A gunshot pierced through the building.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Tucker’s slack form stiffen, but I didn’t look his way because I didn’t want to draw attention to either of us.
The single popping sound bounced off the walls and faded away, leaving everything and everyone in silence. Garlic Breath was no longer screaming.
There was a sick feeling inside me that whispered he couldn’t scream anymore because he was dead.
What kind of people killed off their own allies when they were injured? Sick ones. Seriously mentally unstable people.
And we were at their mercy.
The man behind the computer whistled low beneath his breath. I looked up, noting his face as he stared at the screen. “Now I know why he wanted this shit so bad.”
Computer guy looked up at me. His eyes seemed to glow with the bright artificial light shining out of the computer. “You’re dead.”
I shivered.
A man stepped out of the shadows. He was wearing a three-piece suit, well cut and expensive-looking fabric. His tie was made of silk and his dress shoes were shined so not a speck of dirt covered them.
His face was lined and slightly craggy. His hair was graying.
His eyes met mine.
Recognition struck me like a lightning bolt. It was Mr. Wallace, the CEO of the company Max worked for. We’d been to countless charity dinners with this man. We’d visited his home for a holiday dinner. I shared a meal with this man. We exchanged small talk and he and Max joked about sports.
“Ms. Carter,” Mr. Wallace Sr. inclined his head. “My apologies you became involved in this unfortunate situation.”
Disgust rolled through me and threatened to rot my insides. I barked out a harsh laugh and strained against the binds. “Unfortunate?” I spat. “You disgusting little worm. How could you?”
He didn’t seem offended by my insult. “It’s business.”
As if that somehow made everything he’d done okay.
“I hope you rot in hell,” I spat.
“I very well might, Ms. Carter, but I daresay that you will get there long before me.”
His cocky, haughty attitude made me so angry that all I could think about was clawing out his beady little eyes.
“Is it all there?” he asked the man controlling the computer.
In response, he turned the screen so Mr. Wallace could take a look at whatever was on the file. As he read, his face flushed with anger. “You’ve certainly been a busy boy, Max.”
The man eating the ketchup-dropping burger looked at his boss and was given a light nod. My stomach cramped as he made his way across the room toward us. His eyes were intent on Tucker, and I wanted to cry.
“Hey, asshole,” I taunted, trying to draw his attention away from Tucker. “You ever heard of a napkin? Or maybe a shower?”
Okay, yes, those were horrible insults, but it was all I had.
He gave me the finger.
His insult sucked too.
Tucker was still out of it, his head still down, his eyes closed. I was beginning to worry that he had slipped into a coma… or worse.
The man struck out quickly, slapping Tucker across the side of the head so hard that the sound of flesh hitting flesh made me scream.
“Stop it!” I wailed, struggling anew. The chair I was sitting in jostled around on the floor.
Tucker’s head rolled back on his neck and then flopped forward again. The man grabbed the top of his head, taking in the short hair in his fist, and yanked his head back to stare down into his face.
“Wake up,” he snarled.
When Tucker didn’t comply, the man used his free hand to stick two fingers into the still-bleeding bullet wound.
Tucker screamed and surged up in the chair. His eyes flew wide and his teeth slammed together. Hot tears rolled down my cheek. Not because I was sad. Not because I had given up. Because I was so incredibly angry. I was so incensed that I was shaking. I wanted nothing more than to get out of this chair and attack every single asshole in this room. I had never been a violent person. In fact, I was always a firm believer in the law, but this…
This gave me a whole new outlook.
Some people didn’t deserve jail. Some people didn’t deserve a fair trial.
Some people just deserved to be shot and left to die.
If someone handed me a gun in that moment, I would not have hesitated to pull the trigger. I would empty the entire chamber out and look for more bullets.
“Where are the copies?” the man torturing Tucker demanded.
Tucker stared at him in stony silence.
The man shoved his face as close to Tucker’s as he could. “Where. Are. They?” He spit when he talked. I could see the little bubbles spew from his mouth and land on Tucker’s face. Then he shoved his fingers back into the bullet wound.
I whimpered and started wiggling around in my chair once more. I saw the pain cross over Tucker’s face. I saw the little lines that formed on the corners of his eyes.
Yet he made not one sound.
And he didn’t look away from the man hell-bent on getting him to talk.
The man shoved Tucker back, rocking the chair, and paced away, then came back and glared. “You’re a lot tougher than I expected a businessman to be,” he said.
Once more, Tucker said nothing.
Ketchup Man turned back to Mr. Wallace, who nodded.
“Please,” I begged, just wanting them to stop. I couldn’t sit here and watch him get beaten. I couldn’t watch the body that gave mine so much pleasure being abused. I couldn’t watch the eyes that stared into me so intently when he would enter me again and again tighten in pain.
Ketchup Man rolled his head on his shoulders like he was getting ready for some kind of sporting event. And then he drew back his meaty fist and swung it forward.
Just as the fist was about to meet its target, Tucker moved. His arms surged forward, coming around his body, and he caught the incoming fist in his right palm. I watched his hand close around the man’s knuckles. I watched the bones of Tucker’s fingers strain against his skin as he tightened his grip until it had to hurt.
The man who thought he had the upper hand grunted under the pain.
Keeping his grip, Tucker pushed up out of the chair, kicking it backward, sending it skittering across the floor and crashing into a nearby wall.
“I’m not a businessman,” Tucker growled, twisting the man’s arms until he fell onto his knees.
“I’m a Marine.”
Everyone looked around in shock, like they had no idea what was going on.
The man at his mercy groaned and Tucker pulled back is fist and sucker punched him in the side of the head. He fell forward, coming onto his hands and knees, and Tucker took the opportunity to deliver a strong kick to his ribs.
I heard a cracking sound and Ketchup Man sprawled across the floor.
“And you tie shitty knots,” Tucker added, bringing his left wrist up, which still had a length of rope wrapped around it. As he was unwrapping, the men at the table shot up and rushed him.
“Watch out!” I screamed as two men approached, but Tucker didn’t need my warnings. He swiped the first man’s feet out from under him, sending him falling on his ass, and then drove the heel of his shoe right down on the man’s crotch.
The man rolled into the fetal position and began to vomit profusely.
“Some guys just don’t deserve nuts,” Tucker spat.
The other guy paled but still came at him so Tucker put him in a chokehold and then used the rope from around his wrist to create a garrote. The man gasped as his airway was being cut off, and Tucker stepped around his back, practically straddling him to apply even more pressure. The man’s eyes began to bulge as he clawed at the crudely made weapon strangling him.
Had Tucker been faking this whole time? Had he really been awake but just didn’t want anyone to know it?
He still looked like hell, with sweat creating a sheen across hi
s skin, his shirt soaked with blood, and dark circles pronounced beneath this eyes, but even in his exhaustion, he wasn’t about to give up.
Suddenly, I understood how he managed to walk ten miles in the dessert while carrying a wounded man.
Determination.
Drive.
And a hell of a dose of badass.
The man’s struggles to get away began to wane and I knew he was just minutes from losing consciousness.
I was so intent on Tucker and what he was doing that I hadn’t noticed Mr. Wallace Sr. approach me. Until he placed a gun to my head.
God. This was just not my day.
How many times could a girl be held at gunpoint before she went mad (or actually got shot)?
“If you want her to live, you better drop him,” Wallace said calmly.
Tucker released his prey and the man fell to ground, wheezing and desperately sucking in air.
“You got a problem with me,” Tucker said, “you come at me. You don’t threaten a woman.”
Geez, if I wasn’t tied to this chair, I would show him women could be badass too.
“You don’t threaten my woman,” he added, his gaze meeting mine for just seconds.
Okay, this wasn’t the time for romantic gestures, but that totally made my heart skip a beat. Maybe he was just acting. Maybe he was playing the part of Max. But Max had never called me his in the entire year we dated. Max had never taken a bullet for me either.
“If you had just died the night of the crash like you were supposed to, she never would have been involved,” Wallace Sr. said.
Tucker took several steps toward us. The hand holding the gun to my head wavered. “Stay where you are.”
“No.”
I glanced at Tucker, wondering what the hell he was thinking. He was baiting a man who was holding a gun to my head.
Hell-O… that qualified as a don’t piss off the crazy man moment.
“I’ll shoot her!” he said, jamming the gun a little bit harder into my head.
“When I was in Iraq, I learned some interesting things,” Tucker drawled. “Like how to sever a man’s spine, leaving him paralyzed but still able to feel.”
The gun against my head wobbled. Tucker took another step closer, prowling toward the man with a wild look in his focused eyes. If I didn’t know him, I would be frightened. The contrast of his pale skin against his dark, red-rimmed eyes was creepy. Added to the fact that he had blood literally all over him, he looked like a walking corpse.
“Do you know the kinds of pain I could inflict and you would only be able to lay there and feel it?”
“You’re lying,” Wallace Sr. said. I could tell he was shaken.
“Oh, I can assure you I’m not,” he replied. “And perhaps after I’m done using you as a live cadaver, I will put you in a car, drive you around at excessive speeds, and then crash it, leaving you to lie inside the crumpled metal while I douse the body in gasoline and then light it on fire. You won’t be able to run. But you’ll be able to feel the heat of the flames. You’ll be able to hear the groaning of the metal as the fire stalks you. And then when you start to burn, it will not only feel like the worst pain of your entire life, but you will smell the melting of your flesh.”
The picture that Tucker painted with those words would live in my nightmares for years to come.
“Who the hell are you?” Wallace Sr. whispered horror in his tone.
“I’m Max’s other half,” he growled.
And then he pounced.
27
Tucker
You know, I’m a laidback kind of guy. I like to drink beer, hang out with my buds, and take random girls home for casual sex (Yes, I use a condom; I’m not nasty). I’m slow to anger and even slower to put myself out there to care about anyone.
But when I get pissed. I get pissed.
And seeing Charlie with a gun to her head pissed me off.
She had to be the first person since high school to slip past my defenses and worm her way into my affection so damn fast. Not even Nathan had managed to become like family to me so quickly.
How the hell a bossy, uptight, schedule-oriented person like her could ever turn my head was completely beyond me.
But then I thought about her heart-shaped lips, her gold-fringed hazel eyes, and the little sounds she made whenever I put my lips upon her skin.
And her laugh… She had a really good laugh.
Being tasered was fuel to the fire, and as I sat tied to a chair, dripping blood all over the filthy concrete floor, and listening to Charlotte beg the men to let us go, I began to grow livid.
But even livid, I remained cool headed. The Marine Corps taught me a lot. Self-control, self-reliance, self-defense. It also taught me how to keep my mouth shut and use the element of surprise. Pretending to be unconscious, pretending to be weak… Well, that gave me an advantage.
It was also an advantage that these asswipes couldn’t tie a knot to save their damn lives.
Being tied up and thrown into the bottom of a pool in training taught me how to get out of a knot fast. Real fast.
And yeah, I was weak from blood loss, twitchy from being tased, and royally fucking pissed off.
Oh, and the bullet hole in my side hurt like a bitch.
But it wasn’t enough.
It wasn’t enough to put me down. It wasn’t enough to make me give up. We weren’t dying here tonight. I wouldn’t allow it.
And so I took my opening.
And now here I stood facing Mr. Wallace Sr.—some old guy on a power trip—and once again he was pissing me off by holding a gun to Charlie’s head.
When I was done telling him exactly what I would do to him if he even tried to hurt her, I think he finally got the message.
The message I was not going to be fucked with.
“Who the hell are you?” he whispered.
Who was I he wanted to know. Who was I?
I was someone I hadn’t wanted to admit to being for a long time. And that lack of admission would haunt me for the rest of my life.
I was done pushing that part of me away. Doing so had gotten me nothing but regret.
“I’m Max’s other half.”
I launched myself forward. Even shot, I was light on my feet. He pulled the gun away from Charlotte and aimed it at me, firing off a shot that went wild. I bulldozed into him, knocking him into the ground and landing on top of him. The gun was between us and he pointed at my chest.
I spit in his face, right in his eyes. Little bits of saliva mixed with blood shot into his eyes and he cursed, closing them, trying to clear his sight. With a flip of my wrists, I disarmed him, using the butt of the gun to strike him in the side of the head.
His body went slack beneath me.
Not willing to let my guard down, I kept the gun trained on his head as I stood, the wound in my side bleeding profusely and the world around me tilting.
Wallace was out cold.
Behind me Charlotte struggled, so I went to her, released the binds that held her, and she launched out of the chair and into my chest.
I groaned when she made contact, and she pulled back with a gasp. “Oh my God!” She freaked. “Tucker, we need to get you to a hospital!”
“I’ll be fine, darlin’,” I said, even though I felt like shit.
The man whose junk I stomped on groaned and rolled onto his back. His face was blotchy and he had puke on his shirt. He fumbled with the waistband of his pants and in two strides, I was at his side and disarming him of the gun he was so kindly going to try to kill me with.
“Thanks. I was almost out of bullets,” I said.
He groaned and rolled back into the fetal position.
Charlotte ran to the computer and pulled out the flash drive. Her purse was lying in the corner of the room, all the contents spilled everywhere, and she went over to retrieve the bag, her wallet, and the paper that was with the drive. She left everything else there, forgotten.
Knowing that Wallace probably had a c
ell phone on him, I turned to search his coat.
One of his lackeys was standing over his body with a gun pointed directly at me.
“I’m really tired of this shit.” I sighed wearily. “Drop the gun or I’ll shoot your ass.”
“I c-can’t let you leave with that drive,” he said, the gun shaking tremendously in his hand. He probably saw me drop everyone else in the room, and if my suspicions were correct, he was the one that probably put down the guy I shot with the shotgun. He probably hadn’t planned to come out at all until he realized he was the last hope of Wallace keeping that drive.
He couldn’t be more than nineteen years old. A kid who got caught up in something he didn’t know how to get out of.
I didn’t want to shoot him.
Didn’t mean I wouldn’t.
“Look, kid…” I tried to reason with him. “Put the gun down and get the hell out of here. I won’t tell no one you were here. Let this be a lesson to you. You roll with idiots, you become an idiot.”
He didn’t lower the gun, but I saw the desire in his eyes. The desire to get the hell out of here.
“I’m only offering once.”
He laid the gun down and took off running.
My gun followed him until he was out of sight.
On my way over to Wallace’s body, I stumbled. The damn room was really spinning and it was getting darker in here.
“Tucker,” Charlotte worried and appeared at my side, slipping her body beneath my arm and lending support.
“See if he has a phone. I gotta call the Feds.” Our phones had been confiscated before we got here, and I had no idea where they were.
“Sit down,” she demanded.
Sitting down seemed like a pretty good idea. I lowered myself down against the wall, at a vantage point that I could see the room and watch the men I knocked out. They wouldn’t stay that way much longer. We were going to have to move. Soon.
The breath hissed between my teeth when I leaned against the wall. Charlotte stood and yanked the green shirt over her head. My eyes fixated on the peach lace cups that supported her perky tits.
What? I was shot, not dead.
The way her creamy flesh practically spilled out of the tops of the cups made my mouth salivate.
Tricks Page 17
