Fearless: Complicated Creatures Part Three (2 page)

He shot her an uncertain look. “And if I stop this instant?”

“I could shoot you in the nuts instead,” she answered with a little shrug. “But I’d rather not. You seem like a nice kid. I just want my money before MI-5 get ahold of your dad.”

“I have plenty of money—just take the duffle in the boot,” he offered anxiously, eyeing the Glock.

Rox lifted her brows. “You keep a bag full of cash in the trunk of your car, Michael?”

“You can take it. Just let me go.”

She considered him. “What else is in the bag, Michael?”

He kept driving, eyes still flicking at the mirrors, looking for flashing lights.

“The bag, Michael,” Rox repeated patiently. “What’s in it besides cash?”

“Passports.” He wiped a hand down his face, his fingers were shaking now.

Rox whistled. “You planning a getaway?”

“They’re for my dad.”

“How’d you get it so fast? The bombing just happened.”

“He had me open a safe deposit box at the Bank of London. I didn’t even know he’d opened one in my name there. I had
nothing
to do with the bomb,” he insisted, his voice rising as real panic set in. “I was in class at uni when it happened—ask anyone.”

Rox kept the gun trained on him. “Where did your father tell you to meet him?”

Michael’s eyes shifted away, his mouth compressing into a thin line. He pulled the Range Rover into a dark side street before parking it and turning to her. “Look, I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, but just fucking take the cash and go.”

Rox reached into her jacket pocket with her free hand and popped a switchblade open so fast, Michael only caught the glint of steel in the dim light before he felt the stiletto sink into his thigh, hard and fast—twice in quick succession.

“Holy FUCK!” he shouted, gripping his leg, dark red blood already blooming across his jeans.

Rox turned off the ignition and pulled back, but not before Michael tried to take a swipe at her. She deftly parried his sloppy swing and sliced a three-inch ribbon across his cheekbone as punishment. The kid gaped at her in shock, one bloody hand gripping his leg, the other holding his damaged face, blood pouring through his fingers in rivulets.

“Don’t make me hurt you more,
cabrón
,” she hissed. “Where did your father ask you to meet him?”

The silence was tense, punctuated by Michael’s panicked panting.

Rox held up the bloody blade in one hand, the Glock in the other. “You want the blade or the bullet?” she asked menacingly. “Five, four, three, two—”

“Port of Tilbury in Essex,” he blurted, in pain and in peril.

“Specifically where at the Port?” Rox replied calmly.

“I don’t know,” he shook his head vehemently. “
Th
—there’s a terminal there,” Michael stuttered. “He said he’d text me the details.”

“Unlock your phone and place it on the dash. Slowly.”

He fumbled with his pocket, pulling out a sleek phone. He tried and failed to open it a couple times, blood slicking across the screen, his hands shaking so badly he nearly dropped the phone twice before he slid it across the console.

“Now your keys.”

He removed the car keys from the ignition and placed them next to the phone. Rox opened the door, swiping the keys and phone in one quick move as she slid out of the SUV. She checked his messages as she walked around to the back of the truck. There were two black ballistic nylon duffels situated in the back. She opened one, found nothing but clothes and personal items. The second one was the money bag. Rox guessed that she was looking at about a million in tightly-rolled Euro notes, pound sterling and a variety of other currencies. She saw a couple 9mm Berettas, a few boxes of .45 ACP full metal jackets, and a cache of passports, each bearing different versions of Lightner’s photo. Basically, a solid go-bag—probably one of a few he had stashed around the city.

Rox looked up at Lightner’s son, who sat still and silent in the front, watching her from the rearview as he gripped the cut on his face with bloody fingers.

“You notice there are no passports in here for you, Michael?” she asked him.

He said nothing, eyes wide and scared.

“Don’t feel too bad about this, man,” she continued as she zipped up the bag and slid it over her shoulder. “Your asshole father was always planning on leaving you behind to deal with the mess he made.”

And with that, she shut the trunk door, and tossed the keys into the gutter. Rox stepped out onto the main street, lifting her arm to hail the first cab she saw.

“Where to, miss?” the cabbie asked, his Cockney accent thick and friendly.

“Port of Tilbury.” She lifted a wad of pound notes from the bag, catching his eyes. “There’s a bonus in there for you if you can get me there in under thirty minutes.”

The cabbie licked his lips. “Sure thing, miss.”

December—Late Night

Hotel Atlantic Kempinski, Hamburg, Germany

J A C K

J
ack lay in
the pristine white bedding of the hotel suite, sweating like a madman, aches and chills coursing through him as his gut clenched like it was trapped in a metal vice. He’d been vomiting earlier, incessantly, it seemed, now that he’d passed into the first thirty-six hours of full withdrawal, but now there was nothing in his stomach to expel except bile. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d eaten; couldn’t recall the last time he’d felt hungry enough to try.

He trembled and shook, wrapped in his fever and torment.
How had everything gone so wrong?
So pear-shaped in a matter of weeks?
First, Mitch Gartner, his best friend and business partner, getting shot by Lightner in London just a couple days ago, and now Samantha sitting at death’s door not a few miles away from him as he lay inert and half-delirious. Jack twisted and writhed as another wave of engulfing pain made his muscles vibrate. He felt trapped, pinned down by the agony and the longing for some kind of relief. God, anything.
Anything
—

Jack could have some bent doctor here in Hamburg prescribe him Sub Oxone or methadone. He could have come off the opioids the easy way—without the sweating and the chills, the convulsions and the mania. Money could buy almost any comfort, after all. But Jack
needed
the pain. He
wanted
the punishment. He’d have to hold on to how this felt, recall the agony, like trying to claw his way out of a steel trap—because it was only by flying this close to the flame would Jack be reminded of the true meaning of fallibility.

He’d become too arrogant, fraught with carelessness. He’d hurt and disappointed the people he loved most in the world because he hadn’t kept his shit together when the inevitable difficulties had arisen. He’d spun out, obsessed with his anger and jealousy, unable to protect her or even defend himself from his own self-destructive passions. Jack had gotten too far away from reality, coming off the greatest high of his life—Samantha, his new addiction … only to disintegrate the moment he’d realized he’d been cut off from her. So now he needed this pain, to return to some semblance of balance. The pendulum had begun its inevitable swing, and he had to go with it. Just like
before
—

The first time he’d gone through withdrawals coming off his addiction was nearly five years ago. He’d resolutely refused rehab, unwilling to risk the attention and still in deep denial about the extent of his dependence. His brother, Jaime, had hauled him out onto their boat to clean out, and in the coming week, Jack learned what burning agony felt like in crushing, vivid detail. Less than forty-eight hours in, and he’d wanted to throw himself overboard, years of unchecked drug use culminating into unbelievable, raw suffering and more thoughts of suicide than he cared to admit. So many days Jack spent writhing in the sheets of the bed in his cabin, listening to the dark blue waters of Lake Michigan lapping gently against the hull, and inside he’d felt like he was surviving the greatest storm of his life. It was the most pain he’d ever experienced, by a landslide, with Jaime’s presence his only comfort, the only thread he’d been able to hold onto while he struggled to stay sane.

Now, the second time in, Jack knew what it was to suffer. But this pain—this time it wasn’t the worst. Because it was incomparable to the pain he’d experienced when losing Samantha, once again finding himself staring down at her pale and prone form. She looked so shockingly small against the backdrop of the sterile hospital bedding as he watched her teeter on the razor’s edge between this life and whatever else lay beyond. That pain—
that
was the most excruciating of his existence. He’d stood helpless against the onslaught, his shame magnified by the fact that while she’d gone head-to-head with her greatest nemesis in Ibrahim Nazar, he’d unraveled, losing himself in the oblivion of mindless sex and dissipation.

Jack struggled to sit up, flinging the covers off the king-size bed as he padded slowly and painfully across the room. He had to
do
something. He had to find some way out of this mess. The luxurious Hanseatic suite felt like a prison, miles away from where he needed to be: by Samantha’s side. He pushed open the heavy brocade curtains, staring past the gentle flurries of snow, touching the ice cold windows as he looked to the dark waters of the Alster beyond. Jack stared into the distance, mesmerized by the lights lining the lake, trying to stay focused as he breathed through another wave of nausea, his forehead touching the cold glass as he gripped the windowsill through the worst of it.

Samantha nearly died protecting herself and her men against Nazar while Jack had faced off with her other nemesis, Lucien Lightner. Jack knew with absolute certainty that given the chance, she’d make the same decisions all over again. Just as he would do battle for her all over again, mortgaging his future and his company to avenge her by taking over Leviathan, Lightner’s company and her biggest competitor. Samantha didn’t know what he’d done. He hadn’t spoken with her since she left him in Chicago. But another secret weighed heavily on his mind now, the last one between them—a burden he yearned to lay down, another lie between them he needed to be free from.

He’d been so busy laying blame at her door, angry for her unwillingness to let him into her world, he’d overlooked the thick manila envelope that became an invisible wedge between them. A folder full of her secrets. Her career in the military, her kills, and worst of all, the catalyst to all of it—the horrible death of her father and brother, the event that triggered so much of her own guilt and self-hatred for merely surviving.

Jack had accused her that last night in Chicago of withholding the truth from him, though he’d been doing the very same. He’d told himself that it would only hurt her, distract her from the immediate twin threats of Lightner and Nazar. He reasoned that not telling her would protect her—that
he
was protecting her, but the fact was Jack didn’t want her to know what he’d done. He didn’t want her to know that he’d gone behind her back to search out details he didn’t trust her to share with him. He didn’t want to admit that he didn’t believe she’d ever divulge secret and vital aspects of herself when she’d done that very thing the last, dreadful night she’d said goodbye. Jack’s eyes went to his open luggage, his gaze falling on the envelope his father had given him on Thanksgiving. A stratum of lurid secrets from her missions and interrogations in the military stacked on one redacted sheet after another, taunting him.

Jack pushed away from the window, forcing his body to move toward the suite’s luxurious marble bathroom. He couldn’t stand to be here any longer. If he was going to suffer like this, he might as well be near her, try to find a way to set things right.

Less than an hour later, Jack trudged into the hospital still sweating and shaking underneath his fine cashmere overcoat, coughing from the cold and the withdrawals as he entered the sterile, glass-enclosed entrance of the hospital.

It was the middle of the night, and the hospital’s head nurse on staff took one look at his gray pallor and the residual cuts and bruises left over from his beat down by one of Lightner’s goons and immediately tried to admit him with brisk efficiency.

“No—I’m here to see my wife, Samantha Wyatt,” Jack muttered, hoping the ruse from the hospital in Rio would work here, as he shook off the orderly trying to help him into a wheelchair. “I
need
to see her—” he continued, leaning heavily against the nurse’s station counter, trying to recall which vaguely familiar hallway led to the critical care facility he’d been in only a few hours earlier.

“Visiting hours are not until tomorrow—” the nurse told him, her German accent thick. “And you are clearly unwell, sir. Let us help you—”

Jack only just managed to ward off the orderly with a stiff arm, the cramping in his abdominals making him wince as he stumbled back.

“No—” Jack insisted through gritted teeth, wiping the sweat from his brow. “I
want
my wife—
I want Samantha
—” He pushed away from the desk, stumbling down the brightly lit corridor, his dilated eyes stinging. He didn’t notice the hospital doors sliding open behind him as he gripped the hallway railing, steadying himself through another bout of nausea.