me what I have been waiting for . . . for years now.”
“And, ah, what is that?” She braced herself.
His pale lips thinned over those big fake teeth. “You.”
Her stomach twisted unpleasantly. She put down her briefcase, smiling, shining, glowing at him while a rapid-fire situation analysis crunched in her mind. She was alone with him, and that was a plus, but he was certainly armed to the teeth. He was a lethally quick fighter. Thin though he was, he had to outweigh her by over a third, and he had a much longer reach. He was a tall man, over six two. Insane, perhaps, but not stupid. He would be on his guard.
Her best bet were the earrings, but not until he was writhing on top of her, distracted by sexual pleasure. Then, once he was safely knocked out, she could kill him at her leisure in any of a dozen ways.
The trick would be to keep from vomiting or passing out while being intimate with him. She had lost her professional cool, and she had Val Janos and his manly mojo to thank for it. It was much easier to calmly contemplate the pits of hell when one didn’t have a shining paradise to compare it to. Damn him.
She shoved the thoughts away. This was all about survival now. She would deal with the mess later.
Georg held out his hand imperiously. “Well? Come here.”
She lurched toward him as if she’d been shoved from behind. His hand clamped her wrist. It was damp. Clammy and horribly strong, like the strangling coils of a snake.
“What, ah, do you want?” she asked faintly.
He grinned like a carnivorous dinosaur. “Take off your clothes.”
“Interesting footage you’ve got there.” Hegel let out an oily chuckle. “I see why you’ve been dragging your heels. Didn’t want to stop fucking her, hmm? And immortalizing the experience, too. Run back that last bit. I love the shape of her ass when she bends over you. And I go wild for a shaved pussy. Silky soft. Mmm. Run it back.”
“Fuck you,” Val said.
The gun dug harder into his neck. “Run it back,” Hegel repeated.
Val snapped the screen closed. “No,” he said.
Hegel leaned forward until Val could feel the moist heat of t
he man’s breath. “Don’t fuck with me, Janos. Do you know how bad your behavior made me look? Do you have the faintest idea how pissed I am with you? Because you’re just about to find out.”
Val started to turn. The gun dug deeper. “One false move, Janos,” Hegel muttered. “Pulling this trigger would be a pleasure.”
Three steps back. Val set the mechanism in operation, let the matrix start to turn in his mind, and floated apart from it. Or rather, he tried to, but the anxious question flew out of him without his permission. “Where is she? What is happening to her?”
“I expect she’s at the hotel with Georg. Although that twisted freak needs lots of help to get it on. You know, I bet she’ll thank me in the end for forcing the issue.”
Val could imagine exactly what Tamar would say if she heard those words. “You think so?” he said distantly.
“Oh, yes. There are worse things than being pounded by one of the richest guys in the world, even if he is out of his fucking gourd. And that kind of woman is sure to realize it real fast. You’ve done all right for yourself, Janos, but you can’t compete with hundreds of millions in drug, prostitution, and gun-running money. And if the moves he’s about to make pan out, his empire is going to expand. I’ll do everything I can to see that happen. This is the ass to kiss, Janos. Too bad you dipped your wick in the sacred well, you bad boy. Georg won’t like that. In spite of his sexual quirks.”
He hated to give Hegel the satisfaction, but fear prevailed, and the question burst out. “What sexual quirks?”
“Oh, nothing really that dirty,” Hegel said lightly. “He likes being watched, that’s all. No matter what he does, even if it’s just a blow job, someone has to be standing there watching, or else his dick goes south. I don’t mind watching myself. Particularly when he gets generous afterward. Me, I don’t mind a buttered bun now and then.”
Sexual confidences from Hegel—ugh. Val’s stomach churned. He changed the subject. “Who were those men at the Sea-Tac airport?”
“Oh, the ones you slaughtered? That was just an insurance policy. A local team based out of Olympia. I mobilized them when it looked like I couldn’t count on you. They were incompetent fucks, but wonder of wonders, you ended up doing your job anyway, Janos. Convenient, getting her over the pond without us having to deal with her kid. That would have been a big pain in the ass, having to keep a three-year-old’s ass wiped. Start the car.”
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