“Something like that.” Torrhent squinted toward the back of the store as Taigen glanced at the items over her shoulder. Tense heat radiated off his body as he pressed his chest into her from behind. With a quick glance back, she noted the gun in his hand. “Do you really need that?”
Taigen didn’t answer. He dropped his duffle bag at her feet and moved past her, signaling for her to stay back. He disappeared behind the counter then out of sight completely. The sense of being watched never left her. Now in the darkened shop alone, Torrhent forced her paranoia aside. Scuffling footsteps drew her attention toward the door Taigen had disappeared through. It took less than ten seconds for him to lead Aaron out with his hands behind his head.
“Torrhent? What the hell is this about?” Aaron’s head swiveled from her back toward the man holding a gun at his back. “Is this about the papers? I’ll give them to you. Free of charge. Just call off your dog.”
“I’m not here for papers.” She stepped up to the counter, taking note of Taigen’s tense body and quick eyes as he wrenched Aaron to a halt.
“Make it quick,” Taigen interrupted. “And remember what I told you.”
Right. Once she’d sent Aaron her message, Isaac discovered their plan. “Aaron, we need to find someone. I know you have contacts back east and I need you to use them.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Aaron winced and Torrhent imagined the barrel of the gun digging a little further into the back of his head.
“We don’t have time for this shit,” Taigen hissed, clamping a hand down on Aaron’s left shoulder.
“Wait!” Her hands flew out, motioning Taigen to back off. Torrhent wasn’t up to witnessing more bloodshed. “Aaron, we need to get a background on Nicholas Chesnick.” Torrhent took a pen and paper from the counter, writing down the name. “Can you do it?”
Aaron looked like he’d pass out. “They’ll—they’ll want the money up front.”
“How much?” Taigen asked from behind. When he didn’t get an answer, the gun moved beneath Aaron’s chin. “How much?”
“Ten! Ten thousand.”
Taigen motioned her over. “Unzip the bag.”
She did as she was told and took a step back in shock. “How much do you have in there?” Bundles of twenties filled the bag. Torrhent couldn’t even count how many.
“Count out ten bundles,” he ordered.
Silence engulfed the entire shop and she suddenly had the urge to hurry. “Here.” She pushed the money across the counter toward Aaron. “Ten thousand. When can you get an answer?”
Aaron swallowed hard. His hands shook at his sides and he didn’t move toward the money. Licking his lips quickly, he nodded. “Come back in a few hours.”
Taigen bent his knees to level his mouth with Aaron’s ear. “Tell anyone we were here and I’ll be the least of your worries. Understand?” The gun remained on Aaron as they backed out the door and hit the street.
Now, they had to wait.
* * *
“Aaron’s back,” Torrhent said. Her contact crossed the street toward the pawnshop less than two hours after their visit and she took a step forward. The sooner they had the information they wanted, the sooner they could move.
Taigen held her back with a hand on her forearm. “Wait.”
“What for?” She turned on him, ignoring the dead tone of his demand. “We’ll be in and out in less than thirty seconds.”
“I said wait.”
She looked down at her arm. Torrhent tried not to focus on how warm his fingers were through her shirt. It was comforting, but new. She’d never let a man handle her this way and wasn’t sure how she felt about his touch or what it meant.
“There.”
Taigen’s voice ripped her attention from her thoughts. She swiveled her gaze from his fingers to the man following Aaron inside the pawnshop. She didn’t see his face before he went in, but Torrhent had a bad feeling. The way he walked, looked back over his shoulder and shoved his hand in one pocket spoke volumes. “That’s not good.”
Suddenly, Taigen wrenched her around and into his chest. His eyes locked on hers, the electric blue depths setting her awareness of him aflame. Warm tendrils of breath tickled her face. “What are you doing?” she hissed. “We don’t have time for this. That man—”
“Is looking directly at us.” Taigen’s grip around her waist increased. He leaned his face in closer as if he wanted a kiss. His lips brushed against her cheek and a jolt of pleasure raced over every nerve in her body. “Don’t move and pretend you actually like me.”
She sank further into his hold as he ripped away her defenses in a single breath. No blood. No guns or knives. No lies. Pure safety. Torrhent had no doubt he’d protect her against this mysterious man, but hoped it wouldn’t come to that. This perfect moment deserved no interruption.
“Let’s go.” Taigen dropped his hold too soon.
She jogged across the street behind him and stopped just outside the door. He pressed her back against the wall with one hand as he surveyed the interior of the pawnshop. The brick warming her shoulders reminded her of reality. The gun in Taigen’s hand was real. The man in the pawnshop was real. All of this was real and they didn’t have a chance against Isaac Rutler. Torrhent bit into her lower lip. “I don’t hear anything.”
Then a shout.
Taigen didn’t move.
“Don’t you think we should do something?” she asked, her eyes darting from the front door to Taigen and back. “What if he’s here to kill Aaron?”
He didn’t bother to look at her as he spoke. “What if Aaron sold us out?”
Torrhent snapped her mouth shut, silencing her retort. She hadn’t considered the possibility. They’d given Aaron the money and she’d expected him to live up to his end of the deal. “What are you going to do? We need that information.”
“Well, I’d prefer not to kill anyone unless I absolutely have to.” His words trailed off as he looked back over his shoulder at her with a smile. “So we wait.”
A gunshot echoed into the street.
Torrhent pushed past him and rushed inside without a second thought, leaving Taigen to decide for himself. Inside, the shop looked the same. Only the sound of her own breathing and her heartbeat filled her ears. The space echoed in cavernous silence considering a gunshot had just escaped its confines. “Aaron?”
The bell on the door tinkled and she spun around, her heart in her throat.
Taigen stared back at her, his gun still drawn and his index finger centered on his lips. “Stay here.” He moved behind the counter and out of sight.
Torrhent searched the sales floor with her eyes, finding no signs of a struggle. Her instincts tickled when the hair on the back of her neck stood on end.
“There’s nothing in the back,” Taigen announced.
“They can’t have just disappeared,” she said, dismissing the sensation crawling up her spine. “It’s impossible. We came in less than five seconds after the shot.”
Taigen searched the counter, opening drawers and rifling through papers. “There’s a single bullet hole in the door frame back here. No blood though. Doesn’t look like anyone will die of high-speed lead poisoning soon. Shooter must have taken Aaron with him. Gunshots have been known to make people comply.”
“How’d they catch up to him so fast?”
Taigen discarded a receipt back onto the register. “He probably went to the highest bidder with the information he had on Chesnick.” He stuffed the gun down the back of his pants. “Come on. Someone probably heard the shot, and we can’t be here when the police show up.” He led her through the racks of clothing.
“Shouldn’t we follow them? They couldn’t have gotten—” Something tripped her, thrusting Torrhent forward, and only Taigen’s grip on her shirt kept her from face-planting on the nasty carpeting. When she looked toward the obstruction, a tennis shoe stuck out from the middle of the rack. Her breath caught in her throat. “This isn’t the right area for shoes.”
Upon closer inspection, she noted the leg attached to the shoe, but didn’t dare venture farther up the body. It was Aaron. Had to be. Torrhent stumbled back quickly, directly into Taigen’s chest. Where she’d found comfort in his embrace before, she discovered tense restraint.
“Don’t scream.”
She refused to look away from the body as Taigen parted the clothing rack and lowered down to his haunches. A single bullet wound decorated the man’s head. Their mystery assassin stared up with a surprised expression glued on his face. Blood dripped from the hole and her stomach twisted. Torrhent focused on following Taigen’s instruction not to scream.
Taigen stood. “Guess he didn’t get far.”
* * *
Back to square one.
Without background on Nicholas Chesnick, their plan stalled dead in the water. God only knew how much time she had before Taigen blamed Aaron’s disappearance on her. She’d vouched for the asshole, even given him her word that Aaron would get the job done, but not all sociopaths kept their calm when it counted.
They headed south out of the city and Torrhent couldn’t stand the silence. She’d run through the scenario dozens of times without any logical explanation of what had happened in the pawnshop. “I can’t believe Aaron did that.”
“You think that guy shot himself?”
“Maybe someone was waiting inside for him.” She exhaled in exasperation. “Could have been a robbery, maybe Aaron was defending himself and that other guy got in the middle of it.”
“Nothing was stolen.”
They’d left Los Angeles behind and hundreds of cars fled the city alongside them. Torrhent focused on single drivers as they passed, her mind refusing to wrap around the obvious truth. The truck vibrated in anger, barely making her words audible in the small three-person cab. “Fine. Say Aaron shot him. What now? Aaron was supposed to lead us to Nicholas and we have no idea where he went.”
“He’ll turn up sooner or later.”
“That’s it? That’s all you’ve got?” Anger bubbled at the back of her throat as she clenched her hands into fists. She stared at him in amazement, her mouth open, eyes wide. “We essentially gave Isaac our location because you wanted to know about Nicholas and now you’re not even concerned about it?”
“Not really. There are other ways to get the information. This was just the easiest. You could also call it an exercise in trust.” Taigen kept his gaze on the road. His nonchalant attitude made her blood boil and Torrhent strained to control her temper. With a quick glance in her direction, he gave her a wink. “You passed.”
“This was all about you
trusting me
?” She turned toward him in her seat. “Someone died back there because of you!”
“And you have a problem with that? He was one of Rutler’s men. He would have come after us down the road. I merely saved us the frustration. Well, Aaron did.”
“I can’t believe this.” Torrhent shook her head. She’d planned for something like this, but not at the expense of others’ lives.
“I don’t know where you got the idea this would be easy or would follow an exact path, Torrhent. Situations like this never work out the way we plan them. You have to be prepared for every possibility.” Taigen’s voice softened. “We can’t go in guns blazing. It’s a sure way to get killed. So we figure out another route.”
She stared out the passenger-side window, unable to focus on the passing scenery. After a few breaths, she forced her anger aside. Men like Taigen did everything for a purpose. He had better skills, more intelligence and experience in these kinds of things. She didn’t trust him, but she’d sure as hell do what he told her to. She turned toward him. “You’re the one who asked for my help. If you want to keep that deal, you won’t play any more games. Agreed?”
He shot her a sideways glance from the corner of his eyes. “Agreed.”
Torrhent nodded. “So what now?”
“An old friend taught me the best way to get inside the enemy gates is to gain their trust, to become one of them,” he explained. “What I’d need is someone on the inside to bring me into the fold, so to speak. From there, I can get what I need. Downside is, it hasn’t worked for me yet, but maybe I just didn’t have the right inside man.”
Trojan horse.
“Is he dead now, your friend? Because I can see at least a dozen ways your plan wouldn’t work, especially if I’m supposed to be the inside man.”
“Actually, you’ve met him.”
“Met him?” The only people she’d met through Taigen was the cop and the men he’d killed. She doubted he’d kill a friend, but she didn’t exactly know the politics in his world.
“That
agent?
That’s who you’re basing your plan off of?”
Torrhent couldn’t keep sarcasm out of her voice.
This is just getting better and better
. She had to get control of the situation. Even though she’d sworn to uphold Taigen’s decisions, no way in hell would she saunter into Isaac’s house like a lamb to the slaughter. “Isaac wants me behind bars for life, or dead. He’ll kill me on the spot if I come within a mile of that house.”
Chapter 8
Taigen shifted the truck into the next lane, passing families on vacation and singles on road trips. Longing shot through Torrhent’s heart as she watched them. Their decisions were so simple and included only what to eat, where to get gas, and what music to listen to on the drive. Hers: life or death. She hadn’t done anything to deserve her fate, yet she’d spent a year in federal prison for a murder she didn’t commit and had broken out to satisfy her craving for justice. Life threw the most devastating curveballs.
“Where did you learn to fight like that?” She hadn’t meant to ask and it shouldn’t have mattered, but if she could decipher Taigen’s background, she’d have the upper hand. His eyes crinkled around the edges and she imagined him trying to wrap his mind around her curiosity.
“I worked security for a weapons manufacturer after my stint in the Navy.” Taigen glanced out the corner of the windshield toward the darkening sky and back to the road. The hard edge in his voice held a hint of warning.
“Are there a lot of contract killings in that line of work?”
“My primary job consisted of protecting the CEO.” Taigen looked at her, his eyes burning with regret just for a moment before he turned back toward the road. “Occasionally, he needed me to handle things when they got out of hand.”
“By ‘handle,’ you mean kill people?”
Taigen inhaled slowly, his chest shuddering on the exhale. “If Wren wanted a man dead, I followed orders. Sometimes it was a single person, sometimes a group. But never children.”
“I didn’t know people like you had standards.” The words slipped past her mouth and she regretted them instantly. As his expression turned stone-cold, Torrhent’s heart plummeted into her stomach.
“I struggle with what I’ve done every second of the day. You want a number? You want their names? The food on their breath? The color of their eyes?” His voice rose in volume and Torrhent cringed from the anger swirling in the depths of his eyes.
“You remember all that?”
“I remember all of that because I can’t forget, Torrhent. Now I’m trying to save lives instead of destroying them to make up for it. So yes, I have standards because I’ve seen what happens when I don’t.”
Taigen’s labored breathing drowned out the beating of her heart in her ears. With every breath he seemed to calm a little more. The anger residing in his eyes cooled significantly as he turned his gaze on her, but Taigen no longer resembled the man she’d recruited to kill Isaac Rutler.
The cold, calculating eyes softened dramatically, defeat taking its place. She’d never noticed the aged lines between his eyebrows until that moment and the sight made her heart skip a beat. Clearing her throat, Torrhent forced her gaze to lock with his. “I’m sorry. I didn’t—I didn’t think . . .”
“That someone like me could be human?”
“Yeah.” She turned her attention back to the window. Unable to focus on the scenery, Torrhent replayed his admission in her mind. Whispers of doubt slithered on the edge of her thoughts. She’d chosen him to kill a man, even to take the fall when this whole thing was finished, but his words struck a hardened chord in a place she’d assumed lost. Her soul.
She felt as if she were on the edge of a nightmare, unable to wake, but not fully asleep. Swallowing past the lump forming in her throat, she forced her thoughts away from the disappointed echoes of her mother’s voice. “Save them from what?”
“A monster.”
Torrhent barely heard his answer over the growl of the pickup’s engine, but didn’t have the strength for any more of his revelations. The silence between them deepened to the point she didn’t care. Her plan to use Taigen against her stepfather dissipated with a few sentences as guilt surfaced. The agony she’d witnessed on his features left evidence of its presence in his eyes and she wondered if her face had ever shown such misery.
“The man I killed last week had a two-year-old daughter.” Even thinking Richard Clemet’s name made her muscles tense. The burden on her shoulders lightened considerably with just a few words, but her admission would never make up for the damage she’d caused or take away the invisible chasm in her chest. “I see his surprised face whenever I close my eyes.”
“What happened?” Taigen’s voice dropped an octave and she knew in that instant he’d most likely figured it out.
“He was a guard at Bedford Hills. I used him to learn the structure of the prison because he was always so willing to tell me its history.” Torrhent directed her gaze out the window as she spoke, afraid to see the grief in Taigen’s expression. She didn’t need his pity. She only wanted the pain to disappear. “When I was finally confident I could escape, I tried to take his gun from his belt. It went off.”
A single tear ran down her face. She wiped it away quickly, rubbing the liquid between her fingers. “Do you ever feel like there’s a void in your chest because of what you’ve done?”
A hand reached for her, resting on her left knee. She jumped, unable to find comfort in a killer’s touch, but he refused to remove his hand. The warmth of him penetrated through her jeans. The first sign of Taigen Banvard being human scared the shit out of her. The second made it worse.
“All the time.”
Torrhent moved her leg from beneath his hand. “I left him on the ground like a piece of trash to save my own life.” She took a deep breath, steadying herself, but nothing protected her from the memory of so much blood. She gagged on the bile rising in her throat. “Pull over.”
Taigen slammed on the brakes and the truck veered to the side of the road. He didn’t ask for an explanation and she silently thanked him for it as she threw the door open and stumbled into the dirt. She didn’t care if he thought she was trying to escape, but the sound of the driver’s-side door opening told her he’d prepared for the possibility. He followed her out, but his movements didn’t distract her enough to calm her stomach. A wave of bile forced past her lips and she doubled over.
“Are you all right?” Taigen asked, casting a shadow near her feet. His hands pulled her hair out the way, soothing the physical symptoms slightly, but she feared nothing would ever heal the black hole growing in her chest.
Torrhent tried to breathe around the sobs clawing up her throat and only nodded.
She straightened and Taigen let her hair fall back into place. Sweat dripped down her chest and forehead, but she didn’t care. Wiping away the tears and snot with the back of her hand, she faced the man in front of her. Concern lay in the lines around his eyes and mouth and between his eyebrows. Her breath hitched in reaction. Nobody had shown concern for her in so long, not since the day her mother went into the city with Nicholas. The fact it came from a man she planned to use as a fall guy ripped a new tear in her heart. “Does this feeling ever go away?”
Taigen’s shoulders rose on an inhale, but his eyes remained focused on her. His expression gave little evidence of his reaction to witnessing her weakness. “Not in my experience.”
She sucked in the hot desert air, wishing it would relieve the tension in her chest. Leveling her chin to the ground, she mentally repaired her armor as if nothing had changed. She’d move on as planned. Taigen’s claims of regret, her admission. They meant nothing in the grand scheme of things. “Isaac Rutler took everything from me. And he’s going to pay for it.”
* * *
His knuckles crested white against the steering wheel of the pickup. Taigen stared at the dry cracks in his hands, but focused on Torrhent in his peripheral vision as she cleaned herself up on the side of the highway. A ping from one of his burner phones interrupted the silence of the cab. Retrieving the phone from the dashboard, Taigen let his gaze flicker to Torrhent in a last attempt to replace the memory of her grief.
She’d killed a man in cold blood and blamed her stepfather for the deed. Something had broken inside of her, ripped down her tough exterior and displayed the scared woman on the inside. He couldn’t take that pain from her, no matter how much he wanted to.
She stared out into the desert, her eyes distant, body immobile. Anger had been the only way for him to cope with the loss of his innocence, and from the hard edge of her jawline, Torrhent seemed to discover the same mechanism to handle her pain. In truth, his heart went out to her. His training had programmed him to accept that the first kill would be the hardest. And it had been. Even now he remembered every detail, but he refused to face it, unwilling to take a walk down memory lane. He’d pay for his crimes and welcome the punishment when the time came, but not now.
He turned his attention to the phone in his hand to give her privacy. Frozen in place as he read the message from one of his eastern seaboard contacts, Taigen repeated the words to himself.
Subject confirmed. Location: New York City
.
Despite being short, the text spoke volumes. Adelaide had made it to New York, presumably in Rutler’s control, and the more time they wasted, the more people his sister came into contact with. He lunged across the cab and shoved the passenger door open. “Come on. We have to go.”
Torrhent turned her face into the hot breeze, gray eyes squinting down the road, as if contemplating her chances of survival without him. She moved slowly but slid into the passenger seat without a single shred of evidence left of her agony, her expression cold. “We need more supplies if we plan to drive straight across the country.”
“My thoughts exactly.” He shifted the truck into gear and pulled back onto the freeway.
Twenty minutes later, they pulled into a gas station. The truck heaved a sigh when Taigen stepped out onto the dirt parking lot. He’d parked close enough for a quick getaway but far enough away to avoid the store’s security cameras from catching their license plate. Only one other car sat in the lot and he assumed it belonged to whoever ran the joint, but tire tracks in the dirt around the store caught his attention. Most likely teenagers out for a joy ride. He filed the knowledge in the back of his mind. The gas pumps were ten yards away, positioned under a decrepit covering with flickering lights. The store wasn’t much, but held the promise of food and supplies. He followed close on Torrhent’s heels as she neared the door then held it open for her to enter.
“Couldn’t find a five-star convenience store?” she asked.
The inside was just as plain as the outside, like any other gas station he’d come across. Shelves lined the walls with more decorating the middle of the room in aisles. A small table had been pushed into the corner next to the wall of windows, but Torrhent went straight for the one refrigerator.
He couldn’t help but laugh when she stuck her head inside.
She turned on him, addressing him through the glass. “It’s hot.”
Reaching toward the top shelf and pulling two bottles of water down, she placed one against her neck and offered the second to him.
Taigen stepped closer, taking it from her, slightly distracted by the structure of her collarbones as she rolled the bottle over them. The refrigerator door automatically closed with a slap.
“What do you feel like eating?” She reached for a bag of chips.
Taigen took the chips from her and replaced them on the shelf. “We need nutrition, not junk.” His chest almost pressed against her back as he looked over her shoulder at the food in front of them. He felt her body tense and he liked it. She was still unsure of him.
As she should be
.
“Sounds good.” Torrhent sidestepped him, her voice a tad husky. “What do you suggest?”
“Fruit.” Tension built in his chest around the souvenir his sister’d left behind as he surveyed the store. The clerk had yet to make an appearance, but the car outside hadn’t moved. Taigen gave her a casual smile, following her around the store slowly, but kept his distance and his senses on alert in case he needed to move fast. Once Rutler’s hired guns realized he and Torrhent were headed east, they’d sound the alarm and do everything they could to stop their progress. Including using bystanders for their own purposes.
Torrhent shuffled in front of him and stopped. Her legs seemed to go on for miles, lean, tanned. Perfect. He couldn’t make out the rest of her figure with the holey flannel shirt she wore all the time, but it didn’t matter. He had a good imagination.
“Do granola bars count? They have fruit in them.”
“I guess it’ll have to do.” His gaze flickered behind the counter at the sign of movement.
An older man, late fifties, waited stiffly for them to approach. He attempted a small smile when Torrhent dropped their granola bars and sandwiches on the counter. With shaking hands, the cashier rang them up, his eyes shooting toward the door several times. “Eleven sixty-five.”
Torrhent swung her pack around to get the money.
“I got it.” Taigen pushed her behind him gently as he slipped a twenty onto the counter. Their skin touched, sending a pleasurable jolt into his chest, but the sensation disappeared, quickly replaced with warning. The cashier made slow, calculated movements as he reached for the cash.
A bright flash caught Taigen’s attention as he gathered the food.
Seconds before blood spattered over the counter, Taigen pulled Torrhent to the floor. He hit the linoleum hard, but wrenched her toward the door by her collar. The second bullet shattered the store’s window as they hit the pavement. The pickup truck remained parked more than fifteen feet away. They wouldn’t make it with the shooter at their back.
Taigen let his body sink into the familiar patterns of a killer as he crouched down, his back to the brick exterior of the building. He pulled his 9mm, dislodged the clip, counted the bullets left, and reinserted it. Six shots. Six opportunities to get Torrhent to the truck safely.
“When I tell you to, run as fast as you can toward the truck. Get in on the passenger side and start it. Do you understand?” Taigen locked his gaze on her, taken aback once again by her brutal determination. Cold, intelligent gray eyes gave him the confirmation he needed and he shoved the truck’s keys into her hand. “Good.”