by Anne Stuart
“Nevertheless, she left the knowledge with you. In the book, the kimono. Somewhere.”
Summer swiveled around on the bench, silhouetted against the open window and the moonlight. He couldn’t see her face, and he didn’t know whether that was good or bad. “And what did they tell you?”
“We’ll figure it out,” he replied enigmatically.
She turned away from him, and he fought back his sudden guilt. If she ran, if the Shirosama caught her, then the cult leader know that he wasn’t looking for just the urn and the girl. There were other pieces to the puzzle.
“And then what will you do?”
“Stop him before he can set off a wave of attacks that would make 9/11 look like a minor incident.”
“Why doesn’t someone just kill him, if he’s that dangerous?”
“The only thing worse than a cult leader demigod is a martyr. He has hundreds of thousands of followers around the world and the resources and equipment to create deadly havoc. His murder would signal the start of it all. The death toll might be lower—tens of thousands instead of hundreds of thousands—but it’s still unacceptable.”
She was silent for a long moment. “How high is the death toll now? There’s Micah and the followers you…killed. And then maybe there’s me and Jilly. How many will die before he’s stopped?”
“I don’t know,” Taka said simply, not denying it.
She turned back to the window. “Tell me when you’re ready to go,” she said, dismissing him.
Run, damn it! Get the hell away from me while you can. But she didn’t move, and he could see defeat in the line of her body, her narrow shoulders. Didn’t she realize she wasn’t going anywhere? He didn’t need her anymore. He had what he wanted. The safest, smartest thing to do would be to permanently silence her, and he was a safe, smart man.
He left her there, heading back into the bedroom to retrieve the antique kimono. He stripped a sheet off the bed to wrap it in, doing his best to clear his mind of anything but what he had to do. He could picture Summer in that huge old bed, sleeping, her hair loose around her. He still didn’t know what his damn problem was—him or her. She was nothing, nobody, merely a part of a difficult job, and yet she got under his skin. Maybe he could blame it on the time he’d spent recovering from his last botched assignment.
Or maybe it was simply that the thought of killing an innocent woman was repugnant. Killing young women wasn’t part of his normal duties. It was perfectly natural that he’d feel conflicted.
She was still sitting in the living room, staring out into the night, when he returned from the car. The rain was even heavier, blocking out the moon, and there were deep shadows in the house. Some things were easier to do in darkness. He came up behind her, looking past her, out into the damp forest. It was a chilly night, but she had the window open, and he could hear the sound of night birds, the rustle of the wind through the trees, the soft patter of the rain.
“I love this house,” she said, in a quiet voice.
Her words surprised him. She hadn’t volunteered much in the way of conversation since they’d left the bedroom in that suburban house.
“It’s very beautiful. Very peaceful.” He wasn’t wearing gloves, but it didn’t matter. His fingerprints weren’t on file anywhere, and he wasn’t going to leave the house standing. He’d already activated the device that he’d taken from the car, so there’d be no trace of anything once it went off. They might not even be able to identify her body.
He’d be on his way to Japan by then—probably even before the smoke cleared. And he wouldn’t look back.
Summer wouldn’t feel a thing. He had no more excuses, no more reason to delay, and she hadn’t moved, leaving him no choice. If he left her alive the brethren could get to her, find out what she knew. Once they did, the Committee would have no way of stopping them. The Shirosama had stockpiles of chemical weapons—enough sarin gas to spread through the subway systems of every major metropolitan transit systems. Biological weapons to take care of the countryside, including trucks that could spread it into the air. They’d done test runs in Nigeria, the Chiba Prefecture of Japan, one of the small Hawaiian islands and the American Southwest. No one had caught on, because of the variety—plague spores in Arizona, hemorrhagic virus in Nigeria, a virulent, fast-moving strain of TB in Hawaii. Only the best scientists worked for the Shirosama, and their results were deadly masterpieces. One small woman was not that great a price to pay to keep the world safe from that kind of disaster.
He came up behind her, putting his hands on her shoulders. He would knock her out before he broke her neck—she would never know what happened—and she’d be in her peaceful, beautiful house on the island. It wasn’t her fault that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. That she’d kept Hana Hayashi’s secrets too well.
Summer jumped slightly when his hands touched her, and then she stilled. She was wearing that same baggy black sweatshirt, and he wanted to touch her skin. He wanted to see her in colors, something other than funereal black. But that was the last thing he needed. He could feel the tension shimmering through her, her blood racing.
And then she leaned back. She let her back rest against his legs as he stood behind her, her head against his stomach, releasing all the tension in her body as she sank back against his. She turned her head to look up at him, and in the reemerging moonlight he could see her eyes clearly. Fearless, accepting.
The feel of her body against his shook him to the core. He stared down at her, his hands on her neck, and he did the unthinkable. He leaned down and put his mouth against hers.
He felt her shock vibrate through her, but she didn’t pull away. She closed her eyes and let him kiss her, passive, accepting, and he realized in the short, endless time he’d known her he’d never really kissed her. Never more than the brief touch of his mouth against hers.
And suddenly that wasn’t enough. It would never be enough. He stopped thinking, pulling her up from the bench and turning her in his arms. He caught her face in his hands and kissed her, full and open-mouthed, and her response was instant, powerful, the compliant woman vanishing. She put her arms around his neck, pulled him down to her and made a low sound of need as his tongue touched hers.
He picked her up, wrapping her arms and legs around him as he carried her across the darkened living room to her bedroom, setting her down on the stripped bed and covering her body with his.
Then he realized what he was doing. He started to pull away, but she clung tightly to him. “No,” she whispered. “Stay with me.” She tried to reach down between their bodies to touch him, but he grabbed her hand, pulling it away as he rolled off her, collapsing beside her on the bed. He couldn’t do this. He didn’t even understand why he’d started it, except that he’d been fighting his attraction since he’d left her alone in the bedroom that morning.
She tried to run then, too late, scrambling off the bed. But he caught her before she hit the floor, hauling her back under him, pinning her there. She closed her eyes, averting her face. “Stop it,” she said.
“Stop what?”
Her eyes flew open, filled with rage and betrayal. “Stop pretending. You made your point this morning—you don’t have anything more to prove. You don’t want me, you can make me do anything you wish, and I’ll be pathetically grateful for your attention, while you won’t feel a thing…”
“You idiot,” he said, his voice savage. “How blind are you?”
“Leave me alone.”
He pulled her legs apart, pushing between them, fully clothed, the rigid length of his cock pressed up against her. Her eyes widened in shock.
“You can feel that, can’t you? It’s been like that all day. It’s been like that almost since I first touched you. You make me crazy with wanting you, but right now doing what I want could get us both killed.”
“No,” she said. “You’re lying. This morning you didn’t—”
He rocked against her, and she shivered in unwilling response. “
This morning I was so turned on that I came without touching myself. And five minutes later I was hard again. I need you. I need to be inside you, now, and it’s too dangerous.” He thrust against her, feeling the tremor of response wash over her, and he knew he couldn’t stop, not until he made her come again, over and over…
She kissed him then, full and deep, wrapping her legs around his hips to bring him closer still, and the heavy material between them was maddening. He’d reached down to unzip his pants when he heard the sound of someone moving through the bushes, and he froze.
16
She felt the change instantly. He lifted his mouth from hers, his soft, beautiful mouth, and barely breathed the words. “Someone’s out there. Stay very still.”
He rolled off her, landing on the floor silently, and her body was hot and aching. Then she heard the sound as well, someone moving through the overgrown shrubbery outside. Someone was coming, and whoever it was would be even more dangerous than Taka.
“Get down!” he said, yanking her off the bed and onto the floor, shielding her body with his as something came crashing through the multipaned window. She could smell smoke, acrid, burning, filling her lungs with fire. She heard him whisper in her ear, “Get out of here!” before he leaped up, away from her.
She tried to sit up, but she couldn’t stop coughing, and the smoke was too heavy to see more than a shadow play of violence. Taka moving among them, the battle a silent, deadly dance. She placed her hand on the bed, trying to pull herself to her feet, but her knees buckled beneath her and she went down again. With smoke billowing around her, she began to crawl slowly in the direction of the door.
There was a roaring in her ears, one she couldn’t identify, and then she felt hands grab her—rough hands. And though her eyes were streaming from the thick smoke, she looked up and recognized one of the brethren, even dressed in uncustomary black like some bizarre ninja. He was immensely strong, and hurting her, and there was nothing she could do but let him drag her, until suddenly his face went blank, wiped clean of any expression at all, and he released her, unmoving. He collapsed in front of her, and Taka kicked him out of the way, reaching for her.
She wanted to scream. She wanted to cry and howl and run, with death and fire all around her, but instead she simply let him take her hand, pull her from the smoke-filled room, out into the rainy night.
The car was parked where he’d left it, with two men lying in the dirt and mud beside it. They didn’t look as if they’d been touched, but they were clearly dead. Taka pointed the mobile phone at the car and the lights came on.
He kicked one man’s body out of the way and opened the passenger door, pushing her inside and closing it before he moved around to the driver’s side. Smoke was pouring out of her beloved cottage, but none of the intruders was following them. Taka started the car and began to pull away, and she felt the sickening thud as he drove over one of the bodies lying in the road. At the last minute he turned and pointed the cell phone at the house. A second later her cottage exploded in a ball of flames, the noise deafening. And they were speeding down the long, rutted driveway.
As they drove down the main road, they passed police and fire trucks, sirens blaring, lights flashing, paying no attention to the dark, anonymous sedan speeding in the opposite direction. At one point Summer turned back to look, and the flames were shooting high into the sky, taking her childhood with them.
“How many men did you kill today?” Her voice was a dull monotone.
“Three in the house. The two outside were killed by the security system on the car—it was set to electrocute anyone who touched it.”
“Isn’t that a little drastic for an antitheft device?”
He glanced at her, clearly surprised by her even tone of voice. He knew she was feeling nothing, absolutely nothing, a blessed numbness. One moment she was ready to climax from the simple rub of his clothed body against hers, and in the next there was fire and smoke and death…and numbness.
“Maybe,” he said, concentrating on the road.
“Did you get the urn and the other things, or were they lost when you blew up my house?”
“I have them.”
“That’s good,” she said. “I’d hate to go through all this for nothing. So why did you bother bringing me along? Why did you save me again? You could have just left me in the house and I would have been blown to hell along with the others. It would be a lot neater.”
He frowned. “I didn’t want to hurt you.”
She began to laugh then. For some reason she couldn’t control it—the absurdity of his reply was so wonderful that she had no choice. She could laugh or she could cry, and she never cried.
“Stop it!” he said sharply.
She couldn’t. Didn’t he understand the cosmic absurdity of it? That no matter what she did, death followed her like a hungry vulture, and any respite was a lie, just a short delay on this inevitable journey of pain and darkness. Really, all you could do was laugh at such ridiculous—
The pain was blinding, stealing her breath, stopping her heart, shocking her into silence. He took his hand away, placing it back on the wheel, and she stared at him, knowing that all color had leached out of her face.
“That’s better,” he said evenly. “Things are bad enough—I don’t need you losing it, as well.”
It took her a moment to breathe, to speak. “‘Losing it’?” she echoed. “I’ve lost everything. My job, my car, my best friend, my legacy from Hana—even the house that I loved. And I’m probably going to lose my sister and my life. I think a little hysteria is in order.”
“I can hurt you a lot more than I just did,” he said. “I don’t want to, but I will. I need to concentrate, and I can’t have you flipping out on me.”
“I want you to either kill me or let me go. And don’t even try to convince me you weren’t planning on killing me. I can be blind and stupid for only so long.”
“No,” he said.
“No, what?” she snapped.
“No, I won’t try to convince you of that. Those were my orders. And no, I won’t let you go. Or kill you.” There was an odd, almost resigned tone in his voice. Strange, when he showed so little emotion.
She felt cold inside. “Then what are you going to do with me?”
“Damned if I know,” he said. And reached forward and turned on the radio, drowning out any more questions.
Jilly slept. Dressed in her white pajamas, she floated above the narrow cot, into the starry sky over-head. The walls melted away, the floors and the furniture, and she was free, floating.
She knew she shouldn’t feel so peaceful. It was all thanks to the needle from the gorgeous neo-Nazi doctor. She’d tried to fight her, but the woman had been much too strong, much too determined. She’d said something to her in her thick German accent, but Jilly had already been floating, and she was only dimly aware of the reassuring stroking of the woman’s hand on hers.
If she was going to be trapped, she’d be happy enough not to wake up, not until she stood some chance of escape. The woman sat and watched her, making notes in a leather-clad notebook, and every now and then some of the undead would wander in, ask questions and wander out again. Jilly was beginning to emerge from her safe cloud. The doctor was busy with her notes. She hadn’t realized her patient was beginning to come out of her drugged state, and Jilly wasn’t about to give her that advantage. The only thing that could possibly help her was the element of surprise. If the woman knew she was waking up she’d just come at her with another needle.
It took all her concentration not to react when the door to her cell opened. She willed her muscles to relax, her eyelids to keep from fluttering. Particularly when she recognized the soft voice of his holiness, the Shirosama.
“She still sleeps?”
Jilly remained motionless, listening to what was happening. The good doctor had risen, setting her notebook down, and Jilly thought there was tension in the room. Though it was probably only her own.
&nbs
p; “She still sleeps,” the woman said in her accented English. “You need to trust me, your holiness. This particular girl is very hard to break, and I’m an expert at what I do. By the time I release her from her sedation she’ll be totally free of her past perceptions. She will be open and willing to embrace your guidance, and she will tell you everything you want to know. But the process takes time.”
“I’m not sure how much time we have,” the Shirosama said in the low, mellow voice that her mother likened to the voice of God and Jilly found creepy. “We haven’t been able to rescue her sister from the hands of the Yakuza, and countless members of the Fellowship have given their lives in the attempt. Blessings upon them.”
Unmoving, Jilly let his words sink in. Japanese gangsters had her sister, the revolting Shirosama had her, some B-movie Nazi femme fatale was drugging her into submission and even if Jilly was conscious she was being watched too closely to get the hell out of there.
“Blessings upon them,” the woman echoed. “I will speed the process as much as I can. One thing that would help would be total darkness, to increase her isolation.”
There was a long silence. “Would that not be difficult for you?”
“Not at all. I’m used to working in the dark. But it must be absolute. No lights from security cameras or coming from under the door. Give me twelve hours of complete darkness and she’ll be ready for your ministry.”
More silence. Jilly wanted to cry out, protest. She didn’t want to be trapped in the dark with this crazy woman, she’d rather take her chances with her mother’s guru. But she was still too drugged to say a word, trapped in a wall of silence.
“As you wish,” he said after a moment. “I have heard great praise for your methods. I put my trust, and this poor lost child, in your hands.”
“You do me honor.”
Jilly wanted to throw up. She couldn’t move, couldn’t open her eyes—it would serve the woman right if she choked to death on her own vomit. She’d try to do it quietly, just to spite the bitch.