"I know this part," she whispered as he wedged her inside. "Stay put."
He nodded, drew his gun,
pressed
his back to the wall at her side. The door slammed open, bounced off the cinder blocks behind. Tripp held the weapon raised, both hands at the ready, his heart doing a freight train in his chest.
Beside him, Glory barely breathed. The shelf of supplies to his right blocked his view of the door but didn't keep his nostrils from flaring, his neck hairs from bristling,
his
adrenaline from pumping like gasoline.
He sensed their visitor long before the black-garbed man swung around and aimed his gun straight at Glory's head. The intruder stepped over his own downed associate and held out a gloved hand.
"Give me the gun and she will not die."
Tripp cursed violently under his breath, weighing his options on a different scale than he would've used in this situation had Glory not been involved.
If he'd had time to do more than react, time to think, plot and plan, he would've stashed the gun behind a can of olives and used the butt end to up his own prisoner count when the time was right.
Instead, he found himself surrendering the very piece that would've gone a long way to protecting Glory from this thug. Now he was stuck using nothing but the wits that never seemed to operate at full throttle unless he had a contingency plan.
Right now all he had was a gut full of bile. That and a big fat regret that he didn't think better on his feet than he did.
Having passed off the gun, he raised both hands, palms out. "Let's neither of us go off half-cocked here."
The other man considered him for a long, strange moment, his black eyes broadcasting zero emotion while he stared for what seemed like forever before he tugged the ski mask from his head.
He was young. Tripp would've guessed twenty-three, twenty-four.
Except when he looked at the kid's eyes.
His expression was so dark, so blank, so unfeeling it was like looking at a long-dead corpse.
Without moving his gaze from Tripp's, the kid shouted sharp orders in Vietnamese. Two other similarly garbed goons entered the storeroom and dragged away the deadweight Tripp had left in the middle of the floor.
Once the cast of extras was gone, the lead player planted his feet and shifted his gaze between Tripp and Glory, both hands hanging at his sides, one worrying the ski mask into a black fabric ball, the other flexed and ready and holding the gun.
"An interesting situation we find ourselves in
here,
isn't it?" he finally asked. "Miss Brighton, would you introduce me to your friend?"
"What do you want?" she asked before Tripp could stop her. "Tell me what you want. I'll give it to you, and you can get out of my shop."
His black hair fell over his brow. "If what I have come for was so easily obtained, then I would have it in my possession by now."
He was after whatever the courier from the diamond exchange had delivered to the Spectra agent. Tripp was sure of it. Was sure as well the information would detail future packets removed from Sierra Leone.
The ski mask fell to the floor. "I'm waiting, Miss Brighton."
"He's a friend.
A customer."
Her hands fluttered at her waist. "We're
just.
. . good friends."
"You allow all your customers to visit your storeroom?" His mouth twisted cruelly. "Or only the ones with whom you are intimate?"
Glory gasped. Tripp placed his arm in front of
her,
a protective barrier he knew did little good. "C'mon, man. There's no need to go there."
The Asian kid raised a brow. "Actually, I think there is. Getting what I want often requires me to explore a defense's most vulnerable link. It is not always pleasant, but it can be quite effective."
Tripp was pissed and rapidly getting more so. "Well, there are no links here to explore. So do as the lady suggested. Take what you've come for and let us all get back to our lives."
"Were it only so simple," he said as he gestured Glory forward. She forced her way past the barricade of Tripp's arm. "But we seem to have hit what will no doubt be an endlessly long impasse thanks to one of Miss Brighton's customers."
Glory looked from the kid back to Tripp, her eyes asking questions to which he had zero answers. "I don't understand."
"You are very predictable, Miss Brighton. As is your customer base.
Same sandwiches.
Same lunch hours.
That made planning this job quite easy. I'm assuming the courier using your place of business for a drop point found your tight schedule advantageous, too."
Tripp's mind raced like the wind. The kid was talking way too much. His gang had blacked out the shop's single security camera, had made entry without alerting anyone to their presence, had secured the scene and done it all while Tripp made love to Glory.
Fuckin
' shit on a stick barely covered it. He'd been monitoring the shop for weeks and he'd never noticed the place being scouted. He hadn't been wise to the entire intrusion until the police bullhorn had sounded outside.
A guy who followed through on such flawless planning didn't start yapping his flap unless he felt there would be no survivors but him. And Tripp had a feeling they were looking into the eyes of an animal
who'd
fight to the death before being taken alive.
"I'm sorry," Glory was saying. Tripp heard the tears in her voice. "I really have no idea what you're talking about or what you want."
She stood in the center of the room where minutes before the downed man had lain. The kid walked in a circle around her, clearly agitated now.
An agitation that had sweat gathering in Tripp's armpits.
He didn't like the look that had come into the other man's eyes or the tic twitching in the vein at his temple. It was a look that shimmered with the need for revenge.
An ugly need.
An ugly revenge.
"Listen," Tripp started, cut off by the kid's sharply spoken, "Do not speak," which was followed by instructions called through the door in his own language. Seconds later, another man appeared and, on orders, approached. "Turn around.
Hands behind your back."
Now Tripp was beyond being pissed off.
Especially when, at his hesitation, the kid pressed the gun barrel to Glory's head.
His palms slick with sweat, Tripp turned and stared blindly at the storeroom's cinder block wall. Blindly, because all he saw was Glory's terrified expression.
That solid reality, her fear, was what he needed to keep forefront in his mind. This wasn't a mission where he had others watching his back. This was a solo run. This was about her life. And he knew she had a lot better chance of coming out of this in one piece with him keeping his head.
The thug at his back bound Tripp's hands together with a zip tie that came close to cutting off his circulation. He bit down hard on his anger and turned
around,
maintaining as passive an expression as his temper allowed while the kid's henchman patted him down.
Once the third man was gone, Tripp asked, "Now what?"
"Now you tell me your name."
Unless undercover or disguised, all the Smithson operatives existed in the private sector as the engineering project consultants they were.
"
Shaughnessey
."
The kid nodded. "My name is
Danh
Vuong
. I find negotiations so much more effective when personalized. Does that make sense to you Mr.
Shaughnessey
? Miss Brighton?"
Tripp nodded without agreement, wishing Julian
Samms
were here. Julian could read people as if they were printed on paper. Tripp had only his instincts to work from.
And those instincts were screaming at him to put this kid down.
The way he was pacing and circling Glory.
The way his forehead beneath his shock of black hair had beaded with sweat. He was on his way to careening out of control.
Tripp needed to draw the other man's attention away from Glory and onto himself without blowing his civilian cover. "It's tough to negotiate anything when we don't know what it is you want."
"What I want is something Miss Brighton is going to help me get."
Vuong
looked from Tripp to Glory. Or, more precisely, he looked at Glory's breasts where her chest rose and fell beneath the ribbed knit of her tank top.
The fabric was a pale pink and it hugged her body the way any man liked to see a tight tank top do. Zippers that matched those on her skirt decorated both shoulder straps.
With Tripp looking on,
Vuong
flipped one of the zipper pulls up and down using his gun barrel's tip.
Glory literally threatened to shake out of her shoes.
"Dude, hey. Would you get the gun out of the lady's face?" Tripp surged forward, purposefully awkward—only to have the Beretta shoved against his Adam's apple until he choked.
He continued to cough and gag as
Vuong
backed him into the wall. "You, Mr.
Shaughnessey
, are on the verge of becoming my biggest liability to date. Don't move. Don't speak unless you are spoken to. I would hate to mar this operation by killing you, but I won't hesitate if you give me reason."
Giving the kid reason would mean endangering Glory further. Tripp had yet to meet a killer who had qualms about removing all human roadblocks to his goal.
Once
Vuong
released him, Tripp dipped his head, working to clear what felt like a permanent constriction in his throat. He watched the kid return to Glory and this time run the gun barrel underneath the curves of both her breasts.
Her nipples tightened, a response to the stimulation that was all about the same fear widening her eyes.
"Very nice."
Vuong
moved the gun barrel higher, circling one of the taut peaks now pressing through both bra and tank top.
"Very nice.
Tell me, Mr.
Shaughnessey
. Does she respond this nicely to your touch? Or is she only turned on by the idea of losing her life?"
Fucking bastard.
Talking about Glory as if she didn't exist.
Still, Tripp didn't say a word. He'd been spoken to, asked a direct question. It didn't matter. His voice was stuck in his damaged throat, his words battling in his head to be heard.
Vuong
turned his gaze in Tripp's direction. "Feel free to answer, Mr.
Shaughnessey
. In fact, I insist."
Tripp cleared his throat with a grunting sort of cough. "That's fear, man. Not arousal."
Vuong
nodded thoughtfully, his eyes waking from the dead. "Our bodies are so complicated, yes? Yours, for example, is as tight as a
wenched
cable unloading cargo from a ship. While mine is . . . what do you think, Miss Brighton?"
"About what?" she asked softly, her voice steadier than Tripp would have thought.
But that was probably because he was back on the strange idea of a cable unloading a cargo ship. A background piece he filed away.
"About my body language.
What emotion am I broadcasting?"
When Glory raised a brow uncertainly, he nodded once. Whatever the intent of the other man's question, Tripp wanted to see
Vuong's
reaction to Glory's response.
"Uh, I think you might be a bit nervous or upset since things haven't gone the way you were expecting."
Vuong
silently considered her words before stepping close enough to drag the gun barrel along the waistband of her skirt. She gasped, trembled. Tripp seethed, steam bellowing from his nostrils, but he stayed where he was.
He needed to get to the knife he'd left with the security equipment after cutting into the coaxial cable. To do that, he needed the bastard out of the room.
But launching himself forward and driving his shoulder into
Vuong's
gut wasn't the way to get it done.