Mercedes stared at him for a long moment, her dark eyes huge in her drawn face. “Come to kill me?”
He motioned with his weapon. “Get up. You’re getting out of here.”
She didn’t move. Only nodded. “You’ve come to kill me.”
Out of patience, he stalked forward. “I’m not killing anybody. Yet. Put on your goddamn shoes and get the fuck outta here before Seth wakes up.”
“If I leave this room, it’s only a matter of time until I’m dead.”
“I’m counting on it.”
“Then why would I leave? Your friends are too good. They won’t kill me. But out there…” She motioned vaguely toward the door with one hand. “Defion is looking for me. They think I’m a traitor and don’t have the same moral hang-ups about murder.”
“That’s your problem. You chose the wrong team.”
“So did you. Once upon a time.”
And I’ve been paying for it ever since. He shrugged out of his jacket and threw it at her. She’d make shitty bait if she died of hypothermia before Defion found her. “You’ll leave because if you don’t, I’ll kill you. And I’ll make it hurt. You know I don’t have the same moral hang-ups as my teammates.”
Her gaze traveled past his shoulder to where Seth lay on the floor. “No. You don’t. Harrison made sure of that.”
Ian ground his teeth together. Harrison Stead, the leader of Defion and one-time father figure to Ian. Harrison was the reason he was willing to throw away the good thing he had with HORNET by releasing Mercedes. Harrison no doubt took her betrayal personally, and would make it his mission to find her and kill her…leading Ian right to him.
Mercedes returned her gaze to him. “I take it you didn’t find Sebastian?”
“No, we did. Fucker just had the courtesy to already be dead by the time we got to him.”
She flinched like he’d struck her and shut her eyes tightly. Despite that, her tears leaked out.
There was that tug again, somewhere in his chest. Bait, he reminded himself. That was all this woman meant to him. She was the chum in the water—her only purpose was to draw his own personal Jaws toward his spear.
Mercedes drew a shaky breath and shoved to her feet. “If they found him, it doesn’t matter where I am. They’ll find me, too. I’m already dead. I just didn’t know it yet.”
Ian watched her go and smiled grimly to himself. She’d taken his jacket. His favorite, but he’d been willing to make that sacrifice. There was a tracker sewn into the lining. As long as she kept it, he’d know exactly where she was.
…
Sebastian was dead.
God.
She hadn’t wanted to think it a possibility, though that tune had been playing on repeat in Mercedes’s head ever since he’d left her in Nigeria.
Sebastian was dead. Sebastian was dead. Sebastian was dead.
Why else would he have left her like that?
She’d wanted to believe he was still alive. Wanted to believe there was a chance. The only reason she’d given HORNET his location was the faint hope that they’d find him and lock him away, too. Keep him safe for her.
Sebastian was dead.
It wasn’t a creeping suspicion anymore, but a fact. He was gone and it hurt so much she struggled to breathe in the icy night air. Ian’s coat was like an iron cape around her shoulders as she trudged through the snow toward the woods, but she didn’t dare get rid of it. She wouldn’t last long in this cold without it. Her boots—the ugly brown things basic girls wore to Starbucks for their pumpkin spice lattes—were already soaked through. Useless pieces of footwear. What the hell was their purpose if not to keep your feet warm and dry?
She needed clothes more suitable for this weather. She could access one of her hidden bank accounts if she found a town, but she had no idea where she was—other than somewhere cold as fuck, likely in the northern hemisphere.
Maybe she should just lie down in a snowbank. That way, she’d deny Ian the satisfaction of using her as bait—oh, she knew exactly what he’d planned for her—and Harrison Stead the pleasure of killing her. She should just give them both a big middle finger and freeze to death.
But, no.
Those thoughts reeked of defeat, and she’d never been the kind of woman to give up without a fight. Harrison had taken everything from her. Her brother. Her lover. Why lie down and give him her life, too?
Shivering, she trudged forward another step. And another. Rage became a fire in her, stoking her engine, keeping her moving. Ian thought letting her go would lead him to Harrison? Well, she would, but he was going to be mighty disappointed. She’d get to Harrison first, and Ian would never have his revenge.
The crunch of a foot through the icy snow halted her in her tracks. For a split second, her body coiled in preparation to bolt into the line of trees up ahead. She quickly reconsidered that idea. If she had a gun pointed at her right now, the snow was too deep to allow for a quick exit, and she’d probably wind up with a new lead accessory to go with her fugly boots.
Forcing herself to relax, she turned to face her follower.
No gun.
It was the first thing she registered. The second?
Marcus Deangelo.
And he was in no shape to fight with her. He stood there swaying on his feet, blinking like he didn’t believe what his peepers told him. Judging by what little was left in the bottle he carried, he could very well be hallucinating.
Her lip curled. She hated him for what he’d done to her. For making her so weak that she’d betrayed the only man she’d ever loved. It didn’t matter that Sebastian was already dead—her betrayal was a betrayal all the same.
She could take the bastard out now. Easy. Like Ian, she didn’t need a weapon to kill. Harrison had made sure of that.
She took a step toward him but stopped short when he collapsed to his knees. The bottle rolled out of his hand and spilled into the snow. He looked…broken. There was nothing she could do to hurt him more than he was already hurting.
“Go inside,” she called. “You’ll freeze out here.”
“Deserve it.” Marcus stared up at her, his face reddened by the cold, his eyes reddened by the booze. “Do you know…more? Please. I don’t care if you leave. I don’t…care about anything but getting justice for Danny. And Leah. She deserves peace.”
With those slurred words, some of that hate she had for him vanished, swept away by the wind with the little flakes of snow swirling around them. He wanted revenge, same as her. Same as Ian. In his shoes, she would’ve done exactly the same thing to get answers. And worse. Because again, like Ian, she didn’t have many moral hang-ups when it came to murder. In comparison, a little waterboarding was a weekend holiday.
God, was she going soft?
Maybe.
This newfound compassion would probably get her killed, but she didn’t entirely hate it. She’d lived so long pushing down her emotions, doing her best to view other people as objects to be used and discarded. She was exhausted by it.
“I don’t know anything more,” she told him as gently as she could manage. “Sebastian never told me who contracted the hit.”
He nodded, then glanced around like he wasn’t entirely sure where he was. “I’m sorry,” he slurred. “Hate myself for what I did to you.”
“Others have done worse.”
“Sorry for that, too.”
“Jesus, you’re pathetic. My sob story is not your fault.” She stalked forward and searched his pockets until she found his phone. She grabbed his hand, using his fingerprint to unlock the screen, then scrolled through his contacts until she found one of HORNET’s head honchos.
She didn’t wait for a response when the line picked up. “Come get your boy before he freezes to death.”
Without ending the call, she tucked the phone back into his pocket. She had to
get gone for now, but even as she ran toward the woods, she knew she hadn’t seen the last of the HORNET guys.
Like it or not, their paths to revenge were on a crash course now.
Chapter Four
Los Angeles, California
Eight Months Later
Leah checked her lipstick in the visor mirror of her Kia Sorento, which currently smelled like spoiled milk. One of the twins—probably Cooper, because he was her little troublemaker—had dumped his drink after she rushed them through a drive-thru for dinner last night, but she hadn’t had the chance to do more than blot up the mess with napkins. So now her car reeked. It was just the cherry on top of her week from hell.
But maybe today things would turn around. Maybe the worst was behind her.
She finally had a buyer interested in one of her houses that had been a nightmare to renovate. A complete money pit she couldn’t wait to be rid of. She’d finally finished moving out of the three thousand square foot house she’d shared with her husband in North Hollywood and into a town house in Glendale, much more manageable for a widow living on a significantly smaller budget. Danny’s life insurance and other death benefits made sure her family wouldn’t starve, despite her recent less-than-stellar paychecks. But she now had three kids to put through school on her own and the huge house that had once been her and Danny’s dream had become an albatross around her neck.
Cooper and Colton had been excited about switching schools, but Maya had been less than thrilled. If the last couple weeks were any indication of the girl’s upcoming teenage years, God help them both. Leah didn’t know if she’d survive it.
Oh, Danny. I miss you.
Tears flooded her eyes, spilled over. They happened less often now, so rarely that they always caught her off guard when her vision started to blur. The intense pain of losing him had dulled to an ache as the months dragged on, as her life settled into a new normal that didn’t include the man she’d loved since she was sixteen years old. She doubted she’d ever be completely rid of the ache, and in truth didn’t know if she wanted to be, but she could function with it. Some days, she even forgot about it until a stray thought sharpened the edge and it cut through her again.
Shit. She was ruining her makeup.
She sniffled and grabbed her purse from the passenger seat. Using a makeup removing wipe, she cleaned her face. She didn’t have time to completely redo everything, so she settled on a bit of mascara and a swipe of lipstick. Then she changed her mind about the lipstick. It was too bright and made her look like a child playing in her mother’s makeup. She wiped it away and replaced it with a nude lip gloss.
She checked her reflection again. The makeup had done nothing to hide how exhausted she was. Her blond waves were falling out of the professional bun she’d tucked them into before dropping the kids at school. Her eyes felt gritty and her contacts slid out of place every time she blinked. Her emerald green blouse was wrinkled, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d washed these black pants, and the thought of trading her sneakers for the heels in her back seat made her wince.
Dammit. Nobody was going to buy a seven-million-dollar house when their real estate agent looked like she’d just rolled out of bed. Especially not Clarence Hayes—multi-millionaire real estate mogul, the founder and CEO of Aid First, one of the biggest humanitarian aid organizations in the world, and a public darling for the upcoming presidential election cycle. He hadn’t announced his intentions to run yet, but everyone knew it was just a matter of time. She’d been beyond thrilled when he called her to view this house and potentially buy it for his daughter. Now she just wanted to get the showing over as fast as possible so she could tackle the gazillion other things on her to-do list.
No. She couldn’t think like that, couldn’t seem distracted when Hayes arrived. She had to focus. She needed this sale. This house would put her kids through college with a bit left over for an emergency fund.
She had to pull up her big-girl panties and fix this.
She took down her hair, ran her fingers through the loose blond waves. She pulled off the blouse. Her satin tank top underneath clung to her figure a bit too much for her liking, but she had a non-wrinkling blazer in the trunk she could throw over it. As for the heels… Well, she’d just have to suck it up. She’d birthed three babies. She could wear heels for an hour.
In the rearview mirror, she watched a dark car inch by the open gate at the end of the drive. That had to be Hayes. Nobody who lived in the area would drive by that slowly. Any minute now, he’d realize his mistake and turn around.
She checked her reflection one more time. Not perfect, but she’d make it work. She tried out a smile. It felt forced. She relaxed her face, drew in several deep breaths, then tried again. That was more like it.
She would sell this house.
She would make sure her kids had the life she and Danny had hoped for them.
She was a warrior. A survivor. A mama bear. A queen.
She had this.
She put on her heels, got out of the car, and waited, but the dark car didn’t reappear. Minutes ticked by and nobody showed. She checked her phone for the time.
He was late.
Her hand started to shake. Oh no. Please don’t ghost me.
Nope. She shut down that line of thinking and stuffed her phone into the inside pocket of her blazer. Positive thoughts only. He was late, but it was no big deal. People, especially rich people, often operated on their own time schedules. So this wasn’t an emergency yet. It just meant she had time to go inside and do another quick sweep to make sure everything was perfect.
The house was already unlocked from her earlier walk-through. She opened one half of the big double doors and stepped inside. Her heels clicked across the tile of the foyer, echoing off the empty walls and the high ceiling. She would have preferred to hire stagers to fill the place with furniture before the showing, but the potential buyer had wanted to see it ASAP. She hadn’t had time to find anyone. She’d brought a vase of bright flowers for the kitchen island, and they provided a much-needed splash of life and color in the too-white, too-metallic kitchen. The whole house was too cold and sterile, if you asked her. But some people went for that look, and she wasn’t planning to live here. She was just trying to sell it.
Hopefully Hayes was into hospital chic.
Off the kitchen were a breakfast nook and the main living area. Two walls of windows folded back to open the space up to the backyard patio. She should open those windows, because the view would sell this house. Beyond the patio and infinity pool, which seemed to drop off the edge of a cliff, a blue stretch of the Pacific crashed against the rocky cliffside. In the distance to the north, you could just see Malibu Beach and the pier.
One of the panels wasn’t folding up right, kept snagging on something. She bent to fix it—
Glass exploded around her, rained down in little shards that bit into her skin.
What the…?
She straightened and glanced around, utterly confused as to how the panel broke—and something solidly human slammed into her side, knocking her into the pool.
She sucked in a lungful of water and hit the bottom of the deep end before an arm looped around her chest and dragged her to the surface. She coughed and gagged, her eyes stinging from the chorine and streaming so many tears that she couldn’t make out the man pulling her toward the shallow end.
He kept saying, “I’m sorry. Christ, I’m sorry,” over and over as he dragged her out of the pool. She was fairly certain she didn’t know him. At least, she didn’t recognize his voice. She didn’t know anyone with a British accent like his. Unless he’d changed his voice on the phone, he wasn’t Hayes. She knew that for sure.
She barely caught her breath before he hustled her away from the pool, down the steps to the lower patio, and then into the low brush covering the cliffside. She’d lost one of her shoes at the bott
om of the pool and then the other as he propelled her along. The rocks cut into her feet, the shrubs ripped through her pants and scraped up her calves. She ran blindly behind him until her brain finally clicked back online, cutting through the fear and panicked adrenaline with a sharp, This is crazy!
She yanked the British man to a halt. He whirled around, his dark eyes a bit wild. She held up her hands and backed away as he advanced.
He grabbed her wrist. “Stop it. We don’t have time.”
Yes, this was crazy. She was crazy to let this man drag her away from the house, her car, her phone. In the confusion of the moment, she’d defaulted to flight, as always. Danny had been her fighter. She’d always been the coward, the weak, fragile woman in need of saving.
With Danny gone, she couldn’t be that anymore.
She yanked out of his grip. “Who are you?”
“I’m the man who stopped you from winding up six feet under like your husband.”
Every cell in her body froze. For a split second, despite the heatwave, she thought she saw her breath cloud with her exhale. “W-what?”
“We don’t have time for this shite.”
To her complete horror, he scooped her up and threw her over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. She drew in a breath to scream, but his shoulder dug into her stomach and drove all the air from her lungs in a rush. She kicked at him, pounded on him with her fisted hands, but her fight didn’t seem to faze him in the slightest. He moved across the clifftop in long, graceful strides, easily avoiding obstacles despite the extra one hundred thirty pounds he carried. Every movement was calculated, no step wasted.
She stopped flailing.
He moved like her husband’s best friend, Marcus. He moved like the men Marcus worked with. Like a well-trained, highly skilled, deadly soldier.
She glanced behind them and saw two men standing at the edge of the patio, scanning the cliffside with guns in their hands. And they did not look like the police.
One of the men spotted them and lifted his gun. She didn’t hear the shot, but saw the bullet tear through a bush about ten feet behind them. The shooter started down the hill, skidding and knocking pebbles loose under his heavy boots as he gave chase. The other disappeared back into the house.
Honor Avenged (HORNET) Page 3
