Relentless (Lodestone)

by Cherry Adair

  This time it was she who did the wrist grabbing. “No thanks. I’ll go with you. I feel too exposed out here, and if anything happens to you, I’ll be stuck here alone.”

  After several heartbeats, he agreed quietly, not sounding particularly happy. “All right. Hold on to my belt so we stay together, but my hands are free. If we encounter anyone, fall to the ground and keep your head covered until I give the all-clear. Got it?” His eyes glinted. “And if we should run into any action, don’t bloody well help me.”

  “God, no. I’ll run like hell and leave you in the dust.” Chauvinistic ass. He managed to make her blood boil in so many ways, and not all of them were good. “Let’s get this over with.”

  She didn’t need to hold on to him going down the steep stairs, but once at the bottom, she slid her hand into the back of his jeans to grip his belt. The heat of his skin through the damp fabric of his shirt gave Isis a crystal-clear image of them rubbing their naked bodies together. The picture was so clear, so visceral that her nipples peaked, and she pressed closer to his back, as turned on as if he’d touched her.

  She enjoyed the sensation, if not her lousy timing. The nerve-racking darkness and the eye-watering stench got rid of the image pretty fast. Eyes moving from side to side as she strained to see any threats in the gloom, Isis kept pace and acknowledged the duality of her responses to the man. As annoying as he tried to be, she was still turned on by everything about him. Go figure.

  They entered the dark mouth of the tunnel. She’d only been inside once, many years before, and tried to picture it in her mind’s eye as they walked. A curved ceiling, lots of cracked, dirty white tile, cement floor, a jog at the end…

  There was enough light from the entrance to illuminate partway inside—but from there the rest of the tunnel disappeared into thick darkness. The close confines smelled strongly of body fluids and greasy french fries. There were American-style fast-food places everywhere in Cairo, and people the world over littered.

  Their shoes echoed alarmingly as they crunched on the gritty floor. The air was still and close, and did nothing for her sweat-dampened skin, or her recurring jitters.

  “Down!” Thorne yelled, reaching back one-handed to rip her fingers free from his belt. A shot ricocheted through the space, causing Isis to flinch. Then another. She dropped flat on her stomach on the filthy floor, then rolled out of the way as booted feet converged and the sound of flesh meeting bone mingled with men’s grunts and guttural curses. She rolled into as small a ball as possible and covered her head with her arms—which was insane, because her forearms weren’t fricking bulletproof.

  FIVE

  Thorne was ready for them—in fact, he fucking well welcomed them. He’d had enough of this bullshit of running around in the dark with his head up his arse. His lips curled back in a snarl as he got off a shot at the guy on his left, which was answered by a hoarse shout, followed by a bullet coming from his right. Close enough to feel the heat and hear the buzz as the shot whizzed by his ear, then ricocheted farther down the curved walls. The sound echoed in the close confines of the tunnel, mingling with the explosion of shattered tile and cement behind him.

  He spared a quick glance to assure himself Isis was out of the line of fire. She was down on the ground, pressed tightly against the wall, head buried in her arms.

  He counted four men but suspected there might be more. Thorne spun to face the closest gun, parried the first blow with his forearm, and used his weapon hand to slam into an eye socket. The man howled, grabbing him by the wrist, and wrenched his arm back. Thorne followed the momentum of the twist, extricating himself, kneed the guy in the balls, and followed through with a right cross.

  It would be nice to get some questions answered, but these guys were clearly the brawn so he saved his breath. Feeling a rush of displaced air, he spun around as someone ran up behind him. Parrying the thrust of a knife with a chop of his arm, he felt the thin, white-hot line cut in his skin. Fuck, he hated knives. The man topped Thorne by a good six inches and was at least fifty pounds heavier, all of it fat, but he moved fast. Only a quick, fast-shoe shuffle had Thorne dancing inches out of reach before the man grabbed him around the throat. He spun and fired a shot almost point-blank into the man’s chest. The warm scatter of blood hit his face before the guy dropped.

  “Who sent you?” Thorne demanded, shooting out his fist as a third guy, robes flapping, came at him with some sort of cudgel.

  Someone else grabbed his arm, trying to wrench it out of its socket. Pain radiated up into Thorne’s neck as he leaned into the wrench. His fingers went numb, and the Glock he was using fell uselessly to the ground. Fucking hell! There was too much action to even consider dropping down to look for it. Thorne spun, rammed his elbow into someone’s jaw, and heard the snap of breaking bone and a grunt of pain. He danced back to avoid another knife, slipped on a pool of blood, and righted himself with a flip in midair before he went down.

  Another attacker seized upon his disadvantage and with a wild cry leapt at him. Thorne grabbed his wrist, wrenched the knife from his fingers, and did a roundhouse kick with his bad leg to the guy’s head. Boot met cranium with a sound like an exploding watermelon. The guy dropped.

  So his leg was good for something. Good to know.

  Fatty was back and sucker-punched him in that nanosecond’s distraction. Thorne’s breath went out in an agonized rush of air. But he’d been hit worse, and he repelled Fatty’s buddy, Robes, by slamming his palm into the bridge of the guy’s nose where there was bone, not soft cartilage. The crunch was satisfying, but he didn’t have time to admire his handiwork. They kept coming, more and more of them, like thugs out of a clown car. One down, two more entered the fray.

  Fuck. It was like fighting a goddamned mythical hydra. Cut off one bloody head and two more took its place. A second gut punch elicited a harsh exhale as Thorne staggered backward. Broken ribs, he was sure. No time to feel it. Striking out cobra-fast, he sliced the side of his palm into Fatty’s windpipe. With a gurgle, the man tottered, clutching his throat as he dropped to his knees.

  Robes came at him again. Thorne’s philosophy was, if an opponent wasn’t standing, he wasn’t fighting. As Robes got close enough, Thorne grabbed the front of his loose garment, pulled him in, and at the same time stuck out his leg. The guy ran right into the obstacle, went down with a girly shriek, and lay on his belly panting.

  Thorne let a short guy get close enough that he could smell the cigarette stink of his breath, Thorne’s eyes watering at the man’s powerful body odor. Jesus. He should kill the guy just for stinking. He hauled back and delivered a lower-rib shot, using the guy’s own forward momentum to make the blow memorable. The man’s gun went one way, the guy the other, but he managed to stagger back upright like a Weeble, then came back in, head lowered like a bull fixated on a red cape.

  Thorne let him come, keeping the others in his peripheral vision. Stinky was in their way, so he had at least a couple of seconds to maneuver while their shots were blocked.

  Stinky was breathing hard and ragged. Couldn’t get his lungs filled. Thorne compounded his problem by pummeling his rib cage, specifically his vulnerable short ribs, until the man’s breathing became even more labored.

  Having sustained a similar beating from his friend Yermalof, Thorne knew how bad the guy hurt, and just how badly the guy’s chest must be screaming for mercy every time he tried to drag in a breath. Grabbing a fistful of Stinky’s thick, wiry hair, Thorne brought the guy’s nose down sharply and his own knee up hard. The sound of crushed cartilage and bone was extremely satisfying.

  Flinging him aside, he ground his foot down on the guy’s wrist. A kick jettisoned the knife aside as it fell uselessly from the man’s numb fingers. For good measure Thorne gave the man a little tap on the side of the head with the toe of his boot.

  He heard the man behind him seconds before he felt the breeze of a blunt instrument skimming his ear. The blow struck hard to his shoulder, hard enough to drop him to one
knee.

  He was up fast, but in the intervening few seconds, there was a wild cry, and Isis launched herself out of the darkness to attach herself like a spider monkey to the guy’s back. Arms and legs wrapped around the man’s torso, she hung on for dear life as the man tried to unseat her.

  Jesus. If it hadn’t scared the crap out of him, Thorne would’ve laughed.

  The man cursed colorfully in Arabic, whirling like a dervish with a determined woman clinging on his back, scoring her nails into the flesh of his face. She was trying to pull him off center with her weight. The man staggered and cursed, trying to pry her legs from around his waist, but she was determined and her ankles were dangerously locked together over his dick.

  The diaphragm was a prime target, and Thorne made sure when he hit the guy there, he hit hard enough for every bit of air to leave the man’s lungs. It had little impact.

  “Off!” Thorne yelled at Isis. He saw her eyes glinting in the darkness, then she lifted one foot and slammed her heel down with unerring accuracy directly into the man’s groin.

  The injured man gave a bloodcurdling scream and doubled over to clutch his balls. Thorne’s balls contracted with him. Isis was on her feet and several steps out of range when the man’s eyes rolled back in his head and he was down.

  “Good job. Let’s get the hell out of here while the going’s g—”

  He shouldn’t have been so goddamned self-satisfied, because he felt a rush of air. There was someone he hadn’t seen. The man rushed him, knife gripped as an extension of his arm.

  “Grab my gun on the ground behind you!” he yelled to Isis. “Hell. Any fucking gun! Move!”

  He and New Guy danced around in a circle, stepping over sprawled bodies as the knife wielder slashed. Thorne kept his distance while also maintaining his balance. He spun to block another attack on his flank, saw just in time Isis’s wide eyes, and grabbed his weapon from her proffered hand. In one smooth continuous move, he turned the weapon on his attacker and fired.

  The sound reverberated and echoed down the length of the tunnel. And then there was nothing left but pulsing silence.

  Boom. Done. Only the adrenaline remained.

  “You all right?” he demanded, crouching to feel for Stinky’s and Robes’s pulses at the same time. Both out, and unfortunately alive, as Isis walked around each man doing God only knew what, bending to pick things up off the floor.

  “To say I’m more scared than I’ve ever been in my life is an understatement,” Isis snapped, voice shaking. Thorne heard the shimmer of anger there, too. She was holding it together, but he suspected that wasn’t going to last.

  “Here, do something with these.”

  These were three guns and a heavy wooden object meant to splatter his brains on the walls. Thorne took the weapons and stuck them in his belt.

  “Let’s not stick around to ask questions.”

  “Or call an ambulance?”

  “Or call an ambulance,” he repeated dryly. The underpass had stunk before—now with various new body fluids leaking all over the place it was no wonder Isis had her palm over her face. Thorne slid his arm around her waist and propelled her from the tunnel at a trot.

  They emerged into the street, where there were lights and people. Still, he kept his eyes peeled for more trouble as they sprinted toward the mosque, where he knew they’d find a taxi, even at this time of night. “How you holding up?” Adrenaline was leaking out of him, and he was aware of the agonizing pain in his thigh, the sharp sting of the deep cut on his arm, and the bruising ache of broken ribs.

  “Oh, I’ve never been better,” she assured him, sarcasm thick in her voice. Her eyes looked dark and huge in her pale face. Snapping open her camera case, she removed her glasses and shoved them with some force onto her face. She was filthy, but he didn’t see any blood on her. Her respiration was erratic, and a pulse throbbed hard at the base of her throat. She turned her head to give him a hard look. “We’ll be arrested when people see you covered in blood like this.”

  “Trust me, no one will even blink.” He kept to the shadows of a stand of trees looking for a cab. Looking for more trouble. He’d look for answers later.

  “Hang on…” She rummaged in her bag, which somehow hadn’t been dislodged from her shoulder despite her recent activities. Isis handed him a wad of tissues and a tiny bottle of hand sanitizer, shoving them into his chest. “Here. Do the best you can. I can’t afford to bail either of us out of jail right now.”

  Thorne cleaned up as best he could, the alcohol in the sanitizer providing a bracing sting in his cuts and abrasions as he scanned the vehicles passing and weighed their options.

  How had Yermalof found him?

  More important, did Yermalof know about Isis? Or had his men just been instructed to take him out? Were they even Yermalof’s men, or had they been followed from the airport by opportunistic thieves?

  He spotted a cab and stepped out of the shadows to wave it down. After stuffing Isis inside, he got in, too, slamming the door and giving the driver the name of their hotel.

  Thorne kept watch in the rearview mirror as the cab pulled into the street. He considered if the attack had really been ordered by Yermalof.

  “What…”

  He shook his head. Not in the cab, and not until he had some definitive answers. She nodded a silent agreement. Smart girl. A chill cooled the sweat on his skin.

  This hadn’t been a random group effort. He’d been followed from the airport. Followed from London? Boris Yermalof had friends in low places all over the world. Especially here in Cairo.

  Thorne knew going to London might reactivate Yermalof’s directive. Now he knew. Fucking hell.

  What the hell was he going to do with Isis?

  “We landed less than an hour before the accident. Since I’m not stupid enough to believe that everything we’ve just gone through could be random, who could possibly know we’re here?” Apparently she could only hold her silence for thirty seconds.

  He slid the glass partition shut between the driver and themselves and lowered his voice. “The van that hit us followed us from the airport. They knew we were coming in on the flight.” His tone was grim, and his eyes constantly flickered from the rearview mirror to the side mirror and back again.

  Something struck him as off. Yermalof was nothing if not chillingly efficient. Sending that many men to rough him up wasn’t the sort of message Thorne expected his archenemy to deliver. Good old Boris was a direct man and liked to inflict maximum pain. Personally. He’d waited eight months to come out of the shadows? He held one hell of a grudge, and the truth of the matter was, the Russian had won the last round.

  Those guys, while fairly adept, hadn’t been as skilled as Yermalof’s usual men. Thorne would either be dead or back in the Russian’s clutches if that were the case. The thought brought bile to his throat.

  “How long till we get to the hotel?” Isis demanded tightly, eyes glittering. She looked a little green and swallowed convulsively. The adrenaline was definitely wearing off.

  “Ten minutes. Are you going to puke?”

  “Probably,” she said in a small voice. “Don’t worry, I’ll try and wait until I get to my room.”

  She didn’t make it.

  WRAPPED IN A HOTEL robe, Isis opened the door on the second knock. “Sorry about that,” she said immediately on seeing Thorne standing there. He’d obviously showered, too, and he was wearing clean clothes. The black T-shirt stretched across his broad shoulders and skimmed his flat abs. Black jeans, and even new shoes.

  He’d been busy shopping while she’d huddled naked on the edge of the bathtub, fingers shaking so bad she couldn’t turn the faucet. Residual tremors still shook her frame. Nauseous and in shock, she’d forced herself to stand under the jets until her stomach settled and she could hold on to the soap.

  Clean, but naked beneath the robe, she eyed her ruined clothing heaped on the floor beside the bed, and her camera bag on top of the comforter. The only not-sucky
thing to come from the evening was that her three-thousand-dollar camera had survived the running and mayhem unscathed. That she could not afford to replace. It was a miracle her camera made it through, which mattered more than a pair of jeans and a shirt. She pressed her hand to her belly.

  There was always a first time for her iron stomach to let her down. Violence and death apparently was her sticking point.

  Thorne filled the door frame, solid. She felt like a wet noodle. “How are you feeling?” she asked, studying his stoic face for clues.

  “Fine.” He finger-combed his damp hair back off his forehead. Just another day in the life of Connor James Thorne.

  She tightened the belt around her waist, conscious of the rasp of the terry cloth against her naked breasts. “Nice clothes.”

  “I brought some for you.” He lifted the shopping bag at his side. Just when she thought he was an insensitive male, he redeemed himself and then some.

  “Thanks. I couldn’t put those on.” She indicated the general direction of the mound on the floor behind her and stood back, allowing him room to enter. Tempted to fall into his arms and borrow his strength, Isis curled her bare toes into the short nap of the carpet instead. “I’ve never been up close and personal to that kind of violence before. It’s different on TV.” She was sure she’d hear fists against bone and see pools of blood in dark alleys in her nightmares for the rest of her natural life.

  He paused, as if he wanted to say something but then changed his mind. “You look better,” he observed, his gaze inspecting her from her wet hair to her toenails. “Color in your cheeks.”

  “Sorry if I embarrassed you.” She wasn’t really, but thought it was a polite way to open the conversation. She had so many questions, her mind was going a mile a minute. Luckily, when she’d been violently sick on the floor of the cab, she’d missed him, but only by a hair. The cabdriver had been vocally furious, but she’d been too sick to be embarrassed. Too terrified to care.

  “You didn’t,” he told her shortly, his limp more pronounced as he moved a few steps inside and closed the door behind him. Isis was acutely aware of his sex appeal and of the bed taking up most of the room behind her. He lobbed the shopping bag onto the foot of the bed from where he stood, without even looking. “As for the driver—a hundred American could buy him a new car. Don’t worry about it.”