Chapter 18 #3
This wasn’t new. She was a more important tool when alive. The kidnapping attempt was about weakening the Prince family. What had to be determined was how anyone had found her. With her telling no one where she’d gone, that ruled out a potential traitor.
A positive in my mind, but that made discovery that much more difficult.
She was shaking, but her hand was wrapped firmly around the sheath of the knife. I finally wrapped my fingers around hers. “Give that to me, honey. You’re fine. We’re both fine.”
Instead of allowing me to take it from her, she backed away, her chest rising and falling from ragged breaths. She glanced into my eyes before surveying the carnage.
“Who the fuck are they?”
Half laughing, I crouched down by the man she’d stabbed to death, ripping off his mask. I didn’t expect to recognize the asshole and doubted I’d learned much from anything in his possession. No big surprise.
There were no discerning marks. Nothing stood out to me at all, other than that he was Caucasian. “That’s what we’re going to try and find out. Are you hurt?”
Shaking her head, I could tell she was disgusted she was wearing the assassin’s blood. “The bastard attacked me. He fucking…”
“Just breathe. We’re okay. Did he say anything?”
“Not a word.”
“Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. Just fine. Okay? You can leave me alone. I’m fine.”
Her eyes met mine again, challenging. She was furious, more so than I’d seen her in a very long time.
“Why don’t you drop the knife. Okay?” As I stood, she took a deep breath, staring at it while walking to the sink. The clatter of the blade as she dropped it brought a sigh to my lips.
She turned on the water, another sob indicating she was anything but fine. I stood over her as she scrubbed blood from her hands, only walking away when she glared me in the eyes.
I held up my hands in surrender, moving through the house checking the others. They were all in their thirties. All white with short, cropped hair.
Almost as if members of a military organization. That was new. What they didn’t appear to be were members of any cartel or even the bike gang from Texas we’d dealt with over a year before.
And as expected, no identification.
They reminded me of what little I knew about the Brotherhood’s invisible army I’d thought about before.
She found me in the bedroom, standing in the doorway. “How did they find us?”
I thought about what she’d brought. The one thing they could count on was her wallet. “There’s only one easy way,” I told her and moved toward the purse that had been dropped on the kitchen floor in the melee.
Her face was quizzical as I yanked the wallet into my hand, and she almost stopped me when I started ripping it apart. But I could tell the moment she realized what I was doing.
It took me ten seconds to find what I was looking for. While the beacon was tiny, little more than the size of a broken-off zipper, the technology had changed over the years. When I held it into the light, I sensed her anger flaring.
As soon as I dropped it onto the floor, I stomped my boot down, crushing it.
“That means they were in my house when I was there.”
Nodding, I surveyed the scene again. “Likely.”
“What now?”
“Now, we get the fuck out here. And you are not going to keep me from taking you to safety.”
Her lower lip quivered, but she nodded. “Okay. When are we leaving?”
“I’m calling the pilot right now. Go get a few things together. But search your bags in case they hid another one.”
“Okay. What about them?”
Another disadvantage of not being in our hometown. No cleanup crew. With the houses being so close, someone had likely heard the shots. That meant police in a foreign country and that meant explanations I didn’t have.
I doubted the Prince family name carried any weight down here.
“There’s nothing we can do. I will take pictures and send them off to a couple people I know. With any luck, they’re in a database and we can discover who they are.”
“Our fingerprints are everywhere. We’ll be considered fugitives.”
“There’s nothing we can do from here, but I’m certain Alexander can make it go away. Go get ready. Change. Gather all your things.”
“Okay, I will.” She allowed her gaze to fall and so did I. “Thank you.”
“Why are you thanking me?”
“Because you always have my back. I can always count on you.”
Jesus Christ. We’d just been attacked and all I could think about was taking her into my arms.
And not just for comfort either.
“No need to thank me. You held your own.”
“You know what’s funny? For all the training you can receive on protecting yourself, being attacked is entirely different. So is killing a man, even if he was going to try and at least hurt me.”
“Oh, he wanted to kill you.” Which I didn’t believe to be the truth, but she didn’t need to hear that right now. “You did what was necessary to remain alive. I’m proud of how you handled yourself.”
At this point, I also wasn’t going to tell her how furious I was that she hadn’t listened to me. That she’d placed her life in jeopardy. Again. But I felt it in my bones. Even now, I was bristling once again from the thought of losing her.
“But you’re pissed. Right?”
There’d never been any way to really lie to her. “But I’m pissed.”
“At me?”
“At a lot of things.”
She held up her hands, which were covered in blood, her body quivering. “I’ll be back. I just…” When she looked at me again, there were tears in her eyes. The moment I took a step closer, she used her arm to wipe her eyes, immediately walking away.
Her reaction had me staring at my hands as well.
I was covered in blood and brain matter.
I took a few seconds collecting the weapons and additional magazines.
We’d have quite the collection. I also checked for pulses.
The fuckers hadn’t wanted to die. The last one was fucking far too young to be living the life of an assassin.
Hell, he couldn’t be more than twenty tops.
Maybe that’s why he’d been the easiest to kill.
As I stood, I pulled out my phone, dialing the pilot. While he was allowed to enjoy himself while he was here, he was required to answer the phone when I called.
When the call went directly to voicemail, I had a very bad feeling.
Then when Emmeline returned to the room, her eyes open wide, I knew we were fucked.
“I think we have another little problem. My passport is missing. They also stole some cash. Why?”
With a growl leaving my throat, I headed to where I’d stored the two duffle bags I’d brought with me.
One had been used for clothes and toiletries.
The other had been used for additional handguns and ammunition as well as my passport and extra cash.
With no safe or other more strategic safety measures in place, I’d been forced to improvise, hiding the items in a closet behind boxes owned by the homeowners.
Anger swept through me as I yanked them out one by one.
Emmeline stood right behind me, watching everything I was doing.
When I came to the last box, I almost breathed a sigh of relief. The bags appeared exactly as I’d left them.
Only the second I pulled them free, another even deeper, more guttural growl left my chest. The weapons, the magazines, my passport, and the cash were missing.
I started to laugh. “To answer your question, dolce Ambrosia, because whoever they are, they want to make it next to impossible for us to leave the country.”