Bone Rider (27 page)

Two, they intended to kill their hostage. By the time they’d slotted into the traffic headed toward the city, they’d all pulled down their masks, and that was always a bad sign. Young could only see Armani’s profile—buzz cut, dark-blond hair, straight nose, the shape of his lips, the arch of his eyebrows, the icy-gray color of his eyes—but it was more than professionals would’ve let him see if they’d intended to let him go. So Young slipped his emergency blade out of its sleeve sheath and started to work on the belt.

Three, the killer yuppies had no idea what, exactly, they had taken from that diner. He figured that one out when he glanced over his shoulder to see the leader had hunkered down in the cargo area with the thankfully still unconscious host. They were hidden from view by the backrests of the second-row seats, but Young could hear the leader murmur and shift around. It didn’t sound as though he was on the phone, giving a preliminary report on their successful extraction and the condition of their package. Too much emotion there, though Young couldn’t identify its flavor through the ambient noise. Shirtless tapped his gun against the backrest of Young’s seat in wordless warning and he looked back front obediently.

“I don’t know what your employer is paying you, but it isn’t enough,” he told them honestly. The belt was noticeably looser. Young gave an experimental little tug. “You don’t have the facilities to contain this thing. It’s gonna kill your asses dead the moment it wakes up.”

Shirtless and Armani shared a brief look in the mirror that said it might be a good idea to get rid of their fruitcake hostage as soon as possible. Definitely oblivious.
That does explain a lot
, Young thought as he finished off his bonds. A lot made sense now that hadn’t before. The suits, the lack of weaponry and communications equipment, the improvised face masks. They hadn’t been after the alien; they’d wanted the host, and they’d wanted him badly enough to take on a platoon of US troops in order to get him. Apparently, the cowboy wasn’t quite the innocent Young had imagined. To his surprise, he found he was almost as disappointed by this discovery as he was relieved.

Instead of heading into El Paso to lose their inevitable pursuers in the city, Armani took the first exit and looped back toward Mesa Street. At first, Young thought the plan was to pick a less obvious route, but then Armani hooked a left after the underpass and Young saw the signs. A mall. It didn’t make sense, seemed like an atypically dumb move, until Young noticed the entrance to the underground parking garage, parts of which were under construction.
Oh, those fuckers
, Young thought grimly. They were going to kill two birds with one stone: switch cars under cover and get rid of the hostage in one fell swoop.

It was definitely time to leave.

If he could have, Young would’ve at least cut Armani’s throat before he threw himself out of the car, but getting away from Shirtless’s weapon was the priority, so Young clenched his jaws and moved. Something punched him in the ribs as he hit the opening door with his shoulder, but his tac vest deflected the bullet and then he was out and slamming into hot asphalt and rolling over and over again until he hit something hard. Lights out.

T
HE
hardest truth Mariya Baikov had learned in her life was that while—or maybe because—she was mother’s little darling and papa’s pretty princess, she was always going to be less important than her elder brother. It was nothing personal. Misha was the firstborn and he was a man. This was how the world worked, regardless of what the media tried to tell you. Equality of genders was still an illusion, a ruse to keep women content with the little freedoms they’d gained. Women of a certain standing weren’t supposed to get their hands dirty—not because they couldn’t hack it, but because it would upset the order of things.

It had taken Mariya years to wrap her mind around this revelation. She got it now, though. She knew it didn’t matter that Misha had no sense for the strategic and bureaucratic hoops involved with keeping the family and their branch of the syndicate thriving and under the radar, or that his idea of a hostile takeover was to kill everyone their father pointed out to him. He was the heir apparent. Mariya was the bargaining chip lucky to be allowed close to the big players. Maybe not so much bargaining chip as prize, not that it made a whole lot of difference. First trophy daughter, then trophy wife, and they honestly expected her to swallow it and to raise her own daughters the same way.

She was bitter about it and not nearly as accepting as she made it seem. Mariya had the smarts, the insider knowledge, and the ruthlessness that would one day allow her to rule where she had been forced to serve. All she needed was an opening to move in and change the status quo… and if she had to step over her sibling rival to achieve her goal, she would. She’d do it for her children, but primarily, she’d do it for herself. To claim otherwise would’ve been a bald-faced lie, and Mariya didn’t make a habit of lying to herself.

Another uncomfortable truth was that as much as she envied and despised Misha, she also loved him dearly. He was a one-purpose instrument, a trained attack dog with little imagination and less ambition, but he happened to be her big brother and he’d always been the first to jump to her defense and the last to judge her by her gender because the sweet fool believed in the pretty illusion. He had always considered her his equal and for that she adored him. She didn’t want him dead; she wanted to see him happy. Well, ideally, she wanted him right where he was now: far away and obsessing over a piece of pretty-boy ass. As long as he kept dicking a guy, he wasn’t likely to sire children that would replace her own in the line of succession. Hell, when she’d found out Misha was queer she’d damn near gone and bought him a rainbow sticker for his rifle. Naturally, their parents hadn’t been quite as supportive.

“Should’ve nipped this in the bud,” her father grumbled, glaring at the same page of the same magazine he’d been pretending to read since they’d taken off in New York. “I knew it. I knew he was stalling me, that little—”

He broke off into incoherent mutterings again, a slur of English and Russian liberally peppered with insults. In the seat behind him, Anton stirred slightly. Not that he was going to say anything. The only time Anton got talkative was when he was drunk and then he was rarely trying to make anyone feel better. Mariya had always been somewhat in awe of him. She didn’t know where he’d come from other than that her father had taken him in after he’d spent several years in a Russian high-security prison. He’d been with the family ever since.

Anton was granite. All edges and implacable strength. Hard and mean enough to scare the shit out of her brother and Andrej even now that they could match him in skill. Some of that respect he’d no doubt beaten into them when they’d been handed over into his tender care for training at the age of ten, but most of it was rooted in instinct. Misha and Andrej were weapons, lethal and merciless, but tough as they were, Anton had been forged in a kind of fire they’d never encountered… and they knew it. It was fascinating to watch them around Anton, to see those two fearless killers edge around their aging teacher with wary eyes, careful to stay out of reach.

Mariya didn’t quite share her brother’s attitude toward the man. Anton had always been there, part of her world, but he had never raised hand or voice to her. Once, he’d repaired a toy of hers that Misha had destroyed in one of their childish squabbles. She remembered how odd those blunt, scarred fingers had looked against the smooth plastic features of her favorite G.I. Joe action figure. When she’d grown older, she’d sometimes wondered what those fingers might look like against her own skin, how it might feel to be caressed by a killer’s hands. She’d never attempted to find out. Anton was off limits and Mariya had been promised to Luka Baikov, and that was that. Even in her most rebellious teenage years she’d known better than to try and play with Anton. It didn’t keep her from quietly wooing him in different ways. Anton was an asset and a threat; she wanted him on her side or at least lulled enough so he’d hesitate when the time came to choose.

She still felt reassured by the man’s presence. It wasn’t going to be fun to confront Misha and drag him back to New York. Mariya knew very well why she’d been ordered to accompany her father: she was the carrot. Anton was the stick. One way or another, her lovesick idiot of a brother would abandon his fool’s errand and step back in line. Or at least attend his own goddamn engagement party.

“You know your brother, Mariya,” her father had said, Russia thick and primal in his angry voice. “You make him see reason. You make him come back.”

So she’d grabbed her purse, kissed her girls goodbye, and got in the car with Vasiliy and Anton like the good daughter she was supposed to be. They’d picked up half a dozen men at the airport, gotten into her father’s private jet, and gone to New Orleans… which had been a bust. One phone call later, they had a new location and off they were again.

It had to be El Paso, of all places.

Mariya didn’t like El Paso. She’d helped plan the family’s business expansion into the Southwest and been the one to pull the plug when it became clear the cost would outweigh any potential gain. The area was already crawling with gunrunners and coyotes who moved back and forth across the Rio Grande while dodging trigger-happy border patrols of every persuasion. It was a brutal environment and completely unfamiliar to the Russians. When the syndicate had started to move in, the locals had banded together and turned on the intruders with a viciousness born of a fierce survival instinct that the East Coast crime lords couldn’t match. It had quickly become clear that it was easier and more profitable to skip the stepping stone and move right on to the West Coast, which was a project still in the early stages of planning.

So Mariya had marched into her father’s office with a simple, color-coded pros vs. cons table and a cost estimate and gotten him to stop the venture before it turned into a useless vendetta that would only draw attention to the Russian ghost syndicate. She’d also been the one who’d personally picked up Andrej, who’d almost gotten his ass killed a few miles south of the border in one of those useless skirmishes. Naturally, by the time she’d arrived, he’d made just the right kind of friends and hadn’t needed rescuing anymore, which meant she could’ve saved herself the trouble of bringing a plane full of muscle.

All in all, the city had left a bad taste in her mouth. Nothing but dust and heat down there, every color muted in shades of brown and gray. It wasn’t even cowboy country, it was desert. It was the ass-end of Texas.

“What do you think, Mariya?” her father asked, pulling her out of her sulk with an impatient wave of his hand. The magazine thumped against her arm, startling and annoying her in equal measure.

“About what?” she grumped. Her father loved those apropos-of-nothing inquiries. It drove her mother crazy and she was fairly certain his men didn’t particularly enjoy them, either.

“Your brother’s butt boy.”

Vasiliy sneered when he said it, the slur rolling off his tongue with feeling. He’d never been happy about Misha’s sexual preferences, but this was the first time he’d put some actual rancor into the unflattering expression. She thought it was likely because this was the first time Misha was really thinking with his cock, had gone so far as to neglect his duty and defy his father’s wishes. Up to now, her brother had been smart enough to fuck his little boy-bitches and then drop them, but this time he’d latched on. The missing flash drive was a flimsy excuse at best for the amount of time and money spent on finding one Riley Cooper. It had only worked this long because Mariya hadn’t cared and Vasiliy didn’t have the best grasp on modern technology.

“He must be one hell of a lay?” she offered, at a loss for what he wanted to hear.

Truth was she didn’t know any more about the man than Vasiliy did. Only his name and that he’d effectively rendered her emotionally constipated, top-notch assassin brother useless. The name had yielded nothing; the fact that he’d gotten to Misha when nobody else had made a dent made him potentially interesting. He might just be what she needed.

Her father spat out another expletive, this one insinuating shameful things about Cooper’s ancestry. The magazine in his hand was starting to look a bit worse for wear.

“Do you think we should kill the
sooka
or buy him?” he clarified when he was done cursing.

“Buy him,” Mariya said, without hesitation.

The realization that his big gay love was a sellout would thoroughly destroy Misha’s newfound belief in fairy tale endings or whatever bullshit notion was currently corroding his brain. It would also be a nice demonstration of how only blood was ever truly loyal and Misha should listen to his sister. Of course, there was a slight chance Cooper might not be willing to play ball, in which case the attempt would backfire. As devastating as that would be to her father’s credibility, it would only make Cooper more valuable to Mariya.

To kill the out-of-control boy toy would put a dead end to her brother’s attempt at romance and make sure there couldn’t ever be a tearful reunion…. Unfortunately, it would also make a martyr out of Cooper and might provoke the apparently already unstable Misha into doing something stupid. Like seeking revenge. Misha had not gotten to be the organization’s top enforcer because he happened to be the boss’s son. If he turned against them, he was going to do a hell of a lot of damage before they could put him down. It would open the way for the only surviving Tokarev sibling, but Mariya would’ve preferred to keep her brother alive.

“Anton?” Vasiliy asked.

“Kill him” was the unsurprising advice from that corner.

Vasiliy harrumphed and tossed the mangled magazine across the aisle onto the opposite seat. “I want to kill him,” he declared darkly. “I want to shove a gun into his…” He flailed impatiently, searching for the most offensive word. “…his
cunt
and shoot him in the guts like a whore.”