Chapter 17 #4
God, he was still so beautiful, Danny thought as he examined his only love’s worried expression in the light from the electric lamps lining the dock.
The high brow and Roman nose hadn’t changed from their first meeting, practically as teenagers.
But Felix had grown into his features, looking leonine and regal and masterful.
Twenty really was overrated to forty, Danny thought irrelevantly, and he’d always hoped to find out how forty was overrated to sixty and beyond.
He still hoped for that.
“I promised not to leave you,” Danny said softly. “I won’t willingly, you know that.”
“But he’s a monster,” Felix said, his voice sounding wobbly and young, when he’d always seemed the leader of the two of them.
“He is.”
“And you barely escaped last time,” Felix told him, as though the scars, heavy keloid, painful reminders along his rib cage, hadn’t been there for the last ten years to remind him.
“And he has our son,” Danny said. “And we promised none of our children were allowed to get hurt—but especially not that one.”
Felix caught his breath and nodded. “Do you even have a plan?” he asked.
Danny managed to pull himself from the fear of the moment and shake his head. “You, Julia, Leon—when, oh when, will you people stop underestimating me.”
Felix scowled, grabbed his hand, and kissed his palm. “Are you going to share?” he asked in irritation.
“Certainly,” Danny said.
In his ear, Stirling said, “Danny, they’re eight minutes out.”
“Good,” Danny said. “Now I need both of you to listen to me carefully. We can’t risk too much communication—we have no idea when he’s going to figure out we’re all mic’d.”
“Go, Uncle Danny,” Stirling said.
“Go, Danny,” Felix told him.
And while he and Felix strode to the upper parking lot of the dock itself, Danny spilled the plan while the enemy drew near.
“YOU UNDERSTAND what to do?” Chuck asked Molly.
Liam had brought the last two girls down just as the others were disappearing through the emergency porthole Chuck had carved.
After helping them through the hole and into the metal semi-sphere that they’d sealed to the curved bottom of the ship and then pumped dry, Chuck had squeezed through the hole, followed by Hunter, both of them trying not to grimace as their rather bulging biceps were scraped along the freshly melted edges.
Then Molly had slipped into the semi-sphere with far less trouble.
“Once the last of the girls is past the tunnel, I get the fuck out and turn off the pumps as I pass,” she said. “And yes, I can swim to the surface after that.”
“Hurry out of the water,” Chuck said. “After this thing catches fire, there’s no telling what will be in it, chemical wise, and we don’t need your hair to turn green.”
Molly grimaced. “Or my skin or my internal organs.”
“Now you’re getting the picture,” Chuck said seriously. “I’m going to give us ten minutes here, ten minutes to find a way to scuttle the ship and then jump off the back when it blows. Danny said it had to be spectacular, so—”
“GTFO,” Molly said. “I hear you, Chuck.”
Chuck smiled at her fondly. “That’s my Molly girl,” he said. In a gesture of tenderness, he tapped her cheek with his knuckle. “Keep your skin on your body, precious—it’s where it belongs.”
And with that, he gave a fierce chin nod to Liam and Hunter, and Molly ducked her head out.
“Can you really rig this thing to blow in ten minutes?” Liam asked, following Hunter, who thankfully seemed to have a better memory than Liam when it came to directions.
“I can scuttle this ship in five minutes,” Chuck said grimly. “The trick is going to be rigging it to scuttle and then getting to the top deck to leap before it goes.”
At that moment they heard shouting, and Hunter said, “Showtime,” before pulling his knife out of a sheath at his belt.
Nobody wanted to fire a gun on the inside of a ship, when bullets could bounce or hit things that would make steam pipes explode.
But that didn’t mean they had to be nice to the people currently racing toward them with their hands full of things like mallets and giant pipe wrenches either.
Liam pulled at the dagger in his belt, positioned his baton, and crouching a little behind Chuck, got ready to pull cleanup duty.
They had nine minutes to go.
JOSH AND Hunter were really going to start checking Grace’s luggage before they left any place they stayed for longer than a minute.
If Grace had stolen half the things he’d babbled about to Kadjic over the last twenty minutes, he was not only going to have an Interpol Red Notice posted in his name, he was going to be wanted by a number of private art patrons who were almost as powerful and far more ruthless than countries.
And the truly frightening thing was, Josh knew Grace wasn’t lying, because Grace sucked at lying, and he also knew the only reason Grace was babbling about all the—oh my God.
When had he had a chance to get at the Queen’s jewel closet in London?
Holy fucking shitballs! Josh was going to have to talk to Molly about that one, because foreign policy was established by what Camilla decided to unearth from the jewel trove, and Grace had stolen a tiara once rocked by Princess Anne.
And the only reason Grace was telling Kadjic about Princess Anne’s asymmetrical tiara, once worn in the only magazine spread to actually make her both pretty and desirable, and how Grace had wanted it for himself, because he loved looking pretty and desirable and how his boyfriend was going to go secretly nuts about that when Grace wore it to bed (oh dear God!) was because Grace was avoiding telling Kadjic about the job at the Louvre and Colombia, which were the two things he’d had a personal stake in, and also not dropping a dime on the rest of the family.
Grace wouldn’t rat them out if he could at all help it, but at this point, Josh was fully aware Grace might not be able to help it.
“Calm down,” Josh murmured through comms. “Grace, my man, if you end up telling these people about what you do in bed, you will never get your dignity back.”
“I have no dignity,” Grace said, and it would have been a non sequitur, but at this point, he’d told them about the decision to turn his hair white, what his favorite ballet was, and how many lead dancers he’d blown before he settled down with his totally monogamous boyfriend.
They were way beyond non sequiturs at this point.
“I have noticed,” Kadjic said, sounding irritated and baffled. “Has it occurred to you that things might go easier on you if you simply stayed silent?”
“Mister, you kidnapped me. If you hadn’t wanted to know about the time I rescued all the frogs from biology class you should have kidnapped somebody else.”
“That is a lie,” Kadjic said. “That is from American television. Nobody truly does that.”
“Sadly not,” Josh murmured, more to calm Grace down than to answer Kadjic.
“I didn’t know they were already dead,” Grace said glumly.
“I opened the boxes and shouted, ‘Hop away, little buddies!’ and they just sort of slithered out, looking pathetic with their little hands in the air. And then they started to melt, because they were all frozen, and they just… you know.” Josh could picture Grace, tongue sticking out the side of his mouth as he did his best impression of a dead frog.
Not one of their finer moments, no. Josh had felt stupid for not looking up how frogs were shipped to the biology teacher. He’d been fully okay with the assignment, but Grace… he just never knew when Grace’s enormous heart had been going to engage. Apparently frogs had done it.
“Why are you telling me this?” Kadjic asked, clearly as bewildered as the rest of the world when faced with a tornado.
From elsewhere in the car, Josh heard an odd sound. It was like a bear… burping?
“Oh my God,” Grace said in wonder. “Mister, is your hired muscle laughing?”
“Vlad!” Kadjic barked. “What—”
And the sound got bigger and louder as the guard—who probably didn’t speak English well—processed the story. “Hop away, little buddies!” he hooted. “Hop away!”
Josh half expected Kadjic to rant, to rave, to grab Grace by the throat and threaten his life somehow, but he underestimated the man.
With an amount of composure Josh found chilling, Kadjic said, “Who are you? Were you sent to infiltrate my operation?”
The baffled silence from Grace’s comm was actually reassuring. It meant Grace had some measure of control over what he said next.
“I’m a narcissistic kleptomaniac,” Grace said, as though schooling someone. “With diagnosed ADHD and undiagnosed borderline personality disorder. Have you not been paying attention? I couldn’t infiltrate a box full of dead frogs!”
“Oh, Grace,” Josh murmured, not sure if his friend would hear him or not. “You are my brother and my best friend and a hurricane with a good heart. I let you down, is all. I should have researched the frogs.”
“I should have known,” Stirling said in his ear. “And Molly blames herself, because she was crushing on some guy and wasn’t paying attention to us that night. We were all a team.”
Before Josh could pass that on, Kadjic snapped—ostensibly to his driver—“Wait, are we at the D??in parking lot?”
“Da.” What followed was a flurry of Russian too quick for Josh’s ears, but Stirling had apparently tuned into Josh’s comms because he murmured, “He’s asking which slip the yacht is in, and how far away they are from it.”