by Meg Ripley
****
Rachel was making her way back to the tiny house she had rented, weaving slightly from the eau-de-vie burning through her veins, when she felt the sensation of being watched. She cussed softly to herself; she had been stupid to drink a third shot. She felt a flicker of genuine regret for leaving Dylan—even if she couldn’t trust him, at least she had felt safe, protected around him. At least he was alert when she was incapable of it, even if the people he was alert to were apparently not necessarily her enemies. Rachel stumbled, reaching out blindly to grab onto something to steady her on the unevenly paved road, looking around in the early evening gloom to try and find the source of her sudden presentiment.
“Rachel, please, let me steady you,” someone said, and she felt a firm hand on her shoulder doing just that. The voice was unfamiliar—and the fact that the voice was speaking English, when she had become accustomed to a constant gabble of too-fast French and weird Swiss German, sent a thrill of fear through Rachel that made her try and lurch away from the hand holding her up. “I’m not here to hurt you, Rachel; calm down.”
“Who are you?” Rachel asked, turning her head. She caught a vaguely familiar face; a middle-aged man, around the age of fifty or maybe sixty on the outside, impeccably groomed and clean-shaven.
“I don’t blame you for not remembering me,” the man said with the faintest glimmer of a smile. “Why don’t we talk at your place? That seems much more comfortable than out here on the road—these Alpine drivers play fast and loose with speed for people would could careen off the side of a mountain at any moment.”
“I’m not leading you back to my house until you tell me who you are and why I shouldn’t start screaming right now,” Rachel said.
“James Whitley,” the man said. “I’ve been looking for you ever since you dropped out of Dylan’s care. You’re in a great deal of trouble, my dear.” Rachel stared at the man in shock; this was her mysterious benefactor? He looked like someone’s father-in-law. He looked like someone she might have seen at a bistro in Rouen. He didn’t look like an unstable billionaire CEO who knew the kinds of people who could procure a fake passport that had fooled four different countries. “We have a lot to talk about, Rachel.”
“Yeah, I suppose we do,” she said, sighing. There was obviously no getting away from him now; his arm was around her shoulder, and even if she wasn’t just shy of drunk, Rachel didn’t think that she could have managed the steep road up to where her rented house stood at a run. “Okay. I’m guessing you probably already know where I live, if you managed to accost me on the way there.”
“I had a good idea of the neighborhood,” James said with another quick smile. “Let’s get you up this last hill and then we can have a nice, long conversation about what’s going on in your life.”
“My life?” Rachel began to walk slowly, following the road, leaning against James slightly. “My life is shit right now, thanks to you; that’s what’s going on in it.”
“There are quite a few people who would find your life pretty romantic,” James pointed out. “But I can sympathize; you’re not wandering around Europe by choice, and you’re under constant threat. I promise you there are a lot of reasons for the things I have done—I’m not out to torture you. But I think that part of the conversation is best saved for home, don’t you?”
“Sure,” Rachel said, stumbling slightly and catching herself. “I don’t seem to have a hell of a lot of choice in anything that’s been going on for the past two months, I might as well just go along with your plan.”
****
Dylan worried at his bottom lip as he watched the scenery flash past the windows of the train. It had been over a week since he had seen Rachel; over a week since she had asked him why he was having sex with her—a question that, in his stunned mind, had nothing to do with the real issue at hand—and then ran out of the apartment. He had been so baffled by her question that it had taken him a few minutes to get his clothes on and follow her; and she had taken advantage of that head start to lose herself somewhere in Rouen, and then leave the city altogether.
He knew that she had left, but he didn’t know where she had gone. Dylan shifted in his seat, taking a slow breath. This is why you don’t get involved with the target, you dumbass, he thought to himself. It had been much easier to track her before; he had been able to remain objective, he had been able to think clearly about where a woman like Rachel would go, what she would do. When Whitley had called him to give him the details on their arrangements—the planned escape from Rouen that he and Rachel would have made if she hadn’t left—Dylan had felt ethically bound to tell his client that he had lost the girl.
“What the hell did you do, Dylan?” Whitley had asked him after a moment’s silence.
“We got into a fight and she ran off.” Another moment of ominous silence.
“When I told you to stay with her at all times, I didn’t mean to stay in her bed,” Whitley told him slowly. “You could have just as easily watched her without sleeping with her.”
“I don’t take my job quite that seriously,” Dylan had remarked caustically. “Look; from what I can gather she hopped a train, probably to Paris. That’s the only place she could really go to get the hell out of dodge from. I’ll see if I can pick up the trail there.”
“Do what you can,” Whitley had replied. “I’m going to take other measures. Do you think Jeffrey knows?”
“If he doesn’t now, he will soon,” Dylan said grimly. “We have to get to her first.”
“One of us does, anyway. Do what you have to do; send me the expenses later on.” With that, Whitley had ended the call, and Dylan had been left to his own devices to attempt to track a woman he thought he might never fully know across the country—and perhaps out of it—without having any idea of what she might do.
It had taken him a few days in Paris and a few persuasive questions to find someone who remembered the woman he described; slowly, Dylan began to trace the path that Rachel had taken, the trains across the country, out of it and into Geneva. He knew that if he was able to do it, Brock with his superior resources would be just as capable—if not more so.
Dylan worried at his bottom lip as he watched the French countryside pass by the window of the TGV. He picked up his phone and flipped through his music library; he had sent Rachel a few messages, a last-ditch effort to get her to reach out to him—but he had gotten no response. She may have ditched the phone, he thought grimly. For all I know I’m sending these messages to some confused French girl who has no idea why she keeps getting songs in her voicemail. As he picked another song from his collection to send to her—not knowing whether she would get it, whether she would understand—the lyrics filtered through his mind. “This indecision’s got me climbing up the wall…How did this come over me, thought I was above it all…Give me some rope I’m coming lose, I’m hanging on you…”
****
Dylan wandered the station at Geneva, sniffing the air as if it could possibly contain some trace of Rachel’s particular warm, spicy scent. He shook his head, clenching his teeth and working to control his irritation. She wasn’t in Geneva, he was somehow certain; she had landed there, dropped by the train, but if he knew her at all—if he understood the strange woman whose life he had been part of for over a month, until he and Brock had ruined the setup—she wouldn’t have stayed. She’d have moved on, prompted both by the need to lose herself even more thoroughly and the less-than-warm Swiss themselves. A big city could conceal her well, but it would also provide plenty of opportunities for her to be grabbed without anyone noticing it. So where would she have gone?
Some keenly refined sense twinged, and Dylan turned on his heel, coming out of his reverie abruptly. Something wasn’t right. He felt the skin-crawling sensation of being watched, felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end. Looking around, at first Dylan saw nothing to alarm—people milling about the station, greeting friends who had come to meet them, rushing out to catch the next train l
eaving the station. But he became aware of a group of men who were standing a distance away, oddly still in the rush. Brock. Dylan felt his heart speed up. He had a few options; they wouldn’t want to take him down in public. They wouldn’t want to create a spectacle, reveal the falseness of their pretend-uniforms. They’d want to get the drop on him.
There would be taxis outside, along with the bus; Dylan could get into a vehicle, get away from them—maybe lose them, if the driver was good enough. Or he could jump onto another train, take the fine when they came to check tickets and get ejected somewhere. The options flitted through his mind as he moved through the station, doing his best to appear not to hurry; he had no more interest in drawing attention to himself—yet—than the hired hands looking for their opening to drop him. If they started to make their move, that would be the time to make a scene. The Swiss might be standoffish, but they were not about to let a bunch of people tarnish the reputation of their police with impunity.
Dylan started towards the entrance to the station, glancing around him in quick, darting gazes, keeping track of where Brock’s henchmen were, how they were moving to follow him as unobtrusively as possible. As he reached the doors, his heart beating faster, he heard one of them call out for him to stop; they had evidently come to the conclusion about what his plan might be to evade them and decided that a little scene was not as bad as losing their quarry.
He broke into a run, and felt his phone buzzing in his pocket. Fuck. Of all the times. Dylan slipped his hand into his pocket, darting out through the doors. He heard another shout behind them; one of the false officers was telling him to stop, that he was being detained—that he could face serious injury if he resisted arrest. Dylan plowed into a woman rushing towards the station and sidestepped, mumbling an apology in panicked, stilted French. Passersby, passengers waiting for their train, watched with morbid interest as Dylan made for the taxi stand, darting between and around people. More shouts from Brock’s henchmen behind him, the sound of one of them colliding with a very indignant Swiss man.
Dylan heard the air splitting crack an instant before he felt the impact of something hitting his back—he had no idea what. He staggered, almost but not quite stopping, as he continued towards the salvation of a cab; whatever it was, he was certain it had come from one of the henchmen, and as the shocking jolt of it settled into a sharp, prodding ache, he knew that if he let himself stop he didn’t want to know whatever other jollies they might have to apprehend him with. It would be in Brock’s interest to have him killed if he suspected that Dylan knew anything about Rachel’s whereabouts. Dylan sucked in a burning breath, feeling the sharp crackling pain settle into a throbbing ache in the back of his ribs. “I’m not bleeding, I can pay you, let me in and get me out of here—those aren’t real cops,” he told the driver. The man looked out at the oncoming men in uniforms and glanced at Dylan, taking in the import of his less-than-ideal French. The doors unlocked.
Dylan threw himself into the back seat and pressed his lips together firmly to muffle the grunt of pain that rose up in him as he was thrown back against the bench when the driver pulled away from the curb in a fast, lurching turn. He took a deep breath and unlocked the screen on his phone—somehow miraculously intact. I found her, it said. Come to this address. I suspect Brock is on your heels. Dylan thought wryly that he more than suspected it and took another deep breath. “My man,” he said, looking up to catch sight of the man through the mirror in the front of the car. “You are about to make the fare of the month.”
****
Rachel could feel the headache gathering at her temples as the slight buzz she had worked up began to fade. She looked at James Whitley closely, trying to decide if it was even worth the effort of thinking anymore. “I understand why you feel manipulated,” James said, returning her regard without a trace of concern. “But I need you to understand where I’m coming from too, Rachel.”
“What I understand is that you could have easily given me some kind of note before I started getting stalked by people,” Rachel said. “I mean, I really appreciate being a millionaire and all, but a simple, ‘Hey, Rach, so there’s this guy who’s going to come after you—I’m sending help, but you might want to vacate your apartment and uproot your entire life right about now’ would have been nice.”
“I’ve been trying to evade him too,” James pointed out. “In case you haven’t noticed, Rachel, you and I have the distinction of swapping places as first on Jeffrey’s list to be eliminated depending on what day it is.”
“Okay,” Rachel said, standing unsteadily. She walked across the kitchen and opened one of the cabinets to retrieve a bottle of water. “Would you like one?” She asked, reaching for another bottle before James replied.
“Thank you.” Rachel returned to the table, handing James his bottle and opening her own before she sat down once more, heavily.
“I’m going to need you to explain exactly what the hell is going on to me,” she said, taking a long sip from the bottle. “Because honestly at this point the whole mess is as clear as mud to me.”
“Jeffrey has been trying to get control of the company for years,” James said, cracking the seal on his own bottle. “Before I was put in charge, his father ran Vantech Incorporated, and Jeffrey thought it was his just desserts to inherit the position.”
“I can see that,” Rachel said, taking another long pull from her bottle. Her impending hangover was not dissipating fast enough. “Where exactly do I come into this?”
“That is a bit complicated,” James told her, a faint smile curving his lips. He drank from his bottle of water and seemed to think for a long moment, spinning the cap on the tabletop. “When I came into my position as CEO of Vantech, Jeff became involved with another company; at first, we were all relieved—it seemed like he had decided to take his ‘loss’ gracefully.”
“Who do you mean by ‘we’? The shareholders?” The ghost of a smile crossed James’ face once more.
“The family; Jeffrey is my step-brother.” Rachel’s eyes widened. You bet your sweet ass it’s complicated, she thought. “In any case, the company he was involved with is the one that he’s trying to get Vantech to merge with now; if he succeeds, then he’ll have as close to a monopoly in our industry as the government will allow. And he would use the merger as a way to boot me and take over his father’s company for good.” Rachel absorbed that for a moment. She could see why James would want to avoid the merger; it would remove him from power.
“So you send me the money meant for the merger, I get that. But why does he have to come after me? If he’s in charge of the company now with you ousted…”
“He will have to take legal action to make it permanent,” James said. “There is a will involved—complicated estate issues and lawyers’ problems, ultimately. He’s only in power as long as I’m alive and able to defend myself. And from what you told me before of his explanation to you, he’s telling the truth about one of his motives: while you’re in possession of the money, his position is bad indeed.”
“How would killing me fix that?”
“If he kills you, there won’t be anyone in a position to dispute his claim that the money was transferred in error—and he could get it back with a minimum of fuss from the bank. The people running Vantech other than myself have no real interest in me as a person; they’re interested in results. If Jeff gets results, they have no reason to back me in the courts.” Rachel drained her bottle, shaking her head.
“Things just get better and better, don’t they?” she sighed. “So, what do I do?”
“You stay out of his clutches, and give me time to get everything the way it should be.”
“How exactly does that benefit me? Brock offered me five million to give back the money you gave me.” James laughed.
“He would have had you killed the moment the transfer was complete,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m afraid I know my step-brother very well.”
“How do I know I can even trust you?”
“I don’t seem to have given you many reasons, have I?” James chuckled. “How about this: I have a contract at the hotel I’m staying at in this area. It is absolutely legally binding and states that in return for assisting me, you will receive an additional five million dollars.”
Before Rachel could respond to the offer, there was a knock at the door. She jumped, nearly tumbling out of her chair. “Shit, shit, he found me,” she said. James shook his head.
“Not just yet, I think. That will be Dylan.”
“Dylan?” Rachel stared at the man across from her at the table in disbelief.
“I’m going to have to cut his pay, I think; I managed to find you before he did.” James shook his head and stood, walking to the door.
“Do I get to have any control or say over anything that happens in my life anymore?” Rachel asked, directing the question to the ceiling.
“Welcome to the life of wealth and prestige,” James said wryly from behind her. Rachel heard the door open.