by Misty Evans
Mr. FBI upstairs had to have heard the commotion. Moving as fast as his injuries allowed, John shimmied across the floor to the server and maneuvered the handle between his palms. With small, quick flicks back and forth, he sawed through part of the flexicuffs binding his wrists. If his arms had been bound in front, he could have broken the cuffs with extreme pressure. He’d done it before. Behind his back? He couldn’t overpower them unless they were already compromised.
Compromised plastic coming up. The tension eased as the server worked. A sharp tug of his wrists and he was free.
Mattock had no pulse. Fucker was dead.
Good.
Staggering to his feet, John gingerly ran his fingers around the wound in his lower back and ignored the too-loud pounding of his own pulse in his ears. His hand came away covered in blood. As he retrieved the phones from the drawer he’d hidden them in earlier, the edges of his vision swam.
He had to get to Lucie, but he’d be worthless to her if he passed out first.
Passing out seemed likely. His body was going into shock from the loss of blood. Cool skin, back pain, flank pain, extreme tenderness over his kidney. In the field, John had treated a lot of abdominal and back injuries. Fucking Mattock might have nicked his kidney. Hard to do, but serious shit if John didn’t stop the bleeding.
He hauled out his phone, hit a button that would send an SOS to Langley. Doubtful Del Hoffman was around this time of night, but the SOS would get answered by someone. Pegasus would kick into action.
At the kitchen sink, he washed his injury with a couple handfuls of water and used a cotton dishtowel to cover the wound. The dishtowels were monogramed with a fancy M. John pressed the embroidered letter to his bleeding wound and smiled faintly at the thought of Charles seeing blood on it.
His assailant had a nice, wide, black belt around his pants that would work for the tourniquet. John stumbled over to where the guy lay, sank to his knees, and went to work removing the belt.
Twice he nearly keeled over from the pain and lightheadedness. Every time, the memory of Lucie with a gun to her head revived him.
He glanced at the kitchen doorway. Listened for footsteps. Where was Mr. FBI? Why hadn’t he come down to check on his buddy and find out what all the noise was?
John’s brain felt like it was filled with cotton candy. The only answer it supplied made him want to throw up.
The guy hadn’t come down to find out what was going on because the bastard was too busy torturing Lucie.
Chapter Eight
“Mattock!” Black Mask stood in the upstairs hallway yelling for his partner.
Lucie stood in front of him, looking down the long, curving stairs to the first floor. She swallowed hard.
John’s okay. He had to be okay.
A cold deadness had crept into her heart when she’d seen John led away, hands cuffed behind his back. If anything happened to him…
She’d heard the noises downstairs. Saw how Black Mask had gotten nervous. Her own nerves were strung tight. “Your partner’s dead,” she told the masked man behind her. She could hope, right? “You will be soon as well.”
He shoved her, sending her sprawling down a couple of steps. “Shut up, bitch.”
She walked the rest of the way down the stairs, thinking of ways to get that gun away from him. Her hands were free. She could run. Or attack him. Or…
Or what, Lucie?
The living room was dark except for a small amount of light coming from the kitchen. In the back of her mind, her worst fear had been that she’d be in this exact situation. That she’d be the victim again.
Now, her worst fear was seeing John hurt. Or dead.
As they rounded the corner to the kitchen, Lucie’s heart stopped.
The place was a wreck and there was blood everywhere. Too much blood. “John?”
He was slumped in the corner of the kitchen behind the long table. The table where they’d made love. The table where a laptop sat open.
Heedless of Black Mask’s gun trained on her, she ran to him, falling on her knees. John’s eyes were closed, his waist encircled with a belt. Bright red blood covered his entire side. “Mon Dieu. John, can you hear me? Wake up. Please, wake up.”
Her fingers shook as she checked for a pulse at the base of his throat. Nothing. She pressed more firmly, and yes, there it was. Faint but steady.
His tan skin was pale. Perspiration covered his face and chest. She checked to see if he was breathing.
Barely, his breath coming in such soft wafts, it was almost nonexistent.
Merde.
Black Mask bent over the man he called Mattock, gun trained on her as he went through a similar routine checking the man’s pulse. Straightening, he kicked the man’s leg. “Worthless SOB.”
Lucie shifted as much as she could to shield John. She leaned her face close to his, placing a hand on his lower abdomen and the other on his chest. Softly, she whispered in his ear. “Hang in there. I’m going to take care of this. Everything will be okay.”
Black Mask sat at the table, scanning the laptop. He gave her a glance, laid the gun near the keyboard, and started typing. “Try anything and I’ll shoot Quick, understand?”
Oh, she understood. “How do you know his name?”
He snorted, removed his mask and a translucent looking patch from his Adam’s apple. When he looked straight at her, his eyes were hard, unemotional.
Goose flesh rose on her arms. Betrayal clawed at her. “You.”
“Yep, me.”
Matt Saunders. The FBI agent who’d been at the party. The man who’d taken her statement after Dmitri’s abuse and counseled her like she was his own daughter. The man who’d been welcomed in by the Morgan family because he’d made sure to keep the kidnapping out of the public eye, and had seemed to truly care about Lucie and Zara.
Now he’d replaced Dmitri in Lucie’s ongoing nightmare. “Why are you doing this?”
Returning to his typing, he ignored her question. “Unlike Quick to hook up with a woman for more than a single night. He’s a player, you know. I read his profile. Never hangs around ’til dawn. I was counting on him to be long gone before midnight tonight. He must want your money as badly as I do.”
Her attention traveled around the kitchen. Plenty of weapons here, but how could she get to one with his gun pointed at her? Plus, Saunders was a trained agent. “He doesn’t care about my money.”
“Doesn’t he? He’s got a hero complex. Save the day and all that shit. Believe me, sweetheart, that only carries you so far in life. I should know. The Bureau never appreciated me.”
Past tense. She could almost hear John’s voice. Buy time. Keep him talking. “You’re no longer with the FBI, are you?”
“The Bureau and I had a falling out.”
“So now you’re a criminal?”
“I was always a criminal. That’s what made me so attractive to them. I got inside the heads of the ones they were hunting, and knew how to fight them with my hacking skills. After a while, being the good guy got boring, and it sure as hell didn’t pay enough. I instituted a couple of enterprises on the side using the Bureau’s resources. Worked like magic until I sold your family’s information to Dmitri. That’s what started the whole thing. Too bad Pegasus put an end to him before I got my final payoff.”
Lucie wanted to spit nails. “Your mother must have been so proud.”
He raised a finger. “Don’t you talk about my mother.”
He knew all about her family, but his was the catalyst for this. Lucie wanted to call the poor woman every name in the book just to get back at him. Instead, she feigned interest. “What happened to her?”
Saunders sat back, crossed his arms. “Your father happened. He stole her money, what little she had. She couldn’t pay for the cancer drugs she needed. Couldn’t pay for the treatments. And once I lost my job, my side enterprises dried up because I no longer had access to the information I needed. I couldn’t help her make the house or car payments. Sh
e died with nothing.” He leaned forward and sneered. “All because of Charles Morgan.”
“My father never stole a dime from anyone.”
The laptop beeped. He watched something on the screen for a second, his eyes narrowing. “And we’re in.”
In to what? Her bank account? The clock on the wall read eleven fifty-seven. Once he got the money, would he kill her and John?
Yes. She’d seen his face, knew who he was. While he wasn’t wielding a needle with a biological nightmare in it like Dmitri had, he was no better.
Tap, tap, tap. “After my dad died, my mother put his insurance money into a fund. A fund Charles Morgan Investment Services recommended. The damn thing tanked last year. She couldn’t work because of the cancer and she never had health insurance. When she went to get her money, there was less than a thousand dollars left. By the time they took out taxes and fees, she got jack squat.”
Jack squat. An unfamiliar term but the meaning was clear. “I’m sorry, but my father did not kill her. There are no guarantees with investments.”
Saunders’s face hardened. “Spouting the company line? You rich bastards are all the same. You think you’re above the rest of us.”
Another beep.
He smiled. “Midnight.”
Picking up the gun, he motioned her to come to the table. Reluctantly, she rose and made her way to the chair he’d vacated. The gun found its way to her temple. On the screen, a prompt asked for her name and the password needed to access her account.
“Put in your password.”
“Couldn’t you just hack my account?”
“I don’t want to leave a trace, and erasing my digital fingerprints would take too much time.”
Time. She and John were running out of the precious stuff.
“Besides,” he continued, using the end of the gun to move her hair away from her neck. “We’d miss this quality time together. Now type the password.”
“I don’t remember it.”
He jammed the gun into her temple. “Put in the damn password. Now.”
“This is a new account set up specifically for the fund. The password is something like sixteen characters long and was sent to me by my father’s attorney. I didn’t memorize it.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
She was, but the lie might work.
He studied her for a second. Turned the gun on John. “Guess you better search your memory harder, then. Otherwise, I’ll shoot him in the head.”
The risk was too great that he would do it. She raised a hand and pecked a couple of keys, pretending she couldn’t remember all the characters.
“Hurry the fuck up.”
“I’m trying. Give me a minute.”
The gun went off without warning, the blast echoing in her ears. She recoiled. “John!”
He hadn’t moved and there was no wound on his head from a bullet. On his chest lay wood splinters from the overhead beam where the shot had torn through cedar.
“You have thirty seconds,” Saunders ground out, once more pointing the gun at John’s head.
Lucie swallowed and scooted back up to the laptop. Her fingers were shaking so bad, she could barely hit the correct keys.
But she did. All sixteen of them.
The moment the bank accepted the password, Saunders shoved her out of the chair, making himself at home.
Lucie hated giving in so easily but was relieved he’d moved the gun off John. She crawled across the floor and knelt beside him once more. “John? Can you hear me?” she whispered, searching for a pulse in his wrist.
It was so faint, she hung on, using her other hand to stroke his face and brush a lock of hair from his forehead. He was burning up and clammy at the same time. “I’m so sorry.”
Behind her, Saunders was typing, pausing, typing some more. “Gotcha.”
If ever there was time to find a weapon, this was it. He was too distracted by her money to pay attention to her.
Lucie looked over her shoulder at the kitchen sink, the broken glasses on the floor. A knife? A piece of glass? Neither of those would be worth much against a gun.
A flash of silver near the island caught her eye. The cake server. She released John’s hand and stretched out a leg. If she could extend her foot a few more inches, she might be able to get it…
A pressure on her hand stopped her. John’s hand was wrapped around her wrist. His eyes were still closed, his breathing shallow, but something had changed.
He was awake. Alive and lucid, by the force of his grip.
The scrape of chair legs warned her Saunders was getting up. Lucie braced, waiting for him to yank her hair or shoot her in the back.
“Time to go, Lucie,” he sing-songed, his presence looming behind her like her nightmare. His voice was light. Proud, even.
There was no way she was going anywhere with him. She stared at John, willing him to know that she loved him. That her last view was of him. “You have my money. Leave and I won’t tell the FBI or the police that it was you. If you’re as good as you say you are they’ll never catch you.”
“True. But I can’t take the chance that you’ll grow a pair and tell them anyway.” He shoved the laptop in a backpack and hoisted it onto his shoulders. “So you and I have to take a little trip outside. The blizzard’s over and I have transportation waiting for us. You’re coming with me until I’m out of the country. Call it a security precaution. A good hacker always covers his tracks.”
Lucie was about to tell him to go to hell when the jerk to her hair finally came, hauling her to her feet. Her wrist broke free of John’s hand, but he didn’t move. Didn’t open his eyes.
“Let’s go,” Saunders demanded.
He tossed her coat at her, once again aiming the gun at John’s head. She obeyed, her mind racing for some way to end this. No way was she leaving John’s side.
“Go put on your boots.”
Boots. Her boots has super thick soles and some righteous heels. Good for pummeling a bad guy. And maybe leading him away from the kitchen would give John the chance to do something. If he stayed conscious. “They’re in the living room.”
He waved the end of the gun at her. She led the way.
She sat on the bench under the security system and tugged on one boot, then the other. Saunders opened the door and stood looking out at the snowy lake, tinged blue in the dark. Cold air snaked inside and wrapped around Lucie’s legs. She kept one eye on the kitchen doorway. No John.
Standing, she decided this was her best chance. Saunders’s back was to her. She could jump him from behind and…
John appeared, his face set in grim determination and a gun in his hand. He aimed it at Saunders, hand trembling, and pulled the trigger.
Click.
Lucie flinched, but there was no loud bang. No bullet.
John’s brows slammed together and he pulled the trigger again.
Click.
Lucie’s heart slammed hard in her chest. Either the gun was out of bullets or it had misfired.
Saunders whirled, his eyes going wide as he saw the gun pointed at him. His own gun came up, but John wasted no time tossing his weapon aside and rushing by her to tackle him. The impact sent both men out the door, Saunders’s gun firing uselessly into the air, as together they plunged into the snow.
They rolled once, twice, three times. John, in nothing but sweatpants, was quickly covered with snow. Saunders’s gun went flying, disappearing into a snowbank, as he landed with his back against the ATV sitting on the edge of the lake. John head-butted Saunders, smacking him backward into one of the wheels.
The hit stunned him for half a second, and Lucie rushed out onto the lawn to look for the gun. Scrambling through the snow, she heard the sound of muffled fighting, shouting and grunting, both men trying to rise to their feet and gain the upper hand. She did the opposite, dropping to her knees and sweeping snow away from the spot where she thought the gun had landed. Nothing. She dug harder, and as she glanced over at the
fight, she saw Saunders land a punch in John’s injured side.
John went down, and Lucie’s heart exploded with anger. Jumping to her feet, she slipped and nearly fell, cartwheeling her arms to keep her balance. John kicked out and caught Saunders in the thigh, sending him stumbling around the end of the ATV. The backpack fell off his shoulders and Lucie decided to go after that instead. One good swing to Saunders’s head and the laptop he so prized would be the very thing to bring him down.
She crawled toward the backpack. John sprang up, glanced at her, then at Saunders. The man was climbing up onto the ATV. The engine roared to life, tires digging in and pulling away.
With a loud, ear-piercing yell, John plowed forward and jumped him. The ATV skidded sideways off the incline onto the lake. Two wheels left the ground, spinning for a second in midair before John’s weight took Saunders over the side.
The cart attached to the ATV broke loose as both men and the ATV hit the lake and spun in circles. Saunders and John skated on their backs to a stop while the ATV righted itself, and the tires dug in again.
Lucie gasped. The ATV was headed right for them. Either it was an older model with no kill switch or the switch had been disabled.
John rolled, grabbing Saunders by the hood of his coat and jerking him into the ATV’s path. The impact made a deafening crunch. Lucie flinched, covering her ears. The cart skidded past John and crashed into the ATV, now stalled on top of Saunders.
Several seconds passed, the only sound the ATV’s motor. Lucie’s breath came fast, her pulse pounding loudly in her ears.
“John?” She struggled to her feet.
He came up on all fours, lifting a hand in a stop signal. “Stay there.”
“You’re hurt, and you’re barely dressed. We need to—”
“Stay there!”
She pulled up short, watching him as he crawled over to Saunders’s body and checked for a pulse.
John sat back on his ankles, exhaustion oozing from every pore. “He’s dead, Lucie,” he called. “It’s over.”
Ignoring his demand to stay where she was, she rushed the ice, falling down next to him and hugging him to her. She laughed with relief and tried not to cry.
