Cold as Ice

by Anne Stuart

“She was going to be Harry’s excuse for coming here unannounced and sending the servants away. She got caught up in a love tryst and met a sad end.”

  “Tryst,” Hans said. “It rhymes with pissed, not Christ.”

  “Fuck off,” Renaud said in a genial voice.

  Hans turned back to face his cohort, and Genevieve could make out a confused expression on his face. “What the hell are you doing, Froggy?” he demanded.

  “Money can’t buy everything, my friend, but it can buy a lot. Including me.”

  She heard the faint popping sound almost at the same time the round hole appeared in the middle of Hans’s forehead. For a moment everything moved in slow motion, and then Hans’s big body crumpled to the ground.

  “Poor stupid Kraut,” Renaud muttered as he went to untie Harry. “Never call a Frenchman ‘Froggy.’”

  Genevieve didn’t move, frozen to the thick, damp earth beneath her. She wanted to throw up. She’d just seen a man killed, as easily as swatting a fly, and her stomach churned in protest against such horror.

  She forced herself to breathe, trying to pull her shocked wits together. Hans was dead, Harry was alive, and Renaud had been bought. By Harry. With Hans dead, the place wouldn’t be blown up; with Renaud busy saving Harry’s life she could run for it with no guilt at all.

  Peter was already on the boat, ready to sail away. If he came back and found Hans’s body, would he abort the mission or reset the charges and blow the place? Or would he track Harry down and finish it himself? And finish her?

  Why had he lied and said he’d already killed her? What did it matter if Renaud knew she was dead or not? For that matter, why did he leave her alive in the first place?

  She started to move backward, deeper into the undergrowth, when Renaud’s voice shattered her illusion of safety.

  “Get your ass out here, lady. I can’t carry Harry by myself.”

  She could run. He wouldn’t have a clear shot at her, and Harry was a bigger priority for him at the moment.

  Then again, he’d saved Harry. Wasn’t that what she wanted?

  “And put the gun down. I don’t think you know how to use it, but women with guns are always dangerous. And stop dragging your heels. I have no problem killing you if you aren’t going to help me.”

  She emerged from the bushes, setting the gun down on the flagstone patio. She didn’t want to look at Hans’s body. When she was growing up, the various family cats had brought in bird and rodent corpses as a token of appreciation, and she’d had to avert her eyes while she covered whatever was left of them with a paper towel while someone with a stronger stomach would remove them.

  Hans was a far cry from a decapitated sparrow, and she felt her stomach lurch again. She focused her attention on Renaud, not the most appetizing sight himself.

  “I have to get him to the far side of the island— Harry was with it long enough to let me know how to get a seaplane to pick us up. You, too, if you do what I tell you. Are you going to help me?”

  “Of course. But won’t they come after us when you don’t show up at the boat and the place doesn’t explode? What if the plane doesn’t get here in time?”

  “By ‘they’ do you mean Peter? He won’t wait that long—company policy. Rules of the game. Once the place blows he’ll be out of here, thinking everyone’s dead and the perfect plan went perfectly. He won’t like it that two low-level operatives didn’t make it, but he won’t lose any sleep over it.”

  “He doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who leaves anything to chance,” Genevieve pointed out.

  “You know him pretty well for such a short time. I wonder why he lied about killing you.”

  “I have no idea. I assure you, he planned to.”

  Renaud shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. Yes, Jensen’s a thorough, exacting professional at what he does. A bloody artiste, if you ask me—I’ve seen his work. But he also knows just how good he is and he’d never imagine that a hired gun like me could outsmart him.”

  “And what if he comes back to check?”

  “Then I’ll kill him. But he won’t get that far, if for some crazy reason he decided to leave the boat. Half the island will be gone in another twenty minutes, and if we don’t get rich boy out of here, we’ll be gone as well. And I don’t intend to let that happen. I’m going to end up with more than enough money so that Peter Jensen and his entire fucking Committee can never find me.”

  “I thought Hans said he was the only one who could blow it?”

  “You were standing there that long? You’re better than I thought.” He rubbed his unshaven jaw. He still had a bruise from where she’d kicked him, and she devoutly hoped he hadn’t noticed it beneath the grime. “Hans isn’t the only one here who understands demolitions. They’ve been set and I’m leaving them. We’ve got twenty minutes, lady, but that’s it.”

  “Wasn’t,” she said.

  “Pardon?”

  “Hans wasn’t the only one who knows demolitions. Past tense. He’s dead.”

  “So he is,” Renaud said. “I’m getting a little tired of everyone trying to correct my English. Get your ass over here or I’ll do what Peter should’ve done.”

  She skirted the body sprawled on the ground and began to help haul Harry to his feet. He opened his eyes for a moment, flashed the ghost of his engaging, toothy smile before passing out again.

  “Shit,” said Renaud, struggling under Harry’s weight. “I thought he’d be coming out of it by now. I cut back the dosage with him but I hadn’t counted on Hans becoming a problem. It’s hard to tell how much to dose him—he’s got the constitution of an ox. I can give him twice the amount of drugs that would kill a normal man and it barely slows him down.” He shifted Harry’s weight. “Put your shoulder under his arm and let’s get moving. Unless you’d rather stay out here and end up as pixie dust.”

  He weighed a ton. They half carried, half dragged him away from the house, moving into the greenery at a snail’s pace.

  “Where are we going?” she managed to gasp out.

  “It wouldn’t make any difference if I told you,” he wheezed. “A beach on the far side of the island.”

  She flashed back to the detailed schematic stored in her mind, and after a moment she remembered the stretch of beach on the opposite side of the island from the villa. Far enough to escape any damage from the explosion, she hoped. It all depended on how ambitious Hans had been.

  Not enough to damage Harry’s boat, which was probably back where they’d been dropped off, close to the main house. If they could just get far enough away in time, they should be fine.

  The hidden bunker wasn’t too far away from the beach, in case anything went wrong. And she fully expected things to go wrong at this point, the way her luck had been going.

  Her bare foot caught on a root, and she went sprawling on the trail, Harry’s heavy body landing on top of her as Renaud let go with a curse.

  For a moment she couldn’t breathe—Harry was heavier than he’d appeared, and it was like lying under a horse.

  A second later, the weight was removed and replaced by a gun barrel pressed against her temple. “Do that again,” he growled, “and I’m leaving you behind.”

  She was going to point out that it hadn’t exactly been her fault, but she kept quiet. She’d been able to fight back with Peter. If she said anything, anything at all, Renaud might very well pull the trigger.

  Leaving lawyer brains all over Harry. His cleaning services were going to have a hard enough time getting rid of the dirt and grass stains on his Versace sportswear. Lawyer brains would be almost impossible to get out.

  She scrambled to her feet, ignoring her skinned knee, and helped Renaud haul Harry upright again. Harry was marginally more awake—he looked down at Genevieve out of totally stoned-out eyes and murmured something unintelligible.

  “Keep going, Harry,” she muttered. “We’re trying to save your life.”

  He didn’t seem particularly moved by the notion, but he managed t
o put a marginal effort into propelling his big, drugged body forward down the narrow path and they moved onward, like a macabre funeral procession with the corpse still alive.

  This was always the hardest part, even in the simplest, most straightforward of operations, Peter thought, staring at the island from the deck of the newly refitted SS Seven Sins run by Mannion and a crew of the Committee’s finest. Now called the SS Tough Break—someone’s sense of humor at work. It was bad luck to change the name of a boat—Harry would be rolling in his grave very soon.

  He’d checked Hans’s munitions work, and the man had done his usual stellar job. Now it was a simple matter of Hans and Renaud getting Harry’s unconscious body to the house and getting back to the boat before the charges went off.

  He wasn’t going to think about Genevieve—he couldn’t. He gave her everything he could to get her out of harm’s way, and he simply had to let go of it. Either she’d make it or she wouldn’t. The rest was up to her.

  But she was smart, and she didn’t give up easily. His instincts told him she’d make it to the bunker safely, and it would be a simple enough matter to send someone to rescue her, all without leaving a trace. She’d never be able to find him—no one knew about the Committee and the work they did. No one even knew where their headquarters were located.

  There was a chance he might never know whether she survived or not. He could live with that—he’d lived with far worse. And in the end, who was she? Just a stray female who’d wandered into his path for a few days, then wandered out. Easily forgettable.

  She was nothing, nothing to him at all… And then all his justifications vanished as the island exploded into flames.

  The blast hit with almost atomic force. The ground shook beneath them, and Genevieve went flying through the air, her grip on Harry’s arm nonexistent.

  It knocked the breath from her, it blocked out consciousness as well. A moment, an hour, later, she opened her eyes to find herself sprawled on the ground in a pool of blood, and Harry and Renaud were nowhere in sight.

  The smell of burning chemicals and fire hung heavy in the air, blocking out the thick tropical vegetation, and smoke was shooting up into the sky, great billowing plumes of it. She sat up, looking down at the white T-shirt. It was now dark with blood. Her own.

  She must be in shock, she thought absently, counting her limbs, fingers and toes. Everything seemed connected—she touched her head, and her hand came away bloody. Either she’d suffered some kind of brain injury and was about to die, or she’d simply knocked her head. Head wounds always bled like crazy, she reminded herself, struggling to get to her feet. She might as well assume the best and keep moving. She couldn’t just lie here on the path and bleed.

  Besides, she could hear the fire now, and the smoke was getting thicker. She didn’t think a semitropical forest would burn that easily, but she wasn’t about to take the chance.

  She’d lost any sense of direction, and for a moment she was afraid she was going to walk back into the fire, but Renaud’s path through the heavy growth supporting a burden like Harry was easy enough to make out, and she started after them, wiping the blood away from her eyes with calm determination.

  She almost missed them. When she stumbled onto the clearing the seaplane was already there, in Van Dorn Enterprises signature orange-and-black colors. The noise of the engines shut out any other sound, and Harry was already on a stretcher, surrounded by an army of caretakers.

  She tried to call out, but the sound was carried away by the wind. She made it halfway across the beach and then her strength failed her, and she sank to her knees in the hot sand.

  Renaud was standing to one side, and he was the first to see her. He had his gun out, and she wondered if he was going to kill her.

  He said something to one of the men hovering over Harry, and they all turned to look in her direction. And then dismissed her as patently unimportant.

  She would’ve liked to march over to one of them, grab him by the lapels of his fancy suit and smack him. Or at least give them a piece of her mind.

  But she had nothing left to give. She couldn’t even keep her balance, and she pitched forward onto the sand. It was going to get into her head wound, she thought, and it would be a bitch to clean. But then, maybe that wasn’t going to matter…

  The hands on her were rough, but she didn’t, couldn’t protest. They were dragging her across the sand, and while she could have wished for a stretcher like Harry’s, she wasn’t in any condition to complain.

  Someone bundled her onto the seaplane, dumping her into a seat and then ignoring her while they tended to their fallen master. She leaned her head against the window, not giving a flying fuck if she bloodied Harry’s precious plane, and closed her eyes as she felt it begin to move.

  She heard a sound, and she managed to surface from her fog for a moment, to look out the window. The doors of the seaplane were still open, which seemed impractical to her, and she opened her mouth to say something. When she looked down below.

  The island was on fire, the inky smoke shooting toward the sky. Harry’s yacht was moving slowly away from the conflagration, heading out into the clear greeny blue of the Caribbean, when something dark came hurtling out of the sky as they passed directly overhead. A moment later the boat disintegrated, as if it had never existed. There was nothing left but a shower of smoke and dust.

  She must have made some sound. A cry, torn from her smoke-damaged throat, as Peter Jensen was wiped from existence as if he’d never been there at all.

  Her cry was enough to catch the attention of the man who’d been hovering over Harry’s limp body. A doctor, she thought, wishing she could feel relief, glad that she could feel nothing at all.

  “You’re a mess, aren’t you?” the old man said in a heavy German accent. “Looks like you might have a concussion. We should’ve left you behind with a bullet between the eyes like that scumbag, but Mr. Van Dorn said bring you along.”

  What scumbag? Renaud? They’d killed him? She tried to say something, anything, when she felt the pinprick in her arm.

  “This will either kill you or cure you,” he said. And they were the last words she heard.

  13

  The dreams were horrible, never ending. Genevieve felt as if she was being smothered, trapped in a nightmare world of blood, fire and pain. She drank the smoke and it silenced her. She bled and she couldn’t move. The flames licked around her, the pain so sharp it blinded her, and death had moved under her skin and settled there.

  She could see Hans, revolving slowly in front of her like a carousel horse, the hole in his forehead a silent scream. She could see Peter, but each time she reached out to touch him he disintegrated into dust that sparkled in the sun.

  The carousel kept spinning, and she would see Harry, sprawled on one of the benches that moved sedately around, his huge smile unshadowed by all around him. Renaud would come into view every now and then, and the black hole in his face was lower than Hans’s—directly between his dark, staring eyes. And the merry-go-round would turn once more. the calliope loud and macabre, and Peter would be there again for a brief moment before dissolving once more into nothingness.

  She clung to the darkness and pain, stubborn, even as it began to recede. The light was taking her to a place she didn’t want to be, and she fought hard to stay in the hopeless night. But in the end her will wasn’t strong enough, and she opened her eyes to a strange room.

  She had no idea where she was. Presumably it was late afternoon or evening—the room was deep in shadows. She wasn’t alone—someone was moving quietly at the far end, and for a moment she wondered if she was in Harry Van Dorn’s villa.

  But no, that was gone as well, and she closed her eyes again, seeking the black emptiness that had become her life.

  “Awake, miss?” The voice by her side was soft, hesitant, and she wanted desperately to ignore it, but her eyes betrayed her, opening to stare into the plain, reserved face of a middle-aged Asian woman, dressed in some
sort of dark traditional clothing.

  “I’m awake,” she said, but her normally strong voice was little more than a husky whisper. “Where am I?”

  The response wasn’t encouraging—a rapid-fire explanation in a language Genevieve couldn’t identify much less speak.

  “Where am I?” she asked again, slower.

  The woman shook her head. “You wait,” she said.

  At that point Genevieve doubted she could have gone anywhere at all on her own strength. “I wait,” she said, leaning back against the pillows, exhausted.

  She was coming back to life when she wasn’t sure she wanted to. The first thing she noticed was the bedding. The sheets were like silk—soft and smooth and of the highest-quality cotton. The same sheets had been on the island. She’d slept, wrapped in one. She lay on top of one, clutching it in her hands while he—

  She let out a soft cry, sitting up, then moaning as her head began to pound once more. Harry’s sheets, Harry’s house. But where? And how, and why? Her memories were jumbled… She could see herself kneeling in the sand. But she couldn’t remember how she got there.

  Then on a small plane that took off in a swoop that almost left her stomach behind. Renaud hadn’t been on it, and she should remember what happened to him but she couldn’t.

  Instead, she remembered what she didn’t want to remember. The huge yacht being blown to ashes, with Peter Jensen on board.

  And she started to cry.

  Once started, she couldn’t stop. The sobs racked her body, so heavy that she was shaking, and the more she tried to stop them the more powerful they became. She fell back against the pillows, and the tears ran down her face. She shoved a fist in her mouth to quiet the sobs, but it did little good. She finally she gave in, rolling over on her stomach and burying her face in the pillow.

  Wherever the woman had disappeared to, it was taking her a blessedly long time to get back to her. Slowly, slowly her tears began to lessen, her sobs quieted, as reality began to drift back in odd-shaped puzzle pieces.

  She wasn’t crying over Peter Jensen.