Surrender

by Lisa Renee Jones

  “I’m not dressed,” I say quickly. “I need two minutes.”

  “Ninety seconds.”

  The line goes dead.

  seventeen

  Neuville will kill everyone I care about, just because I care about them.

  That is the only thought I can afford right now, outside of how to warn Kayden before it’s too late to save him, and everyone around him and us. I have no room for worry, fear, or anger. Just rapid decision and action. I need that two minutes I asked for, not ninety seconds, and I have no choice but to risk taking it. I toss my phone down, having no doubt Matteo is monitoring any movement it makes via the satellite tower. By the time it hits the floor, my gaze is already on the space under the door dividing me from another seemingly empty room, as a wild plan forms in my mind. I’m under the wall in a split second, squatting and finding exactly what I need in yet the next room over: a pair of legs under that wall, which means a purse and phone should be present as well.

  I go to my knees and lower myself to my elbow, face to the carpet, and scan for the purse that is thankfully on the floor, but it’s going to require me reaching deep into the room. The woman is dressing, her back to me, and I have no time to spare. I go all in, sliding my upper body under the wall and snagging the purse to drag it to me. The minute I have it, I dig for a phone, find it, and shove the purse back into the room, uncaring of where it lands. I’m already on my feet and dialing the one person I know isn’t in danger at the moment or corruptible, like those bastards Gallo and Matteo, praying she answers an unknown number.

  “Bonjour.”

  “Sasha, don’t speak, just listen,” I order. “This is life or death and if you’re in a public place, take cover now.”

  “I’m not,” she says. “Go on.”

  “Matteo’s dirty. Gallo’s dirty. Neuville’s here. He’s got guns on just about everyone, and don’t call anyone. Gallo will shoot Kayden and Adriel if their phones ring, or he might just do it anyway. Get creative and save them. I have to go.”

  “You can’t go with him, Ella. He’ll kill you.”

  “He’ll kill everyone else if I don’t,” I say. “You know him. You know I have to do this.”

  She hesitates, then says, “Yes. He’ll kill everyone. We’ll get to you. He has to go to the airport.”

  “I can handle myself,” I say, anticipating my purse and gun being taken from me and digging out cash for survival when I escape, and credit cards to be traced, if I can manage to use one of them. “Save the others.”

  “Leave the phone on.”

  “Trace it after you save everyone else.”

  I end the call, turn the cell on vibrate, and stuff it in the opposite boot from my right now much appreciated backup gun. The money and credit cards get shoved deep in my sock, though I’d rather they be at the soles of my feet, where I know I won’t be searched. I open the door, scanning the empty hallway, and walk down it. I’m out of time but I look right toward the store, and then left toward the back door. My hand goes inside my open purse, gripping Annie.

  Inhaling, I shove open the door that takes me into a narrow road and shared sidewalk dividing us from yet another row of stores and restaurants. Matteo is parked to my right and doesn’t get out, and I start to get into the backseat. My idea of pulling my gun on him is dashed when he faces me, holding his own. “Give me the gun and the purse,” he orders. “And I know your skills, Ella. Don’t think for a minute I won’t shoot you.”

  “Neuville wouldn’t like that,” I say, slowly lifting my purse over my head. “He wouldn’t get to rape me again first.”

  “Maybe he’d settle for Giada,” he taunts.

  “Sick bastard,” I growl, handing him my purse.

  He yanks it from me. “Get in—and I’m only giving you my back for two reasons. You aren’t getting close to the wheel, and if we aren’t standing in front of Neuville in ten minutes, he starts killing people.” He glares at me a few moments. “Understand?”

  “I understand he’s going to kill you.”

  “Not before he has some fun with you.” He races forward, turning the ignition and mumbling something in Italian while putting us in gear.

  Ten minutes.

  My mind races.

  I still have a gun, but I won’t for long if I don’t use it.

  Ten minutes.

  That’s all Sasha has to save everyone.

  It’s going to have to be enough, because Evil Eye applies here, and when I see Neuville I’m killing him. It’s what Kayden would want me to do, and I don’t let myself think about Gallo killing him the minute he saw him today. Kayden was nervous about him as it was, on edge, and ready for whatever came his way. He’s alive and Neuville’s about to be dead, right along with this piece of trash driving me.

  “Why?” I ask, as he weaves through people walking the shared space, which buys time for Sasha to work her magic. “Kayden’s a good man.”

  “Alessandro and I have something in common,” he says. “We both stole from the wrong person.”

  “You stole from Neuville?”

  “And Kayden,” he says. “Neuville found out.”

  “You should have—”

  “Gone to Kayden? He’d have sent me to Neuville anyway, but with no way to save myself.”

  “All you’re doing is ensuring that Kayden kills you.”

  “He won’t be alive to know I betrayed him.”

  My gut twists. “You underestimate him.”

  “But not Gallo’s hatred.”

  Kayden won’t underestimate that hate, I assure myself. I know he’s alive, and he’ll stay that way. But if I get found with this phone on me, Neuville will kill someone to punish me. I slip it out of my boot and under the seat, hoping they figure out where I am and where that means I’m going next. Or that Matteo follows. Whatever the case, it ensures Matteo is found and pays for what he’s done.

  The car jolts to a stop as a group of walkers step in front of us. “It was you who took those journal pages, wasn’t it?”

  “You know the answer.”

  “You were watching us in our tower.”

  “He was watching you.” The announcement turns my blood to ice. “I couldn’t save you from that.”

  “Did you even try? How did you get in there?”

  He scrubs a hand through his dark hair. “I was over my head, Ella. I’m still fucking over my head. Maybe I should have gone to Kayden, but I didn’t.”

  “You can now.”

  “It’s too late for that,” he says, turning us around a corner that puts us in a pedestrian- and retail-free area, which means I’m running out of time. “I just need my payday and I’ll disappear.”

  “From the necklace,” I say.

  “For delivering you.”

  I don’t have time to let the spike of anger this creates in me take hold, because he cuts right and we’re suddenly in an alleyway and then halting. “The party stops here, Ella.”

  He’s right. It does, because my gun is already in my hand.

  Matteo’s cell phone rings and he listens before handing it to me. “Neuville wants to talk to you.”

  I inhale and take the phone. “So close,” he says, his voice meant to be pure seduction, but it cuts like a rusty nail. “If we open the doors and you resist, even slightly, someone dies. Kayden dies. And just in case you doubt I’m going to do it, watch Matteo fall.”

  I suck in air and look up at the same moment a bullet pierces the front window and Matteo slumps forward. Dead, and he never saw it coming. “Party is over, Matteo,” I whisper.

  Neuville laughs, a nail-biting sound. “That sounds like enjoyment. I’d better pick someone else.”

  My heart races but my voice is calm, steady. “You made your point.”

  “I like insurance,” he says. “You should know that, but you seem to need a
reminder. Nathan’s at the hospital right now, and his current patient has a syringe in her pocket that would kill him in thirty seconds. I suggest you leave whatever gun you have on your person that Matteo missed in the car. Understood?”

  “Yes,” I lie.

  The doors to both sides of the backseat open almost instantly, and I react. I shoot the man to my left and then the one to my right, and step over him. But there are three more men, all pointing guns at me. And then there’s him, in the center of them all, tall, dark, and striking in a fitted black suit, so close I can almost see the evil in his charcoal eyes.

  And my gun is aimed at him. “I am many things you didn’t realize I was,” I say. “Including a perfect marksman. Tell them to put their guns down. Because if they shoot or move you’ll be dead, even if I am, too.”

  “I knew everything you were,” he says. “More than you did, and I could tell you things you burn to know—but not if I’m dead.”

  My father. Those words rip through me and I know in that moment that Neuville is connected to my father’s death—and that’s all I need to know. “You have nothing to say that I want to hear.”

  “Well, believe this,” he says. “If I’m dead, Gaston, my second, who I’m sure you remember, has been instructed to visit our friend Sara, which won’t upset him. He’s quite fond of her. He’s been watching her, you know.”

  My blood freezes with those game-changing words. Kayden will protect himself. Nathan is far more than just a doctor and can do the same. I trust Sasha to have protected Giada and Marabella. But Sara is an entirely different story.

  “I can almost hear you thinking,” he says. “Let me vocalize your thoughts. Is Sara safe? Are all those people protecting her as good as you are? The answer is no to both. She is not. They are not. Now, Kayden’s men are good, but there’s that layer of Americans between them and her, who all mean well, and are exceptional in their own country, but not in France. Paris. I own those places. Put the gun down or I’ll have a bullet put in her body now, and let her suffer while she waits for you to get there.”

  “She is nothing to me,” I say. “A girl I met while undercover.”

  He removes his phone from his pocket. “Then I’ll tell Gaston to fuck her, shoot her, and get rid of her.” His eyes meet mine, a brow arching, and evil radiates from him.

  He isn’t bluffing. He never bluffs. I lower my weapon and Bastile, a brawny man with a goatee, who’s also Neuville’s personal bodyguard, snaps his fingers at me, silently demanding my gun. I look at him, remembering the many times he smiled at Neuville’s nastiness toward me, and his tall, muscular body looks like a mighty fine target for a bullet.

  “The gun,” he growls.

  Grimacing, I hand him the damn thing, which earns me a stomach-churning “Good choice, little one” from Neuville, who I force myself to look at. He then steps aside, placing me in profile, and grandly waves me forward, inviting me back to his world, and my personal hell.

  I walk forward, cold air biting at my bare arms, but I feel nothing. No physical reaction. No emotion. This is about survival for me and death for him, and I’ll ride out whatever storm I have to in order to get there. One of his men opens the back door of a limousine for me and I slide inside. A moment later Neuville is across from me, the smell of him whiskey and cigars and bad memories. Almost instantly the vehicle is moving, and I know his urgency is all about escaping Kayden’s city.

  “Where’s the necklace?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You do know.”

  “I don’t remember.”

  His lips thin. “So I hear.” He studies me, his eyes heavy lidded, expression guarded. “Did you fuck my brother?”

  “I never made it to your brother. Someone attacked me and I ended up in the hospital.”

  “And then in Kayden Wilkens’s bed.” Without warning he is next to me, and a huge chunk of my hair is in his hands. “I hate the brown hair. Did he like it? Did Kayden like it?”

  “No,” I say, my eyes meeting his. “I did this.”

  “I see the rebellion in your eyes,” he says. “Good. That only makes me want to fuck you and punish you all the more. And I will punish you on the plane.” A needle jams into my neck—and everything goes dark.

  I gasp for air and jolt to a sitting position to find myself on an airplane, engines humming, and Garner Neuville looming over me in his egotistical power-mongering way, a syringe in his hand. “They were right,” he approves. “Woke you right up.” He moves away, thank God, and sits in the leather seat across from me, the cold air chilling my bare arms, my fingers digging into the arms of the chair.

  “Where’s the necklace, Ella?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “That’s what I hear. I’m not sure I believe you.”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “Three hundred million dollars,” he reminds me.

  “That I don’t need or care about.”

  “I wonder if Kayden would trade the necklace for you?”

  “He doesn’t have it either.”

  “But would he?”

  I know he would, but I won’t give Neuville the power over Kayden or me that he’s looking for. “You’re all greedy bastards. And if someone hadn’t tried to take the damn thing from me, I wouldn’t have lost my memory in the first place.”

  “Convenient that you remember me, but not that necklace.”

  “I’ll tell you what I told your brother. Nothing about having everyone hunt me down for that necklace is convenient.”

  “When you were talking with my brother, or when you were betraying me with him?”

  “He said he’d kill you,” I lie. “I saved you.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you believed him?”

  “Yes.

  He stares at me, eternally it seems, as is his way. He tries to tear you down, unnerve you. He wants me to reply again because the silence rattles me, but I do not. I won’t. I stare back at him, and while I can still see how I once saw his sculpted face, gray eyes, and thick, dark hair accented with a widow’s peak as handsome, now all I see is a mask for the devil.

  “Take your clothes off,” he orders.

  I don’t gasp. I don’t give him a reaction. That’s what he wants, and it’s not like I didn’t know this was where I’d be headed the moment I found myself getting into that car.

  But this isn’t about me. This is about saving Sara, and living to kill this man. And the bottom line here is that I’m in a plane, in the air, going who knows where, and no one can rescue me. I have to get through this flight to ensure Neuville doesn’t survive this night—if it’s even the same night. I don’t know how long I’ve been out. I don’t know how long we’ve been in the air. And if I refuse his order, he’ll enjoy making me do it. I’m not giving him that satisfaction. I take off my boots, cautious to keep the money and credit cards from his view. Those credit cards might be the only way I have to tell Kayden where I am.

  Pushing to my feet, I don’t give him the satisfaction that hesitating and looking awkward would reward him with, or the reluctance it would indicate. I simply take off my clothes and I’m naked, calm, and composed on the outside in only seconds.

  On the inside I’m angry, and feeling other things as well. Humiliation. Dread. Vulnerability. Fear. I hate that one the most. But training in mental fortitude saves me from their destructive influences, and I package them up into a tight mental ball and set them aside.

  Neuville looks me up and down, lingering at places I know he will touch me, but that ball I set aside is not in the mix. I am my father’s daughter, a CIA agent, a survivor, and Lady Hawk—and a Lady Hawk cannot, will not, cower. I will think of my Hawk. I will remember that surviving this means he will replace every memory of this man with new ones of him. Good things that overcome the wa
y this man rapes me with his eyes and leaves me standing under the cold air that makes my nipples too damn pointed, his eyes too damn pointed as he lusts over them, and me.

  It’s at least ten minutes before he stands, placing himself almost directly in front of me, and grabs a chunk of my hair. Again, it’s no surprise, but it bites. It always bites.

  “You will change your hair back to red tomorrow,” he orders. “You will be nothing you were with him.” He lets go of my hair and grabs my wrist, showing me the hawk tattoo. “Did he threaten to kill you if you didn’t get this?”

  “It’s a tattoo,” I argue.

  “That’s a no, and the wrong answer. I will not fuck you with this on your body. I will burn it off before this night is through, and make sure you suffer as a punishment for making me do it.”

  And I will kill you before you ever get the chance, I silently vow. I just need to get to Sara. The minute I’m in the same room with her—

  He backs me up and sets me down in the chair. “Hands on the armrests,” he orders, and when I do it without question, I get the reaction I want: irritation. He wants me to resist. He wants to punish me. It turns him on. And I won’t give him the triggers he seeks.

  I have to remind myself of this when he reaches inside his pocket. At the sight of the rope he produces, I know my mental resistance to being tied up is something not easily fought, and it comes at me fast and fierce, and I have to deep breathe to calm myself. You don’t kill a mob boss on a plane, with his men on it, and live.

  I let him tie me up.