Vengeance (SSU Trilogy Book 1) (38 page)

“Once you are dead, I will send your head to your mother. After a sufficient amount of time, I will order her killed and my revenge will be complete.”

The girl slipped down, exposing his head.

Then three things happened.

As he shifted his grip on the girl, she raked her fingernails down his cheeks.

The lights went out.

And Niko fired.

#

“No!”

Niko’s cry echoed in the dark. He leapt toward the place he’d last seen Alvarez and Jenna.

Dammit, the lights going out had thrown off his shot. What if he’d accidentally shot Jenna instead of Alvarez? How would he live with himself?

Just then the backup generator kicked in, throwing the room into stark relief.

Alvarez’s leg disappeared through a door in the wall, the tapestry that had hidden it piled in a graceful heap on the floor. Jenna was on the floor, pushing to her knees.

Niko allowed himself a second of blinding relief that she was alive, then followed Alvarez down a set of stairs where emergency lights glowed faintly along the edges.

Niko heard Alvarez thudding down the steps ahead of him. He tried taking the stairs two at a time, but on the first landing, his wounded leg shuddered and almost gave out. One of Alvarez’s bodyguards had pounded his fist into the wound during their scuffle and now it throbbed in time with Niko’s pulse. Chafing under the restriction of walking down every step, Niko pushed himself to go faster.

Down below, a door slammed.

Four steps later, Niko rounded a ninety-degree turn and pulled up barely in time to stop from crashing into a dull metal door.

Niko knelt, knowing gunfire would be aimed at where his head should be, and slowly opened the door. It led into a garage. Not the one he’d used to enter the house. In the middle of the space, Alvarez was climbing into a black town car. On the other side, a guard pushed Aunt Madalena into the vehicle.

Niko shot the guard, then the front tires.

The guard went down. The bullet bounced off the tires and ricocheted off the concrete floor. Shit. Reinforced. Niko ducked back into the stairwell to avoid being hit. When he opened the door again, the car had already rolled out of the garage and into a tunnel.

Niko ran after them. He knew he couldn’t do any damage to an armored vehicle, but he needed to know how far the tunnel stretched.

As the taillights disappeared, Niko cursed and relayed the information to Rafe out on the road.

Then he limped back toward the stairs.

#

Jenna glanced at the door that Niko had disappeared through. Was he nuts? Running headlong into an enclosed space where Alvarez could easily ambush him?

She started to go after Niko, thinking she could back him up, but then she saw Kai’s inert body. Her heart froze.

She dropped to her knees beside him. “Please don’t be dead,” she murmured. Her fingers slid across Kai’s neck until she found a slight pulse. She was so relieved, she kissed him on the forehead.

Kai stirred and opened his eyes. “Jen-na?” His voice was thin and muffled.

“I’m here, Kai.” She smoothed her hand over his hair. “We’re safe now.”

His lips started to curl in a smile, but the effort was too much for him and he lost consciousness again.

The doors behind them burst open. Men in black assault gear stormed in, taking up positions around the room. The eye of a deadly automatic weapon stared straight at Jenna.

Her hands were on top of her head before she even realized what she’d done. She held her breath as the men on the far side of the room poked at Alvarez’s guards. None of the men stirred.

She didn’t care if they were unconscious or dead.

At the sound of footsteps from the direction of the hidden door, several soldiers shifted the aim of their weapons.

Niko stepped through the opening and immediately dropped to his knees with his hands up. “The Little Mermaid,” he shouted.

To Jenna’s surprise, one of the soldiers grinned. “Darling it’s better, down where it’s wetter, under the sea,” he sang in a beautiful tenor.

The soldier nearest to Jenna muttered, “Can’t wait ‘til that kid of his grows up. I’m sick of Disney code phrases.”

Jenna choked back a laugh. Across the room, one of the men helped Niko to his feet. But when he went to put weight on his left leg, it gave out. The man put his arm around Niko’s waist and draped Niko’s arm across his shoulders. They spoke quietly a moment, the soldier said something into his lip mike, then he helped Niko out of the room.

Not knowing if it was okay to lower her arms, Jenna kept them up as she watched Niko leave. He didn’t even glance her way.

A tight band squeezed her heart. She didn’t want him to go! There was too much she wanted to tell him. Too much—

“It’s okay to lower your arms, ma’am.”

Jenna started. She hadn’t even realized that the soldiers no longer had their weapons aimed at her and Kai. She let her arms drop with a grateful sigh.

“How badly is this man hurt, ma’am?”

She looked at Kai. “I…I don’t know. Bad, I think.”

“If you don’t mind—?” The soldier dropped to his knees beside her. “I’m a medic. We’ll get a helicopter to medevac him, but it will help if I can tell them his condition.”

Jenna nodded and moved back so that the man had room to examine Kai. She felt tears prick her eyes and blinked them back. Kai’s injuries didn’t seem life threatening, but she couldn’t bear the idea she might lose him now, when she finally realized how much she still loved him.

When she’d surrendered in the jungle, she’d never imagined ending up in a situation like this. She’d thought she and Kai would be dead by now. Her vengeance complete. Her soul finally at peace.

She’d hoped to find a way to rescue Niko’s aunt, too, but she hadn’t seen or heard of the woman since her arrival.

The next few minutes passed in a blur. The medic finished examining Kai and decided not to move him until the helicopter arrived. The rest of the soldiers rounded up Alvarez’s men and marched them off. They asked if she wanted to wait outside, but she elected to stay with Kai.

Several minutes later a new team of soldiers arrived with a stretcher. “Your ride’s here,” a lanky man with a charming grin told her as he supervised Kai being lifted onto the stretcher.

Jenna followed the men out of the fortress, taking the time to notice the exotic artwork and high quality furniture. A hard knot of anger lodged in her throat. Pain, intimidation and death were behind every graceful piece of art. Even the abundance of living plants couldn’t mask the evil of this place.

She shuddered and hurried after her brother.

The soldiers settled Kai on the floor of a helicopter next to Mark Tonelli. He looked awful, but not nearly as bad as Kai. She was glad Mark hadn’t been left behind, but that was all the thought she spared him.

She buckled in to the sideways facing seat and one of the men started to close the door.

Niko stood on the lawn, talking with some of the soldiers, unaware that he was about to be left behind. “Wait!” she called out. “Niko!”

He glanced up. Motioned for the soldier to close the door. Then, when she called out again, he turned his back on her.

Jenna sank back in her seat, the center of her chest aching as if she’d just been kicked.

As the helicopter jumped into the air with a sickening lurch, she had the terrifying feeling she’d never see Niko again. She told herself it didn’t matter, but when her teeth started chattering, she knew it wasn’t just from cold.

In a few short weeks she’d come to trust and depend on Niko to be there when she needed support. Now, she felt as weightless as an astronaut in zero gravity.

One of the soldiers knelt in front of her. “Let’s clean you up a bit, ma’am,” he said. He reached out with a damp cloth and ran it lightly over the cuts on her face. She bit her lip and closed her eyes so she wouldn’t cry. She wanted Niko to tend to her, like he had that night at his cabin.

“Suck it up, Paterson.”
She could almost hear the gravelly voice of Grayson yelling at her. “
You gonna be a girl and cry because you can’t have everything you want? Or are you going to be a soldier and deal?”

That’s right,
she reminded herself.
Don’t cry. You came away alive. Kai is probably innocent. That’s more than you expected. Be happy.

But her greedy heart wanted both Kai and Niko in her life. She spent the entire helicopter ride fighting against self-pity, and losing.

Chapter 29

Friday, Early Morning

U.S. Naval carrier, off the coast of Mexico

“I lost him,” Rafe told Niko, leaning against the doorway to the small infirmary. “He had too much of a head start and he knew the roads better than me, dammit.”

From his seat on the exam table, Niko shook his head. “Don’t blame yourself. Alvarez had his getaway well planned. We had no way of knowing he’d take Aunt Madalena with him.” In fact, Niko hadn’t even realized the escape route existed. It was one of the few things Alvarez had kept secret from him.

He scrubbed his hand over the back of his neck. Dammit, he’d vowed to end things tonight, and instead he’d let Alvarez escape. With Aunt Madalena.

Not only had he screwed up and let Alvarez get away, but he hadn’t handled Jenna well at all.

What could he say? He’d seen the blood on her face from a new knife wound and been filled with rage. Even now, he wanted to kill Alvarez for cutting her. At the same time, he was blazingly aware that if she hadn’t surrendered in the jungle, she wouldn’t have been hurt in the first place. He was so angry with her, he was afraid he’d do or say something unforgivable.

So he’d turned his back on her when she’d called out to him from the helicopter.

But now he wondered if he’d been wrong about her wanting to kill her brother. She’d seemed so loving and concerned for him back at the fortress, hovering over Paterson just like she’d hovered over Niko when he’d been hurt in Acapulco.

No. She had definitely planned to kill her brother. And herself. What other explanation was there for her surrender? For the cyanide pills?

Hell, maybe he should have asked to examine her mouth to see if she still had the tablets in place.

Right. Like that wouldn’t have ended up with his tongue halfway down her throat, all thoughts of investigation blown away. And wouldn’t that be a fucking mistake. He didn’t even know who she really was. How much of what he’d seen from her these past weeks had been a lie? Just an act to get him to help her find Paterson?

Until he figured that one out, he’d damn well keep his distance.

“Niko?”

He shook himself out of his thoughts and realized that Rafe was looking at him with a puzzled frown. “Sorry. What?”

“I asked what you plan to do next. Other than get that leg treated and have the stitches in your arm examined.” Rafe’s stare made it clear that he’d stop any attempt Niko made to leave the infirmary before he’d been looked at by a medic.

“I need to talk to Paterson,” Niko said. “Just before I entered the room, I heard him tell Alvarez he never had the chip. If that’s true, and he’s been searching for it all this time, then Ryker needs to know.” And if Niko was very lucky, he’d still find the chip and trade it for the release of his aunt.

“Shit.” Rafe crossed his arms over his chest. “That…yeah, that would change things.”

You have no idea.

#

Friday, Evening

San Diego, California

Jenna sat down on one of the hard, neon orange chairs in the hospital’s waiting area, then immediately stood back up again. She picked up an old news magazine, thumbed through it, then tossed it onto the wobbly, metal coffee table when she realized she didn’t have any idea what she’d been looking at.

Half an hour ago, Niko and Rafe had walked into Kai’s room and asked her and the guard to leave. When Kai reinforced their request, she’d reluctantly retreated to this lounge. But waiting here alone was sheer torture. She’d remembered that the SSU wanted to bring Kai in to question him on the location of the microchip and what happened the night of the attack. The SSU also believed Kai had been responsible for the fire at Dr. Nevsky’s lab that killed the scientist and his assistant.

She wished she knew if the guard assigned to Kai was for his protection, or to prevent his escape. Although it remained a mystery how anyone would think he’d make a getaway when Kai couldn’t even walk.

Except for the few minutes when she’d been taken to another room to have her cuts and scrapes cleaned and the knife wound on her check stitched, she’d been by Kai’s bedside since they’d wheeled him out of surgery. She’d fought the entire time against a smothering panic brought on by the familiar beeps and hisses of the medical equipment monitoring Kai’s vitals. Deluged by painful memories of weeks spent trapped in her hospital bed.

If it had been anyone else, Jenna would have run. But this was her brother. She owed it to him to stay.

Owed him out of guilt for believing him guilty all these years. Out of her newly recognized love for Kai that was slowly filling up the void in her heart.

And she had to stay because she’d never had anyone by her side when she awoke in the hospital. All her memories from that time were tinged with fear and despair and a gnawing loneliness that still hollowed her out.

Kai deserved better, so she’d stayed.

And when Kai finally opened his eyes, his smile of joy at seeing her had melted her heart and driven away the remnants of suspicion.

Now Jenna nibbled on the side of her thumbnail. She’d heard Kai tell Alvarez that Dr. Nevsky had triggered a self-destruct mechanism that had started the fire at the lab and led to his death. But how long would it take for Kai to convince the SSU of his innocence?

After two years hating Kai, it felt strange to think of him as one of the good guys. Yet, perversely, she was now filled with a fierce need to protect him.

She stood up, prepared to go storming back into Kai’s room and demand to know what was going on. After only a few steps, she stopped, remembering the guarded look Niko had given her upon his arrival. He was back to being the cold-eyed warrior she’d first met.