The long haul through the tall mountains dividing Kosovo and Macedonia passed in a mind-numbing downpour that drowned out thought, broken only by her Adonis’s rumbled directions. He guided her through the darkness, but not without cost. By the time they reached what looked like a highway and he announced that they’d probably already crossed the border into Macedonia, he was slumped in his seat, pale and sweating profusely despite the heater keeping the cabin slightly cool—set deliberately so to keep them both awake.
Dismay had Rory saying the first thing that came to mind. “Why’d you do it? Draw his attention? Jump in the way? He might not’ve shot me. I mean, why lose good money?”
A weak snort answered her. “Osum would’ve shot you. I sensed it.”
That gave Rory pause. The ox was Osum, the one ultimately responsible for that hooker’s death? She found the knowledge that he’d paid with his life strangely comforting, especially when he’d nearly killed her Adonis. “Still, I could have handled him myself.”
“I didn’t know you could morph like that.”
She spared a glance at him. “I’m a lamia. Of course I could Change like that.” Only after the words were said did she realize the inanity of her statement: he couldn’t have known; she’d never gone into detail about her abilities. She bit her lip, stricken with dismay.
Beside her, Damon sighed, then added under his breath, “I couldn’t risk that. Never could I risk that.”
Her gut tightened at the soft-spoken words. Though uncertain that she’d heard Damon correctly, she didn’t ask him to repeat himself. That way lay conversational waters she wasn’t sure she wanted to explore just yet. Luckily for her, he fell silent after that. She didn’t press him, content to let the miles pass without comment.
Endless hours later, the road rounded another ridge to reveal a distinctive outline on top of a distant crest, a solitary brightness that shone through the gentler rain. Rory straightened over the wheel, straining to see better, growing certainty making her heart race.
“Damon, look! That has to be the Millennium Cross.” While she hadn’t seen the landmark lit up before they’d left for Kosovo, it couldn’t be anything else, which meant the end was in sight. Skopje—and their contact—should be just at the foot of Mount Vodno.
She sighed in relief, the prospect of handing off responsibility for the nuke giving her renewed strength.
Then she realized her Adonis hadn’t responded to her comment. “Damon?!”
He’d passed out, the stain on his shirt almost doubled in size from the last time she’d checked.
Rory stopped in the middle of the empty road, throwing the truck into a skid in her haste. She should have suspected his injury was worse than he’d let on when he hadn’t offered to take over driving! She’d been so focused on getting to Skopje that she hadn’t given it a second thought.
Acting on a vague memory of a medical drama she’d seen on TV, she tilted his seat back as far as it would go, hoping that lowering the level of his heart really would help slow the bleeding.
It struck her that he wore an undershirt. So stupid of her to have forgotten. Tugging its tail free of his pants, she tore off the clean hem of the garment, and reduced it further by another several inches. His undershirt was ruined anyway, so she might as well put it to better use. Folding one strip into a wad, she pressed it on top of the blood-soaked handkerchief. Using the other strips, she secured the makeshift dressing to his ribs, ending with a tight knot over the wad.
All the while, Damon remained unconscious.
Rory brushed his hair out of his face, shuddering inwardly at the coolness of his skin. “Damon Venizélos, don’t you dare die on me.”
He didn’t answer her, didn’t respond even when she pressed a kiss on his pale lips.
She couldn’t lose him now!
With a wary glance at the suitcase at his feet, Rory drove on. There wasn’t anything else she could do to help him, except get him and the nuke to their contact. She had to trust he’d fight to stay alive.
And pray she’d get him to help in time.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Rory reached the outskirts of Skopje, the capital of Macedonia, in no mood to appreciate the gentle dawn washing the sky with color, grateful only that the rain had finally stopped an hour earlier. The illumination of the imposing cross overlooking the city, her beacon of hope through miles of silent driving, faded into obscurity, no longer able to compete with the rising sun.
The directions Damon had given her led to a nondescript compound, a featureless block of gray, concrete wall that was indistinguishable from its neighbors save for a small, black street number. Only the sentry’s speedy response to her password assured her she’d found the right place. Almost as though she’d said, “Open Sesame!” the gate cracked open and ponderously swung back on its hinges.
Inside was a different story. Armed guards stood around the courtyard, where they couldn’t be seen from the street, weapons held at the ready. Surveillance cameras kept watch, hidden under eaves, obvious only to her trained eyes.
A man approached the car as soon as the gate was closed behind her. His shock of white hair seemed to glow in the early morning light—a strange thing to notice at a time like this, but Rory was punch-drunk from worry and hours of driving.
She ignored him, sliding out from behind the wheel and rounding the hood at a run to get to Damon’s side as quickly as she could. She dragged the muddy suitcase out from under his legs, then touched his pale lips. He was cool, his skin gray and clammy, but rapid puffs of air warmed her fingers. Fresh blood made a large splotch of color where it had seeped through the makeshift bandage.
“I’ll take that.” The stranger reached for the bomb with a nearly tangible air of absolute confidence, apparently accustomed to obedience.
Instinctively, her hand tightened around the handle. It was her only bargaining chip, and Rory wasn’t about to give it up just like that. “No, him first.”
Pale green eyes narrowed at her opposition. She met them with her version of implacable determination, ready to kick and scream, maybe even claw a man or two, if that was what it would take to get Damon immediate medical attention.
White Hair seemed to realize cooperation would get him what he wanted more quickly than browbeating—or perhaps she just looked that crazed. He called two guards over, rapping out orders in machine-gun fashion.
Rory lurched back, startled by the staccato words delivered almost next to her ear. The nuke’s case whacked her shin, the burst of pain drawing tears from her eyes, but at least access to the door was clear.
Running over, the pair shouldered their weapons and eased Damon out of the car. As they laid him on the ground, more people rushed out of the building, dragging a rattling gurney between them over the uneven bricks of the courtyard.
“I’ll take that now, so you can rest.” The words barely penetrated her daze, so focused was she on her lover’s still form. “Smith, here, will show you to your room.”
Rory shook her head impatiently. “Damon first.”
“You’re out on your feet,” White Hair pointed out in a low, sympathetic tone that threatened to undermine her resistance.
She was mortally tired, but the fear that her lover would die if she let him out of her sight made her resist the offer. “And he’s nearly dead.” Stumbling on worn pavers, she hurried after Damon into the building, hard plastic banging against her leg. “This isn’t going anywhere until I know he’s alright. I want to make sure he’s going to be okay, first.”
He humored her, had to be humoring her. Rory knew that in her weakened state, she wouldn’t have been able to put up much of a fight if he ordered his men to take the bomb from her. Instead, White Hair let her have her way, keeping pace beside her without much of an effort down the featureless corridor.
To her surprise, Damon was rolled straight into surgery. A mass of medical people converged around him, cutting off his shirt and connecting him to a bag of whole blood. Someone brought out a metal tray of surgical instruments. They weren’t going to wait to operate on him.
But didn’t they have to do pre-op or something? The medical dramas she’d caught on TV seemed to put a lot of stock in X-rays and an alphabet soup of tests; weren’t those necessary? Since diScipios avoided hospitals like the plague, Rory didn’t have any firsthand experience to draw on.
She turned wide eyes to White Hair, who dismissed her misgivings with a remarkably cavalier shrug. “He’s unconscious anyway. Might as well get the bullet out and patch him up.”
With a faint sense of disbelief, Rory watched them clean the wound, revealing torn flesh. Her stomach lurched at the sight. The handle of the nuke bit into her hand as she clung to her self-control, while they dug for the bullet.
Fighting to keep her gorge down, she looked away and caught the reflection of a mad woman on a shiny steel door. She stared for a moment, then realized it was her. Spiky hair, runnels of dried blood across her face, the odd gob of mud and meat clinging to her ruined clothes. No wonder White Hair had humored her; she looked like a demon out of classical myths. He probably thought she’d go postal on him if he didn’t agree.
She might have, too.
It was a miracle that Damon could bring himself to speak and joke with her in the truck, after he’d seen her in that demon form she’d Changed into.
A sharp
ping
, then the rattle of metal careening over metal, pulled her attention back to the surgical table. They’d extracted the bullet, now rolling on the tray, and were sewing the wound shut. The rough-and-ready procedure had taken very little time.
Shutting her eyes against an insidious surge of weakness, she tightened her grip on the nuke when her knees threatened to give way. Not yet.
Rory resisted White Hair’s suggestions about handing over the nuke until Damon had been installed in a private room. Handover could wait. After all, it wasn’t as though there was any chance of losing the bomb at that point.
“Satisfied now?” White Hair asked in a dry tone of near exasperation.
Knees melting in relief, she dropped onto a chair beside Damon’s bed, the bomb landing on the floor with a hard thump. She forced her hand to release its handle, her fingers feeling frozen in place from the tight grip she’d kept. “Yes, thank you.”
White Hair must have taken the nuke away when he left, but she didn’t notice, too focused on watching Damon. Conscious of the fact she’d nearly lost the man she loved.
The realization came to her like the first drops of a gentle shower that grows into a thunderstorm. Somehow, while she wasn’t looking, the sneaky bastard had gotten past her defenses and stolen her heart.
Rory bit her lip to hold back a tearful laugh. Stealing from a thief. Wasn’t that a scream?
The seamed face of the Old Man with his trademark head of televangelist white wasn’t what Damon wanted to see the first thing after rousing from unconsciousness. If he was honest with himself, it didn’t even make the tenth on his list.
Radiating a curious mix of concern and pride, his superior frowned down at him, his bushy brows beetling into a squiggly line over his nose. “Congratulations, boy. You did it. Cut things a bit close, but you did it.”
That wasn’t exactly what he wanted to hear, either, much as it gratified his ego. Sliding his hand out from under his pillow, he pushed himself up on his elbows, earning an annoying pinch on his left arm, where an IV was stuck in, and a stab of pain in his side.
“Careful,” the Old Man cautioned, taking the visitor’s chair beside Damon’s hospital bed. “Your injury’s fairly minor, but you lost a lot of blood.”
“Whe—” He had to cough to clear his dry throat, his mouth feeling like a casualty of surgery. “Where’s Rory?” Damned if talking didn’t send a shaft of pain up his side. He ignored it with the ease that came with practice and familiarity.
“Your master thief?” The Old Man extended a tumbler of ice chips, a noncommittal expression on his face.
Damon glowered in answer, saving his breath in case he needed it for more important things, but his superior pretended ignorance until he’d sipped some water and was sucking on the frozen stuff.
“I sent her off to rest.”
Crunching ice, Damon swore silently. She could be anywhere by now. The security of the compound wouldn’t stop her; it might even pose a challenge she couldn’t resist. She didn’t need him to help her leave; she had her own connections in the city. And if she’d left . . .
The Old Man narrowed pale green eyes at him. “What?”
Damon levered himself higher on the pillows, into a sitting position. The effort it took left him damnably weak. “Are you sure she’s resting?”
“As tired as that woman was, and after she’d spent most of the day hovering at your bedside? Yes.”
Rory had hovered at his bedside? Damon couldn’t credit it, but his superior wasn’t one for inaccuracy. “Really?” There was no helping the hopeful tone of his voice. At this point, the slightest scrap of encouragement was welcome.
“Something you want to tell me?”
Lifting the edge of the curtain surreptitiously, Rory studied the compound’s walls, using her IR goggles to locate the hidden guards. Probably because they were trying to keep a low profile, there were no spotlights to eliminate the shadows, only a zigzag tangle of photodetectors invisible to the human eye.
Ignoring the cold draft undercreeping her too-short towel, she plotted alternate routes through the gaps and gauged the risk from a professional standpoint. It would be so easy to slip between them, into the darkness, and just disappear. Maybe use one of the identities Damon’s agency had provided or drop by the Bear for new papers and fly out. She wasn’t worried about the rest of her fee; Damon wouldn’t let them stiff her, and White Hair didn’t seem the type to do so, either.
The job was over, her commission fulfilled. Why hang around for painful farewells? He had his life and she had hers. He was a Fed and she was a thief, something that was in her blood.