“You don’t know where he’s been, Star,” Kadie said to her colleague, trying her best to sound disgusted instead of indignant.
The couple ceased kissing, and Star giggled while burying her head against his neck. One of her hands began to unbuckle his belt, and the other slid under his tee shirt onto those stone-solid abs.
“Don’t worry, Sugar,” Tuck drawled, wearing a swaggering smile under his still covered eyes. “There’s plenty of me to go around.”
“In your dreams, Swift,” she said, spitting out his false name.
Star reached for the top button of his jeans, and the space they all occupied got smaller. Pressure on her chest left Kadie desperate to gasp for air. She couldn’t, he couldn’t, surely—she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t stop her hands from shaking, was this panic? Or shock, or—
A sharp splintering sound stopped Star. Tuck sat up straight. Sikorski looked from side to side, the papers falling from his limp hand. A shout from the front seat was silenced by another crack. The car lurched to the side and gathered pace.
“Get down!” Tuck demanded, leaping off his seat and snatching Kadie from hers in the same stroke he used to push Star to the floor.
“What—”
“Stay,” Tuck said, ripping the blindfold off.
The whole car shook. The smooth road was no longer beneath them. They bumped and banged along uneven ground, surrounded by the sound of wheels trundling faster on grass, whipping plant life out of the way.
Tuck was up in a crouch, holding the button to open the privacy screen. “What was that sound?” Sikorski demanded. “What is—”
“Gunshots,” Tuck said, without looking at the immigrant. Instead, his eyes touched hers and something went unsaid before he shoved her toward the floor and jumped into the seat she’d vacated. Rolling through the privacy screen, he clambered into the front of the car. “Hold on!”
“We’re going to die!” Star screamed. “We’re gonna die! We’re—”
“No!” Kadie said, snatching the blonde’s hand. Sikorski was forgotten on the floor, protecting himself and no one else.
Star wasn’t placated, tears of fear streamed through her mascara. “But we’re gonna—”
“Do not panic,” Kadie said, speaking as slowly and calmly as she could while imparting her vehement confidence. “He will get us out of this.”
The car lurched to one side. The back spun out on the grass and they were thrown to the left wall of the car. On another bump, and a choice curse from the front, the car skidded, unable to get purchase on the slick surface.
“Three,” Tuck murmured from the front. They hit a deep divot, bouncing them from the floor to the ceiling of the vehicle.
“Two,” he said in an eerily serene whisper.
The car was decelerating, she could feel it. Deliberately slowing her breathing, she closed her eyes and prayed for salvation. Tuck was in the front, if they hit something head-on—
“One,” he said just as the car heaved to a stop, shoving them all towards the front in a bundle of bodies.
No one moved for a moment. Sikorski lifted his head first. Star started babbling. Raising her focus, Kadie saw the steady movement of Tuck’s shoulders as he breathed out some of the adrenaline. In a blaze of sudden movement, he threw open the door beside him and left the car. She could hear him moving outside, slowly, deliberately.
It took him a while, but eventually the back passenger door opened an inch. It stuck in its frame, clearly bent out of shape. Accompanied by a roar from Tuck, the door was yanked from the frame, and he stuck his head inside to look at them all. Grabbing Star, he hauled her out, and shoved her to the dirt beside the door.
“Stay there,” he demanded of Star.
Returning to the car, he reached in and lifted Kadie completely off her feet. Taking her out, he stayed low as he carried her around the door and put her on the ground by the front wheel. “Are you hurt?” he growled. She shook her head, but that didn’t stop him from running his hands over her, through her hair, checking her scalp, her joints, her face.
“I’m ok,” she said, taking his hand from her skin. “Are you?”
“That’s the most interesting car journey I’ve had in a while,” he said, locking his eyes on hers, their hands were joined, and she didn’t want to let him go, even when Sikorski came out of the car.
“Where are my men?” Sikorski demanded.
“Front seat,” Tuck said still crouched in front of her, he didn’t let go of her hand. “Dead.”
Sikorski blustered. “Dead, I don’t—”
“Check for yourself,” Tuck said. “One head wound each. Two bullet holes in the front windshield. Sniper, and a damn good one, clear kill shot to a moving vehicle, we had to be going forty miles an hour.”
“How do you know that?” Sikorski questioned.
“I’ve ridden in a car before and I pay attention,” Tuck said. “Unless you know who the shooter was, and what they wanted, you should be careful up there.”
Sikorski was frowning, pissed off and probably calculating ways to retaliate against whoever their assailant was. “What, I—”
“Why do you think the women are in the dirt?” Tuck asked, still crouched, sandwiching her between him and the car. The car door shielded one side while there was a group of trees on the other. Protecting her was his motivation for the position and their lack of altitude. Fixing her attention on him, she was humbled by his instinct to cover her from every angle, although one of the shields was him. A sniper wouldn’t get her, deliberately, or by accident.
“Then we should be in the car,” Sikorski said, opening the front door to look at his men. Star crawled around behind him.
“You saved us,” Star said to Tuck, who was stroking Kadie’s finger with his thumb.
Averse to praise, he didn’t look happy to be labelled a hero. “I saved myself,” Tuck said. “You folks came along for the ride.”
“Where…” Star looked up to examine the car and where it had been headed. “What’s over there?”
“I wouldn’t look over there.”
Star didn’t hear him. She crawled to the trees they would have hit if the car had gone another ten feet. As soon as she got there, she screamed and scrambled backward until she got to them. “It’s a drop,” she shrieked. “A dead drop.”
Kadie didn’t look at Star, her panic was obvious and well-founded. Tuck’s thumb moved faster over her hand. The slight impatience in that maneuver betrayed to her that he’d known exactly what was beyond those trees.
“Lucky break then,” he mumbled.
Star was in the midst of her own emotional outburst and didn’t see, or care, that Tuck was uncomfortable. “You… You’re our hero! You saved our lives! Without you, we’d…!” Star’s tears dropped to her cheeks, and she launched herself at Tuck, wrapping her arms around him, and sobbing against him.
“What do we do now?” Kadie asked, unmoved by her colleagues clambering actions.
Tuck held on to her hand, and although Star had her arms tight around his neck, and her body against his, their simple connection was much deeper.
“How far are we from our destination?” he asked her.
Kadie shrugged. “Two miles, maybe three from the road we were on, but I don’t know how far off-road we are.”
He nodded. “We won’t get the car out of this,” he said. “Not a car like this, on this terrain.”
“Can we walk it?”
Glancing down at the spike heels she wore, the corner of his mouth curled upward. “The heels might kill you before the sniper does, I suppose. Is this the first of these?”
“There is always someone trying to kill me,” Sikorski said from behind them. “It’s the price of being the best.”
Tuck wasn’t startled by Sikorski’s interjection, but Kadie hadn’t even known he was there. “You might have told me I’d be a target,” Tuck said, acting like this was an inconvenience that could’ve been foreseen.
The Russian wa
s unapologetic. “You are not,” Sikorski said. “I am the target.”
Anger tightened Tuck’s expression. “Except I was next to you. Those guys in the front weren’t the target either, how did that work out for them?”
Being shot at would shake anyone up, it had hit her hard, she was still trembling. Sikorski showed no remorse for what he probably considered collateral damage. “Feel free to walk away if you can’t handle—”
Star leapt to her feet. “He saved our lives!”
Sikorski didn’t look at the emotional woman, but his hand moved in a blur through the night, to backhand Star in response to her insolence. The blow sent her back to her knees. Tuck was about to leap to her defense but Kadie pulled his hand to her chest. This was not the place to start a fight, not with two dead bodies already on the scene.
“I shall call for transport,” Sikorski said, retrieving his phone from his pocket.
Star was already forgotten, she sat in a daze a good six feet away, her hand covering her cheek. Sikorski walked away from them toward the back of the car, then kept on going, and for a blessed moment they were alone.
“What were you trying to prove?” Kadie muttered, squeezing her fingers between his. “What were you thinking?”
“That you were in trouble,” he answered.
Lifting her eyes to his, she saw the truth there. “You were in trouble too.”
“Never entered my mind.”
She believed that he prioritized her wellbeing over his. Their push and pull games became insignificant in view of how close they’d come to losing each other just now. “What good are you to me dead?” she asked, covering their joined hands with her other one, and pulling it toward her hammering heart.
“I’m not much good to you alive,” he said, casting his eyes to Sikorski who was at the rear of the car.
How he could still be thinking about her association with Sikorski when they’d just nearly lost their lives, Kadie was astounded. But he’d proved himself. If nothing else, she knew he had skills and instincts that would keep them alive. “There are things you don’t understand,” she whispered.
“Have you been with him?” Tuck asked, snapping his attention back to her. “Have you?”
Worse than thinking about her connection to Sikorski, he was thinking about her bed and who had been in it. Thoughts like that seemed out of place right now, but he was adamant. “Tuck,” she said on the quietest breath.
“I’m going to kill him.”
“That’s not what you do,” she said, dipping her head towards their hands.
“It will be today,” he growled.
“No,” she said. “You’re better than that.”
“You can’t tell me you wanted his hands on you.”
After seeing him kiss Star, she could imagine what it would feel like to think of him being intimate with another woman, his anger was understandable. At the start she’d wanted to hurt him for hurting her, now she wanted that pain to go away. “Not everything is as it seems,” she said.
His eyes narrowed. “What? What’s going on?”
“There’s no time,” she said, watching Star crawl in Sikorski’s direction, probably with the goal of apologizing as she’d been conditioned to bow down to the Russian’s will. “I can’t explain everything here, he’ll be off the phone soon. It won’t take his people long to get here.”
“When?” he asked. “When will you explain it to me?”
“The house, it’s bugged, everywhere. Cameras, audio, you have to be careful.”
He exhaled. “That’s nothing.” He touched his ear and glanced toward Sikorski who was still on the phone. “Are you guys with me?”
Frowning, Kadie realized that he wasn’t talking to her, he was using her as cover, again. “Who are you talking to?” she asked.
“Yeah,” Tuck said. “Two down. Our people are fine. Objective achieved.” He smiled, just a brief flicker, but it was there. “You didn’t really doubt me, did you, Swallow?”
Horror made her squeeze his hand. His people were in his ear. “Did you plan that?”
He made eye contact with her, but didn’t answer her. “You did good, Rave. Took out both guys, one shot each. I owe you a hundred bucks.”
“Tuck,” she hissed, smacking his chest. They’d almost died and the whole thing was a ruse perpetuated by his people. “You nearly got us killed.”
He caught her hand on his chest. “Don’t call me that again, not out here, we have rules.”
“I don’t care about your damn rules, what did that achieve?”
“I just saved the fucker’s life,” Tuck said, nodding toward Sikorski who was dealing with a weeping Star. “I have his respect and now he owes me. A threat to his life that endangered mine, means I have a favor to call in.”
“What the hell kind of favor?” she asked.
Whatever her mission entailed it was nothing to what he and his people wanted to achieve. It was her goal to save a life, not take them. Swift was part of a team who were capable of murder, he was smiling and chatting about a bet to the man who had just murdered two people and she couldn’t imagine that was the first time something like that had happened.
Raven was his best friend, that’s what he’d told her once. He’d never told her that the man was a killer. Never told her that he was a sniper capable of taking almost superhuman kill shots. Tuck had told her that Raven and Swallow were together. She couldn’t picture a woman who would want to be with a man who had such lethal skills.
Yet, Tuck had just pulled his own crazy stuntman maneuvers to get them out of a moving vehicle that was dangerously out of control. He’d trusted his colleagues to kill the bodyguards, just as they’d trusted him to get the car pulled to a halt. If they needed something from Sikorski, and had chosen not to kill him, then his death wasn’t their ultimate goal. She needed to know their objective.
This kind of exploit terrified her, but Tuck hadn’t broken a sweat. “We’re going to talk, tonight,” Tuck said to her, stroking her hand again. “You’re going to tell me everything about what you’re doing here and if I’m satisfied, I’ll reciprocate.”
“If you’re satisfied?” she asked, widening her eyes at his audacity. “Your friend almost killed me.”
“The privacy screen is bulletproof and Rave knows his angles, he’d never have taken the shot if he thought it might hit you.”
He knows his angles, a man she’d never met had pulled the trigger and risked her life. “What if he missed?” she asked.
Tuck smiled again. “I’ll let you ask him that when you meet him.”
That took some of the wind out of her sails. She couldn’t bluster about a man who she might have to face-off against soon. Tuck had never so much as hinted about these people while they were in a relationship and here he was suggesting that she was going to meet them.
“I don’t want to meet him.”
“I’m taking you out of Sikorski’s place as soon as I can, and when I do, you’ll meet the Kindred. Those of them who are here anyway.” His head tilted and she guessed he was listening. “Yeah, Swallow, I guess she will need her own codename… But it won’t be one she uses for long.”
So he wanted her to meet these crazy, killer people, but wanted her out of his life as quickly as possible too. Maybe he hoped that by meeting his cohorts, she’d be terrified enough to tuck tail and run. Maybe she would be. If the Kindred were as lethal as she’d seen tonight, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to be a part of their ranks. Though that had once been her greatest wish.
But there was no time to argue. Sikorski was heading back toward them and Tuck noticed, so his frown blended his features. “How long have you been here? With him.”
The numbness returned to her soul because she didn’t need to be reminded of what she’d been through. “Too long.”
Sikorski came to the front of the car, Star dragged herself along behind him. “A vehicle will be here to get us momentarily,” he said, then looked at Tuck. “Then we have b
usiness to conduct.”
“Yes, I think we do,” Tuck said. Both men were as sure, and as arrogant, as each other.
With all the parties suspicious and angry, Kadie couldn’t imagine what they hoped to achieve tonight. Anyone else would want time to recover from this trauma. Not these men. Eventually, the vehicle would get here to take them back to the mansion where Sikorski had been staying with his people. But then what?
TWELVE
Tuck took the heavy crystal tumbler that Sikorski had just filled with a generous measure from the Waterford. He watched Sikorski drink before he took a sip. There hadn’t been much chance to see the house so far.
When the off-road vehicle had arrived, within ten minutes of Sikorski’s call, they had all been bundled inside. Sikorski still requested that he be blindfolded. By then, he was too fed up to argue and put the thing on without objection. Raven and Swallow would have caught up and been watching the route anyway, so he was secure that he had backup.
His saving grace in the vehicle on the way to the mansion was that Kadie had been at his side. She wasn’t as forthcoming with the advances as Star had been and he’d been grateful of that. By then, he’d been wound so tight that he’d have taken her up on the offer just to fuck out some of his frustration, and to remind himself that she was really here, alive, and that if nothing else, he was better positioned to keep her safe.
As the engine had started, Kadie made a comment about seatbelts and he heard everyone click in. Despite the fact that he hadn’t moved, he wasn’t exempt from her instruction. Kadie’s body covered his as she reached over him for his belt and clicked him in, and just like that he was rock hard.
Both women had guided him into the house when they arrived. He was brought to this room, pushed onto a leather couch, and then left alone. When the door closed, he took off the blindfold to see he was in an office lined with high bookcases. Two couches faced each other in the center of the room, and a huge carved desk stood under the imposing bay window on the wall opposite the door.
Swift (Kindred Book 4) Page 13
