Blamed (24 page)

The bunker split in two directions, one south and one west. Peering down the southern hall, Vick could see where it diverted slightly to the east, another weak lantern casting shadows in either direction. When Casey indicated he and Tobias would take that path, Vick nodded and headed west.

Chamber after chamber with locked doors and dark porthole windows passed before his senses tingled. He paused, listening intently.

There—the faint slap of wet, bare feet against flat stone.

Gun raised, he hurried around the left bend in the hall, unable to control the frantic pounding of his heart. It was either her or Nash or, God forbid, another of his victims, but Jesus Christ, he prayed it was—

“Beth.”

He wanted to scream when he saw her. He wanted to
destroy.
Rage shook him, stealing his breath and blurring his vision, but then he blinked and stared at the blood-drenched, incoherent woman singing Bon Jovi off-key and stumbling on weakened legs down the bunker’s dank hallway.

Her hair was gone, unevenly shorn away to reveal a pale scalp, her cheeks sunken beneath a thick spatter of drying red. The side of her neck was caked in old blood, her lips cracked, and, in nothing but what had in another life been a pink lace bra-and-panty set, every mark on her battered body was brutally visible. Violent bruising bloomed over her ribs, purple, blue and black, and he could hear the liquid rattle that told him those ugly ribs were broken and pressing against her lungs. Track marks dotted the insides of her elbows, and at infrequent—but obviously painful—intervals, her slender arms carried sliced lines, fresh and oozing and made by some sort of blade. The fingers of one hand curled around the wet grip of a military-issue knife, the swelling at the joints and knuckles indicating multiple fractures. Her knees were scraped raw but healing, likely from the fight with Nash in Hyde Park, but a scattering of precise, knife-inflicted wounds similar to those on her arms marked her calves and thighs. Blood, old and new, covered her feet entirely.

In her other hand, she held what appeared to be a plastic key card. And...a severed finger.

Horror erupted in his chest as he frantically counted the digits on her hands. Abused though they were, all ten remained, which meant... “Where’s Nash, love?”

She flinched, weaved on her feet, and fell with a sickening
crack
to her knees. The finger and key card dropped from her good hand, but the knife she clutched with busted fingers never fell.

Casey was right. Being a Faraday—and all that entailed—had likely saved her life. Any other person would be sobbing, clinging to Vick like a life preserver, disarmed within the first five seconds. Not Beth. Training and instinct, and maybe even some warrior strain in the Faraday genetic code, demanded she retain her weapon and keep her distance, but her legs could no longer carry her.

And Vick would never let her crawl.

As he might with a feral creature, Vick holstered his weapon and moved, palms out and unthreatening, until he knelt in front of her. “Beth.” He kept his voice soft, soothing, though his mind remained a screaming inferno of helpless fury. “Baby. Will you let me—? Yes, give me the knife, darling.” Taking care not to further hurt her damaged fingers, he extracted the slick blade and tossed it behind him to clatter against the concrete floor. Hopefully the noise would reach Casey and Tobias, wherever they were, but Vick dreaded them seeing their sister in this state.

She listed forward suddenly, head lolling at an unnatural angle, and he struggled to catch hold of her somewhere undamaged. Placing his hands under her arms, he tried to lift her, but she roused with a cry of pain.

Which was when he saw the destruction of her back. A noise somewhere between a sob and a growl caught in his throat as he cupped the back of her prickly scalp. “Oh, baby. Oh, baby, baby,
no.
” The beautiful, smooth skin of her back, from just below her shoulder blades to right above the base of her spine, had been replaced by dozens of lacerations, no doubt inflicted by a whip or lash of some kind, the open wounds infected and weeping.

Vick gave a strangled bellow. “
Faradays!
” Face pressed to his throat, Beth made an unhappy sound, and he shushed her tenderly. “It’s okay. I’ve got you, I’ve got you now.” Needing to hold her, needing to get her the fuck out of this hellhole, he kept her upper body tilted against his, her forehead tucked beneath his chin, and looped an arm under the mostly unharmed backs of her knees. His other forearm curved around her unmarred shoulders, and he prepared to stand. “Beth, darling, I’m lifting you on one...two...three.”

He stood with a soft grunt, hearing the pounding of heavy boots approaching from Casey and Tobias’s direction in the south tunnel. He turned to meet them when Beth spoke.

“Camera.” When he didn’t immediately respond, she vainly struggled in his careful hold. “
Camera.
Get the camera.” Without warning, her head dropped limply on his shoulder, unconsciousness sweeping her under once more.

Terror spiked, but he did as asked and carried her limp body down the hall, away from her no-doubt panicked brothers, following the trail of bloody footprints until he came to the open door of what had been her torture chamber for the past four days. “Oh, fuck me,” he breathed, taking in the scene in disbelief.

It was a kill box, worse than any Hollywood could dream up. Blood from an arterial spray spanned two gray walls and the stone ceiling, a heavy pool of it surrounding and seeping out from under the dead body of John Nash to cover almost the entirety of the floor. A metal surgical table, the kind you’d find in a field hospital or a veterinarian’s clinic, was stained with layers of wet ruby over crusted rust. A rolling cart listed to one side, an array of torture tools scattered across its surface, none sterile.

He couldn’t take Beth back in there. Unconscious, unaware, it didn’t matter—she had escaped, and he refused to return with her to that hell. From the doorway, he scanned the room for the camera and found it, red dot blinking with life in the opposite corner, bolted to the ceiling.

Either Nash recorded his sessions...or someone else was watching.

Rage rippled through him, but he remained frozen on the threshold as Casey and Tobias skidded to a halt behind him. Vick turned.

Tobias gave an anguished cry while Casey’s gun fell to the ground with a sharp
clack.
They both reached for her at the same moment, both paused when they realized they couldn’t touch her without hurting her. Casey spoke first, emotion thick in his throat, his Boston accent stronger than ever. “Is she...?”

“Alive? Yes.” But she wouldn’t be for long if the infection on her back didn’t receive immediate treatment. He nodded toward the room. “The camera in the corner. She said to retrieve it.”

As one, they turned to stare at the little black box with its taunting, blinking bulb that said recording—or transmitting—hadn’t ceased.

It was Tobias who moved. After laying a shaking hand over Beth’s bare head, a caress so light she wouldn’t have felt it even if she were conscious, he strode through the congealing pool of their enemy’s blood to the corner where the camera was mounted. Toppling the cart to its side with a violent clatter, he reached for the camera, using the butt of his gun to knock loose the screws. Dexterous fingers toyed with the colored wires that would disconnect the camera as he pointed the dark lens directly at his face. “I’m coming for you,” Tobias vowed, death in every syllable.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Three weeks later

Beth was a terrible, awful, no-good, very bad patient. Mostly because she was impatient, restless to be better, faster, stronger but unwilling to wait for her healing body to catch up with her brain.

She told her older sister as much during their now-daily Skype chat. “Swear to God, I have never been so bored in my entire life.”

“Not even when Tobias tried to explain tax law to us?” Gillian’s skeptical expression said it all as she tucked a loose strand of dark, wavy hair behind one ear. “He’s the only human being on the planet who thinks IRS stands for
Is Really Sexy.
”

Snorting through an amused giggle, Beth lifted her uninjured hand to adjust her ponytail...and encountered nothing but air. She sighed.

Gillian echoed the sound, the laptop camera capturing part of the view out her San Diego office window, the palm trees and blue skies seeming jarringly out of place considering it was the middle of March. The engineer propped her chin in her hand and leaned closer, gray gaze sympathetic behind the clear lenses of her glasses. “It’ll grow back, you know.” Mood suddenly lightening, she flipped the long mass of her hair over one shoulder, stroking a hand over the silky, coffee-colored strands before waggling teasing eyebrows. “For now, you just have to live in envy.”

Beth fought a smile. “Ugh. You are the least favorite of all my sisters.”

“I’m your only sister, B.”

“Well, you’re also the most favorite. So.” Beth reached toward the camera with her cast-covered hand and wrist, wishing she could sit next to the sister she hadn’t seen in over a year. When she hadn’t been on assignment, Beth had spent a significant amount of time field-testing weapons for Gillian, often traveling out to stay with her older sister in California. Those trips had been filled with bad-movie nights, painting each other’s nails and doing tequila shots while reading
Cosmo.

Having been homeschooled alongside her siblings by tutors—for the security of the family business, of course—close girlfriends had been few and far between, practically nonexistent aside from Gillian, and Beth missed her now, like
whoa.
She understood Gillian’s inability to travel to her, though—her work was important, and dangerous, if the constant monitoring by the FBI indicated anything. “How’s your federal watchdog these days? Still growling at anyone who gets too close?”

Gillian heaved a greatly put-upon sigh. “Theo is fine. In fact, he’s right outside my door, if you want to say hello.”

“I do
not
want to say hello,” Beth grumbled. “The last time I said hello, I got stuck in an FBI holding cell in Chicago for four hours—for which I was forced to endure a very special lecture from Special Agent Tight-Ass.”

“You really shouldn’t call him that. His name is—”

“I know what his name is, thank you. But you know how this shit works—say a name three times in a mirror, and suddenly there’s a creeper in a tacky suit standing behind you, making you regret all your life choices.”

Gillian laughed, as Beth had intended, but she sobered quickly. “Have you decided what you’re going to do, now that you’re safe?”

Safe
remained a relative term, as far as Beth was concerned. For a week after her rescue, she’d floated in and out of consciousness, her awareness vacillating between painful clarity and blessed oblivion. She didn’t remember her release from the private London hospital, or the flight to Boston, her first coherent memory following her collapse in the bunker hallway that of laying on her stomach in her childhood bedroom, her mother, Sofia, efficiently redressing the lacerations on her back. Until her husband’s collapse a decade earlier, she’d been active in practicing emergency medicine at Massachusetts General, though she now dedicated herself to his care while tending to whatever wounds Faraday employees brought in from their time in the field.

But while surrounding herself with the familiar eased the most visceral fears lingering from the trauma of her abduction and torture, living within the property lines of the protected compound had the opposite effect: Instead of soothing safety, Beth struggled against the constant prickle of panic chafing beneath her skin. Wishing for home in moments of extreme terror did not mean she wished for home permanently. Yet that was exactly the sort of future her father envisioned for her. “I want to go back to Chicago.”

Gillian nodded, understanding perfectly the siren call of a beloved career. “Theo told me how CPD intervened with your boss to hold your position for you.”

Indeed, detectives Rossi and Harding had come through in a pinch—at whose urging Beth didn’t know—and claimed she was currently in protective custody for the duration of an investigation. Not a lie, precisely, but definitely not the truth. Beth smoothed a cautious hand over the silky hairs clinging to her scalp. “Don’t know how I’m going to explain the new ‘do.”

“You’re pulling an Emma Watson. Only shorter, because your head’s so cute.”

“No, my head’s so
cue.
As in, ‘cue ball.’”

Another laugh from her big sister. “For what it’s worth, I think going back to Chicago is the right decision.” Gillian paused thoughtfully. “Unless you have a reason to be somewhere else?”

Beth rolled her eyes. “How is it you’re even less subtle than Casey?” Since their return to the States, her oldest brother had essentially haunted her, refusing to let her out of his sight...and refusing to shut the hell up. All she heard was his name, over and over—
Vick
,
Raleigh Vick
—and while she longed to see him, her tiny little logic brain kept kicking her in the nuts.

He wasn’t here. Therefore, logic dictated that he didn’t want to be here. Her brothers had told her Vick was the one who’d found her in the bunker, that he’d held her during the sound-barrier-breaking drive to the hospital, but after that...poof. Nada.

She had told him she loved him, and he still wasn’t here.

In all her years living with a gun in her hand, she’d never needed anyone to save her butt, always confident in her ability to rescue herself. Hell, she’d rescued herself from Nash, too, not that she intended to throw a victory parade over the fact. But the safety Gillian mentioned had nothing to do with John Nash—because incontrovertible proof and static blasts of shudder-inducing memory confirmed him as Beth’s most recent kill—and everything to do with the risk to her heart.

Weak though she might be, her healing annoyingly slow, Beth would soon be able to defend herself against any threat. She just didn’t want to, damn it.

She didn’t want to sleep with the Beretta under her pillow. She didn’t want to brace her body and mind for the likelihood of capture, the possibility of death. She didn’t want to enter her thirties still seeking that elusive normal, when the truth was she had to create her own version of normalcy.

A vision of what that might be floated across her mind: a secure home in her favorite city, daily El rides to the museum, cocktails with her friends and coworkers. The occasional trip to the local gun range with a couple of detectives. A dog named Waffles.

She’d spent so long proving to everyone in her life—her parents, her siblings, Gavin, Vick—that she could take care of herself just fine that now, when she maybe didn’t want to do it alone anymore, alone was the only option left to her, if she wanted to live beyond the walls of the Faraday compound. Romance wasn’t in the cards, not with the spinning emotions currently tangled around her bruised heart. When she’d first come to in the second week, she had looked for him, for some reason expecting to see Vick sitting in a chair next to her bed as he waited for her to wake up.

Not finding her spy at her bedside broke something inside her already-battered body. But then she remembered how they had left things in the park, and her surprise at not finding him at her bedside faded.

Shoving all thoughts of Vick aside, Beth tuned into the conversation with her sister. “I’ve been avoiding having this conversation with Dad.”

“About what’s next? Yeah, I get it.” In a mirror of Beth’s earlier gesture, Gillian reached toward the laptop camera before her fingers fell to the desk. “But if you talk to him now, it’ll be over and done with. And who knows, maybe it will speed the healing process.”

Doubtful, but the advice was solid. “Okay, so, I do it now, get it over with. But if he makes me cry, I’m calling you again and making you watch
Fool’s Gold
with me while we Skype.”

“Again? Seriously, B, it’s the worst movie.”

“Seriously, G, it’s the best,” she retorted, and closed her laptop on the sound of Gillian’s pained groan. The rom-com with a gazillionaire’s yacht, sunken pirate treasure—and priceless art!—and the crack team of Hudson and McConaughey never failed to fix Beth’s blues. But before she could be happy, she needed to go and...try not to be sad.

She gingerly made her way down the winding stairs to the main floor of the Faraday family’s Queen Anne. The house was nestled into a private corner of the land that had been theirs since the eighteenth century, lush with greenery and wildlife in the summer and protected from the worst of the winter winds by a thick stand of evergreens. An acre away—still on Faraday property—sat a single-story warehouse constructed in the early twentieth century. An indoor shooting range was all that was left of the former manufactory, the interior now mostly offices, including her brothers’. The factory had relocated to San Diego when Gillian took over R&D five years ago, but until that time, the warehouse had been the central hub of Faraday power, at the heart of their land and their family.

Frank continued to resent the move to San Diego, and was known to grumble more about the division of assets and lack of access than he was about his oldest daughter living on the opposite side of the country.

Conscious of her aching back and mending ribs, Beth didn’t rush through the house when she reached the first floor, but meandered from room to room, enjoy the bright midday sun streaming through the large picture windows. Home was its own comfort, she mused fondly, but Beth was not a woman whose life necessitated comfort. She liked the challenge of the new, the different, the exciting, and as she had learned over the past year, new and different and exciting did not require her to country hop while killing people.

Eventually, she located Frank Faraday in the solarium off the kitchen, his wheelchair facing the windows, providing a perfect view of the picturesque backyard. A manila folder sat unopened on his lap. “Dad?”

His gray head turned, blue eyes lighting on her, but not with any particular pleasure. In the time since her return, they’d barely spoken, but one issue had been made abundantly clear: Her father believed Beth had come home to the compound for good. “Elisabeth. How are you feeling?”

A loaded question, as it was one he rarely permitted any of his family members to ask him. Multiple sclerosis had stolen the vibrant life he’d led, the diagnosis one he’d hidden from everyone—including his wife—until he was compromised in the middle of an assignment. Frank had never quite forgiven his youngest daughter for witnessing his collapse, much less finishing the job for him with an accuracy and clean getaway he might not have managed on his own.

Ever since, the Faraday siblings had worked hard to offer their father the breathing room he needed to focus on his health, not that Frank had appreciated their efforts, leaving his relationships with his children strained, at best. They knew he loved them, just as they knew Faraday would have crashed and burned if they
hadn’t
gently elbowed him aside. Frank had been running Faraday Industries almost singlehandedly for a quarter of a century, but under his children’s leadership, the company’s known public reach had expanded from an American staple in military manufacturing to an unrivaled weapons-technology power.

The success, though bringing in oodles of revenue—technical term, of course—didn’t exactly endear them to their sidelined father.

“Better,” she told Frank now, moving to stand beside his chair. “I...need to talk to you about something.”

The grooves worn into his familiar face, rugged but fatigued with the onset of age and illness, deepened as he stared up at her. “You want to leave.”

Her oversized cream sweater shifted over her shoulder as she shrugged, the soft cashmere brushing delicately over healing skin. “When I left last year, I left for good. I don’t want to get stuck in this life again.”

“No one said you had to.”

“But it’s assumed, isn’t it?” Her lips twisted in a wry grimace. “We’re Faradays. We’re supposed to contribute and uphold the family name, but I have no way of doing that unless—”

“Unless you take on assignments again,” Frank finished for her, gravelly voice with its thick New England syllables sharp as an axe. “You’re right—we don’t have much use for an art curator around here.”

The blunt statement pummeled her confidence, but she stood tall, nodding in apparent agreement. “No, but the Art Institute in Chicago does.” Her bottom lip caught between her teeth as she hesitated. “They’ve held my job for me. I can go back tomorrow, if I want.”

Frank shifted his stare past her to the view of the backyard. “Is that what you want? Your job? Or are you thinking there’s a man waiting for you back there, if you get on a plane and go?”

Vick.
Their interlude in Chicago, fraught with danger but amazing and lovely and painfully poignant, was nothing but a memory, a moment in time never to be recaptured. So as much as she might wish he’d be waiting for her on the tarmac at O’Hare International Airport, Beth knew that, if he hadn’t been here, he most certainly wouldn’t be there.

Stupid-ass logic brain, kicking her in the balls once more.

And since her father knew, there was no point in pretending. She swallowed past the lump in her throat. “I know he’s not there.”

Her father snorted derisively. “Damn right he’s not. The British bastard’s been on my property from the moment you arrived.”

Pulse thundering in her ears, Beth steadied her suddenly weak knees with a hand on the back of a nearby armchair. “Vick’s
here?
” At the compound? But she hadn’t seen him once in the past two weeks. “Where...where is he staying?”