14
THE VIPER STRIKES
I stepped out of the shower, dried off, and wrapped the towel around my chest. Roth wasn’t in the bedroom, so I assumed he was in his office. I dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, brushed my hair out and pulled it back in a ponytail, not bothering with makeup.
Still no Roth.
Something in the pit of my stomach churned: something was off.
I padded down the hall in my bare feet to his office, finding it empty. Not in the gym. “Roth?” I called out. “Where are you?”
No answer.
I checked the kitchen, the dining room, the larger industrial kitchen, the foyer and sitting room, and finally, the library. The library was a huge cathedral of a space, shelves lining the walls from floor to ceiling. There were two floors of shelves, nooks and crannies with overstuffed chairs and reading lamps and small tables. I moved through the library, checking each reading nook, and then ascended to the upper floor. My skin tingled, my stomach heavy as lead, blood running ice cold in my veins. Something was very, very wrong. I should go back to the private quarters, remain behind the biometric lock separating the rest of the house from Roth’s rooms.
Wait for Roth, the thought hammered at me.
But I didn’t listen. I moved from stack to stack, hands trembling, barely daring to breathe.
The last nook I checked, in the farthest corner of the upper floor, was one with a huge black leather chair with a matching ottoman. Usually the chair faced toward the library, but as I approached, I saw that it had been turned away to face the corner. A hand was visible, resting on the arm of the chair. The hand was slim and feminine, the nails long and painted cherry red.
“Kyrie.” The voice was low and smooth and sultry, lightly accented. “Do join me.”
I backed away, two steps, three. But then stopped, frozen, as the visible hand retreated and reappeared, this time holding a compact pistol.
“Don’t make me end this too quickly, my dear.” The barrel of the pistol pointed at the other chair, which had been dragged over from another nook. “Now, Kyrie.”
On shaky legs, knowing I’d made a mistake, I circled around and sat in the chair she’d indicated. Facing me was Gina Karahalios. I didn’t need an introduction to know it. She was tall and poised and beautiful. Long black hair pulled in a twist over one shoulder, skin naturally tanned and artificially wrinkle-free, eyes dark as shadows and colder than ice, glinting at me in amusement. She wore a green dress, expensive, cut to cling to her curves, the neckline scooped deep, a string of fat black pearls draping her neck and nestled in her falsely enormous cleavage. A Chanel handbag sat on her lap.
I swallowed my fear and tried to keep the tremble from my voice. “Gina. What do you want?”
She smiled, a predatory curve of artificially plump lips. “A lot of things. But right now, you. And I have you.”
“Where is Roth?”
“Val, you mean?” She winked at me. “He’s dealing with a…distraction.”
“Do what you want to me, but leave him alone.”
She laughed, a bell-like sound of hilarity. “Oh my. How very original of you. I don’t think so, though. I’ll do what I want with you, and then I’ll do what I want with him. I’m afraid much of it will hurt rather a lot.”
“Why?”
“Why?” She peered at me from beneath thickly mascaraed lashes. “Because I always get what I want. I want Val. And I want you to suffer for daring to touch what is mine.”
She reached into her Chanel bag and withdrew a small metal cylinder, which she screwed onto the barrel of her gun.
“He’s not yours, Gina. He never was, and never will be. And if you lay a hand on me, all you’ll succeed in doing is making him even more angry.”
Her hand shifted slightly, and the gun popped with a short, sharp bark. A hot, piercing pain slammed into my knee, and I screamed, clutching my leg, watching the blood gush, thick and bright.
“He’s so very sexy when he’s angry, don’t you agree?” She sounded so calm, as if we were two girlfriends talking about a mutual crush.
I could only scream breathlessly, the agony blasting through me and stealing oxygen from my lungs, the pulse from my veins, thought from my mind. I heard the click of a cell phone camera, and looked up through tears to see Gina touching the screen of a pink-and-diamond encased iPhone, and then heard the telltale sound of a sent message. She slithered up off the chair, smoothed the front of her dress, tugged the scooped neckline down to better prop up her cleavage, and then moved to kneel beside me. Raising her cell phone, she held it up to get a downward angle, capturing the agony on my face and the bloody wreck of my knee, pressed the barrel of her pistol to my temple, and then—click—took a selfie.
I watched her send it to Roth.
I couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, couldn’t even breathe. The pain was excruciating, beyond anything I’d ever even imagined. I couldn’t even sob.
Gina stood up again, smoothed and straightened her dress, placed her cell phone in her purse, which she then hung on her shoulder. She turned to me. “Come along.”
I stared at her. “You—you sh-shot me.”
She gave me a well, duh look. “And that won’t be all I’m going to do to you. Oh no. Not even close.” Gina touched a long, cherry-red fingernail to the bottom of my chin, lifting my face. “But…if you cooperate with me, I’ll in turn make sure I’m the only one who will touch you. Do you understand?”
“I—”
“What that means, in case you’re too stupid to follow, is that if you make trouble for me, if you cause me to repeat myself, I’ll let one of my boys…play…with you. You won’t enjoy that, I assure you.” She tapped me on the nose. “Now. Come along.”
“How am I supposed to—”
Gina rolled her eyes at me. “It’s one knee. You have two. Now let’s go, you silly little cunt. I have things to do.”
I gritted my teeth, bit down on a scream as I struggled to my feet. Or, foot. I couldn’t put any weight on my knee, but I had no choice except to hobble as best I could toward the stairs. Gina followed behind me, gun barrel pressed against my spine, urging me to go faster. Getting down the library stairs was raw torture. Inch by inch, step by step, I fought, trying not to scream, not to sob, not to show weakness. This woman was a viper, the kind of animal who would smell fear and prey on it.
I would not be prey.
She shoved me toward the front door, where a bulky, swarthy, short man in a trim black suit stood with some kind of compact machine gun in his hands, waiting. I happened to glance to my left, toward the formal sitting room, and I fell to the floor, a sob catching in my teeth.
Eliza. Eyes open and staring, a crimson pool spreading beneath her skull. Roth’s kind and devoted housekeeper was dead.
“Eliza? Eliza, no. No. Nononono.” I crawled toward her, fingernails scrabbling at the hardwood floor, heart breaking in my chest.
I was grabbed around the middle and lifted off the ground. A hand pawed at my breasts, but I didn’t even notice as I focused on Eliza, sweet, quiet, competent Eliza.
Dead Eliza.
Within me there was a hard, cold knot of rage, already in place and building, put there by the chase across France, by Roth’s kidnapping, by the turn my life had taken, all at the hands of this woman. Rage at the hell my man had endured. All that rage was only intensified by the sight of Eliza.
I thrashed, kicked, bit, and screamed, heard grunts of pain as I connected with flesh.
“Knock her out, Tobias.”
A blow struck the back of my head, a lance of dizzying pain knocking the breath from me, narrowing my vision to tunnels. Another blow, and then a third, each harder than the last, and finally blackness swallowed me.