Crave fa-2

by J. R. Ward

  As their stares met and the guy smiled in that way of his, Isaac thought . . . shit, this fight had been nothing but a warning shot across his bow.

  A message that they were on him.

  An invitation to run.

  Fine. Fuck Matthias. And that compound fracture was his response: They could take him out but he was going to do some serious damage on his way to the grave.

  Isaac didn’t hang around. He popped up onto the links and sprang himself over the lip. Fortunately, the crowd knew better than to get too close, so he was able to quickly head for Jim—

  He slammed right into his public defender.

  “Christ!” he barked, jumping back from the woman.

  “Actually, it’s Childe. With an ‘e.’” She cocked an eyebrow. “Thought I’d try the taxi offer again—you need a ride back to Boston? Or are you not heading in that direction?”

  Momentarily forgetting his manners, he bit out, “What the hell are you doing here?”

  “I was going to ask you the same. Considering that one of the provisions of your bail is that you not participate in illegal cage fighting. And that realllllly didn’t look like a game of Parcheesi you just played. You broke that man’s arm.”

  Isaac glanced around, wondering what the quickest way to the door was—because she did not belong in this group of roughnecks and he had to get her out of here. “Look, can we go outside—”

  “What are you thinking? Showing up here and fighting?”

  “I was going to come to see you.”

  “I’m your attorney—I should damn well hope so!”

  “I owe you twenty-five thousand dollars.”

  “And I’ll tell you how you can settle the score.” She planted her hands on her hips and leaned forward, that perfume of hers getting into his nose . . . and his blood. “You can stop being a stupid ass and show up for your hearing in two weeks. I’ll give you the time and date again, if you’ve forgotten to write it down.”

  Okay . . . she was totally hot when she was pissed.

  Annnnnnnnd that was so not an appropriate reaction under the time-place doctrine. Among other things.

  At that moment, Jim and his boys approached, but Grier didn’t spare them a glance—even though Jim was staring at her hard. And didn’t that give Isaac an idea of what she’d be like in a courtroom. Man, she was incredible when she was focused and angry and ready to serve someone up on a plate.

  “Two other things,” she bit out. “You’d better pray that guy whose arm needs to be set in plaster doesn’t call the police. And you need to see a doctor. Again. You’re bleeding.”

  Just to fill in the gap, even though there wasn’t one, the promoter came up with what looked like a couple thousand dollars. “Here’s your cut—”

  Abruptly, Grier’s eyes turned pleading, even as her beautiful face remained tight. “Don’t take the money, Isaac. And come with me. Do the right thing tonight and it’ll save you a whole lot of misery later. I promise you.”

  Isaac just shook his head at her and stuck his hand out to the promoter.

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  As she cursed and turned away, he was momentarily struck dumb by the fact that she’d dropped the f-bomb.

  Snapping back into action, he reached for her arm, but the promoter stepped in the way. “Now, before I give this to you”—he slapped the bills on his palm—“I want you to come fight two nights from now.”

  Which would be a no-go. He was hoping to be out of the country by then. “Yeah. Sure.”

  “It’ll be here, assuming we got no problems. You were frickin’ amazing—”

  “Just shut up and gimme the cash.”

  Isaac rose up onto the balls of his feet and stared over the milling heads, watching Grier’s fancy-dancy hairdo march out toward the back door. By and large the men got out of her way, but then, given her mood, she was probably capable of castration.

  Just by force of will.

  Drowning out the promoter’s jock-sniffer ass-kissing, Isaac grabbed the money, shoved his feet in his combats and took his sweatshirt and windbreaker back. As he ran off after his public defender, he buried the green in his pockets and double-checked on his guns, the silencers and his plastic bag piggy bank.

  “Where the hell are you going?” Jim said as he and his boys followed at a jog.

  “Wherever she goes. She’s my attorney.”

  “Any chance of talking you out of this?”

  “Nope.”

  “Fucking hell,” Jim said under his breath as he shoved some guy out of the way. “FYI, Matthias’s number two left.”

  “Black sedan,” the man with the piercings cut in. “The quarter panels were dinged and the thing was dirty as shit, but the tires were brand-new and there were electronics in the trunk.”

  That was XOps for you, Isaac thought. Incognito and state-of-the-art at the same time.

  As he broke free of the exit, the sound of cars and trucks starting up and taking off turned the night into a traffic disco. Amid the growling engines and flashing headlights, he looked around for her car. She’d drive something foreign, he was guessing. A Mercedes, BMW . . . Audi . . .

  Where was she?

  CHAPTER 11

  Undisclosed location, OCONUS

  Matthias was well aware he was an agent of evil in the world.

  Which didn’t mean he was totally bad. In large measure, the billions of innocent people on the planet were not on his radar screen and he left them alone. He also did not take candy from babies. Or shave cats. Or give the e-mail addresses of people who’d pissed him off to European sex-toy sites.

  And he had, once—back in 1983—walked an old lady across a busy intersection.

  So he wasn’t all bad.

  That being said, if, in the process of getting a job done, he had to accept certain collateral damage or sacrifice an “innocent” or two, that was the way shit went: In those cases, he was no different from the car accident or the cancer or the lightning strike, nothing but life’s lottery lost for the given individual.

  After all, everyone’s clock was ticking, and he’d played Grim Reaper enough to know that firsthand.

  As he repositioned his broken body in his leather chair, he groaned. At the age of forty, he felt more like a hundred thousand years old, but being a survivor would do that to you.

  At least he didn’t have to shit in a bag and still had one eye that worked.

  In front of him, on the glossy desk, were seven computer screens. Some showed pictures, others streamed data, and one told him where each of his operatives were on the planet Earth. With what he was in charge of, information was mission critical. Which was an irony of sorts. He was a man with no identity operating a team that didn’t officially exist in a world of shadows—and intel was the only concrete thing he had to work with.

  Although even that, like people, could fail you.

  As his cell phone rang, he picked up the thing and looked at its little screen. Ah, yes, perfect timing. Matthias was looking for two men—and he’d sent his second in command after one of them.

  The other . . . was complicated. Even though it shouldn’t have been.

  He accepted the call. “Have you found him.”

  “Yeah, and went a few rounds with him in the ring.”

  “He’s alive, though.”

  “Only because you want him to be. By the way, his lawyer showed up at the fight—and guess what. She happens to be the daughter of a friend of ours.”

  “Really. What are the chances.” Actually, they were a hundred percent, because Matthias had gone into the Suffolk County court system in Massachusetts and purposely had retired captain Alistair Childe’s surviving offspring assigned to the case.

  They’d needed to get that traitor Isaac Rothe out from behind bars so they could kill him and keep his body for future use—and good old Albie’s little girl was just the ticket: She was a fine attorney with a bleeding heart that led her into places she didn’t belong. Perfect combinatio
n.

  And clearly it had worked: Rothe was free less than twenty-four hours after his arrest.

  Christ, it had been that easy to find the bastard. But then, who’d have thought he’d use his own last name?

  Huh, Matthias thought. Maybe he was taking candy from a baby here.

  “You should have let me kill him in the ring,” his second in command bitched.

  “Too many witnesses, and I want him flushed out of Boston.”

  Because now that Grier Childe had served her purpose, he had to get Isaac the hell away from the woman. Matthias had already killed the captain’s son, and so he considered their score even. However, the sonofabitch had already tried to leverage his way out once and that meant the daughter had to be used to keep her sanctimonious daddy-o in line: As long as she was alive, she could be killed, and that threat was better than duct tape over a flapping mouth any day.

  “Follow him out of state as only you can,” Matthias heard himself say in a calm, level tone. “Wait for the right moment, and not around Childe’s daughter.”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “Because I fucking said so. That’s why.”

  Matthias ended the call and tossed the phone across the desk. All of his men were good at what they did, but his number two had tricks that no one else could come close to. This of course made the guy extremely useful, but also a danger if his ambitions or thirst for blood got away from them both.

  The man was a demon, straight up—

  Abruptly, Matthias had to take a deep breath to ease a pain in the center of his chest. Lately, the sharpshooters had been happening with increasing frequency, rendering him breathless and slightly nauseated. He had a feeling he knew what it was, but he was going to do nada to stop the myocardial infarction that was coming his way.

  No doctor’s visit for him, no stress test, no Lipitor, no Coumadin.

  On that note, he lit up a cheroot and exhaled. No Chantix to stop smoking, either. He was going to go hard with the coffin nails until he dropped dead from the big one—God knew he’d tried to kill himself with that bomb in the desert, and that had been a giant fuckup. Much better to ease into his grave the old-fashioned way, through bad diet, lack of exercise, and addictions.

  As a chiming alarm went off, he braced his palms on the arms of his chair and prepared himself for getting vertical. Pain meds would have eased him tremendously, but they also would have dulled his brain, so that was a no-go. Besides, physical agony had never bothered him.

  Gritting his teeth, he pushed hard on the chair and hefted his weight onto his legs. Moment to steady. Reach for the cane. Deep breath.

  That night in the land of sand when he’d been saved by Jim Heron had had repercussions, and a lot of them were the lead-and-steel kind—only not weapons. Thanks to that cocksucking soldier dragging him out of that ruined, dusty building and hauling him eight miles through the dunes in a fireman’s hold, Matthias was now part man, part mechanics, a creaky, clunky version of the strong, powerful fighter he’d once been. Put back together with pins and screws and bolts, he’d wondered in the beginning whether it would be a turning point. Whether the pain and suffering he’d gone through with all the surgeries would open a door to his becoming . . . a human.

  As opposed to the sociopath he’d been born.

  But, no. All he’d had since then were these precursors of the heart attacks that ran in his family. Which was a good thing. Unlike the bomb he’d set in the sand and deliberately stepped on, he knew a coronary would do the job—hell, he’d watched his father die from one.

  Actually his father had been his first kill, courtesy of Matthias knowing exactly what to say to cause his old man’s ticker to seize up good and stop dead. He’d been fifteen at the time. Pops had been forty-one. And Matthias had sat on the floor of his bedroom and watched the whole thing, idly turning the knob on the radio that woke him up for school, looking for a good song among all the crap on the airwaves.

  Meanwhile, his father had turned red, then blue . . . then faded out to gray.

  Perverted fucker had deserved it. After all he’d done . . .

  Pulling out of the past, Matthias drew on his coat, and as always the simple act of dressing was a production, his back straining to accommodate the shift of his arms. And then he was out of his office and walking the subterranean halls of the anonymous office complex he worked in, his body hating him for the ambulation.

  His car and driver were waiting for him in the underground parking facility, and when he got into the rear of the sedan, he groaned.

  Shallow breathing kept him conscious as the flaring pain grew volcanic . . . and then gradually subsided as the car eased forward.

  From up front, he heard the driver say, “ETA eleven minutes.”

  Matthias closed his eyes. He was not entirely sure why he was making this trip . . . but he was being drawn to the northeast United States by a compulsion not even his rational side could deny. He just had to go, even as he was surprised at the need.

  Then again, just as his number two had found his target, Matthias had also located the soldier he was after personally, and this long flight back over the ocean was because he wanted to look the man who had saved his life in the face for one last time—before the bastard’s corpse was buried.

  He told himself it was to confirm that Jim Heron had indeed died.

  There was more to it than that, though.

  Even if he didn’t understand the whys . . . there was much more to this trip for him than that.

  CHAPTER 12

  More than anything, Grier was furious at herself. As she pounded over to her Audi, weeding through the other cars and getting heckled by a knuck dragger or two, everything came into sharp focus: where she was, what she’d done earlier at the courthouse, who she was trying to save.

  Isaac had broken that guy’s arm. In front of her and a hundred other people. And treated it with the same degree of shock and panic as someone hanging up a phone.

  Like he did that every day.

  And then he’d accepted money for it.

  Coming up to her sedan, she got her key fob out and deactivated the alarm. And as she caught her reflection in the glass of the driver’s-side door, she thought of her brother.

  The kind of wild buzz that had driven her to come out here reminded her of the night he’d died.

  Grier had been the one to find his body and her resuscitation efforts had made no difference . . . because he’d been dead before she’d started them. But she’d kept up the pumping on his chest and the breathing into his mouth anyway.

  The paramedics had had to drag her off his body. Screaming.

  And the thing was, in death, as well as in life, he hadn’t cared about all her efforts to save him. He’d been transfixed by his final fix, a haunting look of ecstatic pleasure frozen on his pasty gray face, his driving addiction fulfilled.

  Recklessness took a variety of different forms, didn’t it.

  She’d always prided herself on being the responsible one out of the pair of them, the one who had excelled at school, and worked hard to get ahead, and never done anything that her parents would have disapproved of. She’d certainly never, ever tried illegal drugs. Not even once.

  And yet here she was, putting herself and her career at risk on the off chance she could talk a total stranger into going straight. If the police had shown up—or did, there was still time for that—getting arrested as a spectator would have had her booted from the Massachusetts bar faster than she could say, “But, Judge, I was only there for my client.” She’d already put up twenty-five grand, which would hardly break her bank . . . except how much farther could those funds have gone if put to use on some program for at-risk youth?

  As her head started to pound, she regarded her actions since around nine a.m. with a clear eye. And what do you know, she saw not so much someone doing good in the world, but an out-of-control woman who was—

  Daniel appeared on the far side of her car, his ghostly face dead
serious. Get in, Grier. Get in the car and lock the doors.

  “What?” she said. “Why—”

  Do it. Now. Her dead brother seemed to focus on the air behind her right shoulder. Damn it, Grier—

  “I remember who you are.”

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Oh for God’s sake, this just kept getting better, didn’t it. The meth head was back.

  Turning around to give her erstwhile suitor another—

  The man grabbed her arms, and with a shove that left her teeth singing, pushed her up against the car face-first. As he held her in place with his body, she was reminded that men were in fact built differently from women: They were a hell of a lot stronger. Especially when they were high and desperate.

  “You’re Danny’s sister.” The breath on her cheek was hot and smelled like roadkill in August. “You showed up a couple of times at his place. What happened to him?”

  “He died,” she croaked out.

  “Oh . . . God. I’m sorry. . . .” The addict seemed honestly sad. In a Tim Burton, distorted-netherworld kind of way. “Listen, can you spare some cash? Rich girl like you . . . hafta have some cash on you. But only if you can manage it.”

  Uh-huh, right. She knew she was going to give him what he wanted whether she liked it or not—which was how, in spite of the way he phrased it, a mugging worked.

  Rough hands rummaged around and her purse was ripped off her shoulder. She thought about yelling, but the weight bearing down on her rib cage made anything more than shallow breaths impossible, and besides, she had parked way around the side in the shadows. Who was going to hear her?

  As her wide eyes tracked the departing cars and trucks that were so close and yet so far away, she had an absolutely absurd memory of the opening scene from Jaws—where the woman was being dragged under by the shark and saw the glowing lights of houses on the shore.

  “I’m not gonna hurt you. . . . I just need money.”

  With his body still forcing her against the car, he dumped the contents of her bag on the muddy ground, her cell phone, wallet, keys, everything pouring free. And then he tossed her sixteen-thousand-dollar Birkin bag over the hood of the Audi.