by Cherry Adair
Thank God. Even though Rand knew he would’ve ripped Europe apart to find her, it could’ve taken two lifetimes to locate her out here in the middle of the Aegean Sea when he’d had no fucking clues. “Why was it necessary to kill Mark Stratham?”
“Ah. Ham. My man didn’t realize that you’d switched and taken the lead in the tunnels until the deed was done. Ham was one of us. Another unfortunate death whose blame I lay squarely on your shoulders, Rand. He’d been most useful, helping us keep track of you.”
Shit. “How many of my people work for you?”
“Out of your entire west-coast office? Twenty to thirty percent? The one’s you brought to the wedding? Five.”
“Cole Phelps?”
Creed waved a hand. “Your assistant proved to be far too diligent and inquisitive.”
“You killed him.” The anger Rand felt was hard to contain, but he had to do so if he and Dakota had a snowball’s hope in hell of getting out of this clusterfuck alive. He didn’t recognize his own voice as he demanded, “How many others?”
“They were either with me or against me. It was survival of the fittest. I’m proud of the way you’ve made Maguire Security the best in the business, Rand, I genuinely am. I always liked you. Smart. Resourceful. Honest. You’re a likable guy. Everyone has been extremely enthusiastic about the work you do. I’m sorry that you won’t be around to hear the accolades at your eulogy. I’m sure everyone’s warm and fuzzy comments will bring a tear to the eye. But the end justified the means. To get Dr. North, we needed you to be in place. Black knight to white queen. The circle of life.”
“Let me kill him first!” With flailing fists, Dakota lunged over Rand’s lap to get at Creed. Rand used his shoulder to block her, and she subsided, vibrating with fury.
“Chess and Disney cartoons, Creed?” The sound of the tires changed several minutes before. An even roughness. Cobbles? Chiseled stone? Still not a glimmer of light. “Maybe you should’ve picked up the fucking phone and filled me in on your plans. Then perhaps I would’ve been more goddamned cooperative.”
“You did give us the runarou—we’re here,” he finished abruptly.
HERE, DAKOTA SAW AS she and Rand were shoved into the ancient stone building, looked like an orthodox church, with muted stained-glass windows, rough-cut stone floors, and breathtaking paintings and mosaic works of art propped against the rough walls by a careless hand.
While barely illuminated by the spare glow of tall white taper candles, the paintings still looked as though they’d been finished yesterday. It was a room of about thirty feet by fifteen. No furniture, just the double rows of flickering candles leading straight to the door she saw in the back.
Seth Creed walked on her left, his leather dress shoes clicking on the hard, gritty floor. There was a faint smell to him that she’d tried to place in the car. Almost like the smell when her hair got caught in the hairdryer … Other men walked two behind, the rest on either side. More heavily armed men waited outside the door. Great. This just got better and better. They were outnumbered and outgunned. Basically, Dakota thought, tamping down hysteria, they were screwed.
Their captors all wore black pants, military-style boots, and long-sleeved black T-shirts. They were hung like Christmas trees with weapons—guns slung over their shoulders, knives in boots, handguns in harnesses, goggles around their necks. Night-vision, she presumed. Rand having her tiny, girly .38 gave her no sense of security at all, faced with all this impressive weapon power. She darted a glance at his face as he walked in step with her.
He appeared only mildly interested in what his friend was telling him. She, on the other hand, was riveted, because the closer they got to that damn door, the harder her heart pounded, the sweatier her palms became, and the more terrified she was.
“How did you get my fingerprints on the vials and letter you sent to Paul?” It was just one of a dozen questions she wanted answered. At this point, she didn’t actually care, but talking was better than listening to their footsteps leading them to God only knew what.
“That was a stroke of genius,” Creed said, pleased as hell with himself. “You actually held the vial and wrote the letter yourself.”
“I most certainly did n—”
“That lovely little nap you took at your engagement party?”
“I—Flunitrazepam!” She slapped her arm over Rand’s chest as he lunged. “Don’t. It makes no difference now.”
“He drugged you!”
She nodded. “Rohypnol.” Known as the date rape drug, and she would’ve done just about anything under the influence, and not remembered a damn thing when she woke up. No wonder the lawyer experts could prove she’d written that letter. She had. If she hadn’t been so hot and sweaty and pissed off, her blood would have been freezing at this new information.
“I’d like to kill you slow and with my own fucking bare hands, you sack of shit,” Rand told him. “But I want you dead too badly to draw it out.”
“Death has no fear for me.”
“Let’s see how you feel when my hands are around your goddamned throat, and I’m squeezing the life out of you.” Rand’s fury was palpable.
Dakota placed her hand on his arm, acutely aware of the inequity between the number of men in the room and the strength of their firepower. All Rand had was a six-inch gun with five bullets. “Let’s see what’s waiting for us before you turn feral, okay?”
“I’m not going to turn feral,” he snapped. “I am feral.”
The sound of the men’s boot heels echoed off the bare stone walls. It was cool inside—the stone must keep the heat of the day out—and she shivered, more from nerves than the temperature. The air smelled … sweet. Medicinal, not rose-scented, thank God. It would be the height of stupidity to attempt to dose them with Rapture. Unless Creed was a voyeur, in which case she’d just added another level of freak-out to what they already had.
She shot a curious glance at Creed walking on the other side of her. He looked like someone’s favorite uncle. Almost as tall as Rand, he had receding, fine, medium-brown hair and wore Coke-bottle-thick, black-framed glasses. He was dressed in khaki chinos and a pressed, long-sleeved blue dress shirt, buttoned to the last button under his prominent Adam’s apple. A less scary guy was hard to imagine. But here he was.
“What do you hope to gain by mass-producing Rapture, Creed?” Rand asked. “After the first billion, the money won’t mean a damn thing.”
The director’s steps faltered, and he glanced at Rand over Dakota’s head. He looked genuinely puzzled. “It was never about the money.” Then he proceeded toward the arched door in a ten-foot-thick wall.
“Then what?” Rand demanded. “Power? Notoriety?”
One of the knot of men waiting for them opened the beautifully carved wood door, and they passed through into a much brighter space. Dakota didn’t have time to take in anything, as Creed suddenly dropped to one knee beside her, head bowed. She glanced at him in surprise. Odder and odder. “What the h—”
“I do everything for Monk,” he said reverently. “Hello, Father.”
Next to her, Rand went stock-still, then bit out incredulously, “Yeah. Hello, father.”
EIGHTEEN
The room was lit by the steady flames of a dozen oil lanterns placed on several of the sterile-looking white work spaces lining the walls. Rand had been inside the labs of Rydell Pharmaceuticals a couple of times to pick Dakota up. This was a quarter of the size, maybe a tenth, but a perfect reproduction of one of the team’s testing units. He saw her eyes widen as she too looked around.
Other than walls that had probably been constructed a thousand years before, the space looked no different from the labs she’d shown him. Creed was right. State-of-the-art. Top-of-the-line. Scary as all motherfucking hell.
Computers, ventilated hoods, glassware, electron microscopes, analytical machines—Rand heard the throb of a generator close by. Or perhaps it was his own erratic heartbeat. “How did you escape a maximum-security pris
on?” he asked his father, who wore a monk’s rough-spun robe, complete with an ancient-looking silver cross on a heavy silver chain around his neck.
Paul looked at him over the flame of his lighter as he touched it to the tip of his cigar. “Walked right out the door. As I’ve so often done in the last twenty-five months and three days.” He smiled. “Money oils a lot of wheels and greases many palms. My life in Capanne was quite pleasant. I had servants”—he reached out a hand and drew Creed to his side—“like faithful Szik here, and—”
“His name,” Rand snapped, “is Seth Creed.”
Paul shrugged. “His adopted name. But my Szik is from Budapest, not so, my son?”
Creed bowed his head. “Yes, Father.”
Rand rubbed his hand over his jaw, sick to his stomach. He got no sexual vibe from the pair. He suspected that the bond they shared was nothing so normal, that what these two shared was complicated and depraved. Whatever the sick relationship ran on, it appeared they were more king and a serf, puppeteer and his puppet, than sexual partners. “So Creed’s worked for you all this time?”
“And he hired you at my request.”
“Fine. Great. Whatever,” Dakota said, moving slightly in front of Rand. “What’s your point? Because I’ll repeat what I told your puppet there—I’m not going to help you in any way whatsoever. Not now, not ever.” She folded her arms over her chest and spread her feet. “White queen to black whatever.”
The corner of Paul’s eye ticked for an instant, or perhaps it was Rand’s imagination. “Do you think something like this operation happened overnight?” Paul asked as if she hadn’t spoken. “I knew I needed Dakota to work by my side if I wanted to produce a stable version of Rapture for transportation. Only small batches, of course. Everything will be made right here on Agion Oros.”
“Dressing like a monk doesn’t make you a monk. What’s going to happen when the real monks who live here discover you?”
“I am a ‘real’ monk.” Paul made air quotes. “I’ve been coming here for twenty years. Everyone knows who I am. We keep to ourselves and pray.” He smiled coldly. “Or rather, they pray, and I work in my lab. To each his own.”
And then, in a non sequitur: “Do you really think for a moment that the two of you met by accident ?” Paul’s smile didn’t reach his eyes. But then, it never did.
“What are you planning to do? Keep me under lock and key forever?” She huffed out a fuck-you breath. “In case you haven’t noticed, women haven’t set foot in this place in several zillion years. Someone’s bound to notice when you have to go on a run for tampons and chocolate.”
Again he spoke over her as if she hadn’t said anything. “I knew that if Rand saw Rapture in action, he’d recognize some of the symptoms, know it was from Rydell, and call you for help.”
Rand gave him a cold look, but he’d changed his depth perception, so while it looked as though he was focused on Paul, he was actually seeing everything behind him. “I didn’t,” he responded evenly as he estimated the distance to various items around the lab that could, and would, be used as weapons the second he considered it time to make his move.
The electron microscope was only a dozen feet away, looking suitably lethal as a weapon. He’d start with that.
Creed stood, head bowed, beside Paul. The four black-garbed men they’d come in with were stationed in the corner, heads bowed in respect to the son-of-a-bitch psycho to whom he had genetic ties.
The windows had been boarded from the outside, and there were three, no, four doors. How the fuck was he going to get them out of here? Zak Stark was supposed to be sending in some counterterrorist group as backup, but Rand had no idea when, or even if, they’d show. There was also the unwelcome possibility that they’d already been taken out by Creed’s muscle.
“I didn’t know that it was the same drug Dakota was working on. We didn’t do a lot of talking,” he told Paul, easing Dakota a little behind him as she crowded close. God, was she trying to protect him? “And even if I had, Dakota was the last person I would’ve asked for help, since I believed she was responsible for putting you in jail.”
Not to mention all the bullshit his mother had fed him, and the proof, impossible to dispute, that he’d seen with his own eyes. What in his life had been real? Rand wondered bitterly. His entire life had apparently been manipulated and twisted to suit Paul’s every fucking whim. He’d thrown away the one truth—Dakota—for his unworthy parents. He deserved to be shot for his fucking stupidity. He was in the right place for that to happen.
“Yet another way you failed me,” Paul told him shortly. “I knew she was the love of your life, son. I worked with what I had. I need her to stabilize the formula for mass production, and you were worthless at keeping her in line.”
“Well, you didn’t get that right either. She was the last person I would’ve called, even if it had occurred to me do to so. I didn’t want her anywhere near this clusterfuck. I asked a friend for hel—” His voice choked off as he saw a gleam, a spark of satisfaction flash in his father’s eyes.
Jesus. He stiffened. He’d been keeping Stark apprised of everything that was going on. Was Zak Stark a part of this too? Because if he was, there was no goddamned cavalry charging to the rescue, now or ever. Was the small boat still where they’d left it at the base of the bluff? Hell, could they even get back there in the pitch dark? And that was if they weren’t shot or otherwise rendered fucking dead.
“Yes, Stark,” Paul said with a self-satisfied smile. “I knew our girl had gone to work for him last year. Nothing escapes my notice. I banked on him sending her to you. Either way, I won.”
“Are you deaf or just stupid? Let me repeat this more slowly,” Dakota said, taking an aggressive step forward, and only Rand’s fingers on her wrist kept her from going right up to Paul. Fury made her voice hard as she bit out, “I. Will. Not. Help. You. Or work with you. Or advise you. Or anything else with you. Go. Fuck. Yourself.”
Paul continued to ignore her, but the tic under his right eye got more pronounced. “Since your mother believed everyone was out to get her money, she bought into the betrayal story hook, line, and sinker. I knew she’d go running off to show you that carefully constructed dossier, but the PI screwed up and gave it to her too soon.” Paul folded his hands inside his sleeves. “It took a lot of work to get Dr. North here where I need her.”
Rand considered the weight of a calibrator on a nearby worktable as his second weapon. “What do you mean, a ‘lot of work’?”
“You were supposed to go to Paris for your honeymoon after your romantic Valentine’s Day wedding. You would have encountered a tragic accident, Dakota would have gone somewhere to recover from her deep sorrow. Instead, she’d have been here with me. With her help, I could’ve gotten Rapture on the market two years ago.”
“Did you kill Catherine intentionally?” Rand asked flatly.
“She was my final test. Rapture built up extremely quickly in her system. I thought she’d last at least another few weeks. Her premature death was very inconvenient.”
“Inconvenient, you sick fuck?” Rand lunged for him, hands outstretched to grab him by the throat. Creed jumped forward and stuck Rand’s own weapon in his face. Son of a bitch was expressionless unless he had his glowing eyes on Paul.
“The lab’s impressive,” Dakota inserted, drawing Rand back and giving him a moment to assimilate all the information. He kept his fingers more lightly banding her wrist. “How long has this, this abomination—and God, yes, I mean the bunch of you as well as the lab—been in an area that’s counted among the most holy places in the world? Why haven’t the monks shut you down and tossed you into the Aegean?”
“We built the lab three years ago. They have no idea it’s here, and they don’t ask questions. They think we’re here year-round. We come into a small cove under cover of darkness by boat. Our closest neighbor is more than ten miles away. No one comes out to this old monastery. Dangerously unstable, the local residents believe. T
hey think I’m a saint for living in such onerous conditions without complaint. A perfect location, with an abundant natural resource right at our fingertips.”
Dangerously unstable sounded damned good to Rand. He could work with that—he’d been doing it his entire life.
“SZIK, TAKE DAKOTA TO her quarters,” Paul told Creed when Dakota yawned—not from exhaustion, which she felt in spades, but from fear. She was too wired to be tired and knew her body just needed the extra oxygen. But whatever delayed the inevitable was fine with her. She yawned again for good measure.
“As impatient as I am to get started, clearly she’s tired and needs to rest before starting work,” he concluded.
“Wherever Dakota goes, I go.” Rand wrapped his arm firmly around her waist, pulling her tight against his side. Very helpful, since Dakota’s knees were decidedly shaky. She felt as though she’d been dropped into a bad play and someone had forgotten to give her the damned script.
“And we’re not staying,” she added for those who hadn’t got the memo.
Paul withdrew his black-framed glasses from his pocket, unfolded them, and, in no damn hurry, put them on his nose. His chest rose and fell with a soft sigh as his magnified eyes gave her a steady look. “I’m afraid I must insist.”
“I’m not afraid to decline,” she countered. She had no idea how they were going to get the hell out of there. None. Before Rand was able to get off five shots from her little gun, the men would shoot him on the spot. He was redundant now. They all knew it.
“Stalemate, Paul,” Rand told him. “I know her well. Once Dakota makes up her mind, you might as well give up.”
Maintaining eye contact with her, Paul told Creed, “Shoot him.”
She stepped in front of Rand, her body blocking his. “Go ahead. If you shoot him, you’ll shoot me.” Rand’s big hands closed in a punishing grip around her waist. She stood her ground, on her tiptoes to cover as much of him as possible. “We’ll die together and you still won’t get your damned drug stabilized. Save the blood and gore, and let us go.”
