“Hid the money?” Jillian stared at him blankly. “What money? What are you talking about?”
“He’s talking about the fifty thousand dollars he was holding for us that you ran off with, honeybee.” Jimmy Moreno’s voice was considerably less friendly now, despite the charming little nickname. “You have to understand that my associates and I can’t have that kind of thing going on, no matter how mad you are at your man for cheating.”
Jillian shook her head.
“I honestly have no idea what you’re talking about! I’ve been living up on the Kindred Mother Ship and I haven’t even been down to Earth at all in the past year. Not since I visited my Aunt for Christmas.”
“Baby, please don’t be like that,” Brad whispered hoarsely. “You and I both know you came down to see me last week, right when I was counting the take for the big game.”
“What big game?” Jillian demanded. “What ‘take?’ What are you talking about?”
“It looks to me like you two have an awful lot to discuss,” Moreno remarked, frowning. “I think I’m gonna leave you kids alone and see if Braddy here can get you to fess up, honeybee,” he said to Jillian.
Then he swaggered out of the small room, closing the door with a hollow bang behind him.
“Brad, what in the hell is going on?” Jillian demanded at once, glaring at her ex. “What have you gotten me into?”
“Look, just give me the money and I’ll pay you back later,” Brad said in a low voice. He had perked up now that Jimmy Moreno was out of the room and he was giving Jillian a sly look from his puffy eyes.
“What money?” Jillian demanded. “You think I just happen to have fifty thousand dollars lying around that I can give to you? Are you crazy?”
“Sure, you’ve got it—in that safety deposit box of yours at the bank!” he insisted. “Don’t be stingy, baby—just let me borrow it for a while and I promise I’ll pay it back. With interest, even.”
“My safety deposit box only has two things in it,” Jillian said. She counted them off on her fingers. “One, my mother’s diary that she kept when she was carrying me and when I was little and two, my grandmother’s diamond engagement ring. It’s an antique but the diamond is pretty small—no more than a chip. I doubt you’d get more than a couple hundred for it, even at the most generous pawn shop. I only locked it up because it has sentimental value and there had been some break-ins in my neighborhood.”
“What? You’re lying! You have to be lying!” Brad’s eyes widened—as much as they could with all the swelling, anyway. “You’ve gotta get me that money, Jilly-baby, or we’re both dead! You know what Jimmy Moreno’s nickname is? Jimmy the knife!”
“What do you mean ‘we?’ I had nothing to do with this!” Jillian put her hands on her hips and glared down at her ex. “Let me guess, you were working for Jimmy Moreno—probably in some illegal capacity—and you started skimming off the top. Am I right?”
“Something like that,” Brad muttered sullenly. “It wasn’t that much, though! These guys make so much money, I didn’t even think they’d notice.”
“Brad, you idiot, guys like Jimmy always notice,” Jillian hissed at him. “What is he—an enforcer from the Mob?”
“Something like that,” Brad muttered again, looking down. “Look, if you’ll just stop being a bitch and give me the money—”
“I don’t have any money to give you!” Jillian exclaimed. “You cleaned me out, Brad! Do you understand that? I had to move up to the Kindred Mother Ship and start all over again because I lost my house and my job and you ruined my credit! You—”
“Okay now, kids, have we got things all settled?” Jimmy Moreno walked back into the room, grinning at both of them. “You going to tell us where you hid them money you took, honeybee?” he asked Jillian.
“I didn’t take any—”
“She won’t tell,” Brad cut her off quickly. “She’s still mad at me because she caught me with another woman.” He looked soulfully up at Jillian. “Baby, please believe me—she didn’t mean a thing to me! Not like you do! I love you with all my heart and soul—please just tell Jimmy where you hid that money you stole from me!”
Jillian stared at her ex in disbelief. She could see well enough exactly where this was going. Brad didn’t care if she had the money or not—he just wanted to shift the blame to her shoulders. Basically, he was throwing her under the bus to the tune of fifty thousand dollars, which he had probably blown at a craps table in a single night.
And unfortunately, it seemed to be working.
Jimmy Moreno was giving her a hard stare.
“Now, honeybee,” he said to Jillian. “Let me explain something to you—you didn’t steal that money from Brad, here—you stole it from me and my associates. And I’m afraid you’re not going to like what we do with thieves, so why don’t you tell me where it is right now?”
Looking at the Mob enforcer’s black, predatory eyes, Jillian felt like someone had dumped a bucket of ice cubes into her belly. Oh God, this was bad news—everything to do with Brad was always bad news! Why hadn’t she just refused to come down here in the first place? She should have left her ex to rot—it was clearly what he deserved.
But she was down here in this situation now, and somehow she had to make it out alive.
“Listen to me, Mr. Moreno,” she said, holding her hands up in a “don’t shoot” gesture. “Brad is lying about all of this.”
“How?” the Mob enforcer demanded, glaring at her. “You said yourself that you caught him in bed with another woman!”
“Yes, but that was over two years ago,” Jillian emphasized. “I left him after that and I haven’t seen him since. He’s the reason I lost my house and my car and my job,” she added, glaring at Brad.
Moreno didn’t look convinced.
“You sure your house and your car didn’t just go up your nose, honeybee? That’s what I’ve been hearing from Braddy, here. Says you got a little too interested in a certain white powder and that’s how you lost your job. The head honchos at The Palms didn’t want a coked-up Head Chef running the place.”
“What? Why would you say a thing like that about me?” Jillian demanded, rounding on her ex. “Have you been spreading that lie all over Vegas? Are you trying to ruin my reputation along with my credit and everything else?”
Brad only gave her puppy-dog eyes.
“Jilly-baby, don’t deny it. Addiction is a disease—everybody knows it. If you snorted that fifty thousand, just admit it. Mr. Moreno just wants to know where his money went.”
“It went into your pocket and then out onto a craps table!” Jillian exclaimed. “Or else into some cheap showgirl’s purse or some stripper’s g-string! I have no idea why you wanted to involve me in this mess of yours, but I have nothing to do with it!”
She started to storm past Moreno, only to have one arm caught in a vise-like grip.
“I don’t think so, honeybee,” the Mob enforcer growled in her ear. “See, my associates and I aren’t about to let anyone leave until we get our money.”
“But I don’t have your money! Brad is lying to you—lying like he always does!” Jillian exclaimed.
But it was clear her pleas were falling on deaf ears. Jimmy Moreno yanked her around so that her back was to his broad, beefy chest and looped one arm around her neck.
“Hey! Let go of me!” Jillian started to struggle…and then she felt something cold and sharp pressing against the small of her back.
“Shut up, honeybee,” Moreno growled in her ear, pressing the knife blade threateningly against her spine. “Nobody’s going anywhere until you tell me where the money is!”
46
It was kind of nerve-wracking, watching the ship appear to pilot itself down through Earth’s atmosphere. But Kalis knew that it was actually the Goddess at the steering yoke. In fact, several times when he looked at it, he could almost see a pair of fine-boned, feminine hands resting on the yoke. So he knew he was literally in good hands. Still, when t
he ship finally landed silently on a darkened street, he felt relieved that the strange trip was over.
The Goddess spoke to him just once more.
“Go Warrior—you have no time to lose.”
Then she was gone.
Kalis was already out the door of the shuttle with her words echoing in his ears. No time to lose…no time to lose. He had to get to Jillian before it was too late!
That was when he heard her screaming.
47
“You know, my associates call me ‘Jimmy the knife’—you wanna know why?” Moreno asked in her ear, his rank breath blowing against the side of Jillian’s face. “It’s because I’m real good with a blade.”
He pushed her around suddenly, so that he had her right arm hooked firmly under his left with his hand locked around her wrist.
“What…what are you doing? I swear I don’t have your money—I don’t know anything about it!” Jillian gasped. She pulled and tugged, trying to get away from the big bastard, but it was no use—he had a grip like a vise.
Like being grabbed by a Trollox, Jillian thought, feeling sick. But Jimmy’s next words brought Ripper and his shop of “Fine Meats” even more clearly to her mind.
“You know, I bet as a chef, you use your fingers quite a lot—don’t you, honeybee?” he said to Jillian in a conversational tone of voice. “I mean, I bet it would be hard to cut up veggies for a yummy stew if somebody chopped off one of your fingers, right?”
“What…what are you talking about?” Jillian felt sick to her stomach with fear as he suddenly brought the knife he’d been pressing against her back out into the light. It was long—practically a machete that tapered to a fine, slender point. The bare bulb’s radiance glimmered wickedly along its edge and Jillian could see, just from looking at it, that it was razor sharp.
Her chef’s eyes analyzed it automatically. Carbonized steel—a really good blade for chopping meat. Ugh—why had she thought that? Especially at a time like this?
“I’m talking about how I’m gonna cut off one of your pretty little fingers every time you lie to me from now on,” Moreno snarled.
“Oh my God!” Instinctively, Jillian curled her fingers into a fist. But Jimmy only shook his head.
“Oh, so you’d rather I cut off your whole hand, honeybee? I can do that, too—I sharpen my blade for an hour before every job.”
“What? No!” Jillian protested. “Please…please don’t do this! I told you, I had nothing to do with any missing money! Brad is lying! He—”
Her words ended in a shriek of pain and horrified surprise as the silver blade moved with wicked precision, slicing through her pinky and ring fingers at the top knuckle joint, where they joined onto her hand.
Or they had joined to her hand, Jillian thought sickly. Now they were hanging by two flaps of skin, dangling beneath her still-closed fist from a few shreds of bloody flesh. Blood spouted from the stumps of her mutilated fingers, splattering onto the dirty concrete floor. Pain lanced through her, sharp and immediate.
“Oh my God,” she gasped, staring in disbelief at her maimed left hand. “Oh my God—oh my God!”
“Now, you got only yourself to blame for that, honeybee,” Jimmy Moreno remarked conversationally. “I told you not to lie to me—I just hate it when a pretty lady doesn’t tell the truth.”
“I…I wasn’t…I didn’t…” Jillian couldn’t get the words out. The pain in her hand was awful but even worse was the knowledge that he might not be done yet.
“Now, you can still hold a knife to chop or a spoon to stir—you still got two fingers and your thumb,” Jimmy went on in that same, conversational tone—the same tone he might use if they were discussing the weather. “But the way you answer my next question determines whether you get to keep those fingers and thumb or not. Now I’ll ask you again…where’s my fucking money you little bitch?”
Jillian’s mind felt distant and far away—as though her head was a balloon, floating ten feet above her body. Shock—I’m in shock, she thought numbly. She tried to think what she could say to keep Moreno from cutting her again, but her brain felt like someone had wrapped it in thick cotton and no coherent answers were coming to her.
“Money? I don’t—” she began and then the knife flew again in a silver-crimson blur and her middle finger was lying on the floor at her feet.
This time, Jillian didn’t scream. She just stared in numb disbelief at what had happened to her.
If watching her get maimed bothered Brad at all, her ex certainly didn’t show it.
“Jilly-baby, just tell him where it is!” he shouted, still apparently trying to pin the blame on her. “Tell him about the safety deposit box—just tell him!”
“Safety deposit box, huh?” Moreno grunted in her ear. “Whatcha got in there, huh, honeybee? Could that be where you put my fifty thou or the coke you bought with it?”
“The only thing in there is my mother’s diary and my grandmother’s ring.” The words came out automatically, sliding through numb lips. A part of her brain was screaming at her, Lie! Lie! Tell him you have the money somewhere else—anything to make him stop cutting you! But somehow only the truth came out when she opened her mouth—a fact that was likely to get her killed.
“Fuck this with the fingers,” she heard Moreno snarl. The knife blade was suddenly whisked out of sight and he stepped behind her. “Maybe this will make you tell me the truth, honeybee,” he said.
And then something skewered Jillian, slicing directly through the right side of her body with a stabbing pain so bright and sharp she actually saw stars in front of her eyes as her vision wavered in and out of focus.
Looking down, she saw the bloody tip of the carbonized steel blade protruding from the right side of her abdomen. The bastard had stabbed right through her!
She shrieked then, as the numbing shock broke and everything went from cloudy and hazy to ultra-bright and sharp.
“The money, bitch!” Moreno snarled in her ear. He yanked out the knife in a move that hurt almost as much as when he had stabbed it in and a gush of blood began pouring down Jillian’s front, staining her chef’s whites, which she hadn’t bothered to change out of before coming down to Earth.
“Please!” she gasped, trying to staunch the flow with her right hand, since her left was wounded and useless. “Please, don’t! Don’t hurt me again!”
“Then tell me,” Moreno insisted. “WHERE’S MY FUCKING MON—”
But strangely, he didn’t finish the question. It ended, instead, with a loud cracking sound and then he let go of Jillian abruptly.
“Oh Gods, sweetheart—you’re hurt!” a deep familiar voice said. “Hurt really bad, I’m afraid!”
48
“K-kalis?” Jillian turned dizzily, so unsteady on her feet that she nearly tripped over the slumped body of Moreno, which was sprawled on the floor at her feet. The mobster’s thick neck was bent at a funny angle and though he was lying face down with the bloody knife still clutched in his hand, his head was turned all the way around so that his face was looking up at her.
Moreno had an expression of surprise on his beefy face, Jillian thought. As though he had spent his life hurting and killing other people, but had never expected to be hurt or killed himself.
“What…what happened?” she mumbled, looking down at the still-twitching body. Nothing seemed to be making sense in her brain. “What…how…?”
“Broke his fucking neck,” Kalis said shortly. “Gods, sweetheart—I’m so sorry I didn’t get here sooner! What did he do to you?”
“Cut me,” Jillian said, gesturing with her mangled hand, which sprayed blood over the dirty concrete floor. “A lot.”
“Gods, sweetheart! Let me see!”
As Kalis started to examine Jillian’s maimed hand, Brad finally spoke up again.
“Whoever you are, let me go—okay? Moreno lured me and Jilly both down here and hurt both of us. None of it is my fault, okay?”
Despite her shock and pain, Jillian glare
d at her ex.
“You’re a…a liar,” she whispered, having a hard time getting the words out. “You told him…told him I took…took his money. I—”
“Sweetheart, don’t try to talk.” Kalis ignored Brad completely—his total focus was on Jillian. He had gently lifted her chef’s whites and was staring grimly at the stab wound she’d taken on the right side. “Right through the liver,” Jillian heard him mutter. “Gods, this isn’t good…”
“Sorry,” she mumbled. She felt weak and unsteady on her feet. Her body kept bleeding and wouldn’t stop and everything was starting to get gray. Was she that badly hurt? Was she going to faint?
Not if Kalis can heal me! Like he did with the venom poisoning.
The thought flashed across her mind and she looked up at the big Kindred hopefully.
“Kalis,” she whispered. “Can…can you heal me?”
“Not in this form.” He shook his head and nodded down at her side. “I can’t draw enough of my Ursus’s regenerative power to heal such a serious wound.”
“What?” Jillian looked at him uncertainly. “I don’t…don’t understand,” she whispered.
Kalis took her by the shoulders and looked into her eyes.
“I’m saying I have to let my Ursus out—he’s the only one who can heal you now.”
“But…but, no!” Even in her woozy state, the idea sent a spike of fear through her. “All this blood—he’ll want to bite me! Eat me!”
“He’ll want to heal you, sweetheart,” Kalis said firmly.
“Just…just take me to the hospital!” Jillian begged, but he shook his head.
“This is a gut wound, Jillian, and you’re bleeding too much—I think the knife might have knicked a major artery. I can’t get you to a human hospital or the Mother Ship before you bleed out. I have to heal you now—my Ursus has to heal you.”
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