Shane made a sound, loud and angry enough for one of the brothers to squeeze his shoulder.
“Apparently didn’t have the patience to keep up the facade of ‘loving boyfriend.’ She shook him, and Shane went to pick her up.” Roth gestured with his chin to Dex. “Dex says he never told Cecily about the Hudson Kings while she was with James, but at the moment, that’s irrelevant. Because James either figured she was still his best shot if he could convince her he was a changed man—or he’s figured out she’s deep with the Hudson Kings now and is more valuable than ever. Either way . . .”
Rothgar tapered off, clearly not wanting to vocalize the obvious: Cecily was in the hands of a Russian operative, a man who would not hesitate to kill her if he decided she was worthless. A man who would not hesitate to try to wring information out of a vulnerable, untrained woman if he thought it would help his own crumbling situation.
Cold dread threatened to swamp Shane’s ability to think. “What’s our last data point on Cecily?” Shane said, forcing himself to think of this as just another problem to solve, another mission to plan. If he let it get personal in his mind, he was not going to get through this in one piece.
“Still not answering her phone,” Dex said, his voice robotic, his eyes staring straight ahead.
“I saw her before work,” Ally said, coming forward. “She was going to class. I think she ends at two thirty. I don’t know if she had plans after. Haven’t seen her since morning coffee, and she didn’t call, although I didn’t necessarily expect her to. When James came to me, I don’t know if he’d already talked to her or not.”
The door opened; Missy bustled in with a bunch of printouts, which she held out to Rothgar along with a cell phone. “O’Neill,” she said, her eyes big. Rothgar hesitated. “Sixth Ward,” she said urgently. It was pretty unusual for Rothgar and O’Neill to coordinate on anything. Rothgar took the phone, and then Missy saw Ally behind him and froze.
The room went silent.
Missy looked at Allison, Allison looked at Missy, and then Ally broke the moment and stared down at her phone like Missy wasn’t even there. “It just keeps going to voice mail,” she said hoarsely.
Missy blinked and turned to the computer.
Shane speed-dialed Cecily on his own phone for what seemed like the thousandth time. No dice. That look on Dex’s face was a look he was pretty sure was breaking through on his own face.
“Don’t like it,” Shane murmured. “Don’t like it.”
Rothgar took the call at the back of the room. Shane watched his face. Jaysus. If he was talking seriously to the Sixth Ward, he was putting his big guns in the game. No small thing to ask O’Neill for a favor.
When Rothgar came back, he took a moment, staring down at the papers and files and photos scattered across the desk. “Good news is she’s not missing,” Rothgar said grimly. “Courtesy of O’Neill, we know he’s got her. We can’t be sure what his plans are, or if he’s inclined to hurt her.”
Pure dread moved down Shane’s spine. Rothgar put up a hand before he could speak and added, “We know he was willing to hit her once, and that was when he still thought she was on his side. So let’s get a plan together and get her back.”
“You have to give O’Neill a marker for that?” Shane asked.
“Yep,” Rothgar said.
Respect.
The two men stood toe-to-toe. Shane could feel the blood pounding in his veins. “Where is she?” he asked quietly.
Rothgar eyed him. “We work as fast as we can to still work smart. So, first thing is let’s create a plan . . . and then you’ve got to respect the team plan. If Dex can do it, you can too.”
Shane looked over at Dex, whose good knee was compulsively bouncing up and down. Cecily’s brother was beyond pissed, his fingers flying over the keyboard as he started pulling up on the screen closed-circuit security cameras pointing all over Manhattan. “Need coordinates,” he muttered.
“Where is she, Roth?” Shane repeated in a measured voice. Contain yourself. Gotta contain it until you get her back.
“I’m gonna ask you to respect the team plan.”
Closest he’d ever come to punching Roth square in the face, and he still wasn’t sure he’d avoid it. Shane pressed his fingers into his temples. “We know where she is, we know who’s got her, then which one of us is helping her if I’m sitting on my ass respecting the team plan?”
“I called Geo after I talked to the Sixth. Geo’s tracking her down in the field, courtesy of their intel.”
“I see,” Shane said carefully. “Geo’s in the field.”
“You don’t have a clear head.”
“I’m clear.”
Rothgar folded his arms over his chest and looked at the ground for a minute, before he raised his gaze back to Shane’s face. “Are you part of this team? Do you want to keep being part of this team?”
Shane felt like he was breaking apart inside. Contain, man.
“You’re in love with this girl, brother. Gone for her. We’ve got plenty of reasons to get Cecily away from James, but I don’t even need more than the two sitting in this room. We’re on it, and we’re getting a plan together. The best way to put that plan in motion is probably to send you and Dex to his room to hold hands so you don’t fuck things up. Since I’m feeling generous, why don’t you hang out here in the war room.”
“Roth,” Shane said, doing a shit job of keeping emotion out of his voice. “I need to be in my car.”
Rothgar stared into his eyes. Unmoved.
“I need to be in my car, Roth. Wheels to the ground. Cecily coming up in my sights. I need this more than I’ve ever needed anything in my life. I’m asking you to do this service for me, brother. I’ve been loyal to you. I’ll always be loyal to you. Don’t bench me.”
Rothgar stared at Shane some more. Then he looked around the room, pausing at Allison’s face, his own devoid of expression. Then he looked around the room some more and stopped at Missy.
They just looked at each other, and then she tipped her head just slightly to the side. And he read whatever the fuck she’d meant by that and finally came back to Shane. He shook his head, the toe of his boot working against the ground.
Shane felt the urge to yell at the top of his lungs. Instead, he pressed his palms together as if in prayer. Every second was a second that Cecily was in danger. Rothgar was the best. He had to know what he was doing. But, for fuck’s sake, could he just do it already.
And then Rothgar said, “Missy goes with you, Shane.”
Everybody in the room, Missy included, looked at Rothgar liked he’d gone bat-shit crazy.
Jaysus. In for a penny, in for a pound? “I don’t want her in danger too.”
“Then her being present should keep you from doing anything stupid,” he said tightly. “I’ll expect regular check-ins. Dex is watching the screen. Geo’s already in the field. Flynn stands by in the room, here. Chase is on deck for any support we need outside.” Roth turned to Chase. “Get your bike out front and your leathers on in case we need something more nimble than a car.”
He turned to the room at large. “Team plan: Ransom to get her back, full arsenal if that doesn’t work. Deets to follow.”
Shane looked at Missy. “Put your body armor on, grab a weapon, and meet me in the garage.”
She stared at him. And then at Rothgar. “You’re letting me go on the front line?”
Rothgar looked blasé. “You got a problem with that?”
“No!” Missy’s eyes were huge.
“Call in from your vehicles. I’ll be in touch with details. Now let’s get this job done,” Roth said with a nod to Shane, who nodded back. They bumped fists and everyone scattered.
Roth pulled something from a desk drawer and tossed it to Ally, who managed to catch it.
“Shane,” Dex called from the computer bank. “My fucking leg.”
“I know. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”
He shook his head, that despair threat
ening to pull him under. He looked back at Shane and said, “Safe. Get her home safe, yeah?”
“Yeah,” said Shane. He lifted his chin to Dex and saw Ally staring in confusion at the box of Band-Aids Roth had thrown over. After a moment, she looked down and realized some blister on her foot was bleeding on her silver stiletto.
Shane let the door close behind him. Rothgar never did miss a thing. Hopefully, that included Cecily.
CHAPTER 36
James was not James with a very perfect upper-crust, rich American accent. James was Yakov Petrenko with a Russian accent, and Cecily now knew this because he’d told her himself in his natural accent. Right after he’d grabbed her off the street and forced her into the passenger seat of his car.
The good news was that she was alive. The bad news was that James said he was taking her to see his boss. The boss of a Russian operative seemed like the sort of person Cecily did not need to have a discussion with.
Given that Cecily’s wrists were bound in front of her with duct tape cutting into her skin, this turn of events seemed net negative.
Having a guy fake a relationship with her for nearly a year was pretty gross and awful, especially when she thought about how many times she’d slept with him.
Having that guy not care that your circulation was getting cut off and blood was dripping down your fingers really meant that all pretenses were gone.
And if they weren’t pretending to care about each other, then James probably wasn’t too worried about what was going to happen when she got where you go when your fake ex-boyfriend wants to use you to get “intelligence” about your brother’s mercenary team to please some Russian bigwigs.
So Cecily was shaking—that was uncontrollable. But she was determined not to lose it completely. Ally and Dex would talk eventually and realize she’d gone missing. And Dex would tell Rothgar. And Shane would find out.
It then occurred to Cecily that Ally might not expect her by dinner, Dex didn’t call every day, and James was unpredictable to say the least. She took a deep breath.
James had buckled her into the passenger seat, with a warning that if she clued other drivers into her predicament, he’d use the gun now sitting in his lap. She wasn’t sure what exactly that meant, but with a little luck, the car in front of them would stop short and he’d jam on the brakes and accidentally blow his balls off. In lieu of that unlikely though spirit-raising thought, Cecily decided to do everything he said until a better idea came along.
The way her hands were bound, she couldn’t open the door, much less open the locks. For now the best she could hope for was that the Hudson Kings had a way of tracking her down. And that they’d figure out something was wrong sooner rather than later.
She looked at James’s profile; strange she’d been with him for so long, was his girlfriend for almost a year, and now he seemed like a complete stranger. Not only that. Even when she thought of him at his best, all she could think was that he wasn’t Shane. Shane came back to me. He came back to me to see if there was a chance. There was a chance . . . but I didn’t take it.
She raised her shoulder and swiped away the sweat on her face. James leaned over and slammed her arms back down. “Don’t even try it.”
Try what? God.
Cecily didn’t answer. For the first time, all the blacks and whites were gray. Marvelously, deliciously bed-blanket-BMW gray. Bending the law didn’t seem so cut-and-dried. Shane and his jobs and his “dirty” money didn’t seem so clearly categorized into what was wrong and what was right, because at the end of the day, the Hudson Kings were the guys who were going to look after you.
The duct tape around Cecily’s wrists was definitely too tight—she could see her fingers turning patchy purple and white. Luckily, it was a little floppy at the corner; worse came to worse, she could nudge or maybe rip part of it off. Did duct tape rip off? Maybe not. Shit. I can’t even think. She was losing it a little, starting to let the panic creep in. For now she tried to be invisible.
James was sweaty now too. He smelled like fear. This would have surprised her a couple of months back, when she’d still thought of him as strong. But that was before she’d learned what strong really was. That was before Shane.
James furrowed his brow, muttering something under his breath.
“Are you going to hurt me?” Cecily asked in a small voice.
“Can you just not talk?” he snapped.
“I thought you wanted to be friends,” Cecily mumbled.
James rolled his eyes. “Cecily, obviously that was a line. Don’t be idiotic. I honestly don’t know what they are going to do with you, but I suggest you prepare yourself.”
Ice-cold fear raced down Cecily’s spine. James had hit her before. She knew what that was like. One guy hitting one girl. That was bad. But the idea of a “they.” That sounded worse.
“I never should have gotten into this shit,” James was saying. His lack of confidence did not make Cecily feel better. It just meant someone else besides James had the power to decide what to do with her. Not to mention, one of James’s big push buttons was feeling emasculated. She knew he liked having a woman around to make him feel like more of a man; now Cecily could see how weak he truly was, now that she understood that you already had to be a man. No one else was going to make you feel strong. You just either had it or you didn’t.
God, she would have done anything to be sitting next to Shane right now. Shane with his cool head and fiery heart.
“It would have been fine, if you’d just given me a fucking crumb or two, but you gave me nothing,” James muttered. “You’re pretty enough, fun, good in bed . . . all you had to do was talk about them, and we’d have had it made.”
“I didn’t know anything. I don’t know anything.”
“Bullshit.” His gloved hands convulsed around the steering wheel. “Can’t believe how much time I put into you—you made me look like an idiot. They gave me one job, Cecily. One job, and I was on my way up. Then your fucking brother and his fucking band of mercs got in the way. Now I’ve got to do this.”
“They should have asked you to kidnap one of the Hudson Kings if they actually want to know about them,” Cecily said.
James got a weird look on his face. “Probably should have,” he muttered.
She stared over at him. “You do know what you’re doing, right?” she whispered.
When he didn’t answer, that’s when Cecily really started to panic.
CHAPTER 37
Rothgar was furious. Thank fuck for the find-my-phone feature Dex had installed on his sister’s new phone, but that didn’t make him any less furious. Nobody fucked with his people. The Russians knew this, and they understood this because they felt the same way about their people. Therefore, it was tough to understand why they’d be this stupid.
Dex’s fingertips flew across his keyboard as he tracked the device moving south through Manhattan traffic. “My guess is he’s heading for a bridge or tunnel,” he said.
“Bridge,” Rothgar said firmly. He scanned the various videos on Dex’s monitor. Twilight was descending over the Brooklyn Bridge. Lights twinkled, mixing with the one or two stars bright enough to puncture the city sky. The span itself was deserted, given over to the construction cones set up for a middle-of-the-night construction project and a couple of massive lights from the cranes shining like movie spotlights.
Now and then one of the videos would show the East River’s inky water crest: first, a line of silver and then a bit of muddled foam, and gone again.
Shane’s car came into view and stopped. He waited, patient as ever, his car the only car on the bridge to ignore the construction closure signage, until a single set of headlights blinked into view.
“I want in Shane’s ear and in Shane’s car,” Rothgar ordered. The sort of personal-space invasion Shane would normally balk at big-time, but this was a special occasion, to say the least.
Dex hacked into the comms system in Shane’s car and gave himself administrative privi
leges. Two lights on Dex’s screen went green. Video and audio.
Shane looked down at the hijacked screen, saw HQ in multiple video mode, and swore loud and blue.
“Nice to know the audio’s coming in clear,” Roth muttered, punching the microphone button. “Shane, it’s Roth. Turn your earpiece . . .” His voice trailed off. “Where the hell is Missy?”
“Backup works best when you’re not in the same vehicle,” Shane said tightly, putting in an earpiece.
Rothgar discovered a new level of furious. “We’ll have plenty of words about that once Cecily’s safe. Now call James on videophone. Use the speaker. Dex will keep your earpiece pointing to HQ. We’re here, but he doesn’t know that.”
“Understood.” Shane plugged his personal phone into the dashboard comms and dialed. After a ring, James’s face appeared on the screen, a thin sheen of sweat plastering his cowlick to his forehead. Cecily sat next to him in the passenger seat, a small smear of blood at the corner of her mouth.
At Rothgar’s side, Dex sucked in a quick breath.
Shane didn’t make a sound, didn’t change his expression. He had to be losing his mind. Because Cecily looked unbelievably lovely and lost in a strappy little white sundress. And she was in the wrong car with the wrong guy.
“Use it, don’t lose it,” Nick muttered from behind Rothgar.
“Hi, James. Nice to see you, Cecily,” Shane said.
The video in James’s car must have opened with a delay, because Cecily looked blank for a moment before her eyes widened and her mouth crooked in a tentative smile.
“It’s you. Fantastic. What do you want?” James asked.
Rothgar studied the screen with dispassionate expertise: Bravado. Lots of it. Really fucking sweaty. Desperation? Or just nervous? Desperation. Blood on Cecily, in spite of the warning James’d gotten from Shane. That didn’t bode well. Desperate and violent.
“I’d like you to stop your car, open the door, and let Cecily out,” Shane said.
“Can’t hear you very well,” James said. “Audio’s tricky.” He reached forward with a brown leather glove and pretended to fiddle with the volume.
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