Chapter 13
Vivian hated the heat that pressed down on her inside the rusted-out skeleton of the old bottling plant.
She hated the dust that hung thick in the air and scraped at her lungs whenever she dragged in a breath.
But, most of all, she hated the dread running beneath her skin until her whole body buzzed.
Bishop.
Their current employer was due to call any minute, and she couldn’t wait to be done with the whole damn conversation. The whole damn operation.
It wasn’t just the mechanical pitch of his altered voice that set her teeth on edge. It was the unspoken warning behind every word he said.
Do this for me, or else.
Vivian didn’t believe in god. Heaven and hell were myths made up by rich men who hoped to keep the peasants from revolting. But every time she spoke to Bishop, she couldn’t shake the sense that she was talking to someone or something too powerful for its own good.
Creepy bastard.
She’d tried to take the edge off her garrote-tight nerves in the usual way—flat on her back with Hummer between her thighs. And to his credit, he’d delivered. Twice. But the warm glow of release had already burned off, and the crawling rawness was back in her blood.
If there hadn’t been so many zeros in the amount Bishop had agreed to pay them, she might have passed on the job. She’d learned long ago to trust her instincts when it came to contracts, and her instincts told her Bishop—and everything he stood for—was bad news.
But her crew would’ve strung her up by her toenails if she’d waved toodle-oo to ten million dollars.
Ten million on top of ten million, she silently corrected. Because Bishop had promised that if the Knights came through with the ransom, she and her boys were welcome to keep it.
“You think he wants them all dead?” Kurt said, sounding like he always did. Like someone had shoved a wad of gauze up his nose. “Or just the hostage?” His face showed disappointment that this last thing might be an option.
Kurt was a bloodthirsty little fucker. Which was usually a boon to the work they did.
But maybe not today.
“Bishop is paying us a pretty penny to do exactly as he says.” She swiped a bead of sweat from her temple and flicked it off her fingertips. It hit the floor at her feet, leaving a dark circle on the concrete. “If he says we only body the hostage, then we only body the hostage.”
That’s another thing that bothered Vivian. Bishop hadn’t exactly been magnanimous when sharing the details of this op.
All he’d said when he’d hired her was, “Take one of the women. Hold her for ransom. I’ll provide next steps after that’s done.”
And when she’d asked if they needed to protect their identities, if his intention was that they release the hostage once the transaction was complete, his exact words were, “That seems like too much trouble. Killing her is easier.”
So cold. So careless.
Most of the time, Vivian considered those to be positive attributes. But, with Bishop, she had to wonder—
“Back up.” Diesel elbowed Hummer. “You smell like dirty sex, and it’s making my dick hard.”
Instead of retreating, Hummer grinned. “Jealous?”
“No.” Diesel flicked a hot, calculating glance at Vivian. “She can’t handle me. She’s admitted it.”
She knew the only things keeping Diesel from doing to her what he did to the other women were his fear of losing the paychecks she brought him and his certainty she’d kill him graveyard dead should he ever try to slip something into her drink.
Because he expected it, because they all did, she gave him one of her lethal smiles. All teeth. No feeling.
“Oh, I could handle you,” she purred. “I just like being fully conscious when I fuck someone. It’s more fun for me that way.”
“Your loss.” Diesel shrugged his gargantuan shoulders.
“So you keep telling me.”
She checked her watch and pulled the burner phone from her hip pocket.
Soon, she’d hear that eerie voice. Soon, she’d receive her final instructions. Soon, there’d be nothing left to do but the doing.
She was ready.
She was past ready and—
“I’m hungry,” Vance declared, cutting into her thoughts. “And it’s still hours before the drop. I saw a Wendy’s three blocks back. I’ll make a run.”
Vance. Cool-headed. Steady. The only one of them she never had to ride roughshod over.
She’d fucked him once. But she’d been too drunk to really remember much about the experience. And he’d never indicated he wanted a repeat of it.
That pricked at her pride. But only a little.
“Walk it,” she instructed and watched annoyance flicker across his face.
“I know it’s hot as hell, but Bishop says the Knights have access to the city’s CCTV grid.
If they were able to retrace her route as she was leaving the city”—she tipped her chin toward the bound woman—“then they might’ve zeroed in on us tracking her and have eyes out for the van.
It stays parked where it is until this thing is done. ”
The rest of the group easily rattled off their orders—baconator this, frosty that—and Vance took it all in without writing it down.
After he sauntered through the bottling plant’s massive steel door, blond hair catching a shaft of light on his way, Vivian returned her attention to the seconds ticking by and the unease growing inside her.
The waiting was always the worst.
Diesel went back to the weapons and gear spread across the table; he liked the feel of steel in his hands. Hummer ambled over to the case of bottled water stashed by the wall. And Kurt strolled purposefully toward their captive.
Because of course he did. He never missed an opportunity to torment.
Vivian didn’t know if Kurt had been born a bully or if he’d matured into one once he stopped growing and developed a Napoleon complex.
Either way, he was a dickhead. A thorn in her side on a good day and a severe pain in her ass on a bad one.
She’d have kicked him to the curb long ago if he hadn’t been such a crackerjack shot.
Unfortunately for her, trained snipers—talented snipers—were few and far between.
Sighing heavily, she lifted her hair off the back of her sweaty neck. The heat inside the building was suffocating and—
“Water,” their hostage croaked. She seemed to be shriveling into a human raisin right in front of their eyes. “Water. Please.”
“Water, please,” Kurt mocked in an exaggerated falsetto.
“Cut it out, Kurt!” Vivian barked. She had little sympathy for Sabrina Greenlee.
But she had less than zero patience for Kurt’s bullshit.
Especially today. Especially in the oppressive heat that made her brain feel like it was stuck inside a pressure cooker set to high. “Give her some fucking water.”
“I got it.” Hummer grabbed a second bottle from the pack and cracked the seal on the lid. He ambled toward their hostage in that slow, loose-hipped way of his.
Mark “Hummer” Keslar could be as ruthless as the rest of them. But he was capable of humanity when it counted.
She figured his humanity was what led him to dive headfirst into the bottle when they weren’t on the job. He was human enough to be haunted by what he did. By what they did.
She didn’t quite understand that about him. But she liked it.
Opposites attract and whatnot, she thought. Plus, he has that Coke bottle cock.
She felt her phone jangle to life inside her hand before she actually heard it. She ignored how her pulse leapt as she answered with a crisp, “Yes?”
“Everything proceeding as expected?” came the warped, soulless voice.
Before she could respond, a screech pierced the factory’s stagnant air like a hot blade through soft flesh. It was a harpy’s scream. A wraith’s wail. The kind of sound to lift the hairs on Vivian’s arms.
Then Hummer bellowed. A raw, shocked roar that made Vivian’s stomach bottom out.
The phone was still to her ear when her head snapped around. But she dropped it to the floor the instant she saw what was happening.
Hummer’s hand clutched his throat as blood pumped hot and red between his fingers. The hostage was still in the chair, but her arms were free. A bloody smear marked her right hand like war paint, and her eyes were wide. Feral.
Vivian had been on assignment in Wyoming once and had come across a wolf with its paw caught in a trap. The blood on its muzzle had been thick and oozing, but that was nothing compared to the blood on the beast’s mangled foot, where it’d been gnawing away its own flesh in a desperate bid to escape.
Freedom at any cost.
That had been the wolf then. That was Sabrina Greenlee now.
“No,” Vivian breathed even as she bolted across the room.
Hummer was already on his knees when she reached him, and Diesel wrenched their hostage's arms back behind her back. But it was too late.
The damage was done.
Vibrant blood darkened the front of Hummer’s shirt. It gushed between his fingers and spattered onto the concrete in thick, metallic-smelling drops.
So much blood.
Too much blood.
“Don’t pull it out!” she screamed when his hand curled around the glass shard protruding from his neck.
But he’d already yanked before she could finish the sentence.
Now his throat gushed like a ruptured pipe. And the sound… Jesus Christ! That wet ffttt-fffttt-fffftt. It made her knees buckle.
“Hummer!” She slid an arm around his big shoulders, her other hand pressing down hard on his ruined neck. “Hummer,” she repeated, trying not to think about the sticky heat running thick and wet between her fingers. “Hold still. I got you.”
His eyes, dark and dazed, found hers. There was a question there. And more. There was…
Fear.
He was afraid because he knew. This was the end for him, and her cold, hard heart cracked. Just a little.
He opened his mouth, but it was only a wet-sounding wheeze that escaped, more blood than breath.
“Don’t speak,” she cooed, easing him down onto the floor, her soft tone at odds with the carnage blooming around her on the concrete like a macabre flower.