Shock Waves (24 page)

“One night we went back to his place.” She forced the words out. “He put on some music and we were dancing, and then he was kissing me.” Against her shoulders, she felt Ethan’s hold on her tighten. “I … I tried,” she said, then turned in his arms to look into his eyes. “For once in my life I wanted to be normal.”

His mouth curved into a sad smile. “You’re perfect just the way you are.”

The words, rough, quiet, seeped through her skin and shimmied around her heart, brought an ache that made it hard to breathe. “I let him undress me.”

She wasn’t sure what she expected from Ethan, but he just looked at her, looked steady, like he was bracing himself for what came next. The prosecutor, she knew. Waiting for the rest of the story.

She forced herself to swallow. “I let him touch me.”

The muscle in the hollow of Ethan’s jaw started to twitch, but still he said nothing, just stood there, naked and waiting.

The old Brenna would have looked away from him then. The old Brenna would have aborted her story and retreated into that place where no one could hurt her, ever, ever again. But standing there in a whispery pool of fading moonlight, she realized she didn’t want to retreat. Not from this man.

“It hit me so hard,” she blurted out. Her voice broke but she didn’t care. “All at once, it was like a sledgehammer coming down on me, and everything I hadn’t let myself see before flared to life in vibrant, horrible color.” She’d gone still at first as the images flashed through her mind at dizzying speed, blurred at first, the edges sharpening with each sickened thud of her heart. Then she’d started to back away. “There was so much ugliness in that man, I don’t know how I didn’t see it to begin with.”

Finally the hard lines of Ethan’s face softened. “He seduced you.”

“That’s no excuse,” she bit out, appalled because he was right. She’d been so gullible. “It happened fast, like a dam breaking. As soon as I saw him for the man he was, I saw other things, other images, and I knew, God I—” She gagged on the words, the memory, but Ethan never faltered, just held her steady. “I realized all the information I’d been giving him about the suburban slayer had stayed with him.”

Ethan’s jaw tightened. “What information?”

Her lungs shut down on her. “That he knew. That the slayer knew we were on to him.”

Ethan swore softly.

“Adam had told me he’d sent my grandmother into protective custody that afternoon, but standing there naked in his bedroom, with him all hard and leering at me, I knew he’d lied to me, and that my grandmother wasn’t safe. That Dave’s wife—”

Ethan pulled her into his arms and buried his face against her tangled hair. “Christ have mercy,” he swore under his breath. “That’s when it happened.”

She wrapped her arms around the thickness of his waist and held on. “That night.” She paused, tried to put distance between herself and the memory, couldn’t. “I tried to leave, to get to them in time, to warn them, but Adam wouldn’t let me. He told me I was crazy, a freak, imagining things.” She paused, pulled back to meet Ethan’s eyes. “That’s when I pulled his gun.”

Ethan looked down at her a long time before a smile slowly curved his lips. “That’s my girl.”

“He didn’t think I’d use it,” she told him, “but I knew how to shoot, and when I missed his groin by half an inch, he changed his tune.”

A low rumble broke from Ethan’s throat. “I forced him into the bathroom, secured a chair against the doorjamb, then got out of there as fast as I could.”

The smile, the pride, that had been lighting Ethan’s face dimmed. “But it was too late.”

She looked down, saw their two bodies pressed intimately together, hers soft and pale, his hard and tanned. “Yes.”

His hands returned to her hair. “I’m so damn sorry.”

“I was an idiot to trust him, to let myself get involved.” She fought back the ancient grief. “To think for one second that I could have a normal relationship.”

He stabbed a hand into her hair, then tilted her face so she had no choice but to see the light burning in his eyes. “Then what’s this?” he asked hoarsely.

Tears blurred her vision, but not the truth. “This is tonight,” she said, pushing up on her toes and pressing her mouth to his. In some distant corner of her mind she heard the low growl in his throat, but rather than discouraging her, it sent even more urgency spearing through her. She opened her mouth and ran her tongue along his, her knees almost buckling when he opened to her, let her in.

“Angel,” he murmured, backing her against the door, where the warm breeze spilled in and the moon rained down, beyond which the ocean roared like the blood through her veins. Feverishly she ran her hands along the hard planes of his body, and when his knee nudged her thighs apart, she didn’t protest, instead she opened to him as he’d opened to her, let him in.

“Tonight,” she whispered, shutting her eyes to the first pinkish strains of dawn pushing up from the tangle of dense vegetation. “Tonight.”

* * *

Against a carpet of sand so white, so sugary it defied logic and possibility, the turquoise surf crashed with increasing urgency. Wave after wave, breaking hard, foaming, washing up over the sand, then abruptly pulling back, leaving a fleeting glimmer before the next onslaught.

The flash of red hit without warning. A churning wave of
it,
surging up from the horizon and sloshing over the beach, washing away the serenity. Seagulls, mildly dipping for fish moments before, squawked and hurried away. Gunfire exploded.

He was running then, shouting, swearing through the sudden crush of darkness. “Stand down!” he roared. “It’s over.”

The flash of sunlight blinded with the force of an explosion, but still she saw him, a tall man in torn cargo shorts and no shirt, running against an impossibly blue horizon. He wasn’t looking back. Wasn’t paying attention to the MP-5Ns suddenly raised in his direction. He just kept running, shouting, the surf sucking at his legs.

From behind him, a small Latino man tackled him, and he staggered, went down hard. Refusing to stop, he pushed to his hands and knees and lunged forward.

He never saw the gun. The explosion of white blinded her, blanketed her, snuffed out her voice and her breath…

“No!”

On the blanket thrown haphazardly against a concrete floor, Brenna jerked herself awake. Her heart crashed in her chest with painful precision, hard, urgent, violent like the surf breaking beyond the tangle of forgotten vegetation. Sweat and the damp dew of morning bathed her naked, slightly sore body. Struggling to breathe, she lifted a hand to her burning throat, fully expecting to find a rope constricting her breath.

“Ethan.”

The sense of abandonment sliced in first. She surged to her feet and spun around the forgotten hotel suite, saw the morning sun spilling against weathered plaster and bare floors, the gaping, empty fireplace, the truth.

Sex was one thing, and sex was good, but Ethan was not a man to allow anything more. She knew this. With him revenge, justice, evidence, always came first. He didn’t believe in things that couldn’t be touched or seen, and the unchained urgency swirling through her definitely fell into that category. She couldn’t blame him. She didn’t trust feelings, either.

The horrible chain of events she’d seen in her dreams, the violent confrontation she’d been trying to prevent, was coming to pass. Ethan had left her, returned to Jorak.

And the woman on the beach.

Pain stabbed into her throat, churned in her stomach. She grabbed the blanket and wrapped it around her body, wondered what foolish notion had led her to believe, for one fraction of one second, that this time would be different.

Tomorrow always, always came.

* * *

“Tell me, my friend. Did you not find my accommodations satisfactory?”

“You know me,” Ethan said with an indifferent shrug. “I get edgy if I’m cooped up too long.”

Standing along the edge of the beach, wearing another of his ridiculous white suits, this one with a blood-red rose tucked in the breast pocket, Jorak Zhukov smiled. “You always did like running in the dead of night,” he mused, but then his eyes hardened. “We will find her, you know.”

The urge to struggle against the two men holding his arms behind his back was strong, but now was not the time to fight.
Brenna
was safe. He’d seen to that. She’d been
sleeping
soundly when he left. The sight of her curled on the blanket, with just a whisper of sunlight surrounding her, had all but shredded him, but he’d forced himself to fold the blanket over her and turn away, walk away. It was the right thing to do. The only thing to do.

By the time she awoke and realized what was going down, everything would be over. “This doesn’t concern her.”

Jorak swiped sand from the linen of his suit. “You made it concern her,” he said, then cocked his head skyward.

Ethan heard it, too, the low hum of an engine. The helicopter, he knew. The one that would land soon and kick the rest of his plan into motion.

“It is time, yes?” Jorak asked, returning his attention to Ethan. He squinted against the bright morning sun. “I hope you said your prayers last night.”

The laugh came all by itself, low, guttural. “Something like that.” He’d lain there in the darkness, with Brenna’s body draped around his, the thoughts in his mind blurring into chant.
Let her be okay. Let her make it out of this alive. Let her find the happiness she deserves.

“How do you live with yourself?” Jorak asked, his voice pitched low. The helicopter came into view then, a state-of-the-art piece of military refinement. “How do you look at yourself every morning and know that you killed your best friend?”

Ethan felt his jaw go tight. “I didn’t kill her.”

Jorak’s face, once marked by the strong, handsome lines of his Eastern European heritage, now gaunt and ravaged by his time on the run, twisted. “I still hear her scream. At night. When I’m lying in my bed, I still feel her in my arms. See the confusion in her eyes when the door burst open.” He paused as the helo hovered over the beach, sending a hard spray of sand against them. “Hear her scream when she went down.”

Remorse clogged Ethan’s throat. “Maybe you should have thought of that before you lied to all of us.”

Jorak watched the chopper set down. “And maybe you should have thought of that before you sicced the FBI on us.”

“Trust me.” Adrenaline kicked hard. “I did.”

Jorak said nothing, just kept watching. The sun glared down on them, insanely hot for the early hour, the burning rays not even diluted by the steady breeze. The sea, impossibly tur
quoise, crashed against
the beach. A trio of seagulls dipped for
their breakfast, completely
oblivious to what was about to go happen.

“Well, well, well,” Jorak mused, and something about his voice, the abject pleasure, almost a lover’s purr, sliced into the steady thrumming of Ethan’s heart. He turned toward the man he’d once called friend, saw him smiling, not at the helicopter, but toward the edge of the beach. “Two guesses what she spent the night doing.”

Time stopped. Or maybe that was just Ethan’s heart. He followed Jorak’s gaze, saw the two armed guards, saw her. The sun glinted down on her tangled blond hair, illuminated the flush on her complexion. Her sundress, a pretty white cotton he’d grabbed for her the night before, hung on her body, dirty and torn.

The wave of red staggered him. It clouded his line of vision, obliterated all the plans, all the deliberate pieces he’d so carefully aligned. There was only Brenna and the truth.

“No!”
On a violent twist, he broke from the guards holding him and ran, shouted, swore, fought his way through the cloying blanket of darkness. He had to reach her, reach her fast. Before the man with whom he’d once broken bread broke something else that could never be replaced.

“Stand down!” he roared, peripherally aware of the door to the helicopter opening. “It’s over.”

The flash of sunlight blinded him, but still he saw her, a slim silhouette against the impossibly blue horizon. She wasn’t
moving. Wasn’t
running, wasn’t taking cover. She just stood there, her flimsy dress flapping wildly, the surf crashing against her calves.

Pain exploded against the base of his skull. He staggered, went down hard, refused to stop. He pushed to his hands and knees and lunged forward.

He saw the gun too late. The explosion of white blinded him, blanketed him, snuffed out his voice and his breath…

“No!”

Her voice carried to him on the hot breeze. Sand stung his eyes and burned his body, but he pushed up anyway. Somewhere close by was another hum, louder, louder, and when Ethan went to push himself up, Jorak’s foot came down on his back and pressed him hard to the sand.

“I warned you,” he said, and his voice no longer sounded mild, cultured, but hard and deadly. “I warned you what would happen if you betrayed me.”

Ethan bit back the coppery taste of blood. “I know the consequences of betrayal.”

At the other end of the beach, the second helicopter, this one a military-issue Black Hawk, touched down, sending another wall of hot sand against them.