Chapter 18 #4
He’d obviously done so with his fists more than once, and Josh’s chest ached as he saw the bruises, the bloody nose, and the careful, injured way Danny was cradling his ribs with one arm while using the other arm behind him to brace against the window.
Oh God, Danny. So many people who loved him enough to keep this from happening, and still, he’d loved them too much to let them try.
“Look at it, Daniel!” Kadjic was frothing. “Look at this! All of it! It could have been yours. The art alone, do you not crave it?”
“It’s lovely,” Danny said, his words muffled from a rapidly swelling nose and probably some loose teeth. “You should give your decorator a raise.”
“I loved you! Why would you forfeit all of this for that child!” Kadjic demanded. “Answer me! Answer me!”
He advanced forward, and Danny simply stood there, and as his eyes landed on Josh and Grace and then flickered away before Kadjic could be tipped off, his smirk changed into an expression of true serenity.
“Because,” he said, his shoulders twitching in a shrug, “he reminded me of somebody I love.”
Kadjic’s blow never landed. His hand fell limply to his side.
“You have a child?” he asked, sounding as though this thought—the thought that Danny had anybody else in his life besides Kadjic himself—had never occurred to him.
“I do,” Danny said. His mouth twitched. “More than one, in fact, although not related by blood. But they’re mine. That boy in the alley? He’s one now.”
“The other one? The thief?”
“Yes,” Danny said. “Oh, that one—he’s more myself than I ever was.”
Next to him, Josh heard Grace gasp, and he wanted to hug his friend, who had needed so badly to know this.
“Others?” Kadjic asked.
“You would not believe if I told you,” Danny said softly, “how many. How very much I love them. How very much these riches do not mean, when you have that sort of love in your life.”
As Danny spoke, Josh sensed movement around him, but he knew without looking whose footfalls those were. All of them—all of them—had spilled through the house, probably coming from other entrances, clearing out the few occupants taking care of the house as they did so.
Hunter emerged next to Grace, wrapped an arm around him, and held him tight as Grace steadied Josh, and Josh looked wildly around.
Liam? Felix?
His mother came to stand next to him, her wig of earlier that evening pulled off, her face wiped clean of makeup. She offered her arm and whispered, “We’re the misdirection, darling. Are you ready to play your part?”
Plan, Josh thought somewhat desperately. There was a plan.
In front of him, Chuck and Carl both quietly disarmed and restrained the chauffeur, enforcer, and butler—with some help from Michael and Lucius, who started a pile of the various knives, guns, brass knuckles, and saps that Chuck and Carl kept producing as they patted them down.
Julia spoke up. “He has a sister, for one,” she said, “who would be very disappointed to see him further harmed.”
“And a son,” Josh said. “One who has loved him since birth and would be very, very unhappy if he’s not returned safely.”
Their voices made Kadjic whip around, and they could all hear his gasp as he took in the situation. “You…,” he whispered wildly, eyes on Josh. “From the very beginning—you?”
“Me,” Josh said, nodding in acknowledgment. “And my mother.”
“I have people here who will gut you—” Kadjic began, but Molly strode in, her blond plait swinging behind her.
“And they are no longer mobile,” she said with satisfaction. “Right, little brother?”
“Infrared indicates we got them all,” Stirling said, striding in through the hallway Josh and Grace had come through. Apparently, while Josh and Grace had pussyfooted through the house, overwhelmed by the beauty, the rest of their party had been absolutely fed up with all that had come before.
“You…,” Kadjic muttered, staring at Molly. “You—you’ve been… you’re the one we’ve been looking for. You’re everywhere! A blond woman—”
“Or man!” Tienne said cheerfully, at Stirling’s side.
“And you!” Kadjic returned his ire—and his obsession—to Josh. “You were at the party. Who are all of you?”
“We’re the orphans you created,” Molly said.
“I’m the boy you tried to kill,” Tienne added.
“We’re the soldiers who fought against people like you,” Chuck said with a nod at Hunter.
“I’m the insurance guy who had to clean up your messes,” Carl said, his voice light even as he kneed the muscle in the throat for trying to take him down.
“And I’m the son of the man you tried to kill in an alleyway in Morocco,” Josh said.
“And I’m the man who’s been planning the heists that have plagued your hopes all summer.
Did you think nobody loved him, Kadjic? Did you think you could wreak the kind of destruction you have, all over the globe, and not earn yourself some enemies? ”
Kadjic was focused on all of them, but Josh was concentrating behind him on Danny, who had locked eyes with Julia, and on the shadows, passing between the waterfall and the glass.
“Now?” she murmured, and Josh realized that she, Danny, and whoever was casting those shadows beyond the window must have been mic’d.
“Now,” Danny said with conviction. “Give it up, Andrejevic. You have nowhere to go. Interpol is on its way, and according to our accounting, you have flat run out of the collateral to pay off your network to get you out of it. You’re done. You don’t even have enough to start over.”
“I’ll destroy all of you—”
“With what?” And for the first time, Danny’s voice rose.
“We’ve taken you, Andres. We’ve ruined your businesses, stripped you of your reputation.
You have enough money to live well, perhaps, so perhaps you should flee into the hills to lick your wounds.
” He shook his head. “But you’ll never be great again.
Nobody will want you. I at least thought you were a good time when I was drunk and heartbroken and looking for death.
But how much fun are you now? We took your crime, and can you see what’s left?
An obscene, sagging, lonely little man, and nobody, nobody, will even miss you when you’re go—”
With a roar, and movements too quick to be halted, Andres Kadjic charged into Danny, and the two of them crashed through the window and out into the three-hundred-foot drop to the mountainous rocks below.
The glass cutter Danny had been wielding behind his back clattered to the floor as he disappeared.