Sweet Seduction Surrender (Sweet Seduction, Book 4)

by Claire, Nicola

  I took a hurried look up and down the road, making sure to survey every direction before I exited the SUV. Inside or outside the car, at this location, was still a safe bet; not a soul walked the street. I approached the fence and peered between the leaves. A rather large blank wall met my eyes. I tried to get a better perception of size, but from the angle I was looking and with the obstruction of the bushes, I couldn't see an end to the vastness of dirty white concrete that loomed through the fence.

  I fiddled with the walkie-talkie, trying to decide if I should check up on Jason. Finally anxiety and impatience took their toll and I brought the device to my face, pressed the button and spoke into the receiver.

  "Jason? What's happening?"

  There was a crackle, as though he was trying to pick his walkie-talkie up, or as though he was frantically trying to turn it down, and then nothing.

  Panic seized me. Had I made a mistake contacting him when he was investigating a suspicious location? He hadn't said not to, but then I also hadn't been that stupid when he was inside ASI. Maybe he assumed I understood it was for emergencies only. My nail found my teeth and I gnawed on it for a second, then without anything else to do, I turned back to the SUV to climb inside.

  A startled cry escaped my lips as I rotated to face the vehicle and found a man the size of a mountain standing before me. Between me and the car itself. He was huge. And had beady eyes a little too close together and bushy eyebrows arrowed down into a V. However, it wasn't the Deliverance facial appearance that sucked all the air from my lungs, but the bulging muscles protruding beneath his too small t-shirt sleeves, the stretch of barrel-shaped chest that stood threateningly in front of my eyes, and the very real looking black gun he held in his beefy hands, pointed at me.

  "Ms Anscombe," he said in a gruff voice that matched his physique. "Come with me." The 'with' was pronounced, wiff.

  OK. Not good. I glanced up and down the street, but still there was no one to see this abduction taking place. I momentarily contemplated flicking a knife at him, but with the gun aimed at my chest and his finger already on the trigger, not to mention the fact that he was probably not alone and Jason was facing off against this goon's counterpart right now, the idea was soon quashed. I'd bide my time. The goon hadn't frisked me, so I was still armed.

  And in the theme of his obvious assumption that I was nothing more than a non-threatening woman, I cowered, bit a trembling lip and said in a wavering voice, "Who are you? What do you want?"

  "Mr King would like a word," he said, taking a towering step closer.

  I shouldn't have been surprised. We'd concluded King's involvement, but we'd had intel advice of his departure. Had he returned? Or was I being taken somewhere else?

  A large hand wrapped threateningly around my upper arm, the steel point of the gun was thrust into my side painfully, and the goon pulled me along the length of the fence.

  "Where are you taking me?" I demanded, my heart in my throat and the shaking in my legs no longer for appearance sake only.

  "To Mr King," the man said, as though I was missing a few brain cells.

  The itch to pull a knife and defend myself was enormous. I'd been trained to combat this sort of situation, but reality is a great leveller. The gun felt real. It was real. When I'd trained, the weapon used against me had been fake, the outcome; one of bruises and a crushed ego. But here, on the side of a road in South Auckland, I knew if I pulled my Kukri and wasn't fast enough to take the mountain beside me by surprise, there'd be no bruises, only blood. My blood.

  I had never considered myself a coward, but in that moment, fear for my life overrode all my training. Simply turned me into a victim, not a Kombatan martial arts specialist.

  How had Jason survived in a world this real?

  Genuine tears trickled down my cheeks, a sense of despondency invaded my mind. I had expected so much more from myself than this. I felt disappointed and disgusted at my weakness.

  We entered a gate at the edge of the property and crossed a short, weed strewn, neglected piece of concrete to a closed door at the rear of Tremayne's warehouse. My captor banged three times on the door with a meaty fist, the sound echoing out across the small courtyard and resounding inside my frantic chest. I might have jerked.

  The door creaked open, the darkness inside momentarily making it impossible to see who had given us access. By the time I was dragged across the threshold, only the back of another medium build man could be seen, walking away from us towards light at the end of a brief corridor.

  A second twitch of my body as the door clanged shut at our backs. I was fast becoming a bundle of nerves and little else. I needed to get a handle on my reactions, settle my mind, ease the drastic clench of my heart. I needed to focus on my training, on Johnson's words of wisdom in my mind.

  But all I could hear was Jason. "If it comes down to it, you do whatever you have to do to stay safe. Even if you have to leave me behind."

  Suddenly, seeing Jason before contemplating anything else was imperative. The need to ensure he was still alive stole all other thoughts from my mind, and replaced all other fears. If I could ensure Jason was still breathing, then I would consider looking out for myself. Retaliating, searching deep within my psyche and finding that place my Kombatan trainer had given me; the strength required to not be a victim, to fight back.

  Having something to focus on other than the feel of my too large captor's hand on my arm, or the press of the gun barrel in the side of my torso, was liberating. In a way only being with Jason had ever been. I clasped the sensation, concentrated on my immediate goal, and started surveying my surroundings.

  We'd passed several rooms; doors open, revealing office like spaces. Whatever this building had been in the past, it was barely used now. The offices were empty, only gathering dust. No obvious solutions appeared in any of the abandoned spaces.

  I turned my attention to the door at the end of the hallway we were in, the one the smaller man had just opened and walked through. Light shone brightly on the other side of the door frame. It had been that light which spilled out from beneath the previously closed door and illuminated the corridor. The blinds were all closed on the empty offices we'd walked past, the only source of lighting came from that room ahead.

  I blinked, concentrated on the brightness, willing my pupils to react swiftly so I wouldn't be light blind when I entered the room. Not that I intended to do anything immediately upon arrival there, but somehow the need to be prepared was forefront in my mind. That, and the need to see Jason as soon as possible.

  A part of me wished I hadn't been so eager. Because the instant I was hauled through the narrow opening, out into the brighter, larger space, my eyes landed on him. Everything, everyone, else vanished. Just me and the crumpled form of Jason several metres away.

  He was bloody. I couldn't tell if the blood was someone else's or his, and if it was his, if it was superficial or not. He was breathing, but his eyes were closed and his limbs unmoving. He'd been beaten, that much was obvious, and I wondered how anyone could get the drop on Jason, and not wear a few cuts and bruises themselves.

  I forced my eyes to leave the shattered looking shape of the man I loved and scanned my environment, looking for evidence that Jason had fought back. Two other men stood in the room. One was the medium built man who had opened the back door, dressed in jeans and a polo shirt, with geek styled mousy brown hair and horn rimmed glasses. The other was tall, distinguished and in an expensive suit. He was also dark skinned.

  Declan King.

  Neither of them had a scratch on their bodies. Jason had been ambushed, caught unawares. Or had decided fighting back was not possible.

  My eyes continued their careful inventory of the room. It was larger than I had expected, large enough to house a basketball court and the spectator stands, I should think. Large enough to house all of Tremayne's art, sitting innocuously in one corner. Large enough to house Declan King and his men, with Jason at their feet.

  And la
rge enough to house Richard Tremayne. Who looked in similar shape to Jason, but his chest was not rising and falling in the same steady rhythm. My eyes settled on Tremayne's still form, unable to pull away from the sight of a dead body. Of a dead person I had known.

  If I had thought our lives were in danger before, it was nothing to the realisation of how true that was now. The evidence of just what Declan King was capable of; there on the cold concrete floor, discarded, no longer needed. Terminated.

  I flicked a steady gaze back at King.

  "Did he renege on your deal?" I asked, surprised at my courage, at the fact I could challenge this man at all.

  But a pit of anger had invaded my body, settled in my stomach and spread ice cold tendrils throughout my frame. I was furious. With Tremayne. With the mob boss who stood imperiously before me. With the sight of a once magnificent soldier lying broken on the floor.

  It was the type of anger that stole all reason. My head was trying to tell me, danger, danger, danger. My body was simply saying, bring it the fuck on!

  "He was superfluous to requirements, my dear," King said, in an unusual accent; somewhere between Kiwi and a type of French.

  "What was he getting out of this?" I asked, needing clarity in something, even if it was only in uncovering Tremayne's motives for now.

  "He was not aware of his role, at all," King said, sounding amused and bored at the same time. "Merely a tool I needed to get the job done."

  "But you made him approach me?" I couldn't quite work it out. Tremayne had sought me out for a reason, it had to be because of this man.

  King let out a loud burst of laughter. It echoed around the room. Jason didn't even stir.

  "I would not work with one such as him, Ms Anscombe. But I am not opposed to using his type. Money hungry and elitist. Everything I was not growing up."

  Ah. A glimpse into the mind of a megalomaniac crime lord with something to prove.

  "But his infatuation with you proved interesting," he went on. "And useful. You do know he was obsessed with you, don't you my dear? Couldn't stop talking about the young, pretty designer he had employed to decorate his new showroom. The plans to have you do the rest of his chain of art stores. The desire to add you to his collection of perfect pieces. For show. For his ego. For his amusement and because he could."

  But he couldn't. I'd turned Tremayne down. Had he gone to King and asked for a favour?

  "So, he approached you, when he couldn't get what he wanted from me?"

  King rocked back on his highly polished expensive Italian made leather shoes, clasped his hands in front of him and smiled a too white toothed grin.

  "You don't get it, Ms Anscombe," he said, condescendingly. "I used him. Nothing more. It was for my purposes that his store was burgled. It was for my amusement that your brother's firm was implicated. It was because I can. He merely presented an avenue I hadn't considered before. You."

  My heart fell. If I hadn't have met Richard Tremayne we wouldn't be here. Nick under question, under threat of arrest, due to a crime he didn't commit. Jason beaten, maybe broken enough to tip him over the edge into that dark abyss. Me facing off against a monster of a man who played with people's lives like a game of chess. And Tremayne, dead.

  All because Mrs Montgomery-Smith had told her husband's acquaintance about my work and Richard had liked what he'd seen.

  "So, you see, my dear," King said, bringing my focus back to the room. "All roads lead to me. And your brother, with his penchant to interfere in my business. He pulled a gun on me, you know. Fired with intent to kill. How am I not to repay him in kind?"

  "Didn't you shoot first?" I asked, trying to stall, trying to give Detective Pierce time to arrive and end this before I had to take that fateful step.

  "Only after he stole something that was rightfully mine," King spat. If you could call the way he spoke, spitting.

  "Abi is not a possession," I pointed out. It had been while rescuing Abi from King's clutches that a gun fight had broken out. Eva had told me. Another reminder of what sort of world Nicholas Anscombe walked in. A world that overlapped into mine.

  My eyes flicked to Jason's on the floor. He was watching me. I tried to still my gasp of breath at seeing him conscious. He gave a small shake of his head, as if to say, look away, don't react. Even when he demands with just a glance and no words, I obeyed. Immediately.

  My eyes returned swiftly to King's and I held his eager, and quite wrong, gaze. King was crazy. Crazier than Tremayne. Crazier than my ex-soldier. His crazy was on a whole other level, making both Richard and Jason seem down right normal.

  "What now, if you don't mind me asking?" I said. So casual. So unaffected. Who would have known I could pull off nonchalant while facing my death, and the death of my lover, so easily.

  "A message. A gift, if you will, " King said, straightening his suit sleeve cuffs. Preparing to leave, I think.

  Nick had once said that a message from Declan King could be fatal. That a gift definitely was.

  I blinked slowly. Took in a measured, calm breath of air. Centred myself using a technique my trainer had taught me. Glanced at Jason, who flicked a gaze at the geek looking guy - the closest man to him in the room and his obvious target. Leaving me both King and his goon of a mountain, who had a gun still pointed at my chest.

  The odds weren't good. But I am not your average victim. I may look all sweet and refined. Dressed in my tailored trousers. My designer blouse. My made to measure jacket. And my thousand dollar shoes. I may carry myself like I went to finishing school, as though I belong in the social elite of Auckland city.

  But I don't. I am my hard-nosed lawyer father's daughter. My private investigator brother's sister. My soldier boyfriend’s woman. I belong in their world, which is a million miles away from the privately educated, socially elite, upper echelons of society that King saw when he looked at me right now.

  I smiled. It was slow and calculating and the only warning they would get.

  They missed its intention. King taking a step toward the gun toting behemoth beside him, and opening his mouth to issue a command. No doubt something along the lines of, after you kill her, make sure you dispose of her body well.

  And in a coordinated move, which God alone knows how we achieved it, Jason rolled smoothly to a crouch, while I unleashed two SOG Fusion throwing knives directly at King and mountain-man's chests.

  The room squeezed down on us, as though the walls and ceiling began closing in and the air started to freeze. I could still hear. I could still see, although what I saw was no longer normal. I could still feel; the sweat coating my skin, the tremble in my fingers, the sick feeling of inevitability rolling out towards me inside my gut. I swallowed bile, sucked in a choked gulp of air, and reacted.

  Despite the fear which gripped me in a claw-like clasp, practice made me move. My training kicked in, even as my mind threatened to rebel at what it was seeing.

  Red.

  Just a splash, a stripe across pale skin. A drip, suspended in the air as it flew from its origin out towards the ground, gravity pulling it downwards. My knives had found their targets. Clean shots, exacting maximum damage.

  But it wasn't enough. A flash of dark clothing told me King was on the move, but his figure was obscured by a mountain of rage. Snarling, spitting fury storming towards me. The glint of artificial lights flashing off the dull black of a weapon.

  My heart stalled. My brain faltered. My body took over the fight.

  I rolled to the left, out of the responding fire from the huge man's gun, feeling the bullet blast past me in a burst of heated air. The sound momentarily deafened me. The ache of my shoulder slamming into concrete stole all reason. Just for a second of panicked time. I blinked, tried to focus. Tried to get my bearings. Jason was behind the geek, two hands on either side of his head. A short twist, and the body crumpled to the floor.

  Then the scene rapidly sped up again, sound returning, so much it left confusion, not clarity in its wake. The yell of rage from
the huge mountain staggering towards me. The vile look of death across his face. My head swam with my trainer's instructions, my mind trying futilely to respond to the stimuli it was receiving. Violent anger. Course words of lethal intent. The cold hard floor beneath my knees. The piercing ache in my shoulder where I'd fallen.

  For a split second, which felt like forever, I thought I was dead. That the next bullet had already reached me. But while my head was imploding and the world outside my mind was exploding, my body was still acting on auto-pilot. I threw a third, and then a fourth knife in quick succession, into the advancing shape of the infuriated and wounded mob boss's goon. He stumbled, clutched at his chest with one hand and the side of his neck with the other. Futilely trying to staunch the flow of blood.

  He would bleed out, my fracturing mind informed me. But my frantically beating heart told me, he was determined to reach me first.

  The fifth and sixth knives entered his femoral artery on his right hand side, and his chest on his left. The feel of the ribbed rubber hilts still ghosts of sensations in my cold, clammy palms. My hands shook, my body quaked. My lips trembled as sounds of distress began to whimper out of me. I'd acted as I'd been trained to do, but nothing prepares you for this. Nothing prepares you for death.

  Death is real. Death is loud. Death is gritty. Death is final.

  The blood loss associated with my well aimed throws would kill this man eventually. If not within the next few seconds. But the knife in the heart stilled all flow of blood completely. I knew this, as I watched the blade flick through the air between me and my target, slowly rotating tip over hilt in a beautiful arc that defied gravity and embraced my will instead. I knew exactly where it would embed itself before it cleaved through flesh, severed arteries, and pierced the organ. I knew.