“How exactly did you get away?” he asked, because this was still not making any sense to him. He found her slippers—neon and hard to miss, fuzzy was an understatement—and pulled them on, too. They were vaguely reminiscent of tube socks, with no real heel, so one size truly did fit all.
“I pretended I was helpless,” she told him. “And they believed it. They left me in the car—in the back. They also left the keys in the ignition, so...”
Damn, that did not make sense. Go to all that trouble to grab Tasha—a roadblock, all those men, all those weapons—and then just leave her in the car, with the keys right there, no less...?
Unless...
“Stop the car,” Thomas ordered.
“What?” She looked at him in disbelief. “No!”
“Stop,” Thomas said. “The car.”
Chapter Five
“They let you go,” Thomas told Tasha grimly from the passenger seat of the SUV. “I need you to pull over. Now.”
“They didn’t let me go,” she argued, but as the words came out of her mouth, she realized she didn’t quite believe them herself. Leaving the keys in the ignition like that? Guard standing with his back to her, practically singing La la la, I can’t see you...?
“No one’s following you. Why? Can’t answer that, can you?”
“They’re... busy...?” Okay, now she just sounded flat-out stupid.
“Pull. Over,” Thomas insisted, pointing toward one of the runaway truck ramps that they’d been passing every now and then, meant for trucks heading down the mountain. “There.” They, however, were still steadily climbing upwards. Her ears popped again as if in emphasis. “Tasha, do it. Now.”
She took her foot off the accelerator as she released her exasperation through her clenched teeth. “If they catch us because we stop—” Oh, shit! As she tapped the brake pedal, there was no resistance and her foot went right to the floor. “The brakes are out! Thomas, hold on.”
“Down shift,” he told her, leaning toward her and doing the exact opposite of hold on, reaching for the gear shift, his hand over hers as she jammed it into second and then first gear.
They weren’t moving that fast. They’d been heading uphill, and lifting her foot off the gas had already slowed them down. And now the engine worked to slow them even more. But momentum kept the big SUV’s tires rolling, and she tried to make the sharp left turn up the ramp.
Tried and failed. Almost in slow-mo, the right front of the SUV headed directly toward a concrete barricade as Thomas, too, tried to wrestle the steering wheel even further to the left. But then he gave up, and put his left arm across her chest, holding her in place against the back of her seat as he used his right hand to brace them both against the dashboard.
They hit going maybe twenty-five miles an hour—and it was still enough to give them a jolt and to make the car screech with the sound of bending metal.
The airbags didn’t go off, but she was glad for that because the one in the steering wheel would’ve hit Thomas directly in his already-bruised head.
“You okay?” he asked, his face inches from hers.
Tasha nodded, wide-eyed.
“Get out of the car, fast,” he ordered, and his tone allowed no room for argument.
So she opened the driver’s side and slid out—he was right behind her, vaulting over the center console.
“What—” she said, but then didn’t have time to ask the rest of her question, which was a colorful variation on are we doing, because he’d grabbed her hand and was running, pulling her with him. He headed away from the SUV, up and across the loose stones of the truck ramp that she hadn’t quite managed to pull onto, and down over the side of the ramp into the brush that covered the steep mountainside.
He yanked her down, then, onto the wet ground, where he shielded her with his body as if he expected...
Boom!
With a tremendous roar, the SUV exploded, and the world around her seemed to melt into a blazing hot wind as she heard herself scream. “Oh my God! Oh my God!”
Flames shot up into the sky and pieces of both metal and the rubble of the road rained down around them.
“You’re okay,” Thomas murmured—although he was probably really shouting over the noise. Still, his voice sounded distant, tinny. “We’re okay.”
She still couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that the brakes had failed, and yes, Thomas had been so completely right—whoever it was who’d left him for dead and kidnapped her had, absolutely, let her get away.
With the intention that she die in a literal fiery crash.
Tasha flashed both hot and cold as she lifted her head and watched the SUV burn. If they hadn’t gotten out when they did, there was no way they would’ve survived that.
“How did you know?” she asked.
Thomas shook his head as he helped her to her feet. “I didn’t,” he said. “Not for sure, but... I guessed.”
Tasha nodded. “Good guess,” she said as she looked up at him. His face was streaked by blood still oozing from the injury he'd suffered. His powerful body was covered by random pieces of her clothing, each more ridiculous than the next. Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have been able to keep from laughing. But they’d left normal behind a long time ago.
They were standing on the side of a desolate mountain in the rapidly fading daylight, with the temperature dropping—a handcuffed, pathetic princess-to-be, and a clown-costumed Navy SEAL who probably had a concussion.
Her own head was still ringing and pounding—and by covering her, Thomas had taken the brunt of the blast. It was amazing he was still standing upright.
Do we need to find a hospital, she’d asked him just moments earlier. She realized with another flash of hot and cold that she might as well have asked if he wanted her to find him a talking unicorn.
“Are you really okay?” she asked him now, her mouth suddenly dry as she imagined having to carry him the rest of the way across this desolate mountain range to the Ustanzian ski lodge—assuming that the road they were on led directly there, with no forks or turnoffs. If she had to, she would, but God, that was going to be hard.
“Bit of a headache,” he said, “but yeah. Things are looking up.”
She laughed at that. “Our car just exploded. We almost died.”
“But we didn’t. And I can cross Find you, Break you free from a compound of armed guards, and Cover my bare ass off my to-do list,” he told her, “so I’m happy enough to surrender the SUV to the Gods of Holy-Crap, and instead stroll the rest of the way to Ted’s mom’s house.”
Stroll.
She looked at the mountains around them.
Right.
“We gotta move now, as fast as we can, while we can,” Thomas said. “Whoever wants you dead is gonna come looking. And when they don’t find your charred remains in that fire, or my body back where they left me...? They’re gonna realize they screwed up, and then they’re gonna try to hunt us down.”
Whoever wants you dead...
Words to put panic into her heart. If they—whoever they were—wanted her dead, what did that mean for Tedric and his parents, and everyone else up at the remote lodge?
“When we don’t show up, they’re going to lock down the lodge, right? I mean, more than they already have?” Tasha asked as they began walking up the road.
Thomas glanced at her. “Absolutely. And Uncle Admiral’s gonna send reinforcements. I predict this mountain will be buzzing with Navy helos shortly after dawn. Our job is to get through the night.”
When he put it like that, it didn’t sound too challenging. And yet...
Still, Tasha embraced his We got this attitude. “It stopped raining,” she realized.
Thomas smiled. “See? Things are definitely looking up.”
Chapter Six
Rio Rosetti was halfway to his cousin Luc’s housewarming party when his GPS went out.
At first he thought it was his phone—an app malfunction due to craptastic battery pow
er. Damn thing had been fading out on him with a vengeance over the past few weeks—going from fifty percent to zero in a heartbeat—a direct result of too many salt-water dunkings after his waterproof case had cracked.
Drying via rice only worked to a degree. His phone was on dead man walking status, and he carried his charger in the front pocket of his cargo shorts.
But when he pulled over into the parking lot of a strip mall to plug it into the cigarette lighter—yeah, Gertie, his car, was that elderly—it soon became clear it wasn’t a power issue. He had no bars and no internet—like instead of being in suburban San Diego, he was suddenly on the dark side of the moon.
It was then he noticed the traffic lights at the corner were out. They were flashing yellow, as if some kind of emergency backup had switched on. Had the power gone out in this part of town? Apparently it had. People were coming out of shops and restaurants that were decidedly dark.
It wasn’t just his cell service that was down—no one’s phone seemed to be working.
He halfway got out of his car to call to one of the women who’d come out of a sandwich shop. “Power out?”
She nodded. “Was there an earthquake?”
Rio shook his head. “Not that I know of.”
But quakes were weird. And yeah, as a Not-A-California-Native, earthquakes also freaked him out, but he’d been stationed in SoCal for years. He’d lived through enough to know how they worked.
Rio slapped on Gert’s radio and got an earful of static. He switched over to the AM news station he often used when navigating traffic, and it, too, was pure white noise.
Gertie’s old-school radio had a search function that would find the stations that came in the clearest, but it swept through the entire dial without stopping.
Both AM and FM.
Rio punched the clutch and jammed his stick into first, and peeled out of the parking lot, heading back toward Coronado and the Navy Base.
It sure seemed as if power had gone out throughout all of San Diego—and beyond, because why wasn’t he picking up any radio stations from Los Angeles?
The federal government, run by Shitty McConman and his mobster henchmen, was in the middle of a pissing contest in the form of a shut-down. Air traffic controllers and other federal workers had been sending out warnings for weeks now.
If he were the head of a terrorist organization determined to strike the United States, he’d fucking do it, right now.
Shiiiiit.
Yeah, there had either been one motherfucking huge earthquake somewhere in SoCal, or...
They were under attack.
Either way, something was seriously, gravely wrong.
Rio punched Gertie into fifth gear and blasted back toward Coronado.
“I don’t get it,” Tasha said.
Thomas glanced at her. They’d left the road, navigating their way through a dense forest of pine trees as they made their way toward the royal family’s compound.
He was hyper-aware of the handcuffs on her wrists. Because she’d been cuffed in the front, he didn’t have to worry as much about her not being able to catch herself if she tripped and fell. Instead, the real issue was the rapidly increasing cold. She was unable to put her hands into her pockets and instead had pulled the sleeves of her winter jacket down as far as she could, to cover as much of her fingers as possible.
And true, it wasn’t dangerously frostbite-inducingly cold, so that at least was a plus.
He’d grilled her on her kidnappers—there were six or seven, she wasn’t quite sure—all men, all white, all heavily armed. The voices she’d heard had American accents, but she didn’t think she’d heard them all speak.
Had she noticed any dogs?
To Thomas’s relief, there were none that she’d seen or heard. Being hunted by men with assault rifles wasn’t great, but it would be far worse if there were dogs involved.
Tash had told him that the cabin where they’d taken her was small and three point four miles off the main road, then another twenty-two point seven miles back down the mountain. The fact that she’d had the presence of mind to pay attention to the SUV’s odometer while fleeing her captors was impressive.
After she’d finished giving him every little last detail that she could remember, they’d fallen into silence as they’d walked. But now she shook her head, and said, “It doesn’t make sense. They had me. If they wanted me dead, why not shoot me? They had guns. I’m assuming they had bullets.” She looked at him, her blue eyes wide in the waning late afternoon light. “I mean, it’s gotta be easier to get ammunition than it is to get those assault rifles.”
“Pretty easy, these days, to get both,” he agreed.
“So why did they leave it to chance?” she asked. “My death? Yours, too.”
Thomas shook his head. “Yeah, I don’t know, Tash. I’m just happy we’re alive.” Understatement.
“At first, I was thinking they wanted it to look like an accident,” she said. “Brakes fail—although not at first, because I jumped on them hard when I first saw you. But okay, maybe they’d damaged them, and my stopping that way finished them off. So eventually the brakes fail, which they did, and the SUV... plunges from a cliff...? But that doesn’t explain that bomb, with a trigger or a timer or whatever it was. Forensics will find evidence—even if just traces of the explosive shows up—and it will... No way that will it be labeled an accident. So are they stupid or...?”
“Or,” he told her. “Bomb-making’s an art.”
The outraged confusion she shot him made him wish for his phone’s camera. “I would argue a hard no to that,” she countered. “Art?”
“Skill,” Thomas corrected himself. “Skill’s a better word. See, bombs have signatures that tie them to the maker and whatever group of tangos—terrorists—they’re part of, so... It really does make sense.”
“But if the terrorists wanted to be sure to take responsibility, why not just take video? If they want everyone to know they killed me,” she clarified. “Film it, post it online.”
“Unless the bomb’s stolen or a, well, forgery for lack of a better word.”
Now Tasha was still giving him a new WTF look, so he explained. “Maybe whoever set up that roadblock wants the authorities to think you were killed by a certain group of different bad guys. Let them take the blame.”
“Bad Guy Team A frames Bad Guy Team B for my murder.” She got it. “Okay.” But then she shook her head again. “But why risk my not-dying by letting me go? Why not tie me to a tree with the bomb-that-frames-their-mortal-enemies securely in my lap?”
“Because they’re not as smart as you,” he suggested, adding, “Thank God.”
“Or maybe I’m not the target,” she said. “I mean, maybe the point isn’t to kill me, specifically. Instead, maybe they just want to scare people by planting a bomb that went off, so they didn’t really care if I lived or died—I’ve been thinking about that, too. I mean, seriously, who besides Queen Wila would want me dead?”
It was meant to be a joke, but as Thomas glanced at her, he saw a flurry of emotions cross her expressive face.
“No,” she said, even though he’d said nothing. “Ted’s mother would never... That’s not even remotely possible. Ted is... No. I’m just some convenient pawn. Maybe the they-who-planted-that-bomb-in-the-SUV would’ve gone after anyone who was heading up to the Ustanzian compound.”
This time she seemed to want a response, so he gave her back a “Maybe.”
She was getting out of breath—from their conversation, or the hiking, or more likely a combination of the two.
These mountains weren’t very mountainous. On a scale from one to ten, with one being Florida and ten being the Rockies, they were maybe a five and a half.
Maybe.
Time and ice-age glaciers had worn them down, turning them into more of what Thomas thought of as foothills. Which was a good thing.
Because he and Tash still had hours of climbing up before heading downhill, before heading back up a
gain, toward the peak where the Ustanzian ski lodge was nestled. Thomas hadn’t been sure at first, but now he knew. There was no way in hell they were getting there before the sun went down. Which meant he needed to create a shelter—a hide—for them to use. They’d have to huddle together—God help him—to stay warm through the night.
Although if they stopped early enough, he would be able to light a small fire—dig a fire hole. The smell would be masked by the hazy smoke that still hung in the heavily overcast sky. Something big, somewhere relatively nearby, was on fire, and the recent explosion of the SUV added to the persistent burning smell.
Tasha had been nervous about that at first, and about a potential fire spreading from the still-smoldering SUV. Like Thomas, she’d grown up in California, where a fire in the mountains was a serious threat. But he’d reminded her that this part of the country was called New England for a very cold, damp, rainy reason. She’d experienced it, first hand, all those years living in Boston. Wildfires could happen anywhere, sure, but not here and especially not at this time of year.
“Do you think...” Tasha cleared her throat now, and started over. “I’ve been wondering what that explosion was that we heard earlier. And if...” She couldn’t bring herself to say it.
She was worried about her prince and his family. “The Ustanzian compound’s the most secure location in the area,” Thomas told her.
She nodded, still watching him expectantly, clearly wanting a more definitely-stated reassurance... that he couldn’t give her. Still, he tried his best. “I haven’t been there, obviously, but from the layout and plans that I studied...”
His words weren’t making her happy, so he tried, “The queen’s security team is certainly elite.”
“Oh my God,” Tash said. “Thomas. Really? I’m sure they’re okay is too hard for you to say?”
But he wasn’t sure. “I’ve never lied to you, and I’m not going to start now.”
King's Ransom: (Tall, Dark and Dangerous Book 13) Page 5
