I don’t respond because I’m too mind-fucked to answer.
“The answer to all that is no,” Ryan says. “Now get on board, Angel, because this train has already left the station.”
After a long time, I manage to speak. “Who told you how much the necklace was worth?”
He sighs like I’m the biggest idiot who’s ever lived. “You have a bad habit of focusing on all the wrong things, you know that?”
I blow out a breath and close my eyes because my clomping heart is making me dizzy. “That’s an amazing offer, cowboy,” I say in a strangled voice, “but I can’t leave with you. It would be a death sentence for someone I love.”
He’s quiet for a moment, stroking a thumb over my earlobe, then he presses the softest of kisses to my jaw. “Mariana, I can help you. That isn’t bullshit. It isn’t ego. It’s the truth. I’ve got a team of badass motherfuckers trained by the United States military in heroics and general mayhem who can be here within hours to back me up. We’ll get your people, and then we’ll get the fuck outta Dodge.”
“There’s nowhere I can run! They’ll find me!”
“Who will?”
I open my eyes. Ryan stares down at me with dangerous intensity burning in his gaze. It breaks my heart how serious he is about helping me.
He doesn’t realize I’m a lost cause, or that I’ve already got one foot out the window.
“The monsters.”
“Not if I get them first.”
I want to scream in frustration. “You don’t understand—”
“So educate me.”
“I can’t!”
“You keep sayin’ that word. Like you forgot you have somethin’ called free will.”
“Free will is for people who haven’t sworn blood oaths to—”
The bitter words die in my mouth. Horror at my blunder rises up in their place. When I look up at Ryan, a wolf is looking back down at me.
“Blood oath?” he repeats, deadly soft. “We talkin’ Cosa Nostra? The Sicilian mob?”
My entire body breaks out in goose bumps. “No,” I say firmly.
His laugh is short and dark. “Oh, okay. Sure. That was totally believable.”
I turn my face to his arm and close my eyes again, cursing myself for my stupidity and him for seeing through me like a pane of clear glass, which no one—with the possible exception of Reynard—ever does.
“So this is good. We’re makin’ progress! Now all you gotta do is tell me who else we’re takin’ with us and—”
“Please don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
I swallow a sob. “Make it sound like a hypothetical. Like it could actually happen. I stopped believing in fairy tales a long time ago.”
Ryan takes my face in his hands. “Maybe they didn’t stop believin’ in you,” he says softly.
When he kisses me, it’s like a promise. Like he’s making a blood oath of his own.
This man is going to be the death of me.
I wrap my arms around his neck and kiss him back with everything I have, my heart shattering into a million jagged pieces.
Because his kiss is a promise, but mine is a goodbye.
Fourteen
Ryan
Just when I’m about to rip off all her clothes, Mariana breaks the kiss and looks away, embarrassed. “Um. I have to…before we…I have to go to the bathroom.”
“I really don’t care if you shaved your legs or not, sweetheart.”
“I have to pee!”
“Well, why didn’t you just say so?” I sit up, help her sit up, and grin at her, because she’s wearing a look like she can’t decide whether or not to smack me or start kissing me again.
Then I catch sight of her neck, mottled with bruises above the collar of the hideous turd-colored sweater she’s wearing, and my grin dies a quick death.
Whoever the bastard is that did that to her, he’s gonna have to answer to me.
And then he’s gonna wish he’d never been born.
“It looks worse than it is,” she mutters, covering her throat with her hand. Before I can say anything, she goes into to the bathroom and closes the door. The water turns on. I picture her standing at the mirror looking at her bruised neck with those big, beautiful eyes, and I want to break all the furniture in the room with my bare hands.
I blow out a hard breath and stand, turning on the bedside lamp. I can’t stay in one place, so I start to pace. I remove my leather jacket, toss it onto a chair, and listen to the sound of the toilet flushing.
There’s nowhere I can run. They’ll find me. It would be a death sentence for someone I love.
Whatever shit she’s mixed up in, it’s bad. And if it’s really Cosa Nostra, it’s pretty much the worst it could be. The real Italian Mafia makes The Sopranos look like Sesame Street.
Thinking about it makes me antsy. I go to the sliding-glass door of the balcony and step out into the cool, misty night. The fresh air is bracing. Even at this hour, the sounds of taxis honking and people talking drift up from the street below. Like New York, London is a city that never sleeps.
I don’t know how long I stand there looking out at the city lights, but at some point it occurs to me that Mariana is taking a really long time to pee.
I whirl around and stare at the closed bathroom door. I’m across the room in a few seconds, knocking on it.
“Angel? You okay in there?”
No response.
Fuck.
I try the door handle. Locked. “Mariana?”
Nothing.
“Okay. You wanna do this the hard way? We’re doin’ it the hard way.” I step back, wind up, and give the door a brutal kick.
It splinters off its hinges and flies open, crashing to the tiled floor with an echoing boom. I stride into the bathroom, my head whipping from side to side, already knowing what I’ll find.
Or, more correctly, what I won’t find.
“This fuckin’ broad,” I mutter, staring at the open window above the bathtub. It’s the old-fashioned, claw kind, made of cast iron, heavy as a cement coffin. Around one of the feet is tied the corner of a bedsheet.
The rest of the bedsheet hangs out the window.
I rush to the tub, jump in, and lean over the windowsill. Sheets dangle all the way to the manicured boxwood shrubs planted along the side of the building two stories below. An elderly couple with a Corgi on a leash are staring up at me from the sidewalk. The dog is staring at me, too.
The man’s voice drifts up on a current of cool air. “Lost something, have you, mate?”
His wife titters. I resist the urge to flip them off.
Mariana is nowhere to be seen.
I don’t bother asking the couple if they saw the direction she ran. I simply withdraw into the bathroom, untie the knot from the foot of the tub, toss the sheet out the window, and pull the window shut. Then I go into the other room and turn on the TV.
She said she had the room for the night, after all. Pity to waste it. Besides, I need to give her a head start.
What’s that old saying about giving someone just enough rope to hang himself?
I call room service and order a cheeseburger and a beer. Then I pull my cell phone from the pocket inside my jacket and navigate to the tracking app synced with the tiny GPS I stuck on the back of Mariana’s ugly sweater.
The screen glows with a red dot, moving steadily south of the Ritz.
Smiling, I settle into the big armchair in front of the TV and wait for my food.
* * *
Standing across the street from Mallory & Sons Heritage Auctions in the morning fog, I think it could be a different century for how old-fashioned the place looks. Even the street feels like something out of a period movie, with its gas lamps and cobblestones. Only the taxi trundling by ruins the illusion. I almost expected a horse and carriage to turn the corner instead.
A cheerful bell rings when I push through the front door. The place smells like incense and old books. Jazz plays softly in the background. A man looks up from a big oak counter carved with a weird battle scene involving dragons and meets my gaze with a level one of his own.
We size each other up.
He’s somewhere north of fifty, neither young or old, neither handsome or ugly, dressed in an average dark-blue suit. Joe Average.
I get the sense his average appearance is carefully crafted.
I also get the sense he’s been expecting me.
Strolling in his direction, I take in everything about the room, including the security cameras masquerading as speakers on the walls. When I get to the counter, I lean my elbow on it and give him a corn-fed, backcountry dumbass smile meant to convey I’m not a threat, and might even be a little slow on the uptake.
He stares at me. His left eyebrow slowly lifts into a condescending arch. In a tone so dry it’s practically dust, he says, “Is that what they’re teaching in the American military now? How subtle. I’ve seen bulldozers with more finesse.”
I instantly decide I like him. “Haven’t been in the military for a long time, pal,” I reply. “I’m just a smiler.”
His tone grows even more disapproving. “The smiling American. How cliché.”
“I’m anything but a cliché, friend,” I say softly. “Where is she?”
His lips purse. He exhales a small, annoyed breath. If he rolls his eyes, I might have to punch him in the face.
“She?” he repeats, a little cattily, I think.