Walking The Edge: A Romantic Suspense/Espionage Thriller (Corpus Brides Trilogy Book 1) (27 page)

Ally looked up from where she checked on the splint. “You’ll never let up, will you?”

Ash shrugged. “I couldn’t stand there and not do anything.”

She chuckled. “The knight in shining armour. You’ll make a lucky girl a fabulously chivalrous prince one day.”

He knelt and double-checked that the cervical collar and the splint on the patient’s broken leg were well secured. He then proceeded with the re-evaluation and the recording of the patient’s circulatory and neurological functions, as limb trauma protocol required.

When satisfied with the patient’s response, he and Ally worked the young man onto the small mattress and secured him before they stood and drew the stretcher up on its wheels.

About to push the stretcher out of the garden, he turned and threw another glance up at the still-open French window. There had to be a way to get her out of this hell. No woman should have to serve as a man’s punching bag.

“You two done here? Let’s pack up, stat.” Cahill sidestepped them and went around the house to the front.

Ash trained his eyes back on the cop.

Bloody hell
—something felt wrong here. Cahill itched to leave, the time not even close to when any of their shifts would be over. Why the haste, then? The cop also behaved like a total wuss back there, reluctant to do anything but kowtow and kiss arse with the Nikolai fellow.

What brewed here?

Ally took the front of the stretcher, which forced Ash to focus on the task. He grabbed the other end and they wheeled it out onto the pavement in front of the freehold residence located in the trendy Mayfair spot known as Shepherd’s Close. After he’d secured the patient safely in the ambulance with Ally in the back, he closed the back doors of the vehicle and stalked over to where Cahill slid into his car. He needed some answers and he would get them.

“Bloody hell, Darren. Whatever happened to positive arrest policy? I can’t believe you left her in there.”

Cahill stepped out from his car. “Bugger off. You have no idea what you’re getting into.”

“Then, explain it to me.”

“You’re nothing but a bloody paramedic today, Ash. Don’t make me have to spell it out to you.”

So that’s how the little twit would play the game, eh? “Like you didn’t spell back there, when you told me I wasn’t a cop anymore?”

“You’re no longer a police officer, and it’s information I cannot give you.”

“Fuck you!”

“No, fuck
you
! You’re the one who fucked us up, Gilfoy, when you left the service.”

Ash cursed under his breath. “And you’re still not letting me live this down? It’s been five bloody long years, Darren. Get over it.”

“If you’d stayed, you’d at least have made it into the Major Incident Unit by now, a full-fledged Ministry of Defence Police investigator. That’s how good you were.” Cahill’s tone dripped with recrimination.

Ash closed his eyes. He and Darren had met on the day they had signed up, back to back, to enter the police force. Matthew Dearborn, another new recruit, had also joined them. They’d become fast friends, at least until the day Ash left his job, with Darren still a constable back then.

Wait a minute.
Darren was now a sergeant.

Ash stood straighter and faced his former colleague. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“What do you mean?”

“Don’t play dumb. The assault in there was nothing but a common drunken fight. They send rookie constables on such calls. Not sergeants.”

Cahill pulled the car door open and stepped towards the vehicle. “It’s on a need to know basis.”

Ash reached out and grabbed the other man’s forearm resting on the doorframe. “You didn’t arrest a man responsible for domestic violence. What the fuck is wrong with you?”

“She knows what she got herself into, Ash.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Seven months ago, the woman you seemed so intent on saving was nothing more than a high-end call girl in Moscow.”

“And that makes it all right for a man to beat her? Because she was a hooker?”

“Damn it, it’s not what I meant.” Cahill paused. “I’ve already told you more than I should.”

As if he’d take such bullshit. “Cut the crap, Darren.”

Cahill sighed. “You’re as much a hothead today as back then, aren’t you? You’re lucky to still be alive, mate.”

“What are you talking about?” He gripped his friend’s sleeve tighter.

Cahill looked away, then back at Ash again. “You didn’t hear this information from me, okay?”

He nodded.

“The man inside is Nikolai Grigorievskiy. Ring any bells?”

Ash frowned. “You mean...”

“Exactly.” Cahill yanked his arm from Ash’s grip. “One of the most dangerous criminals from the former Eastern European block. Drugs, firearms, prostitution rings, human trafficking—you name it and he’s got a hand in there. Any person who dares go up against him ends up dead a few hours later.”

“What’s he doing still roaming free? No one’s been able to nab him yet? He was hot stuff even five years ago.”

“There’s the catch. There isn’t any concrete proof to prosecute him.” Cahill nodded towards the ambulance. “The bloke in your rig is Grigorievskiy’s nephew, Mikhail, and one of the men involved in the fight is Boris Petrov, Grigorievskiy’s right-hand man. See what you got involved in? You’re lucky I was there to bust your arse out.”

“So I should have let him hit her? That’s what you mean?”

“The woman is trouble with a capital T, Ash. She’s the reason the fight happened today. Mikhail accused her of cheating on his uncle, and Boris jumped to her rescue. The other guy involved was collateral damage.”

It didn’t make sense. “Cheating on his uncle?”

Cahill snorted. “You got involved with Grigorievskiy’s wife, Irina.”

“She’s in danger.”

“No, she isn’t. She chose to be with him. Irina is a twenty-year-old call girl from a derelict suburb of Moscow; Grigorievskiy had an affair with her during the New Year celebrations. Three weeks later, he married her. For her, this life is like the scenario of
Pretty Woman
coming true.” Cahill paused. “You can’t save her, Ash.”

“Shut up.” The words came out as soft whispers.

“She isn’t Karen Dearborn,” Cahill added in a whisper.

Ash closed his eyes for a second at the mention of her name—the reason he’d left the force, when she’d died because Ash hadn’t been able to protect her from her abusive husband. What good was it to protect a whole country if he couldn’t protect a single life when it mattered?

“So we just leave her in there?”

“You know as well as I do that our hands are tied until she presses charges, and looks to me like she won’t.”

Ash knew a dead-end when he saw one, this situation being one of them. The reality of domestic violence showed most victims choosing to remain with their abuser.

“As much as we can, we don’t mess with guys like Grigorievskiy,” Cahill said. “We’re keeping a close watch on him, and praying he leaves the British Isles real fast so we can wash our hands of him.” The cop placed a hand on Ash’s shoulder. “Forget about her.”

“I can’t believe everyone is letting this guy roam free.”

Darren sighed. “Seven men, Ash. French, British, Dutch, German, you name it. All sent to infiltrate his operations in the past few years. Each one stabbed and tortured, mutilated, then butchered, before what remained of their bodies landed on the doorstep of their respective agency in a sealed crate. No one can take this guy down. Let it go.”

Ash stood there and watched as Cahill got into his car and drove away. He wasn’t worried about Grigorievskiy—let the cops do their job there. But Irina—she proved a different matter.

He cursed and kicked the pavement in his frustration, which sent a loose piece of gravel flying until it hit the metal railing around the house with a sharp
ping
.

Nothing he could do, and the notion drove him insane. He brought his left hand up and ran his fingers through his hair. Not anything he could’ve done when he’d been with the police, and he’d hoped that becoming a paramedic could change it all. How wrong he’d been—he couldn’t save the people who mattered. People like Irina, whose partners used them as punching bags. Like his mother, who lived in permanent fear of her moody and unstable husband, his father...

As he walked back to the ambulance, he stopped by the driver’s door and glanced back at the house. Somehow, he hoped Irina would make it out of her situation alive. He yearned to barge in there and pull her out, but he couldn’t, Irina being one more victim he couldn’t help.

He closed his eyes, and in his mind, he saw her as he’d left her back there in that sitting room. Her dark, blue-grey eyes superimposed themselves on another pair of irises of similar colour.

Rayne’s.

Think of her
—she
is thriving, and secure.
At least, he hoped so. Where was she today? The last time he had heard from Rayne, she’d been in Kinshasa, working with the humanitarian organisation that had recruited her straight after she finished secondary school. The call had come in the middle of the night, lasting just under three minutes, like the other twenty-five times she had called him during her seventeen years away.

Her last call had come through eight months ago. She might not even be alive any longer. Who went into war-torn and strife-heavy areas of the world and got lucky every single time?

I can’t afford to think of her, not under these circumstances.

Not at this point. A patient relied on him to get proper medical care.

Ash climbed into the vehicle and started the engine. He had to get Rayne out of his mind, but to do that, he had to find out if her family had any news of her. Now he’d thought about her, he needed to know if she was okay.

Wherever she could be, was she safe? Or might some man potentially be using her as his punching bag? The Rayne he knew would never allow anyone to lift a hand to her, but who knew what sort of man she dealt with every day in those God-forsaken places she visited?

Suddenly, it killed him like never before not to know where she could be.

***

From the front-facing window on the second floor of the Shepherd’s Close freehold,
Corpus
agent Rayne Cheltham watched the ambulance pull away from the curb.

Shivers crept up her arms, and she hugged herself tight to ward them off.

Get a grip!

She was a professional on an assignment, for God’s sake. An elite, trained operative from a clandestine agency that handled operations for governments and international forces as a stealthy left hand. Her superiors entrusted her with the most important missions—nothing should faze her.

Before today, she would’ve said that nothing could affect her when she had her eyes on a goal.

But she couldn’t be sure anymore. She’d never had her past collide with her present like a few moments ago, in the form of her childhood best friend.

Ashford Gilfoy, better known as Ash. The boy who had been there to catch her when, at six, she had slipped while climbing the chestnut tree that sat right on the border between their two houses in Hastings, two days after her family had moved there from Salisbury. The boy who had taught her how to ride a bicycle without the training wheels on the long and winding, gravel-covered lane leading to her parents’ mansion. The teenager who had smashed the nose of the first lad who had broken her heart, at thirteen, during recess in the schoolyard. The young man she had left seventeen years ago on a platform at London Waterloo, on the day she’d bid her old life goodbye.

For the first time since that day, she’d stepped back on British soil, and kismet decided Ash should cross her path.

Why now, of all times? She stood a hair’s breadth away from closing the contract on this mission. Seven months of intensive infiltration work and she remained poised to achieve her aim—neutralize Nikolai Grigorievskiy’s criminal operations before she took out the man. The
Corpus
always sent her for the kill, but the trick spelled that she had to make her target’s death appear self-inflicted, at the bare minimum, or an accident, in the direst of cases. Measles, as such operations were known in their clandestine world—a planned assassination not leaving any indication of the cause of death. She would then have to sanitize everything—leave no evidence, no witness, nothing to lead back to her. Unlike her other agency counterparts, she wasn’t an out-and-out black ops assassin, but a different level of highly implicated
agent provocateur
.

In other words, a consummate actress who got to her ends by manipulating people and circumstances. All those years of drama school, at her mother’s insistence when, obviously, she’d be too tall to become a ballerina, had come in handy. In fact, her portrayal of Lady Macbeth in the drama school’s end of year play had caught the eye of the people who had recruited her into the
Corpus
. Seventeen years now into the agency, fifteen of them as Kali, her operative name, a sociopath with no apparent conscience who followed her orders with diligence. Never had any one of her targets come close to figuring she could be an undercover agent. Her track record was flawless—each assignment undertaken with one hundred percent success rate and a marginal body count.