Ultimate Weapon

by Shannon McKenna

  At least no one would expect her to be driving a 1965 Fiat 500 held together with nothing but rust. But on the flip side, she would attract attention just by looking so ridiculous in it.

  Stop dithering and get to it, she lectured herself.

  Truth to tell, she actually had been stalling. She was angry and baffled at herself. It was so unlike her.

  It had taken a certain amount of time to prepare her plan of attack for Ana, of course, and to arm the appropriate jewelry pieces. Another reasonably long interval had been necessary to bathe, groom, arm, and adorn herself to her satisfaction. She fiddled uncomfortably with the matching tongue studs that she’d chosen for the occasion. She didn’t like body piercings much as a fashion statement, but the studs were the only weapon for an intensely personal job like this one.

  They belonged to a secret, personal category of Deadly Beauty designs called Ultimate Weapons—but only in her head, since she’d never spoken of them out loud to a living soul. They were ideas she had not developed commercially because they were too dangerous. Besides, many of them had no aesthetic component of any kind.

  They were just for herself. Her paranoid, fucked-up self.

  She put each weapon she designed through a certain algorithm she had developed to estimate the risk factor to the wearer. Any weapon with an over fifty percent risk factor of accidental death went into the Ultimates category and as such, was not saleable.

  The tongue studs had a seventy-five percent risk of death.

  She just had to make her tongue relax and stop worrying the things, or she could break the capsules prematurely. That would be disastrous. Self-control, Steele.

  Yikes. She’d never had such difficulty summoning it.

  After she dressed and prepared, she’d taken a few moments to center herself and find that calm, chilly, professional inside her.

  Robot Bitch. Right. That was where it all broke down. Because Robot Bitch was nowhere to be found, and without her, Tam was lost and dithering. No other word for it.

  Not wanting Val to come back and find her gone. It felt like such a flagrant fuck-you. Not wanting to reject his help, to hurt his feelings, of all crazy things. Not wanting to make him angry. God, since when had she ever given a shit about whether or not she made a man angry?

  If said man was not holding a gun to her head or a knife to her throat, that is. There were exceptions.

  And this was another exception, God help her. She did care, enough so to box herself in and fritter away precious time hoping he’d get back before she’d gotten around to leaving. So that they could have a proper knock-down, drag-out fight that she could definitively win, forcing him to acknowledge that they’d be better off if she went alone.

  Hah. Dream on. That knock-down, drag-out fight was a problematic scenario. Val was bigger, stronger, and quicker than her, though she hated to admit it. Stubbornly unreasonable, too. And very intense about protecting her, which was touching and sweet and manly of him, but oh, dear God, what an inconvenient pain in the ass.

  The only way to win an argument with a man strong enough to be worth arguing with was to just slip away and do as she pleased while he was looking elsewhere. Deal with the fallout later. That had always been her policy before. So what had changed?

  Never mind. She was afraid to examine that question too closely.

  After all, she was calculating cold-blooded murder. If Janos didn’t ride shotgun, he had a small measure of plausible deniability with Ana, Donatella, their Camorra husbands, and the Italian authorities.

  And the more streamlined her plan of invading the clinic, the better. For him, too. She understood his desire to monitor the situation so that he could keep her in one piece to help him save Imre, but solo, she could handle this more smoothly.

  Besides, Val was too damn pretty. He attracted attention from every side. It was like hauling around a jewel-draped pink elephant. People looked, people took note, people remembered. Especially women. He was wildly impractical, as an accessory. To murder, anyway.

  She herself was pale and severe today in her somewhat limp and wrinkled suit, hair braided tightly back. No makeup. Unlikely to attract undue attention. Ana would certainly notice that Tam was wearing the same clothes as yesterday, which bugged her, but there was no remedy for that except for shopping, and she had no time for anything so frivolous, or she would miss her window. It was today or it was never.

  And? So? Move it, Steele. She forced herself to pick up the pace, hustling back to their funky room for a blanket to cover the filthy seat of the Fiat and protect her clothes. She grabbed her briefcase and purse, and off she went to find a decent car to drive and get the job done.

  If all went well, she’d be back soon to face down Val’s wrath with her usual sass. And then she would go with him to Hungary and keep her end of the bargain.

  And his wrath did always translate into spectacular sex. She was pleasantly aching and sore from last night’s massive dose.

  She practically knocked Val over as she turned the corner of the casale. He tottered at the impact, a frightening apparition. Dead pale, blood and bruises on his face, hollow-eyed. He put out his hand to the building for balance, stumbled, and jolted down onto one knee.

  It was a body blow to see him like that. It knocked out her air.

  “Jesus, Janos! What happened to you?” she demanded.

  He shuddered and swayed on his knees, teeth chattering. He smelled like the sea. He’d gone for a dip, for Christ’s sake. The raw mountain breeze whipped around them. She reached down and gripped him under his armpits, dragging him to his feet. The fabric of his wet jacket was sticky and dark on one side. Blood. “Oh, merde,” she muttered. “You’re wounded. What the fuck happened to you?”

  “András,” he whispered. “Novak.”

  Great. Just great. The baddies, all converging on them, and it had to be today. “Come on, let me get you out of this wind. You look like ten different kinds of shit, Janos. I should never have let you go out by yourself. I might have known you’d fuck it up. Men.”

  His pale, shaking lips twitched at that, but he stumbled, thudding against the building with a gasp of pain. She loaded as much of his weight as she could onto her shoulder, on the nonbleeding side. She was not trashing her one outfit if she could help it.

  Once inside, she whipped off her own jacket, rolled up her sleeves, and pushed him down until he sat on the bed. She started in with his shoes, peeled off the sodden pants and briefs. He moaned with pain when she started in on the jacket, so she slowed down, peeling it off what appeared to be the good arm first, and then lifting the blood-soaked sleeve gingerly away. Then the shirt.

  She sucked air through her teeth when she saw the ragged, oozing mess of his shoulder and hurried to the bathroom, rummaging for the cleanest towel she could find. She pressed his torso down onto the bed, heaved his long legs up until he was lying flat, then dragged the thickest wool blanket out of the armoire and laid it over him.

  “You lie there and warm up,” she said. “I’ll go get some disinfectant from the signora.”

  Breathless seconds later, she was eyeing the sleek little Opel parked in the ulivetto as she banged the signora’s door. Nice. At least he’d gotten some decent wheels before getting himself fucked up.

  She burst out her request for disinfectant, bandages, and dry clothes as soon as the door opened, and realized that her voice was thin, high and shaking, like a child’s. Whoa. Breathe, Steele. Breathe.

  The signora’s face furrowed into a deep scowl. “He is in trouble?”

  Tam gave her an expressive shrug. “E’ un tipo fuocoso,” she confided. He’s a fiery type. She hoped the older woman would assume he’d gotten into a stupid, macho fight.

  The signora shook her head. “Men,” she muttered darkly. She shoved open the door to the kitchen and gestured Tam inside.

  The room was huge, spotless, a baroque-era kitchen with appliances that dated from the 1950s. She disappeared into the inner rooms and returned momen
ts later, presenting a bottle of alcohol, rolls and pads of gauze, and, miracle of miracles, surgical bandages—the kind you could buy over the counter in the States. Left behind by other tourists? Who knew? They just might close the wound.

  The older woman thrust some men’s clothes at her.

  “They will be short for him,” she warned. “I don’t have any pants long enough for that one.”

  Tam thanked her effusively and scurried back, heart pounding wildly, as if Val might die or disappear if she took her eyes off him.

  He was still shivering violently, even under the heavy wool. She turned on the light and hastened to deal with the shoulder wound.

  It alarmed her. Deep, jagged and uneven, it looked like it needed internal and external stitches from an ER doc who knew what the fuck she or he was doing, not a seat-of-the-pants emergency medic like herself. She cleaned it as best she could, wincing in sympathy as he sucked in a tortured breath at the sting of the disinfectant.

  She bandaged it, following the directions on the box to close the torn flesh until the surgical glue set. It took only seconds. Whether it would hold, she didn’t know. The shoulder was the worst, but she worked on his battered hands and knees as well. Then she dove into the poison kit, where she kept her emergency pharmaceuticals. Too bad she didn’t have a topical anesthetic, but at least there was a full spectrum intramuscular antibiotic. She loaded the syringe, poised it over his good arm.

  “Allergic to antibiotics?” she asked. “Don’t even think about going into anaphylactic shock on me, big boy. My nerves are shot as it is.”

  He shook his head, eyes squeezed shut. She jabbed.

  He was still vibrating with cold, and in the absence of a hot bath, she could think of only one solution to that. She stripped off the rest of her clothes, lifted the blanket, and clambered on top of him.

  She braced herself for a shock, but oh, God, he was cold. Shuddering, clammy, sticky with sea salt. She wrapped her arms around him, tried to give him all the warmth she had. Wishing there was more. She wanted to cover every inch of him with comfort. Wanted to be bigger, wider, softer. A down comforter of a woman. Not a tight, wound up, stringy female, all bent metal and barbed wire and twine.

  The contact seemed to help him anyway, thank God. His shuddering began to ease, and he began taking deeper breaths. She ran her fingers through his salt-stiffened hair, which had dried into a spiky punk do, which she kind of liked. À la Hollywood bad boy.

  “What the hell happened to you, anyway?” she asked.

  He opened his eyes. To her alarm, they welled full of tears.

  “Imre is dead,” he whispered brokenly. “He killed himself. I watched it on videophone. He stabbed a piece of glass into his femoral artery.” His voice was shaking like a young boy’s. “He did it to free me.”

  She drew in a long, careful breath. “Oh, my poor baby,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry.”

  It was either exactly the right or exactly the wrong thing to have said, because it melted him right down, and that, to her startled horror, melted her down too.

  The two of them blubbered, arms wrapped tight and shaking around each other. As if his grief and loss were her own.

  And it was, she realized, as she cried against his chest. It was her own, and he was her own. He had been for quite a while now, but she hadn’t wanted to face it yet. She should have known when he’d made her cry by telling her to pretend she loved him two nights before. She should have known after that dream, after he picked up her stuffed valentine heart out of the dust and rubble of her broken doll self and brought it to life. Miraculously.

  When the emotional storm subsided, she wiped her face, propped her chin on her forearms. Both of them embarrassed and shy.

  She sniffed back her tears, and went on the offensive as usual. “So? Let’s have it, loverboy. The bruises, the shoulder, the dip in the sea?”

  “András,” he said.

  She nodded. She knew the man, and wished that she didn’t. It was not safe to be on that guy’s radar screen. He was in the same class as Kurt and Georg. “How did András find us?”

  “He had a tracer on me. He must have gotten it from Hegel.”

  That was a nasty shock. “He had a what?” Her voice squeaked.

  He jerked his chin in the direction of his shoulder. “There,” he said. “It must have been in there since I was treated for that bullet wound last year. Looks like PSS stopped trusting me even then. They wanted to keep me under control. Hegel must be dead, I assume.”

  “So that’s how they found us at the hotel. And the airport, too.”

  “Yes.” His voice was subdued. “By following me. I should have figured it out earlier. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s not your fault,” she heard herself say. Though of course, it was. She couldn’t help the meaningless words from coming out. Look at her, trying to make the guy feel better about almost getting her and Rachel killed, hah. What a gooey, soft-headed chump she was becoming. Frightening to contemplate.

  The story came out of him, terse, halting phrases issued from his chattering teeth. The death-defying dive into the stormy sea, swimming through icy salt water in underground caves, digging transmitters out of his own body in the watery dark with the tip of a pocketknife. Could she have done it?

  “Why didn’t—”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t call you,” he said simply. “I couldn’t lead him to you. And there was no time for a doctor. András would have had me and that would have been it. Game over.”

  “Got it,” was all she said.

  He started to give her his habitual shrug, but froze halfway through, grimacing in pain.

  She refused to let herself melt with pity. His machismo was pointless. His pain hurt her. If he suffered needlessly, then so did she. Life had too much suffering in it as it was. Suffering needlessly pissed her off, big-time.

  But not all of him hurt. Amazingly, Val’s body was stirring beneath her, his cock growing long and hot and hard against her belly. She wriggled against it, hardly believing the evidence of her own senses. Yes, sure enough. Rock hard and ready. Even now.

  “Val,” she said sternly. “You have got to be kidding.”

  “Sorry,” he said innocently.

  “You know that this naked hugging thing is strictly therapeutic in nature, right? I was worried about hypothermia and shock. I was not looking to wank your willie. We don’t have time.”

  “No?” he said. “But you are so beautiful. So hot and strong and full of life.” His arms tightened, pulling her closer. “And I love you.”

  She stiffened. “Don’t get flowery on me, Val,” she warned. “I can’t take that kind of thing. You know that. So just don’t do it.”

  “I love you,” he repeated stubbornly. “I almost died today, and I would have missed my chance to tell you, although I am sure that you know it. So I will say it if I damn well please, and you will listen. I love you. I mean every word. I love you, Tamar.”

  Her eyes leaked, her face was hot. This was so not fair. Not now, on top of everything. She wanted to tell him she loved him too, but the words were backed up, bottlenecked behind a burning knot.

  She hid her face against his good shoulder. Waited until her throat opened up and she could trust herself to harrumph.

  “Well,” she muttered, “you can’t be too badly hurt, if you’re rubbing your erection against me and carrying on about deathless love. I suppose that’s good news. Now what?”

  That flashing, deep-grooved grin was so beautiful, it practically broke her into pieces. “My tough babe,” he murmured. “I hate to say it, my love, because there is no place on earth I would rather be than beneath your naked body, but we must run quickly. And far.”

  “But you cut the tracer out, right?”

  “I was in this bed with that thing transmitting for sixteen hours,” he said. “He will check here. Perhaps he is already on his way. I hope I bought time with my ferry trick, but I cannot count on it.”

  She
stared into his eyes, her mind working furiously. “You have the car,” she said. “We’ll go and find another place where you can rest up while I deal with Ana and Stengl. I have to get that over with. Then, I’m all yours. We will run. Anywhere you want.”

  His face went somber, and he gazed up at her for a long moment. “Perhaps you have not understood,” he said carefully. “Our plans have changed. We must leave it, Tamar. All of it. Stengl, too.”

  Everything went cold and distant around her, as it had in Ana’s salone. She felt a door slam shut inside her. A door with her bereaved fifteen-year-old self behind it. No. She took a deep breath.

  “No, Val,” she said. “I came all this way for this. I’m not leaving until it is done. Don’t try to stop me.”

  But she could already see that he didn’t get it. He couldn’t. How could he? He’d already rearranged his reality, and Stengl was not relevant to his reality. Only to hers. She was alone with the nightmare of her past and she always would be.

  She actually tried, for a few seconds, to imagine letting it go. Just walking away. But she’d gone too far down that road by now. She’d spent too many years imagining Drago Stengl’s face when he saw her standing before him and knew death was near.

  When he finally understood what he had done to her. To all of them. Knowing that at last the bill had come due.

  She couldn’t let it go. Or rather, it would not let her go. It had clutched her like a skeletal claw for her whole adult life. Its grip was not easing now. It clamped down, a death grip, crushing her. She couldn’t endure any more of that. Not if deliverance was possible.

  He cupped her face and stared earnestly into her eyes. “Imre did this to set me free,” he said, his voice urgent. “I cannot waste his gift. I cannot risk the last thing on earth that I care about. I want to make a life with you. I never dreamed of such a thing, but you have made me dream of it, and now I must have it.”

  “And Rachel?” she asked.

  He waved an eloquent hand. “Of course we will get Rachel,” he said forcefully. “I am not stupid. I know she comes first.”