by Zoey Parker
He wanted to promise her he’d be back. Tell her he’d be okay, that he’d come back to her like an action hero, covered with grime and staggering from a wound to his calf, but still unblemished, either by what he’d done or what had been done to him. He wanted to come back to her like that, rugged and masculine and not covered in blood and too cold to be moved.
But he didn’t want to lie to her. He’d made a point of never lying to her. So, he left her with that kiss, and he moved off into the darkening night.
Chapter Twenty-One
Tess kept still in the car for a while. She toyed with the phone and found a book, reading for a little while. She played games for a little bit. She glanced at the clock and saw that only fifteen minutes had passed.
The baby kicked. She’d been feeling that more, and it had been a pretty fantastic feeling. For a long time, the growing lump in her stomach had felt like that; just a lump, just someone else’s daydream. Not hers. Feeling the baby kick, that made it alive in her head. Alive in her body. That was amazing.
If she’d been a regular woman having a regular pregnancy, they’d have done the big anatomy scan by now. She’d probably know if she was having a boy or a girl. At least, what was between the baby’s legs; she’d been in enough nightclubs to know that what you saw between someone’s legs didn’t always match up with who they were. But she’d still have an idea. She could start thinking about what sort of person the baby might be... A tall child with their father’s eyes… A small one with his curls… What features would they get from her? She could barely remember her face some days. She’d covered it up with makeup so many different ways, and she was damn good with contouring. She could make herself look like so many different people, and sometimes it was hard to remember which one was her. Since she’d met Milo, she hadn’t had much of a chance to use makeup; even when she’d been in the club, dancing, it had been a different sort of look that she’d reached for. Her face, in very many ways, hadn’t been the point.
Watching Milo walk away from her had been hard, harder than she’d expected. It was the right thing to do. He needed to be completely undistracted, totally focused on what he was doing if he was going to survive. He couldn’t just wander through and expect to be alright. And she needed him to come back. She needed it more than she’d thought was possible. So, staying here and being terrified on her own was the best was the way to do that? Fine. That was what she’d do. Even if it meant she had to sit on her hands and force herself to take many long, deep breaths to stay put.
She’d had plenty of boyfriends she’d watched head off into near-death situations. Being involved in the criminal underworld made that almost a necessity, though she hadn’t really thought of it that way. She hadn’t really ever cared before either. It hadn’t mattered because the men hadn’t mattered. They were interchangeable – nothing but a way to survive in a world that wasn’t all that great. It could have been much worse, and it certainly was for many of the girls she had known over the years, but it hadn’t been out and out bad for her for a while.
It was weird, wanting him to come back. In a way, he was the one she’d needed the least. She had the financial security she’d been trying to find for years. So why did she want him so much?
She didn’t realize she’d been crying until she felt the wetness on her cheeks. She sniffled for a moment, grabbed a tissue out of the center console, and pulled down the mirror on the sun visor to wipe her eyes. She needed to stretch her legs. She got up out of the car, taking a long moment to settle her body. It wasn’t actively hard to get up and down yet, but she could feel how it was going to happen. But stretching was good; she put her hands up to the sky and let all the creaks and stretches move down her spine. It felt good to be up and moving around. She knew she needed to stay in the car in case she needed to bolt, but surely stretching for just a moment would be fine. After all, she’d need to pee eventually. With this baby on her bladder, sooner rather than later.
Of course, that was when she felt the arm around her middle and the cloth against her face. Of course it was. She fought hard for the thirty seconds she had before her vision blurred and her limbs got too heavy to move. She tried to push whoever it was away, but she couldn’t do a thing. All she could think was that their arm was wrapped just above her baby. How could they possibly do this to her baby?
Chapter Twenty-Two
Milo was barely a hundred steps away from the car before the old chill descended over him. He knew who he was and what he was in this place; he knew how to move through the dark and be unheard. He knew how to be death. It was a skill he’d learned a long time ago, and at the side of a man he’d once thought of as a brother. Thinking of that time, of Bastille, hurt him through and through. They had been close once. They had been – Well, friends was too much for the likes of them. They had been willing to work together. That was the most he had expected, some days. The most he’d been able to hope for.
They’d trained side by side, and in the early days, they had worked on jobs together. And then Bastille had gone rogue, murdering so many of the men who had raised them, even if their version of “raising” was “turning into sharpened weapons”. The men had known nothing more than that world themselves. And the children who’d been slaughtered – there was no version of that which had been fair or just. They had been children. Nothing but children. If Bastille had taken them away from the compound, they might even have grown up to be men, instead of death. But it was too late to think about it now. Milo hadn’t been able to save them, and he couldn’t avenge them. Life didn’t work that way.
He moved through the growing darkness, part of the shadows. He wasn’t some kind of action hero who pulled out his gun miles before the target was reached; that was a good way to get your arms tired or hamper your hands in a way that made an unreasonable amount of noise. It didn’t help anyone. He drew close to the warehouse and found his entrance – a window to the side which had been broken ages ago, based on the dust on either side. There wasn’t any glass left in the frame; it had all been knocked out by those who used the warehouse for shelter, or weather, or something else entirely. He boosted himself up through the window easily – Another reason you never get your gun out until you need it, he thought to himself – and slipped down inside. The distance was slightly more than he expected, and he landed with more noise than he preferred, but still nothing anyone else was likely to hear. He moved quickly through the building; once he got away from the side windows, he did see that there were tracks in the dust. More than one set, enough to have worn something of a path. He made a scornful noise – in his head – about whoever had let security get so sloppy here. Even if Toro was running on his own, he should have known better.
He moved carefully along the path, searching for wherever Toro and his men would be hiding out. The building was quiet, far quieter than it should have been. Something twisted in his guts, and he found himself thinking of Bastille again; he’d had the same sense of nervous concern heading into the facility that day. He hadn’t known then what was wrong in his head, but he knew now. He knew that sense of too quiet that meant something was seriously, seriously wrong. People waiting for him would leave a scent of anticipation in the air. This feeling? Either Silk Road had given him bad information, or something else had gone horrendously wrong on the way.
He was about fifty feet into the warehouse when he smelled death. Blood and shit in a toxic mixture that still made him gag after all these years. His feet sped up; he knew, somehow, exactly what he was going to find. The dust trail led to an open door into an office, a light hung in the corner that was splaying down into the rest of the room, and the stench of death heavy on the air.
Bastille sat on a desk, one foot up on the surface, the other dangling down. He was the absolute picture of lounging casual appearance, except for the gun resting in his lap.
“Milo,” he said, without looking up, “so nice to see you.”
“Can’t say the same, Bastille,” Milo replied.
His weapon rested on his thigh, but he didn’t for a moment pretend that would mean Bastille didn’t know exactly where it was. “I was just fine not having seen you for years. What are you doing here?”
Bastille shrugged. “Hired for a contract. You know how it is.”
“I do,” Milo replied. “Little strange, though, don’t you think? That we got hired for the same deal?”
Bastille smiled the wide, creepy grin that Milo had hated for a lot of years. “What makes you think it was the same deal?”
Milo’s brain stuttered just a little over that, trying to guess what in the world Bastille was talking about. If they hadn’t both been hired to deal with Toro, then why had – oh God.
“That’s right, little brother,” Bastille said, his voice twisting harshly on the final word, “I was hired to take you out. To deal with you, after all these years. Silk Road wasn’t satisfied with your work, and I was their insurance policy. Does that feel good – knowing that you didn’t deserve a clean death? They knew I’d take out all these frustrations on you. All the years of living in your shadow…”
“Bastille,” Milo said, trying to regain his mental footing. “It’s been a lot of years. Do we really still have a grudge? After all this time?”
Bastille laughed, and then his gun was trained on Milo so quickly that Milo caught his breath and froze. He wouldn’t have a chance to bring his own weapon up, and at this range, Bastille couldn’t miss.
“Do we still have a grudge? Brother, you got me shot, got me caught. Yeah, we have a grudge.”
“So, you’re here to murder me. That’s how we’re going to end this? Just like you murdered all our brothers, all our fathers?”
Bastille shook his head. “You’ll never understand how that happened. You’ll never understand—”
It turned out that Bastille was right; Milo never would understand. There was a loud crack of gunfire, and then a small hole appeared in Bastille’s face, just above his eyes. Blood and matter spattered behind him, and even though he was dead in a heartbeat, his body didn’t seem to quite know it for a moment. His mouth opened and closed a couple of times, muscles operating on fading electric impulses, before his body went limp and slid to the floor.
Milo spun around, ready to face down whoever was coming through the door, but before he could, pain exploded in his head, and his vision went black.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Milo came back to consciousness slowly and with an incredible, world-shattering headache. He choked back the groan that wanted to escape; without knowing where he was, he didn’t know if it was safe to make any noise at all. He could hear a woman speaking, switching back and forth between Spanish and a lightly accented English, but he didn’t know the voice. He probably could have opened his eyes, but based on the color penetrating his eyelids, there was a lot of light, and that light was going to hurt. He might be more at risk conscious than unconscious, so the best thing to do was keep his muscles lax and his body still until he was alone, and then figure out what was the next step.
But whoever was watching him was watching too closely; in the moment between waking and realizing that he needed to be still, the woman had noted his returning awareness.
“He’s awake,” she said to whoever was with her, and the person grunted sharply.
Milo expected to be handled roughly, but instead, a cool cloth rested on his forehead. A drier, warmer one had been taken away. Someone was taking care of him. Why was that happening?
“Wake up, Mr. Sykes, it’s time you and I had a face-to-face conversation.”
He didn’t recognize the voice, but now that he was coming out of the fog, he recognized the intonation. But why – how was Silk Road a woman?
He opened his eyes to see an older Latina woman standing over him, wearing a pretty smile with her arms crossed under her breasts, and looking no less deadly as she did it.
“Hello, Mr. Sykes,” the person he had known as Silk Road said. “It really is about time, isn’t it?”
Milo’s mind raced. If she were just going to kill him or have him killed, he would already be dead. It was either torture or something else. He didn’t think torture was likely to be on the menu. Maybe some people started torture that way, but he’d always found that starting with abject terror did a lot to loosen a subject’s tongue. Of course, you didn’t get real information under that kind of duress. But sometimes it was good to make someone hurt before they died.
“I am sorry,” the woman continued, “that we needed to resort to such techniques to get you here. That is, of course, not our preference. There are those we hurt because we must, but you are a partner in so many ways. I may disagree with your methods of achieving your goals – or, more specifically, the timeliness of achieving those goals – but you are not my enemy.”
Milo braced his hands and slowly levered himself up to sitting. His head throbbed as he was moving, but the ache eased off a little as he settled down. “I’m glad to hear that, Silk Road.”
The woman raised an eyebrow, and her smile became a little more real and a little less pretty. Someone brought her a chair, and she settled down it. She didn’t cross her legs; she spread them and leaned forward, her elbows on her knees. She was a strong woman, clear muscle showing as she moved. Her hair was nearly back, shot through with strands of white, and twisted up into a bun that looked tight enough to keep hair out of her eyes when she fought. He was sure she fought. There was no way a woman like this didn’t fight. She was older, and her lined face demanded respect, but she was also incredibly beautiful. He liked the two together; they gave her a kind of wisdom he found himself enjoying.
“Water? You should eat.”
His stomach rumbled, and panic ran through him like a cold river. “Tess. Where is she?”
Silk Road gave him a long look. “What do you mean?”
“She was waiting in the car. About a mile from the warehouse. Fuck. Did your people get her too? Or did she run? I told her to leave if I didn’t come back within a few hours. I need to find her.” His heart was racing so hard it made his head pound even more, and he had to swallow against bile in his throat.
“Be calm,” Silk Road said, and for a minute, Milo thought that it would be alright. But then the woman added, “We found the car, and there was no one there. She must have left on foot.”
He shook his head hard. There was no way his Tess, his beautiful Tess, would walk out on a dirt road like that, not when she had the car right there. Her hips had been bad for two weeks, and her back was starting to ache from the weight of the baby. There was no way. She’d have driven off if she’d done anything.
“No, Silk Road – you have to believe me—”
“Ruta.”
“What?”
“My name is Ruta. If we are to be partners in this too, you may as well know my name. You have seen my face, after all, and I must trust that you will not tell the world that Silk Road is a woman; my enemies barely tolerate me as it is, behind a faceless mask. Without that protection, I doubt I would survive.” The woman’s grin spread just a little wider. “And if I do not survive, I won’t be able to help you find the woman.”
He leaped to a conclusion. “You took her.”
Ruta scoffed. “Of course I didn’t. Are you mad? I wouldn’t hurt another woman, certainly not one who was only doing her best to escape the monster she’d found herself chained to.” Milo felt himself puff up, but Ruta’s laugh pricked his ego and settle him down again. “Not you, though I’m disappointed she decided to trade one protector for another. There’s still a chance of getting her to give it up, I suppose. But to return to the point. No. I did not take the girl. If I had, she would be safe. I suspect I know who has her though.”
“Bastille was at the warehouse. Did he kill Toro?”
Ruta shook her head. “No. And I made a mistake in hiring that son of a bitch, and sometime when we are all less distracted, I will make a proper apology for that. I was angry – angry enough to send someone to keep you
honest. Or so I thought. I did not understand that he had such a… fight to pick with you. It was why my men had orders to take care of him when they went in to keep you safe.”
“Why the crack to the head then?”
Ruta laughed again. “That was to remind you that you had a job to do, and you had not done it. To make sure you understood what needed to be done. What still needs to be done.”
And then the pieces fell into place. “Toro has her.”
Ruta nodded. “He does, I think. He somehow escaped the warehouse; perhaps he saw the girl on the way out. My sources had said he was fonder of her than some might initially expect. He had kept her for a rather long time, all things considered. Considering the things he had his hands in.”
“What did he have his hands in?”
Someone appeared with a bottle of water so cold that there was condensation on the sides, and a thermos of what smelled like a rich stew. Milo accepted the items and, after a nod from Ruta, dug in. He’d been in enough situations to know that when a meal presented itself, you took it. You relished it, because who knew when the next one would arrive? Especially when it sounded like there was going to be another fight coming up. You needed to be safe if you were going to save someone else.
