Earth Bound (40 page)

He wrapped his arms around her and lifted her from the washing machine. “I don't think I'm ever going to mind washing clothes again,” he said.

He kissed her again and again, making a thorough job of it. He had a lifetime, he knew, but still, he didn't think he'd ever get
enough.

Keep reading for a special preview of

DARK CRIME

by Christine Feehan

From the
Edge of Darkness
anthology, available August 2015 from Jove
Books

B
LAZE
McGuire pulled her waist-length red hair into a high ponytail at the back of her head, contemplating the fact that she was going to die tonight—and it was of her own choosing. She was going to war with the Hallahan brothers and their mobster boss. They didn't know it yet, but they would be walking right into hell. They thought they were going to have everything their own way, but they were wrong.
Very
wrong. She was a woman. She was young. They dismissed her as no threat to them. And in that they were making a
very, very
big mistake.

Her hair wasn't just red hair, it was
red
. Her hair had been that vivid, insane color of red since the day she was born. Hence the name her father had given her, staring down at his newborn daughter who was already giving the doctors hell for dragging her out of her safe little world, kicking and screaming into the cold light, her hair blazing along with her lungs—and that should have given them a clue what they were buying when they murdered her father.

Most people didn't know when they were going to die, she mused as she rigged the explosives on the door to blow,
the charge precise, sending anyone in front of it outward, a little blowback into her beloved bar, hopefully leaving it intact. Still, if the charge didn't kill them all before they got inside, she would give up the bar's interior in order to take the battle to them. Tonight, the four Hallahan brothers were going to come for her, and she would take as many of them with her as possible.

Sean McGuire had been a good man. A good neighbor. An even better father. The bar was successful because he had a reputation for being honest and he was a good listener; he genuinely cared about his customers, his neighbors and especially his daughter.

He knew everyone by name. He laughed with them. He attended funerals when they lost someone. He got them home at night safe if they drank too much. He cut off the ones who were spending too much and needed to be home with their families. He was just a good man. A good man some mobsters had pulled out of the bar and beaten to death because he wouldn't sign his establishment—the one that had been in the family for two, now three generations—over to them.

Sean had also served in the Marines and he knew his way around weapons, especially the making of bombs. He was a specialist in the field, so much so that he had actually helped out the local bomb squad the three times they'd gotten calls, because what he knew about explosives, few others did. And what he knew, he taught his daughter.

Blaze had been given an unusual education and she'd loved every minute of it. Her father made it clear he loved her and was always proud of her and he'd always been patient with her, but he believed in teaching his daughter everything he would have taught his son. He was patient, but he didn't make it easy because she was a girl. She was required to do everything—and learn everything he knew about defense and offense. She'd soaked up the training.

It had always been the two of them, Sean and Blaze, after her mother left. Truthfully, she remembered her mother as a disconnected woman who was never happy—
when she could remember her, and that wasn't often. Her mother left when she was four. They'd never done one single thing together. Not one. She couldn't even recall her mother holding her. It had always been her father.

Sean had been a boxer, a mixed martial arts cage fighter, and he enjoyed the lifestyle. He had always insisted his daughter work out with him. She had—since the time she was two. She grew up boxing with her father. Learning martial arts. Street fighting. She learned to fall properly and she knew all about joints and pressure points. More, Sean hadn't neglected teaching her how to shoot or how to use a knife. He certainly hadn't neglected her training when it came to explosives.

Later, when she was ten, Emeline Masters came into their lives. Emeline lived mostly on the street, shuffled from one home to another, but mostly on the street. Emeline became a family member and spent a great deal of time crawling in Blaze's bedroom window from the fire escape and sleeping inside with her. Sean pretended he didn't know. Emeline, thankfully, was away from all of this and in Europe where Sean had sent her to protect her. Blaze had called her, of course, but told her to stay where no one could harm her.

Blaze smiled grimly to herself as she laid out a grid pattern on the floor of the bar and then paused to glance out the window, looking down the street. This had once been a good, decent neighborhood, a place she had called home for twenty-four years. She'd grown up in the apartment over the bar. It was a big building, right on the corner, prime property. The building and three others on either side had been in their family for generations. Her family had taken good care of them and never sold, not even when property values had soared.

Her eyes narrowed as she returned her attention to the delicate job of setting wires throughout the bar. Low. Mid-calf. Thigh. Hip. She crisscrossed them, building a web. Yeah. They should have known all about that redheaded baby when they dragged her father out of his own bar and
beat him to death. They'd broken nearly every bone in his body before they killed him. She knew, because the ME had told her.

Rage welled up. Swirled in her belly. Deep. So deep she knew she'd never get it out. She knew why they'd broken his bones. She'd heard about the “persuading” technique from a few of the other business owners. The mobsters wanted properties signed over to them. Her father had already signed his property over to her.
She
owned the bar. They'd gone after the wrong person. And now they were coming for her because she'd sent them an invitation. Not to buy her out, but to war.

She would have signed over the bar to them in a heartbeat if they'd called her and told her they had her father. They thought it was important to teach the neighborhood businesses a lesson—what they wanted, they got. They weren't going to get what they wanted, not even after they killed her. She'd made certain of that. They wouldn't touch Emeline either. They wouldn't get to harm the last person in the world she loved.

Blaze pressed her fingers to her eyes to stop the burning. She hadn't slept, not in days, not since she'd come home to find her father gone, the door to the bar open and blood on the floor. She'd been frantic, running through the streets like a maniac, calling the cops repeatedly only to be told they couldn't do anything for twenty-four hours, but they'd send someone by. They hadn't. She'd sat alone in the apartment over the bar, arms around her knees, rocking herself, trying to tell herself that her father was strong and he knew how to take care of himself, but there was so much blood.

She taped a knife under the table closest to the stairs. If she lived through the initial attack, she would have to have an exit plan. She needed to rig the stairs. If she got to the apartment—and she knew the chances were slim to none—she could go out the escape and up to the window. She did that often. She'd been doing that with Emmy since she was ten years old. Once on the roof, she could choose any
direction. She would also stash a couple of weapons up there as well.

Two factions of mobsters had moved into the neighborhood, the first and the most brutal, a year and a half earlier, and they were extremely violent. Four brothers, Irish by the look of them, but Sean hadn't known them and he knew every Irishman in the city, went by the name of Hallahan. The four were always the front men for one of the crime lords, with their grim faces and their ugly demands. All were quick to brutal, extreme violence. And they owned the cops. The police, who had always spent evenings and sometimes days in the bar playing pool, had stopped coming around. She knew they worked for a man by the name of Reginald Coonan. Their boss always stayed in the shadows, but he liked blood and his men liked violence.

A few weeks earlier, a tall, extremely good-looking man in a business suit came by the bar and handed a business card to her father. It had a number printed on it, nothing else. The man was soft-spoken and simply told them if they needed protection, to call that number and someone would come. She found it significant that her father hadn't thrown the card away, even though they both thought this was another crime lord intending to take Coonan's territory from him. Sean had never discussed the incident with her, but he kept the business card safe, right by the phone.

Blaze had never moved the card. But she'd looked at it numerous times. She'd done a little investigating and it hadn't been easy to uncover the identities of any of the mobsters. She knew now the four Irish brothers. Each of them had grown up in Chicago and had moved to her city. They were Hallahans, and all were short, muscular and very scary. They had come to the city because it had gotten a little too hot for them where they'd grown up, and, she suspected, because Reginald Coonan, their boss, had moved from Chicago as well.

She had very little on the other faction. The man that had come so quietly into the bar was named Tariq
Asenguard. He owned a dance club—an extremely popular one in the neighborhood. He was quiet, only came out at night, and owned a very kick-ass estate edging the water. The entire place was fenced—and he had multiple acres, a gatehouse and a boat. She didn't know where he'd come from, and every avenue she'd tried to find out more had been shut down.

Everyone knew he had money—lots of it. He was also a very scary man. He could take over a room just by walking into it. She had mixed reviews about him. Half the people who had encounters with him thought he was the devil. The other half were certain he was a saint.

He had a partner, a man by the name of Maksim Volkov, who no one knew anything about. He was the silent partner. He owned the property bordering Tariq Asenguard's estate, but few ever saw him. He was partners with Asenguard in the dance club. Asenguard, who was there often, was clearly the face of the club, but few actually ever saw Volkov. There was something about his name that made Blaze shiver. Tariq Asenguard was definitely a badass, but he was cool about it. Maksim Volkov was a question mark. She knew others worked for them, but it didn't matter now. She didn't care.
They
hadn't murdered her father, so therefore she was throwing in with them. After she was dead.

Methodically, Blaze positioned weapons throughout the room and around the bar, and then practiced getting to them. She didn't want to hesitate. She'd need every second she could get. If nothing else, she wanted to take the Hallahans with her when she went. She felt calm. Nerves would come later. And then the kick of adrenaline.

She glanced at her watch. Outside, light was beginning to fade. The streetlights wouldn't come on. Someone had shattered the old-fashioned gaslights that lent character to the streets. The four brothers almost always came at night. She knew they didn't care if anyone saw their faces and knew who they were. Everyone was far too intimidated by them to come forward.

She just plain wasn't the come-forward-and-testify type,
not when she didn't believe for one moment that there would be a conviction. These men had killed her father. They'd tortured him first and then they'd killed him and thrown his broken body out of a moving car, in front of the bar like trash, right at her feet. She hadn't seen them torture or kill Sean, only throw his body at her.

The brothers had timed it just right, coming into the bar at closing when Sean was standing just inside the door. The ME said he found Taser marks, puncture wounds where her father had been taken down, not by one Taser, but by four. The moment they had incapacitated him, they had struck brutally, leaving behind a good amount of blood. It had been Blaze who came home to find the bar unlocked, blood on the floor and her father missing. Even with the blood, the police had done nothing. They promised to send someone around to take a report, but no one showed up. That hadn't surprised her. The cops had all but abandoned her neighborhood and everyone in it.

Blaze looked around the bar. The building—and the bar—were over a hundred years old. She didn't understand why the mobsters spared some of the properties and went after others. Their takeovers seemed random. She'd tried to put together a pattern, but she couldn't find one. It wasn't the businesses they wanted, because after they acquired property, they never opened the business again. The dry cleaner six doors down was closed. The lovely little grocery store on the opposite corner remained closed, forcing all the residents to go out of their neighborhood to get food.

She made her way up the stairs, leaving a trail of weapons. She didn't believe she would ever get to them, but still, she had been taught to plan for every contingency, and living was one of them. The apartment where she'd grown up was large. She loved it. It had been home all her life.

Home.
Her father had done that. Given that to her. He laughed a lot. His eyes lit up when he laughed. So many times he'd whirled her around the living room floor, singing at the top of his lungs, making her laugh with him. He lived life large and he'd wanted her to do the same.

She knew her father dated women, but he never brought them home. She asked a million times why he didn't remarry, because she was always afraid if she found someone he would be lonely, and she didn't want her father ever to be lonely. Sean simply told her there was no point in settling. It was either the right one or no one. He'd learned that lesson the hard way and said he hadn't found the right one, but that he was still looking.

She had always wanted that for him. Wanted someone else to love him the way she did, but he'd never let anyone other than Emeline fully into their lives, and maybe that was what made her the same way. She dated, but she never gave herself to anyone because she knew it wasn't
the
one. Maybe there wasn't really the perfect one. The right one. She'd never know now because she was going to die tonight.

She stashed a go bag with clothes and money on the roof by the fire escape, tucked out of sight. Two more guns and that was it. She was more than ready for war. She stood on the roof for a few minutes just looking out over her neighborhood, remembering the sound of laughter. There had always been the murmur of voices and the sound of laughter. Now there was just . . . silence.