Читать книгу Shannon McKenna Bundle: Ultimate Weapon, Extreme Danger, Behind Closed Doors, Hot Night, & Return to Me - Shannon McKenna - Страница 27

She struggled, of course. She could not help herself. It was a given, an automatic response. But the fight was a frantic search for some place to put that desperate energy raging inside her. She fought how hard she wanted him, how much she was beginning to need him. She fought that sad, yearning ache that scared her out of her wits.

Not just for his beauty, his intensity, his fabulous cock. She wanted the life-giving elixir of his kisses, she wanted to wander through the boundless wilderness of him, to get lost in him. She wanted to devour him, soak him up, drink him in. She wanted to be devoured.

Stubborn bastard. She was furious at him for being a stubborn dickhead about Georg, and at the same time, pathetically grateful that he had stopped her from drinking that toxic brew.

He had saved her. From Georg, from herself. How dare he.

Val pushed her against the wall, wrenching her arms behind her, and for some reason, his smoldering barbarian energy did not piss her off. She’d encountered that conquering warrior vibe in her lovers before, and had been secretly amused by it. Never tempted. Never stirred. It was just another weakness to be exploited, another blind spot to turn to her advantage. She’d toyed with men’s vanity, their illusions about themselves. She’d made them dance to her tune when she bothered with them at all. Puppets. Clowns. Big bore.

But Val was no clown. He had no illusions, no vanity. Val danced to no tune but his own. And she was anything but bored.

He was going to throw her down on the bed and fuck her, and she could not wait. She was going to explode, combust. She needed Val’s delicious hot scent to drive away the memory of Georg’s bitter odor, Georg’s sour breath, the damp, bruising clutch of Georg’s hands. After today’s nightmare, she was crazy for it, but she just couldn’t…stop…struggling. Her muscles trembled with the electric compulsion.

He immobilized her in his huge embrace and leaned, pinning her body against the wall. “Tell me that you want me,” he said.

She squinted, disoriented. “What?”

“Tell me that you want me,” he repeated impatiently. “I don’t trust myself to read you.”

She wrenched at her trapped wrists. “Why the hell not?”

He made a frustrated sound. “I want it too much,” he burst out. “I need it too much. I do not want to…how did you put it? Project my gutter fantasies onto you?”

She shook with breathless, hysterical laughter, every inch of her tensed against his body. “Why this sudden insecurity?”

His face was tense, a mask of rigid self-control in the shadowy room. “I do not want to be like him,” he said starkly.

Tam gasped in astonishment. The idea was so incongruous, she almost couldn’t process it. “Him? Georg? Hah!” Her voice cracked. “You are nothing like him! As if!” She shoved him hard to punctuate her statement. “You are his polar opposite!”

His grin flashed. “Ah. Good, then. This heartens me.”

She made a frantic growling sound, lunged forward, and sank her teeth into his neck, hard enough to hurt. “Goddamn it, Val,” she hissed when she let go. “Don’t be sweet. Not right now. You’re ruining the barbarian conqueror vibe. Keep waffling like this, and I’m going to have to put you down.”

He laughed, a free, delighted sound. Plaster dust and flakes of paint pattered down on the antique tile floor as he pushed her back against the wall. He wrenched her jacket down over her shoulders and off, then attacked the buttons of her blouse.

She gave him a shove that rocked him back a bare couple of inches. “Hey. If you rip the only clothing I have to put on my body, I swear to God, I will kill you. Slowly and painfully.”

He slowly uncurled his fisted fingers and let go of the handful of silk, but he did not step back. “Take it off,” he commanded.

She unbuttoned the blouse, and that was as far as his patience would stretch. He wrenched the sleeves down, flung the blouse away.

He stared at her breasts, his gaze hot and intent as he slid his sensitive fingertips slowly around her nipples. Tender, lazy strokes that left glowing streaks of light and heat in their wake, every nerve wanting him back. Hungering for more. Her nipples tingled. He bent low, and she gasped at the faintest contact, the scratchy brush of his stubbled cheeks, the softness of his lips. His swirling tongue, the wet suckling pull of his hot mouth. He kept her like that, topless and trembling against the wall while he made love to her breasts, until her tension melted, softened.

He gathered her up into his arms and tossed her on the bed. His huge shoulders were silhouetted against the dim light filtering in the door as he loomed over her, his face in menacing shadow. He tugged off her boots, her pants. Flung them behind him. His own clothes followed.

He was naked. So strong and powerful and hot against her skin. The empty shackle of the handcuff dangled, a kinky fashion accessory swinging and glinting on his wrist.

Something to push against, that was what he’d offered her the night they met. That was exactly what she needed, to keep pushing and pushing, until she finally pushed through that wall into someplace where she could stand to be. Someplace where her nerves weren’t firing in crazy panic. Someplace where she could let herself relax and feel it.

Val could give her that. He was tough enough. Brave enough.

He climbed on top of her, folding her legs high, draping them over his shoulders. Stroking his hands down the fine, sensitive skin of her inner thigh. He covered her with his body, caressing her pussy, and found her slick and wet.

But not wet enough for his first deep, relentless thrust.

She cried out and scratched his chest, drawing blood. He just stared down, pinning her beneath him against the swaying bed.

“Do not ever do that to me again,” he said.

She swatted at him, hard. “Do not think your big dick gives you the right to give me orders, loverboy.” She spat the words at him.

He seized her hands, pinned them on either side of her head. “Never…again,” he repeated hoarsely, punctuating each word with a deep, jarring lunge of his body.

She writhed and wiggled, squeezing and clenching around his thick shaft. “You still don’t get it, do you? It was the only way!”

He went still on top of her, his fingers tightening painfully around hers. “I will never get it,” he said. “It is too much. Do not ask it of me.”

She wound her legs around his hips, squeezing the little muscles of her pussy around his cock with all her strength. Lifting herself against him, to feel that sweet, hot, gliding thickness caressing her deep inside. “I’m not asking anything of you but this,” she said fiercely. “So why don’t you just shut the fuck up and give it to me?”

He did. Deep and hard, every thrust jolted her wonderfully closer to the place she needed to be. With each thrust she grew slicker, hotter, more eager for the next, more desperate for the licking flames, the unbearable sweetness, brightening, sharpening. Piercing bliss.

The bed squeaked and groaned. Val’s breath was hard, panting. She gasped for breath. Small sounds against the vast, diffused backdrop of lashing rain outside the open door, distant thunder, wind whipping the foliage outside, the fragrant, rain-scented chill. Their twined bodies churned, clenched around a molten core of sensation.

It exploded into bloom. Melting sweetness throbbed through her, endlessly. She floated through that infinite realm. Filled with grace.

He took longer to finish, gathering handfuls of her hair and burying his face against his shoulder. His climax tore through him violently. His hips pounded hard against her body.

They lay together, limp and damp afterward. Their twined bodies generated sensual, enfolding heat, despite the cold of the room. Day had faded completely. They rested, formless as clouds in the blue half light, in an otherworld apart from all the pain and confusion and danger.

She wished they could stay there together forever. She never wanted to break this fragile bubble of calm—but she had to.

She turned his face, tilting his chin up so that he looked up into her eyes. There was something he had to know.

“I did not fuck him,” she said. “I would have, true, but I didn’t. You know that, don’t you?”

He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “I know that.”

“He couldn’t have performed, anyway. Not without an audience. It’s his thing.”

“I know. Hegel told me.” Val said.

“He got that from Kurt,” she said. “Kurt liked that. So, of course, Georg fixated on it. Kurt was God for him. I think what Georg truly wanted was just, well, Kurt. That was his way to get…closer.”

Val flinched, dragging himself out of her body. “Please. No more details. I cannot stand it.”

That infuriated her for some reason. She felt thrown back upon herself. “Why? Can’t you handle it, Val? Do I disgust you?”

His head swiveled around. “Shut up,” he said fiercely.

His harshness startled her. She curled up, wrapping her arms around her knees. “Fine,” she said distantly. “So we won’t talk.”

Val seized her by the shoulders and gave her a short, hard shake.

“I cannot stand the thought of anyone hurting you,” he said. “Not now, not in the past, and not in the future. Is that so fucking offensive to you, Tamar?” His eyes bored into hers, daring her to object.

She gaped at him, disarmed. “Um. I see.” She cleared her throat, and said the first thing that popped into her head. “Val? Could you get that handcuff off your wrist? It’s bugging me. Sort of like, ah, as if you were walking around with your fly open.”

He made a frustrated sound and got up, puttering around in the dimness to search in his discarded jacket on the floor. He pulled a tiny kit out of the pocket, smaller than a cigarette case, full of small tools.

He came back to the bed and switched on the flickering fluorescent light by the bed, and scowled with concentration as he picked the lock mechanism.

She rolled closer to him and stroked the dips and curves of his muscular thigh with her fingertips. It took him only a minute before he leaned over and snapped one of the open cuffs onto a wrought iron loop that decorated the painted metal headboard.

“It looks perverse, hanging underneath the Madonna Addolorata,” she said. “Sort of sacrilegious.”

He snapped off the light. The darkness seemed much deeper now. “It seems appropriate to me,” he said. “Under the circumstances.”

She didn’t want to touch that with a ten-foot pole. She got up from the bed—and stopped cold, as hot semen trickled down her thigh.

She stiffened in shock. “We didn’t…” Her voice trailed off.

Val’s dark gaze was unapologetic, and unsurprised. “No,” he said flatly. “We didn’t.”

She stood like a statue, her hands flat on her belly. There was nothing to say. She couldn’t blame him, despite his aggressiveness. That carelessness was mutual, and they both knew it. If he hadn’t jumped her, she would have jumped him. Without a thought of protecting herself.

Fear swept through her like an icy wind, weakening her limbs. The dark got abruptly darker, the air swirling through the door colder against her sweat-chilled skin.

She felt so fucking vulnerable.

“Is it a dangerous time?” he asked in a carefully neutral voice.

She harrumphed. “Who the hell knows? This is me, Val. This is Tam. Do I look like a woman with a predictable cycle? Could anything about me be characterized as regular? Get real.”

His chest jerked with dry laughter. “Ah, sì? And what does a regular woman look like?”

Her shoulders lifted, dropped. “Not like me, that’s for sure,” she muttered. “I don’t even eat. I go for months with no period. Nothing about me is normal.”

“Yes, this is so,” he agreed, a little too readily.

She slanted him a cool glance and hurried into the bathroom.

The water from the bidet was icy cold, and there was no soap, but it didn’t matter. She washed until her private parts burned from the cold, all too aware of the futility of the gesture. She dried off, wrapped the threadbare towel around herself. When she came out, Val was motionless on the bed.

“Promise me something,” he said.

“I don’t make promises,” she said. “To anyone.”

“I demand it.” His voice hardened.

“Demand all you want,” she replied. “Feel free. It changes nothing.”

But he persisted. “Never do that to me again, Tamar.”

“Do what?” She injected a fake lightness into her tone. “I’ve done a lot of unforgivable things lately. Help me keep them straight.”

“Do not use your body as currency.”

Anger boiled up inside her like lava. How dare he. He, of all people, should know better. “Do you think I ever wanted to, in my life?” she demanded, incredulous. “Did you ever want to, Val? What are you telling me? That you can protect me from the greed and lust and cruelty of all men forever? Do you think I can be sure I won’t be in a situation where I have to trade sex for the chance to live for another fucking ten minutes? Like today, for instance? Don’t be stupid! It makes me angry!”

“Just…promise it.” He bit the words out slowly.

“No,” she said.

He wrenched the towel off her body. His cock was lengthening. His eyes gleamed in the dark with undimmed intensity. Oh, God. Men. As if his huge, waving erection had anything to do with anything.

She clenched her jaw. “I will not lie to you,” she said.

“I’m not asking for a lie.” His voice vibrated with intensity. “I’m asking for you to change the truth.”

She shook, a tremor of laughter that was closer to tears. “Oh? Like it’s so easy? The truth is the truth, Val. You can’t change it. You can’t control a damn thing. There is no limit to how bad things can get. If you accept that, you’ll be stronger. Maybe you’ll survive. That’s the best a person can hope for.”

“I love your strength,” he said quietly. “Your strength excites me. Your cruelty exhausts me.”

She shook her head. “It would be so easy to lie to you.” Her voice trembled despite her best efforts to steady it. “I could have said, oh, sure, baby, you bet. I promise, cross my heart. But I didn’t. Not to you, Val. I’ve given you what I’ve never given any man in my life, you thick-skulled, ungrateful prick. What I never imagined giving anyone. And you call it cruelty.”

He grabbed her hips as she began to turn away, and jerked her close, pressing his face against her mound. His mouth moved, hot and hungrily against her clit, his strong, clever tongue probing, seeking.

The feeling was knee-weakening, shockingly wonderful, but she was too electric, too emotional to bear it. She swatted at his face. “No.”

His expression was now impossible to read in the darkness. “Your ‘no’ is meaningless.” His voice was low, as soft as silk. Full of his own secret knowledge of her. His mysterious power.

She shivered at its promise. “Too bad for you. Let go.”

“No, I will not.” He flung her down onto the bed, and yanked her arm toward the headboard.

Too late, she realized what he planned, and by then, the cuff was snapped closed over her wrist. She flailed and slapped with her free hand, but he slid down the length of her and pulled her body on the bed so that she was stretched out, long and taut. All she could reach were handfuls of his hair, which she grabbed, yanked. In vain.

He put his mouth to her, and loved her with it, eagerly, desperately. He suckled, licked and swirled her into a state of slick, creamy desperation. Jerking, shivering. Trying not to whimper and beg.

The handcuffs helped, perversely. Even though she yanked and rattled, even though the metal hurt, the cuff gave her a fixed point of reference that she could cling to. It left the rest of her free…to feel it.

Really feel it, as she never had before. She’d always had to pretend to like cunnilingus, for those lovers who had insisted upon it. Too intimate, too exposed. It had been hard to pretend.

She wasn’t pretending now. She writhed at the tender tremolo fluttering across her clit, the slide up and down the furled folds of her labia, the plunge of his tongue into her pussy. He found her sweet spots, and exploited them, exalted them.

Time stretched and warped. She came apart, over and over, until she stopped struggling and lay there, damp and sprawled and vibrating.

He turned on the hideous bedside lamp, and picked the lock again, then petted and kissed the angry red marks on her wrist.

She glanced at the huge erection waving right at eye level, and cleared her throat. “Ah, do you plan to do anything with that?”

“If you want it,” he said quietly. “I get tired of hearing only no.”

“You won’t hear it this time.” She caressed his cock with one hand and cupped his balls with the other, swirling her fingers tenderly around the hot, heavy globes. She pulled him down on top of her, guided him between her legs. Nudging, wiggling, pressing him inside.

Tears welled into her eyes at the perfection of it when he pushed himself deeper. They settled into a lazy rocking against the squeaking bed, clutching and sighing, riding the soft, surging waves. In no hurry. It was all pleasure. It was all perfect. He was perfect.

And if she were not so exhausted, that would have terrified her.

When they were too tired to move, he rolled over onto her and stared down, as if he could see her face in the dark. “Someday you will make that promise to me,” he said.

She put her hands on his cheeks, stroking the angular shape of his bones, the faint, scratchy sting of his beard. “I will not make false promises,” she said softly. “Not to you, Val.”

He turned his head, kissed her palm, with those soft, hot, supple lips. “No,” he said, his voice stubborn. “The promise will be real.”

She shook her head. “You’re wildly romantic, Val, did you know that?”

“I suppose,” he said. “Since I met you, I have become so.”

“I hate to break this to you, but I’m the most unromantic person on the planet,” she told him. “Which doesn’t mean that I don’t care.

I did what I did because I care. I wish I could make you understand that.”

“I do understand it.” He grabbed her hand, rubbed it against his cheek. “But I reject it. I will not ask that of the woman I love. I would not ask it of myself. The subject is closed.”

Love. The word made shivers of marvelous terror course through her. Along with something else, something nameless, sweet and dangerous, that fluttered through her, rustling her, like wind shaking a tree.

She shoved it away instinctively. “Toughen up, Val.”

“Leave the subject alone,” he growled. “It is irrelevant now. We have burned that bridge, and thank God for it.”

“Not at all,” Tam said crisply. “As far as he knows, you burst in and abducted me. I could contact him, feed his vanity—”

“No!”

She sighed. “Damn it, Val. Do you want to save Imre, or not?”

“Don’t put it in those terms. It is an intolerable thought. Just let me protect you. Please. For once.”

She was startled, and moved. “I don’t need protecting,” she told him.

“Of course you do not,” he said wearily. “I do not give a fuck whether you do or not. I want to protect you anyway.”

She shook her head.

He grabbed her shoulder, squeezed it, shook it. “Tamar. My love.” His voice sounded exhausted. “If someone offered to protect me, I would not spit in her eye. I would be flattered. Perhaps even…touched.”

“Oh, I think we’ve got the touching part all covered,” she murmured, smiling in the dark. “Do you need protecting, Val?”

“No. But it would be nice to have someone care enough to try.”

She pressed her face against his shoulder and licked, savoring the deep, salty flavor of his dried sweat. Relaxing against his heat, his strength. She inhaled and realized that her chest had relaxed.

She was breathing so deeply. The breaths so unforced.

It was true, what he said. It would be tragically futile, to try and protect someone like her.

But it was so nice that he cared enough to try.

The overhead light switched on, without warning. Val and Tam both sprang up, Tam lunging for the purse, with the gun…

Ah. Never mind. It was just Signora Concetta, her hand on the lightswitch, her eyes huge and shocked. She crossed herself.

Tam grabbed for the towel that lay on the floor and wrapped it around herself. Val had no such recourse. He got up, picked up his trousers, and started putting them on. Lazy and unhurried.

The signora took a long look at Val’s body, and cleared her throat, with a great, phleghmy, gurgling cough. She looked as if she were trying not to smile, though the expression looked a bit rusty.

“Scusatemi. You wanted dinner,” she said stiffly.

“So I did,” Val said calmly. “I still do. Especially now.”

The good lady had taken Val’s suggestion of wine, bread and cheese as a challenge to inflict death by food. The assault started with a jug of homemade wine and two thick crockery cups to drink it out of. Then a crusty loaf of bread, a wedge of cheese with a filthy green rind that looked like it had been rolled in dead grass, and a creamy, yellow-white interior that smelled powerfully of sheep. A huge, phallic chunk of homemade salami followed.

“Cinghiale,” the signora said proudly. “Wild boar. My sons killed it.”

Then she went out onto the patio and bent over what they then realized was an enormous wheelbarrow. She began bringing in earthenware oven crocks, each wrapped in its own artfully knotted dish towel, each filled with a fragrant hot baked or stewed dish.

She covered the rickety table with them and went out again. Her next armful of jars held vegetables preserved in vinegar, oil and garlic; sun-dried tomatos, eggplants, peppers, olives. A basket of freshly picked oranges was the crowning touch, or so they thought until the signora reached into her apron pocket and pulled out a slender-necked corked bottle filled with a pale yellow liquor.

“Limoncello,” she announced proudly. “My own lemons. Very good.”

Val grabbed the lady’s hand, which fortunately no longer appeared to be covered with chicken blood, and kissed it fervently.

“Signora, you are an angel sent from heaven,” he declared. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

The signora yanked her hand back with a smirk and took a long, appreciative look at Val’s naked chest and half-fastened pants. She grunted her approval. “You will need it,” she said. “Buon appetito.”

“God, yes,” he said in heartfelt tones.

The signora frowned at Tam and pinched her upper arm. “Eat some of my braciole,” she admonished. “You’re too skinny. That man will squash you.”

After the signora had gone, they perched on the rickety, termite-riddled chairs on each side of the loaded table, and dug into the feast.

Tam discovered, to her astonishment, that food just kept on going right into her and space kept opening up for more. It was so different from her usual feeling when eating or trying to—that the food was bumping up against a blank stone wall that would let nothing through.

Not tonight. Tonight, she was open, yawning wide, eager.

Usually, strong tastes repelled her. Tonight, they were strangely marvelous. She ate three times as much as she usually managed to choke down, and Val inhaled over ten times that much on his own.

When she finally stopped, stuffed, she sat back and just watched in awe as he continued to eat, and eat, and eat.

“You’re risking your life with that stuff, you know,” she informed him. He layered sun-dried tomatoes with the wild boar salami, cheese, and fleshy red festoons of peppers on a huge chunk of dripping, oil-soaked bread. “Salmonella, botulism, and ten other lethal bacteria that I could name.”

“Don’t name them.” His white teeth bit down, eyes closing in delight as he chewed. “And this from a woman who travels with at least twenty different types of deadly poison in her beauty case?”

Tam grabbed an orange and began to peel. At least its contents would be more or less sterile. “That’s different. Those compounds were cooked in a lab under controlled conditions by people who hold advanced degrees in chemistry from MIT and Stanford.”

He ripped off another chunk of bread and fearlessly prepared another heap. “But they do not taste as good,” he pointed out.

She took a bite of orange. The explosive, tangy sweetness made her gasp. “The chicken blood alone might carry you away,” she warned.

Val stabbed his fork into the crock that held thinly sliced dark meat wrapped around flavorful cheese, hot pepper, parsley and garlic, floating in a rich lake of spiced tomato sauce. He chewed fearlessly and stared her in the face, a suggestive gleam in his eyes.

“Don’t think for one second that you’re going to kiss me after you eat all that garlic,” she warned him.

“Don’t think for one second that you can deny me,” he retorted coolly. “I’m much bigger than you are. Faster, too.”

“Ah, but I’m more treacherous,” she teased him.

His face sobered. He looked at the food in his hand as if he’d forgotten what to do with it. “I would not want to put that to the test.”

She missed that fleeting moment of lightness. It was so rare in her life to laugh and joke, kick around a man and have him come back for more. To have fun. Typical Tam. Trust her to kill it by accident.

She tended to kill things, as a rule. She abruptly hated herself for it. “I won’t betray you if I can help it,” she said, a lame attempt to save the moment.

“Me neither,” he replied quietly. “I swear it.”

She lost her appetite for the uneaten orange, delicious though it was. She held it out. “Freshen your breath with this,” she commanded. “And then come back to bed.”

That worked, but sex always did with men. His face brightened.

He devoured the orange, stripped off his pants to reveal his already lengthening cock, and slid between the sheets, holding the covers up for her. Oddly, his doggish male predictability bothered her less than usual tonight. She eased between the covers, curling up against his heat.

He was, of course, at full salute. It was ridiculous, but she felt too mellow to say anything about it, even when he rolled on top of her.

She was wet and soft from the last time, and very sensitive. He pushed his big phallus slowly inside her. Tam looped her arms around his shoulders and wiggled, seeking the perfect angle.

“Do not come inside me again,” she warned.

“I will not come at all,” he assured her. “I’ve come enough.”

She made a dubious sound. He took her face in his hands and looked earnestly into her eyes. “Trust me,” he said. “Please.”

The snide comeback was ready on her lips, but somehow she stopped it. It was the look in his eyes, the intensity behind the words.

He wasn’t feeding her a line, jerking her around. It was a plea from someplace deep within him. He wasn’t even talking about sex.

She swallowed, clamping down on her mortal dread of being made a fool of. She could risk this. Maybe just this much, for once.

“I will…try to,” she said, haltingly.

He bent his head down and kissed her reverently on the forehead.

“Thank you,” he said. “I will try to be worthy of your trust.”

That was too much for her. “Oh, stop it, you melodramatic fool,” she snapped. “Don’t get swishy on me, Val. I can’t handle it.”

He proceeded to wrap her in a breathlessly tight, hot, marvelous embrace and express himself nonverbally, most eloquently…and to her utter satisfaction.

András strolled down the darkened corridor of I Santi Medici. The security of the place was lax. He’d slipped in a door that someone had left conveniently propped open; he’d sauntered through dim, deserted halls and stairwells, and he’d been obliged to kill no one so far. The nurses and doctors on call at this indecent hour had all been elsewhere, chatting in the nurse’s station, or dozing on unused beds. No one noticed him sliding by like a big, quiet ghost.

He knew exactly where to go, having sent flowers earlier that afternoon. The stringy youth who he’d paid to deliver them had ascertained the room number for him. Ah, yes, there it was, a big bouquet of calla lilies and birds-of-paradise. The nurses had placed it with the other flowers clustered around the white and blue ceramic statue of the Madonna who presided at the end of the corridor, her electric crown glowing eerily in the darkness.

A grim-faced old man in pajamas and a green bathrobe sat outside his room door with an IV in his arm, the rack clutched in his fist. No doubt trying to evade the groaning or flatulence of his roomates. He blinked at András with clouded eyes. A witness. Pity. András took note of the room number. Unfortunate for the old man, but he was well into his eighties and clearly not enjoying his life overmuch. András would probably be doing him a favor by holding his nose shut for a few minutes after he finished with Hegel.

Hegel was not alone in his room either, András was irritated to note. He hadn’t wanted to conduct a full scale massacre tonight. At least the other man was sleeping. A stringy, grayish creature with a chicken neck and a mouth that gaped wide and toothless.

Hegel’s eyes were closed. His head was bandaged and one arm was in a cast. András grasped the nurse call button, which dangled on the end of a plastic cord, and looped it up high over the IV rack next to the bed. Well out of the man’s reach. He grabbed a chair and sat down.

Hegel’s eyes popped open at the scrape of the chair, widening with alarm when he saw who sat before him. András was ready with the rubber ball, which he shoved into Hegel’s mouth. He wrapped a gag of rubber around the man’s mouth to hold it in, knotting it behind his head. He fastened Hegel’s good hand to the metal bedstead with a cable tie, pulling it tight enough to cut off the circulation.

Then he laid a heavy hand over the other man’s throat, putting a relentless pressure on his larynx. “We need to talk,” he said. “My original plan was to cut or burn you for a few minutes before we started to demonstrate my commitment, but you must be loaded with pain medications right now. My skills would be wasted on you. But I could puncture your eyeball, for instance, with this.” He held up a long, gleaming needle. “Or saw off one of your ears with this.” He held up a serrated blade, one of the offerings of his multiblade pocketknife.

Hegel’s eyes protruded. He made a gurgling sound in his throat.

“Or we could skip that part of the conversation and speak of Tamara Steele and Val Janos,” András suggested.

Hegel nodded frantically.

“I will take off the gag,” András told him. “If you speak above a whisper, I will put it back in, saw off one ear, and deflate one eye. Do we understand each other?”

Another frantic nod. András reached back, loosened the rubber gag, and plucked out the ball, wiping the spit off on Hegel’s sheets.

Hegel coughed, staring wide-eyed at the other man. His jowled face glistened with pain and fear sweat.

András reached into his briefcase and took out the laptop which he had taken from Hegel’s hotel room after speaking with Ferenc. He opened it, perched it on the man’s chest, and unfastened the tourniquet that held his arm to the bed. “The password, please.”

András observed carefully as the man’s stubby, trembling finger punched a sequence of letters, numbers and symbols into the computer. He committed the password to memory.

“And now, explain to me how you have been monitoring Janos and Steele,” he said.

Hegel cleared his throat. “Janos has an RF trace implanted in his body.” His voice was thick and hoarse. “He doesn’t know.”

András chuckled. “How despicable of you, Hegel. That’s cheating. Tell me about the frequency, and how the tracking software works.”

Hegel swallowed, licked his lips. “But I can’t—”

Pop, the ball was wedged into his mouth again, and András’s big hand ground the man’s teeth into his lips on top of it. “I do not want to hear those words again,” he said. “First your eyes, and then your ears. Is that turd Luksch worth that kind of loyalty?”

Hegel squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head.

András lifted his hand, and let the other man push the ball out with his tongue, coughing desperately. András gestured toward the laptop. “Tell me everything,” he said softly.

It took twenty minutes to pry the technical information out of the man: the frequency of the trace, the use of the software, how to access archived data, how to monitor in real time. Relatively simple for András, who had used similar technology many times before.

He stared at the screen, committing to memory the exact spot where the man was lurking this very night. Some obscure point in the mountains, several kilometers from the main coastal highway. Thinking he was safe and hidden. It gave András a pleasurable feeling of power.

Good. It was all good. This was becoming so easy, it might not even be a worthy challenge, he reflected with faint amusement. But he would gladly exchange challenge for speed. It reflected well upon him in any case. And his work here was done.

He took the laptop, stowed it, and stood. He looked down at Hegel, trying to think if there was any reason on earth, any reason at all, not to kill him. The man saw death in his eyes and held up his hand to ward it off. András had seen that classic gesture many times.

“There’s more,” he said hastily.

András fondled the knife in one pocket. “More? What more?”

“Don’t kill me. Help me get away from here, from Georg, and I’ll tell you everything I—”

“Don’t try to bargain with me, fool,” András said. “You will tell me everything you know now, or I will cut off your dick and choke you to death with it. What more do you have?”

Hegel swallowed repeatedly. “The child,” he said hoarsely.

András frowned down at him. “What child?”

“She has a child. Steele. She adopted a girl. Three years old.”

András began to grin. Ah, yes. This would make the old man very happy. “Where is she?”

“I don’t know exactly. She appeared on the airport security cameras in Sea-Tac International three days ago. I had three men following Janos in an attempt to locate Steele and the child. He killed the men, took Steele and the girl, and from that point, all I know is that he climbed on a plane in Portland with Steele alone. Somewhere between Sea-Tac and Portland International Airport, they left the child with someone. I do have some archived footage from the night between those events, and I know he spent them at a luxury resort between Tacoma and Seattle,” Hegel babbled on. “A place called the Huxley. I assume they left the kid with someone during that interval, but I didn’t investigate any further because Luksch just wanted Steele. Nothing else.”

András sat down on the chair, chewing the inside of his lip.

“She has, ah, dark curly hair,” Hegel added, a note of desperation in his voice, the sound of a man with no bargaining chips left. “She’s small, very thin for her age. And she’s extremely—”

Thhtp. The silenced Glock drilled a bullet between Hegel’s eyes. The man flopped back onto his pillow and gazed blankly into the air.

“Thank you,” András said softly.

He gazed at his handiwork for a moment. The slumped body on the bed lacked dramatic impact. He really ought to put a bit more artistry into it. He didn’t have time to get truly creative, but the boss always appreciated that personal touch.

András shrugged off his jacket to save the bloodstains, clicked open his case and took out a small saw and a pair of industrial strength rubber gloves. A few minutes later, he was relatively pleased by the artistic effect of Hegel’s head, nestled in the center of the blood-soaked coverlet, severed hands clasped piously beneath his chin. He snapped a picture on his cell phone, encrypted it, sent it to the boss. The old man needed a pick-me-up. Waiting made him frantic.

András heard an unintelligible sound, turned, found that the man in the other bed was awake and staring at him, eyes bugged out.

Automatically, András aimed the gun at the man’s forehead—and then paused, taking note of the lopsided mouth, the fellow’s garbled attempts at speech. Stroke. András’s grandfather had suffered from a stroke when András was a child. He still remembered the horrified fascination he’d felt at the old man’s distorted face, his helpless frustration. His vain attempts to communicate.

It made him almost nostalgic. Poor old Grandfather.

No need to risk another shot. Each time the silencer was slightly less effective, and this poor old man would never be able to describe him. András tucked the gun into his jacket, leaned over the man’s bed and put his finger to his smiling lips.

“Shhh,” he murmured. “Not one word, eh? Our little secret.”

The man’s eyes and mouth kept stretching wider. A red mote in his eye began to grow and grow. His eyelid filled with blood. It welled over and trickled down his pale cheeks, like a miraculous blood-weeping statue of the Virgin. He was having another catastrophic stroke before András’s eyes.

András could not help but smile at the irony of it. It was one of those days. He was riding great cresting waves of death. Exhilarating.

Ah, yes. Which reminded him. Green Bathrobe. Details, details.

He slid into room 14. Green Bathrobe was asleep, as were his two roomates. András took a pillow from the unoccupied bed and pressed it over the man’s face, counting with slow, deadly patience while his mind churned, compiling a list of professionals in the Seattle area.

Someone who could locate and discreetly extract Tamar’s child. The boss would want her, the way a greedy brat wanted toys and chocolate.

Admittedly, he didn’t have much time left to play.

And András would be the one to deliver this treat. A turn of the knife to show the old man his error in having favored Georg over András as successor after Kurt’s death after years of loyal service.

Some silent moments later, the other inhabitants of the room still slept, and Green Bathrobe’s pulse was absent.

András slid back down the hall like a shadow again, his hand on the butt of his gun. Daring fate. Let someone come out of the nurse’s station and force him to shoot again and again. To leave a pile—no, a towering mountain of bleeding bodies in his wake.

Once he started riding that wave, he never wanted to stop.