Chapter Forty-Two
Valencia, Spain
Verena waited twenty seconds after the man exited the brokerage office before following.
Tailing someone solo wasn’t easy, but she’d done it before.
She was experienced at this kind of thing.
Still, the man she was following had dismantled her team with chilling efficiency, so she wasn’t going to underestimate him.
But right now, she had the upper hand. She had studied him, not the other way around.
He didn’t know she was behind him; she was sure of it.
She could tell by the way he walked. The crowd helped, because despite the heat, the promenade was packed.
It was filled with locals out for their lunch break and with families returning from the beach.
Somewhere behind her, jazz music drifted from one of the beachside cafés.
Then, overhead, flying over the canal, a cheap plastic drone flew past, its high-pitched whine almost lost in the ambient noise.
Verena looked up, trying to pinpoint the drone’s exact location, and almost bumped into a pair of American tourists who were blocking the walkway while licking at their melting ice cream cones.
When she looked back toward the man, he had stopped at a juice bar and seemed to be ordering a lemonade. She stopped beside a vendor’s cart and looked at the display of handmade jewelry. She turned a pair of earrings in her hands.
When she glanced up again, the man was gone.
Shit. Her heart rate skyrocketed. Where the hell did he go?
Verena turned slowly, pretending to examine another set of earrings. He couldn’t have gone far. There were too many people for him to sprint without drawing attention. He had to be somewhere close. She stepped away from the vendor’s cart, searching for the man with her eyes.
Someone grabbed her arm, and Verena spun to the right, ready to strike.
It was the vendor, a small woman with a surprisingly strong grip.
“You need to pay for those,” the woman loudly said in Spanish.
Verena was about to reply, when she realized that the woman was right. She’d walked away from the vendor’s cart with a pair of earrings still in her hands. She cursed herself and gave back the earrings with an apology.
Her phone vibrated in her pocket. She knew it was Mia. She didn’t answer. She couldn’t. She had to fix things first. She needed to know what the man had learned at the brokerage firm and if he’d shared his findings with anyone. Then she’d kill him with the knife Mia had given her.
Just then, she spotted him. He was fifty feet away, walking away from her.
She followed him as he stepped past the shaded plaza by the Veles e Vents building. Then he turned right, and she lost sight of him. She regained visual contact thirty seconds later as he headed toward the city.
The promenade soon gave way to narrower streets lined with low-rise residential buildings. Since the foot traffic had dropped significantly, Verena slowed her pace to widen the gap between her and the man. She removed her hat to alter her looks.
There was something about the way he moved that rubbed her the wrong way.
Something that unsettled her. It had taken a while for her brain to register something was wrong, but now that it had, it wouldn’t let go.
She’d felt the same way a few times when she’d walked a beat in Los Angeles as a young LAPD officer.
Her instructor had drilled into her to trust her instincts.
And right now, her instincts were screaming at her. She just didn’t know what they were saying. What she did know was that she had to end this soon because her phone was vibrating again. Mia would have to wait.
She let her hand brush against her waistband, where her knife was clipped. She would need it soon. She counted the distance between her and the man in her head.
Thirty meters.
Twenty.
She was ten meters away when the man made a left into an alley. She reached the mouth of the alley a few seconds later and stepped in without hesitation, her hand drifting toward the knife. This could be the perfect place.
She made the left turn, then froze, a flash of heat rushing through her spine.
He was there. Right fucking there, standing five feet away from her.
He had drawn her in. She’d never had the upper hand. Not even for a second. But it didn’t matter.
She lunged at him with the knife.
Twenty seconds.
That’s how long he had before she made the turn.
Caspian had pushed his countersurveillance run for as long as he could, trying to figure out if the woman following him had backup.
He hadn’t spotted any, but it didn’t mean she had none or that drones weren’t flying overhead.
Still, whatever backup she might have, it wasn’t close enough to matter. Not yet.
Caspian had given her just enough room so that she felt confident, but not so much that she’d lose him. He had let her believe that she was getting closer, that she had him.
She was good, like a police officer would be, but not trained the way he was.
The first clean look he’d gotten of the woman—after only catching a glimpse of her right before entering the brokerage office—had come when he’d stopped at the lemonade stand, where he had pretended to glance at the chalkboard menu while actually catching her reflection in the glass behind the counter.
From that new angle, he’d recognized her immediately.
The woman from the Veloce.
And now she was there, following him. She’d taken off her hat in what seemed like a weak attempt at blending in, but the move had only confirmed Caspian’s conviction that the woman didn’t want him to realize she was tailing him.
Caspian waited in the shade of the alley, his back against the stone wall.
He thought about pulling his Wilson Combat SFX9 out of its holster, but there were too many people.
And he wasn’t about to shoot the woman anyway.
He needed answers, and she might be the key, the one who could unravel the entire thing.
Having a gun in his hand would only complicate things.
Five seconds. Then he heard her footsteps. Light and quick.
She came around the corner fast, too fast in his professional opinion, her eyes still hunting forward. Until they locked on his.
He saw the flicker of surprise as her brain caught up to what was in front of her, but then it vanished, replaced by something colder.
The knife appeared so quickly it caught him off guard.
She moved fast, faster than he’d expected, holding the knife in a reverse grip and stepping in tight, cutting the distance and his reaction time.
Caspian pivoted his hips and sidestepped, his left forearm snapped across her knife wrist, deflecting her strike.
She turned, tried to spin with him, but he stepped in, broke her posture with a powerful open-palm strike to her chest with his right hand, and kicked her back leg out from under her.
As she fell, he caught her wrist and twisted it in a controlled lock.
“Drop it, or I break your wrist,” he warned her, adding a bit more torque.
She let the knife go. He forced her up, almost lifting her clean off the ground, and slammed her, stomach first, into the wall.
He heard her breath rush out of her lungs.
He pinned her there, twisting her right arm behind her back with enough force to make her knees buckle.
But the woman wasn’t a quitter. She stomped on his feet, hard.
But he didn’t let go. Instead, he angled her wrist one inch higher.
“Don’t try this again or you’ll lose the use of your shoulder for the next couple months,” he warned her in English. “Scream, and the same thing happens.”
He wasn’t bluffing. Another half inch and her shoulder would go.
To anyone walking past the mouth of the alley, they would look like a couple caught in a heated embrace. A little rough, maybe, but nothing alarming.
Caspian lowered his mouth to her ear.
“I’m gonna ask you a series of questions,” he said. “Answer them truthfully and you’ll walk away from this. If you don’t, the first thing that will happen is I’ll dislocate your shoulder. There won’t be a second warning. I’ll snap your neck here and there. Understood?”
She nodded, but he could see she was pissed off and probably surprised to find herself at a disadvantage.
“Who else is coming after me?”
“No one. I’m alone—”
Caspian didn’t wait for her to finish her sentence.
He cranked her wrist up by at least three inches and drove his weight forward.
There was a sharp, wet pop as her shoulder dislocated.
Before she could scream, he let go of her arm and clamped one hand over her mouth.
She twisted in agony, but he held her still.
He counted to five, then said, “I don’t have time for games,” he whispered. “You know what happens next time you lie. There’s no need for me to repeat it.”
Her head, which was turned to the right, was against the wall. He could see tears running down her right cheek. Her breath came in sharp, desperate bursts through her nose.
“Who else is coming after me?” he asked, knowing that this time, she’d tell the truth. He removed his hand to let her talk.
“One more. I swear. Only one more,” she said. “Shit!”
“How much time do we have before they show up?”
She started to tremble, but not from pain. From fear. She didn’t know the answer to his question, and she was afraid he wouldn’t believe her.
“I . . . I really don’t know,” she said. “It’s the truth. You have to—”
“Shut up!” he hissed, not wanting her to think he’d show her even an ounce of mercy.
“You were on Veloce in Port de Sóller. I saw you,” he said, then added, taking a chance, “And I know you work for Blackstone Security. Now, tell me your name.”
If the woman was surprised that he knew the company she was working for, she didn’t show it.
Unless she’s not working for them and she has no idea what I’m talking about . . .
“Verena Kaine,” she said.
The name didn’t ring a bell. “Where’s Paul Hobb?”
Caspian felt Verena’s knees go soft again. He knew what it meant. Hobb was dead.
“He’s dead, isn’t he?”
She nodded. While Ranger had told him Florence was safe, they still didn’t know if this had anything to do with her or not.
“Why were you after Hobb?”
“He . . . knew too much,” she said.
“About what?” he growled.
She hesitated, but he didn’t. He wrapped his arm around her neck, his forearm pressing up into her jaw, his other hand cupped against the back of her head. One hard twist. One hard pull. And it would all be over.
“About what?” he repeated.
Her whole body shook. Then, breathless, she said, “Hearts United.”