by Sofia Grey
She sat on the bed again and started picking at her fingernails.
“So,” he said, “do you know Irina?”
“I did.” Her voice was little more than a whisper. He had to strain, to hear it over the music. “I’m really sorry. She didn’t make it.”
Jack raised his eyebrows in a silent question.
Sapphire resumed her nail chewing. “She’s dead.”
Friday 21 May
Chapter Twelve
It should have been a short walk to Maria’s car, parked ten or eleven spaces away.
She had her right arm looped around Yanni’s middle, to make sure he stayed on his feet, and her tote bag was slung over her left shoulder. Rather than stopping, she scrabbled awkwardly with her left hand for the car keys.
“It’s the green Mini Convertible,” she said. They hobbled toward it, and her fingers closed around the key fob. At last. She tugged but felt it catch on something with a metallic chinking sound. Damn. They were halfway to the car, and she needed the keys.
She peeked into the bag and saw the handcuffs tangled around the key fob. “Come on,” she grumbled to the keys. She jiggled the contents of the bag and tugged at them again. The remote-locking fob freed itself enough to pop its head above the confines of the bag. Maria pointed it toward her car and pressed the button, but they were too far away.
“Keys.” There was an urgent note in Yanni’s whisper.
“Huh?” Maria looked up, still intent on untangling the mess in her bag, as Yanni stopped walking and pushed her against the wall.
“We’ve got company,” he said.
Company, in this case, meant two enormous men heading straight for them. Did these guys work out or what? Muscles bulged under their shirts, and their legs were like tree trunks.
Maybe they just happened to be here?
“Keys. Now.”
They were carrying handguns. Holy. Fuck. Two pistols pointed at Maria.
Adrenaline lent her speed. One final monster tussle with the contents of her bag, and the keys rose to the surface. She zapped the remote, pushed the fob into Yanni’s hand, and closed her fingers around the grip of Aiden’s pistol. “Get in the car.”
Time seemed to slow down. Yanni bent over and darted towards the Mini. He hauled the driver’s door open and climbed inside.
Maria moved to a squatting position, presenting herself as a smaller target. They were still a distance away. Did she have time to get into the car? Yes.
Was it worth firing a warning shot at them? No. She had no spare ammunition. Also, while she was busy doing that, what was to stop Yanni from bolting, and stealing her car?
Her Mini roared into life, and Maria hurled herself forwards just as Yanni flung the passenger door open. She scrambled inside. There was a loud bang. She squealed. Another bullet fired at them whizzed through the soft roof of her car.
“Stay down.” Yanni’s yell wasn’t needed. Maria bobbed below the level of the dashboard, as he gunned the engine and fishtailed across the car park, driving straight for the men.
One let off another shot, and then leapt out of the way, but the other guy stood his ground. He was blocking the exit.
If he stayed there, Yanni would drive right over him.
Yanni shifted down a gear. Hit the gas. Both hands on the wheel, he aimed for the shooter.
Maria couldn’t watch. Please don’t hit him, she chanted inside her head.
The car jerked to the side, and there was a jolt of impact. A thud. And then they were accelerating up a slope, about to leave the basement car park.
She opened her eyes. “Please tell me he jumped out of the way?”
“He jumped out of the way.”
She looked back and saw the guy lying on his side. The other guy was crouched beside him.
“Brace yourself. The barrier is down.”
Her attention snapped ahead again, and she grabbed at the dashboard. The Mini smashed through the flimsy exit barrier, as though it was made of matchsticks. She winced. It wouldn’t do her paintwork any good. And did her insurance cover her for bullet holes in the roof?
They were outside and still intact, as far as she could tell.
It took a minute or so, before her breathing slowed to the point where she could speak, another few seconds to accept that Yanni was driving her car very fast through the darkened streets, and that she had no idea where they were going.
With her heart banging painfully, Maria dropped the gun back into her bag, then checked out the hole in the soft fabric of the roof. Fuck. She was glad it didn’t go through her.
“Are you hurt?” Yanni darted a quick look at her.
Reality hammered at her. He was no longer the battered, injured, weakling. He was now a lethal panther of a man, strong, sure and fully in control of a dangerous situation.
Was he faking his weakness when he stumbled getting into the elevator and leaned on her to get across the car park? He ran to her car fast enough, and he seemed to be driving it just fine.
Yanni was a predator, and she had let him out of his cage.
She’d bitten off more than she could chew this time. This was no Tanner, to be teased and played with. Yanni was most likely a killer. Any allegiance he might have toward her was purely temporary. She braced herself for the sudden halt, for him to pull over and throw her out of her own car, but he carried on driving.
Maria forced her tensed muscles to relax a little. “I’m good,” she answered. “Are you okay? And are you going to tell me who that was in the car park?”
“How long do we have? How much of a head start?” He was ignoring her questions.
How long? She rubbed her forehead and pushed her hair out of her eyes. “Not long. Ten… fifteen minutes before Aiden gets free.”
It was at this point that her composure disappeared. As the adrenaline rush slowed, she trembled and huddled back in the seat, tears pressing against the back of her eyes.
She’d just been shot at. People were trying to kill them.
What the hell did she do?
*
It took a lot of gentle coaxing on Jack’s part, before Sapphire would tell him anything further.
“The new girls usually come in twice a week. They start off in Dublin or Cork, then come here. After Gloria’s, they move us to another salon, then another, every week or so. We just go where we’re taken.”
He held out another cigarette to her. As before, she lit it from the glowing remains of the previous one.
“So,” she said, “the last few lots have been damaged, and they can’t work. Which means I’ve been here over a month, and that is not normal.”
“Hold on, what do you mean, damaged?”
“A rival, moving in on Gio’s patch.”
“Gio is the club owner?”
“Aye. So, the last lot? The ones that were due on Monday? Irina was in that group, but she never arrived.”
Jack was confused. “How did they get damaged?”
Sapphire rolled her eyes and tugged her robe a notch tighter. “They were marked. With knives. You can’t work with a bloody great cross cut into your face or your arse. What punter would go for a girl like that?”
Whoa. “You mean the girls were attacked, to stop them from working?”
“Aye. It means that Gio has to get a fresh shipment. And it acts as a warning.”
“How do you know this?”
Her look was scathing. “I work here, Sherlock. We talk, okay? And I met Irina. I was just leaving Dublin when she was brought in as fresh meat.”
Unease shivered down his spine. “Fresh meat?”
Sapphire sat on the edge of the bed, dropping her head, hands across her face. “You don’t think we do this for the fun of it, d’ya? Jesus. I wanted to go to University. I answered an ad for a chambermaid in a Dublin hotel. I just wanted to work for a year, to save up the tuition fees.”
Something didn’t make sense. He spoke carefully. “Why don’t you leave? What’s to stop you walking out?”
Her eyes looked old, much older than her tender years. “Gio owns me, I’m his property. If I try to run, his men will hunt me down. They’ll kill me.” She licked her lips and searched for another cigarette. “They’re saying that’s what happened to Irina. She tried to run for it.”
The insistent vibration of Jack’s phone demanded attention. He held up a finger to halt Sapphire, who now sat staring aimlessly at the grimy curtain.
Juli was calling.
“Hey, babe,” Jack said.
It was Aiden that responded. “You need to get back here. Our friend has checked out and not gone alone.” He sounded beyond pissed.
An icy hand closed around his heart. “Juli?” he whispered, unable to find his voice.
“No. Maria. Juli’s fine.”
Jack closed his eyes for a moment, allowed a wash of relief, and then focused. Yanni had Maria. Christ. “We’re on our way.” He had to find Tanner. “Sapphire, I need to find my buddy, the guy I came in with. He went off with a little brunette. Might be German. Can you help me?”
“Lola. She’s a Slovak, actually. I’ll tell Mitch on the door, and he can interrupt them, as long as your friend doesn’t mind. Being interrupted, you know.”
Jack nodded, his mind flashing ahead, planning, calculating, and second-guessing. As she moved to the door, he felt a pang of guilt. “Thanks—uh—Sapphire. Is there anything I can do to help?”
She shrugged again. “It’s too late for me, but the bastards need to be stopped from bringing in all these wee girls. There was one the other week—she was fourteen for fucks sake. Her uncle had sold her for the price of a second-hand car. Can you believe it?”
She reached out and touched Jack’s arm. “I’m sorry about your friend. Irina was a nice kid too.”
Jack asked the doorman to call a cab, slipped him some money from his dwindling supply, and lurked inside the club while he waited for Tanner to appear. Standing on the edge of the stage, the bouncer’s face was familiar. Where had Jack seen him before?
Tanner grabbed his shoulder. His expression was grim. “I got a message from Aiden. What the fuck happened?”
“I don’t know, but he’s got Maria.”
“Not for long.” Tanner’s voice held an undercurrent of steel. “If he so much as lays a finger on her, I’ll rip him apart with my bare hands.”
They returned to the apartment, to find Juli unconscious on the sofa with Aiden patting her cheeks and trying to wake her. Pink fluffy handcuffs trailed from one of his wrists, and he bore a livid graze down one side of his face. In the kitchen, the heavy table lay on its side.
Jack dropped to his knees by Juli’s side and grabbed her hand. “Is she hurt?”
Aiden snorted. “You trusted Maria, huh?” His face was tight with fury.
Jack was confused. He glanced at Tanner, who shrugged. He looked equally baffled.
“She did this.” Aiden grated the words out. “Maria.” He shook the cuff-laden wrist.
Wait—what? “Are you saying Maria let him go free?” Tanner sounded as disbelieving as Jack felt.
Aiden stood and gestured to his empty holster. He was as furious as Jack had ever seen him. “No, she didn’t just let him go free. She went with him. Stole my pistol, knocked me out with a fucking Taser, and cuffed me to the kitchen table. Then she fucked off with him.”
Tanner gaped.
Jack struggled to make sense of his words. Failed. “And Juli?”
“The sleeping pills are gone. Looks like Maria slipped some into her drink. I’m trying to wake her. See if she knows anything about this.”
The relief made Jack weak at the knees. Juli was drugged, not hurt. “He’ll probably let her go as soon as he’s away.” He tried to sound optimistic but failed with this too.
Tanner could have been made of stone, for all the emotion he showed. “She may have gone willingly, but there’s nothing to stop him keeping her as a hostage. Payback for how we’ve treated him. She knows fuck all about Yanni. She has no idea what she’s dealing with.”
*
Yanni showed no signs of kicking Maria out. He cruised along a quiet, residential street that she recognised. “That’s Juli’s house,” she said.
“I left something here.”
“What sort of something?”
“My passport and other documents. I needed a safe place for them.” He parked and killed the lights and the engine, then looked at Maria. “Are you coming or staying?”
“Coming.” Otherwise he’d be gone, she was sure of that.
He broke into the house with ridiculous ease, forcing the lock on the back door. He huffed a sigh. “Tell Juli she needs to fit an alarm.”
With the kitchen light switched on, he bent to rummage in the cupboard under the sink and emerged with a bulky brown envelope in his hand. This disappeared inside the fleece jacket, and Maria saw a glimpse of dark red on his side, a stain spreading across his shirt.
“You’re bleeding again,” she said.
He glanced down, grimaced, and tugged his clothes away, to check the wound. “I think the stitches are holding.” Seemingly satisfied, he quickly ran through the contents of the kitchen drawers and selected a pair of carving knives and a sharpening steel.
“You’re going to carry a knife?” She tried to control the tremor in her voice.
“Says the girl with the gun.” His tone was dry, almost amused. Next thing, the lights were switched off, the back door closed, and they headed back to Maria’s car. The stop had taken less than five minutes.
As she fastened the seatbelt, Yanni stared at her, one hand on the gear shift, the other on the wheel. “Are you sure you want to come along?” he asked. “It could get messy.”
Did she really have a choice? “If I say no?”
“Say no and I’ll leave you here, but you need to decide fast.”
He gave no indication of wanting to hurt her, and if she stayed with him, she’d find out if his story about Irina was true. “I’m staying.”
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
They cruised through night-time London, heading, by her best guess, for the M25 orbital motorway. She checked the time—11:35 pm. Aiden would almost certainly have raised the alarm by now, and the police could be looking for her car.
Did Yanni draw the same conclusion? A couple of miles from the motorway, he drove slowly down a back street, lined with railway-bridge arches. Most of the arches seemed to be lock-ups.
Parking outside one, he spoke curtly. “We’re changing cars. Come on.” He tossed her the Mini keys.
“I can’t leave my car here. It’ll get trashed.”
He shrugged. “Get back in it then, and go home.”
Scowling, she locked and secured it as best she could.
Meanwhile, Yanni opened one of the lock-ups and climbed into a gleaming black Mitsubishi SUV.
“I’ll move forwards. You pull down the shutter,” he said. “It’s self-locking.”
With a final look at her lovely car, now abandoned in this no-man’s land, Maria climbed up beside him. While he seemed happy for her to go along at the moment, how long would that last?
Yanni asked Maria for her phone before they went anywhere. He turned it off and removed the battery, then slipped it inside his pocket. “You can have it back later. I don’t want your friends tracking us from its signal.”
They were soon heading west on the M4 motorway, but while her phone might no longer be transmitting its regular pulse, he didn’t know about Oscar. She carried the little bean cat in her bag, but as a precaution had removed the tracker pin and attached it to a pocket flap on Yanni’s jeans before he put them on. Without close examination, it looked like another stud on the denim. She hoped he’d never notice it. As soon as Juli got the tracking software running, the guys would be able to identify Maria’s location with relative ease. She wanted to use it on a distance trial, and this would be perfect.
Yanni stayed silent, a mode she struggled with.
; “Go on, then,” she said. “You may as well tell me where we’re going?”
No reply.
“How do I know Irina exists? She could be a figment of your imagination.”
He glanced at her, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “And if she is? Just my imagination, that is.”
“If she doesn’t exist, I’d have to wonder where we’re really going, and why you’re happy for me to come along.”
“I may want to keep you as a hostage.”
She shivered. “I’m the one with the pistol. I’d shoot you first.”
“You don’t look like a killer to me.”
“You’re supposed to be meeting her on Saturday, right?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it’s only Thursday—okay, Friday—so what happens in the mean time?”
“Well,” he drawled, glancing at her again, “I could tie you up and torture you and handcuff you to a bed?”
She shivered again, but strangely, didn’t feel scared. He was playing with her. Wasn’t he?
“Or,” he said, “I could make a deal with you.”
“A deal? I’m listening.”
“Come along for the ride. Once I’ve found Irina, assuming she made it, I’ll tell you the whole story. And then we part company.”
“How do I know I can trust you?”
There was a pause. A flash of a wolfish grin. “You don’t.”
She had the advantage here. She had a sidearm, a Taser, a pepper spray and a set of handcuffs. He might have her phone, but Oscar’s button would be sending back data for the others to find her. And if he really wanted to take her as a hostage, he wouldn’t have given her the opportunities to walk away.
He was calling her bluff. “We have a deal.”
She watched the motorway signs flashing by. “I brought your pills. Both the painkillers and the antibiotics. Correct me if I’m wrong, but you need to keep taking those.”
“Thank you.”
As far as conversations went, this was almost as stilted as talking to Tanner.
How was he reacting to this? With fury probably, almost beyond anything she could imagine. He’d be mad at her now, and so would Jack, but at least Juli wouldn’t have put their marriage on the line.
