Ripped: A Blood Money Novel

by Edie Harris

  “What do you mean, he ‘dropped by’?”

  So much for not shaking. Chandler hugged her torso tightly, keeping her gaze trained on Tobias’s chest. “During one of my s-sessions. Where I had to prove I was the monster I claimed to be. Kedrov came and sat in my kitchen and watched.” Her throat thickened. “He laughed. He applauded.” That first time, he’d spent the night in the flat with her alone, his guards wandering the halls, his burned and scarred body hunched in a chair next to her bed, staring at her unblinking as she pretended to sleep. At one point, he had reached out to pet her hair with two gnarled fingers, all the while humming an off-tune song about house kittens and alley cats. “He kept coming back, after that.”

  But that was neither here nor there, not with Tobias. She exhaled slowly. “If you’re wondering who wanted to hurt your sister, Kedrov is the most likely suspect.”

  “I know.”

  She jerked her eyes to his. “You...know? How do you know? I just told you Kedrov was alive.” And she was one of only a dozen or so people on the planet who knew so.

  “We backtraced the camera feed after finding Beth in the bunker. Adam managed to hack Kedrov’s computer, and we got a clear shot of his face.” Tobias slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans, rocking back onto his heels. “I’m going to kill Kedrov for what he did to Beth.”

  That’s why he was headed to Moscow, why he required her help. “Did you know I knew about Kedrov?” she demanded.

  He shook his head. “All I wanted was access to the inner circle, which I knew you had. Maybe inside knowledge about the geography of the place I’m most likely to find that circle, who’s willing to take bribes, who isn’t. Chandler...” Reaching out, he cupped her cheek, and she helplessly leaned into the heat of his palm. “I won’t make you take me there.” When she opened her mouth to argue, he shushed her with his thumb against her lips. “You said it yourself, with Kuznetsov dead and Kedrov obviously hunting you down, the last place you ought to be traveling to is Moscow.” Concern, painfully genuine, radiated from his scruffy face.

  “I have to go,” she mumbled as the pad of his thumb stroked over her lower lip, sending a wave of welcome heat through her numb body.

  “If you’re worried about Yang and your position at T-16—”

  “I’m not.” She pushed his arm away, gently, and stepped back. “We made a deal, Toby. You took me to my sister’s wedding—and went above and beyond that particular call of duty, I must say. Now I...I will take you to Moscow to kill Karlin Kedrov. Your sister deserves to know she’s safe in this world, and she won’t feel safe until he’s dead.” Scrubbing her hands over her face, she retreated another step, until she knelt by her suitcase. “Trust me when I say I know a little something about things that go bump in the night, yeah?”

  His voice, when he spoke, was quiet and low. “What are you doing, sweetheart?”

  The battered pair of trainers slipped onto her feet, she quickly knotted the laces and stood. “I need to run.”

  He reached for his own bag. “I’ll run with you.”

  “No.” Holding out a hand to halt his progress, she went to the door, opened it. “There is a lot of ugly in my head right now, baby.” The endearment snuck out without warning, and saying it dulled the jagged edges inside her, enough so she could smile at him, a soft, small smile. “But there’s a lot of beautiful, too, and that’s due to you. Please...let me run.”

  His clear gray gaze bored into hers, drawing forth promises she wasn’t ready to keep and letting them simmer on her tongue. “You can run, Chandler. So long as you run back to me when you’re done.”

  Unable to speak past the lump in her throat, she nodded and fled down the stairs and through the front door of the Lupine, not stopping until she was past the quaint front gate and onto the cart path beneath the trees. Leaning against the boot of the Mercedes, she sucked in great lungfuls of crisp morning air, tasting the dew in each molecule as she valiantly fought against the insistent sting of tears.

  She wanted to keep him.

  She wanted to keep Tobias, and that could never, ever happen. Not after the role she played in Beth’s nightmare, and certainly not given her connections to monsters in this life and her past one. No great surprise there; Tobias Faraday was so far out of reach for a girl like her that they hadn’t even been able to invent a plausible lie as to how they knew one another.

  It was the saddest of truths: she was falling for a man to whom she wouldn’t exist were it not for a great tragedy she had participated in perpetrating. That was not a connection. That was a bloody consequence.

  Pressing her overheated forehead to the sedan’s ruby-black finish, she soaked in the coolness, forcing her jumbled mind to slow, to calm. Calm, calm, be fucking calm, goddamn it. Big breath in, slow breath out. Big breath in—

  And a giant’s hand fisting in her hair to yank her away from the car.

  Chandler shrieked as she kicked back at her assailant, elbows swinging as she attempted to land a blow, but the arm attached to the fist remained outstretched, holding her away from his body. She twisted violently, hissing as she felt a sizable hank of hair detach from her scalp, and in doing so got a good look at who was behind her.

  All sensation fled her limbs, her face draining of color. “Rolan?”

  The Priest—who was supposed to be dead, considering the round Chandler had solidly blasted into his massive chest yesterday morning in the Noltes’ garden—stared down at her with his usual empty-eyed expression. His Russian was as hollow as his gaze. “You get to choose, devochka moya. Come home or I snap your neck.”

  She had no doubt he meant it, and no doubt he meant her to choose right now.

  The sound of a door slamming snared her attention, and the Priest took advantage of her momentary distraction to wrap his powerful fingers around her throat. But Chandler didn’t care, because striding down the front path toward them was Tobias, a sleek sidearm gripped confidently in both hands and cold rage in his eyes. “What did I tell you about speaking to her, Kuznetsov?”

  The Priest squeezed.

  Chandler sucked in air, instinct demanding she claw at the threat to her windpipe, but she forced her hands to remain at her sides. “Toby, no,” she begged hoarsely. Just like in the garden, she could see how this would unfold: Tobias might get his perfectly aimed shot, but Kuznetsov would break her neck like a pretzel stick first.

  As her vision began to swim, the epiphany struck. Come home, he’d said. Come home...to Moscow, where Karlin Kedrov waited to play with her once again. She would be in the same room with him, sharing the same oxygen—perhaps doused in the same blood spatter. For the first time in her life, Chandler was grateful for her past, the days with Reggie, the months with Nash. That violence had prepared her for this.

  She was going to kill Kedrov, for Toby. My Toby.

  Begging him to understand—and to forgive—she took one last look at Tobias before tapping the arm holding her immobile. “Let’s go home.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  Plane rides were interminable.

  Tobias had never thought so before, having enjoyed the opportunity to rest after a business meeting or read up prior to another. Flying offered him a chance to regroup, especially when he flew privately on the Faraday jet as opposed to commercial; no one bothered him, and he had the freedom to move about as he pleased without being chastised by a patently polite flight attendant.

  But tonight, regardless that he was aboard the family plane, no matter that he could pace the length of the center aisle to his heart’s content, everything about this particular flight left him antsy.

  “Sit down, man. You’re driving me nuts.”

  He turned on his heel to spear his older brother Casey with a dark look. “I will sit when I wish to sit,” he responded crisply. “Your sanity is your business.”

 
The former soldier and head of all Faraday tactical operations sprawled in an oversized leather chair, wearing his typical uniform of white T-shirt and black cargo pants, one combat-booted ankle propped on his knee. Casey had arrived on English soil with the other two Faraday employees Tobias had initially requested as backup for Pippa’s wedding, though they hadn’t arrived until after the fact. A convenient coincidence once the world imploded this morning.

  She’d left. Chandler had left with a dead man twice her size crushing her throat.

  “Yeah, well, you’re giving me a headache.” Casey massaged his temple. “Did you do up your buttons too tight this morning?”

  As a matter of fact, Tobias had. After gathering their belongings from the room at the Lupine, he’d settled the bill, driven hell-for-leather for London and begun making some calls. All without taking a single deep breath. He couldn’t breathe, not when he kept remembering the too-calm expression on Chandler’s face in the moment she told Rolan Kuznetsov to take her home.

  She shouldn’t have looked like that—as though the Priest coming back from the grave had been part of her plan all along. As though returning to Moscow didn’t terrify her. As though she were saying goodbye to Tobias...forever.

  Unacceptable.

  The first call had been to Casey, demanding he and the Faraday pilot, Reid Okumura, prep the jet at Heathrow for a direct flight to Moscow, followed by a second call to Adam. Taking Chandler’s phone apart had revealed an internal tracking device—as soon as she had turned her cell on again after Tobias had returned it to her that week, the Russians could find her, meaning that the Priest had likely known about her presence at Val Manor from the first, no matter that he was there for the wedding festivities. Certainly that was how Kuznetsov had tracked them to the bed and breakfast, as well. Pulling up her deleted voicemails, he rattled off to his younger brother the number for the call from Kedrov.

  “I need an exact location for that number by tonight.” He couldn’t afford to waste time searching an entire city for one tiny blonde woman, not when every second that passed increased the danger she faced.

  “You got it, bro.” Adam had waited a beat, his words slightly hesitant. “Tobias?”

  “Yes?”

  “She went with the dude willingly, right? Maybe...maybe it’s what she wanted to do all along.”

  Tobias had hung up on his brother.

  Adam was wrong, he knew. Chandler’s face when she was watching the recording of Beth’s torture, the visible revulsion in every line of her body when she had confessed to knowing Kedrov was alive. There had been much she hadn’t told him about her months in Moscow, pretending to be Mary McCallister, but he found he didn’t need to know. It didn’t stop him from wanting to know, of course, because he was inquisitive by nature and understood that the best means of mounting a proper offensive was to learn the enemy’s playbook. Chandler had that playbook memorized, whether she knew it or not.

  He’d never wanted to send her inside the Polnoch’ Pulya unprotected, had meant what he had told her when he said she didn’t need to come with him. He knew what she hadn’t explained: that if Kedrov was calling her, personally, and sending his top enforcer chasing after her, Chandler was as good as dead.

  Which was why he had no time to lose. Once aboard the plane, he’d briefly run through the situation with Casey and the two operatives, Henry and Finn. Their presence on this mission was a boon, as Tobias had no doubt he would need all the extra muscle he could lay hands on. As soon as the pilot had them in the air, he’d grabbed his suitcase and headed for the bedroom and adjoining bath at the rear of the plane.

  An hour later, he’d emerged, and the man from the cozy bed-and-breakfast suite had disappeared. Coiffed and shaved, dressed in the sharp charcoal three-piece suit he wore to the most vital of his negotiations on behalf of Faraday Industries, he hardened his jaw and deemed himself ready.

  Battle armor, in the form of bespoke tailoring and tidy buttons.

  Now he paused in his pacing, his glance flicking to where Henry and Finn played what appeared to be the board game of Life in the forward section, at a table situated beneath a flat-screen television blaring a Premier League match. The two soldiers, one a former Marine medic, the other an Air Force officer who’d served alongside Captain Okumura, traded barbs in hushed tones, laughing as the silly game turned competitive and completely unaware of the turmoil raging within Tobias.

  The animal side of his nature was no longer content to simply prowl. It rattled the cage and roared, because it knew without question what Tobias barely felt capable of comprehending.

  Last night with Chandler had been astounding. Restraint had disappeared, all the aggression and emotion he kept under lock and key escaping to pour into his hands and mouth and body, everything hers to command. She had taught him what she liked, what she loved, what made her scream and gasp and groan, and in turn, she’d given him free rein to direct her as he saw fit.

  He’d moved over her, under her. He’d touched her with reverence and tenderness, excitement and the rough edge of passion. He’d sampled her every taste and was left hungry for more. And until he had woken up alone in their shared bed—finally, they shared a bed, and his sleep had felt infinite—Tobias had been half-convinced he had actually died in the west garden at Val Manor the day before, that Kuznetsov had shot him, that Chandler hadn’t saved his life and that he was stuck in some sort of dreamlike afterlife where he could do and say everything he didn’t dare in reality.

  For a few greedily sensuous hours, his words and actions were solely his own and not driven by the need to protect his family and their interests. For those hours, Tobias had been fully himself.

  It was all Chandler’s fault. As soon as he had her back in his grasp, he planned to tell her as much. At length. Perhaps involving the use of his hands on that perfect ass of hers.

  “I can’t believe we’re chasing after that crazy bitch.”

  Casey’s hard tone drew his attention back to the present, forcing Tobias to carefully hide away the memories of the night before and become the man his brother knew. Knew and trusted, though tension gripped him at hearing the epithet Casey flung at the woman Tobias l—”Chandler is neither of those things.”

  Casey eyed him speculatively, irises a darker gray than the rest of their siblings, a smoky color verging on a blue-brown hazel. Of the five of them—Adam, Beth, Gillian, Tobias and Casey—it was Casey who most closely resembled their Canadian-born Moroccan mother, Sofia, in terms of coloring. His dark hair was buzzed nearly to his scalp, his skin quite dark from spending most of his time out of doors, hopping from one country to the next hot on the trail of danger and disaster.

  He was perfect for those sorts of missions, blending into the background because of his apparent indeterminate racial status, his features aquiline yet rugged. No one would guess that his father was a fair-haired, blue-eyed Caucasian with roots tracing back to the American Revolution. The oldest Faraday sibling used that to his advantage, coupled with his perfect fluencies in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and Farsi. Casey’s sturdily muscled frame tended to give the impression he was a man more of brawn than brains, and early on in his career—first with the Army, then with the CIA before leaving to help run the family business—he’d preyed on that assumption to gain access to various criminal organizations in South America and the Middle East as a low-level bruiser. No one ever suspected the new grunt of being more than a dumb rock, not until it was too late.

  Above all things, however, beyond the linguist and the spy and the soldier, Casey was a family man. In that, Tobias and his older brother were alike. The safety and welfare of their core unit was of the utmost importance. Beth’s capture had shaken Casey, Tobias knew, much as it had shaken him. That said, their instincts were oceans apart. Where Tobias planned to eradicate the threat Kedrov posed in its entirety so that Beth could go about her life in Chicago w
ithout fear, Casey wanted to smother Beth in protection with an abundance of loved ones, bodyguards and firearms.

  Casey was the defensive line.

  Tobias was the fucking quarterback. “Ms. McCallister is under our guardianship. Abandoning her to the Russian mob is not an option.”

  “Do you have a plan?”

  “No, Casey, I thought I’d knock on the door and shout ‘surprise.’”

  “Someone sure is feeling sassy.”

  Hands turning to fists at his sides, Tobias battled the foreign urge to land a right hook on his brother’s square jaw. “The plan is to do my job and negotiate the release of Chandler into my custody.”

  Casey snorted. “Assuming she’s still alive.”

  “She’s alive.” Ice swirled in his blood, the back of his neck prickling as something rather like fear crystallized in his gut. Chandler dead—hell, Chandler harmed in any manner—was no option at all, not for Tobias. “You and the others keep the vehicles running and Okumura on standby. We’ll probably need to leave in a hurry.”

  “And Kedrov?”

  He swallowed past the angry knot that manifested in his throat at that name. “Kedrov is not the mission. Getting Chandler out of there is.” It was the truth, but he resumed his pacing nonetheless.

  Sighing, Casey pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. “Then we need to talk about Gavin.”

  Gavin Bok—the Faraday operative currently embedded within the Polnoch’ Pulya. When last they’d seen him, there had been no mention of the vendetta against Beth, no mention of Nash and Chandler, no mention of Kedrov not being dead. He hadn’t checked in via satellite phone or responded to the encrypted message Adam had sent Gavin’s way when the situation with Beth grew dire. But neither had they received a distress signal from Gavin, and standard operating procedure was to maintain faith in the covert operative unless proof presented itself that such faith was misplaced.