Chapter Twenty
If the brute had confronted them alone instead of accompanied by three more men brandishing guns, Diana knew that she and Ian could have flayed the bastard.
Since the night they’d fought together in Mayfair, she’d cultivated a deep appreciation of his physical prowess and defensive acumen. But now that she knew Ian’s body intimately, she was desperate for him to unleash his strength and agility to throttle the thugs who held them.
Out of reflex, her fingers crept into her pockets.
“Hands up, Miss Rives,” the assailant ordered in accented English as he turned the gun on her. “Wouldn’t want you reaching for those pretty knives of yours.”
Beside her, Ian remained ethereally still. Diana hoped he was bracing for an attack. Then she feared what would happen to him if he went off too quickly and she didn’t have time to cover him.
The leader cocked the trigger of his gun. “I believe I asked you to raise your hands.”
Ian gave a feral hiss.
The armed men stepped closer.
The potential of it escalating to shots and seeing Ian’s blood spilled on the stone floor made Diana quickly raise her hands. “I don’t believe we’ve had the pleasure.”
“You toffs never remember people like me.” He flashed a manufactured smile. “Unless we give you cause.”
Diana forced a laugh and willed her thoughts to stop whirling. They needed a diversion to facilitate their escape.
“You’re a man of business; that much is obvious.” She couldn’t risk looking at Ian as she crept forward, or she’d reveal her efforts to befuddle their captors. “Let’s negotiate.”
“You’re not understanding, piccola.” The tough waved his gun around at her and his men. “There’s no advantage for you to play.”
“I respectfully disagree.” Diana glanced at the man on their left.
His hold on his pistol was shaky; he was the weakest link of the bunch and the best target to disarm.
She prayed Ian noticed it too. “Everyone wants something. I’m prepared to provide you with a much more lucrative compensation than what your current employer is offering you. ”
“Who says I need a bribe to get my hands on you and those pretty emeralds?”
A howl erupted from behind her.
Diana threw her best right hook with her palm exposed and belted the leader in the nose. His disoriented state allowed her to wrench the pistol from him.
The fiend roared at his henchmen, but Ian had similarly disarmed the shaky one.
With one boot on his neck, Ian pointed two pistols at the man who was still armed.
The goon holding the gun at Ian pulled the trigger, but Ian ducked in time, and fired back to disarm the assailant by shooting the pistol out of his hand.
Diana kept her gun pointed toward the gang leader. Ian searched the basement for other accomplices before taking a post with his back to hers. The waves of heat coming off him made her heartbeat retreat to a less frantic pace.
“Are you hurt?”
They spoke in unison, and it sent a delicious thrill through the pit of Diana’s stomach.
“I’m fine,” she confirmed.
Ian uttered a low grunt to affirm the same before he swung around and aimed both guns at the leader. “Let’s revisit our discussion.”
“I don’t think we will, Mr. Holt.”
A wiry man with graying hair appeared at the crypt altar.
The same man who’d scrutinized them so closely during their visit to the Swan’s Nest. Although short in stature, his posture held the same regal and lethal air as a lion king.
Behind him stood six men, all armed to the teeth. Half of them wore gendarme uniforms.
The lion king flicked a hand, and the guards surrounded them before either Diana or Ian could move.
They took the pistols. One of them quickly dispatched her of the knife in her pocket.
The rough search of her person made Ian voice an incoherent, vicious protest, which earned him a silencing punch across the mouth.
Of all the moments for him to abandon his Herculean restraint. Diana silently pleaded for him not to do anything stupid on her behalf. She wished she could assuage him by telling him her other knife remained tucked inside the bindings wrapped around her breasts.
As she searched for some other escape route, her eyes clapped on Birdie, hiding behind the circle of men.
When they arrived in Monte Carlo, Diana had ordered the crew hands to keep tailing Ian, to keep up the appearance she remained distrustful of him. They’d obviously followed him as he’d reconnoitered the church.
The shame of her grave miscalculation heated Diana’s cheeks. Embarrassment and fear morphed into hot anger, and the warning flash of Ian’s dark eyes couldn’t stop her from flaunting a deadly smile at the gray-haired man. “Have we met, signore?”
“Forgive me, Signorina Rives, I’ve forgotten my manners. You may call me Titus.” His mouth twitched. “I did not expect I would need so much muscle to detain the two of you. That will teach me to follow the advice of your Widow.”
Amelia had once accused Diana of single-mindedness for the White Stag mission. Until now, she’d never seen the danger in it. She’d wanted a cause to drive her, something to fill her up. A purpose. A calling.
It was easier to live solely focused on that mission. In the boundaries of the black-and-white orders, on Widow’s black-and-white paper. She hadn’t questioned a thing. Because her mother had conditioned her not to.
The woman who had manipulated and lied to Diana her entire life was in league with men who’d happily kill her over a set of emeralds.
“What exactly is your agreement with Widow, capo?” Ian’s voice was cold, detached, a bastion of politeness. But his body remained coiled tight, poised to pounce the moment he had the advantage.
“Ah, you can show respect when you choose to. All that time in England must have made you forget what Don Alberti taught you.” Titus shook his head.
“That’s why you didn’t bring us i gioielli.
But now that your memory has returned, Holt, I won’t need to remind you about the rules.
And you won’t move while my compagnos relieve Miss Rives of the necklace. ”
With a flick of his hand, Titus directed two of the gendarmes to approach Diana.
Diana stifled the urge to twist the ties that bound her hands and reached for the only weapon she had available: her wiles.
She glanced at Titus from beneath her eyelashes and dropped the pitch of her voice to a husky tone. “I’m wondering, Mr. Titus, if you would appease my curiosity.”
“We all know what curiosity does to cats, signorina.”
“Indulge me, signore. What did Widow offer you in exchange for the necklace?”
Titus laughed and wagged a finger at her to mock her attempt to beguile him. “If Widow hasn’t told you, piccola, I won’t. But I’ll give you a hint.”
He signaled to a gendarme, who belted Ian in the stomach.
As Ian doubled over, guards seized him by each elbow, while two others gripped his neck in a headlock.
“There’s no need for this, signore.” Diana wrestled against her restraints. “Let us negotiate.”
“This is not something we can haggle over. You have nothing left to concede. And no incentive that would persuade me to abandon my plans.”
It took three of them to hold Ian down while they pried his jaw open. One of them poured a vial down his throat and smothered his nose and mouth, forcing him to swallow it.
“What are you doing?” Diana bellowed, because she’d never stop the ratbags by shrieking like some harpy. Rage made her limbs convulse, but she clung to it because it was far more useful than terror.
“This is business, signorina.” Titus shrugged.
“Widow insisted we keep you alive. I thought about taking you both as insurance for our agreement, but you’re too unpredictable and I don’t have money to waste on more men.
These gendarmes are costing me a fortune.
” He laughed as if he spoke about a new pair of horses.
Ian’s legs buckled, and he fell to the ground on his hands and knees.
Tears pricked at her eyes, and Diana didn’t fight them. “We gave you the necklace. There’s no need for this.”
“Consider it an education,” Titus quipped. “So neither of you forgets the rules again.”
The men wrestled Ian to the ground and pulled at his shirt. Buttons scattered across the stone floor as the cloth parted and exposed his skin.
And the small splash of ink above his heart.
“Wait!” she roared loud enough to attract Titus’s notice. “Ian wears the mark of the Tarka. Beneath his shirt.”
The men paused.
Titus ripped Ian’s shirt back and acknowledged the tattoo with a faint grunt. “So. Alberti marked you.”
He shoved Ian’s face into the ground and motioned to his men to lock their pistols before he turned to Diana. “Until Il Gioco concludes, I can’t harm anyone bearing a mark of an heir. But the two of you have held up this competition long enough.”
The men bound Diana’s mouth with a gag while the burliest guard threw Ian over his shoulder.
The rest kept their pistols aimed at them as they dragged them out of the church to a waiting wagon.
Diana protested against her gag, but with the gendarmes standing guard, the few people they passed didn’t give them a second look.
The cart stopped at the harbor, and the guards dragged them to a dilapidated pier, where a rickety rowboat was moored behind an ancient tug. They shackled Diana’s bound hands to the rudder and hauled Ian’s limp body onto the boat.
Titus nodded approvingly. “We’ll let nature take its course. Find out if you’re a strong as you think you are.”
He raised his walking stick, and the horn of the tug blew. The sound pierced Diana’s ears and she arched over Ian’s body to protect him.
As the tugboat lurched away from the port, the horn blew again to drown out her screams.
A viselike pain strangled Ian’s head.
Consciousness found him shortly afterward. The first thing he detected, along with the pounding at his skull, was that he was bobbing up and down on the water.