Love and Let Die (2 page)

The dark-haired one gave him a tip of his head. “Of course. Should have been here sooner, mate, but my partner insists on afternoon tea. The name’s Damon Knight.”

“And I’m Basil Champion the third, but obviously the third time’s the charm. You can call me Baz. I think the three of us are about to spend a bit of time together. We’ve hit a snag with the Irish. Into the lift you go before the police figure out we’re not really Scotland Yard and we all get fucked.”

They all stepped into the elevator.

Damon Knight pushed the button to go up and turned to him. “What do you know about a man named Liam O’Donnell?”

O’Donnell was an Irish operative, the very one he’d hand selected to meet with the Russian. He felt numb, but compelled to ask the question. “What’s gone wrong?”

“Everything.”

The doors closed and despite the fact that he had two other men with him, Ian suddenly knew he would always be alone.

* * * *

Charlotte Dennis came awake in complete darkness. For just a moment she thought she’d gone blind. The drugs she’d taken could cause numerous horrific side effects. Maybe this was just one of them. But the pain in her shoulder was pure gunshot wound.
Fuck.
Had they taken the bullet out? She’d known they would have to leave it in for a while. If they had taken the fucking bullet out, they might have noticed she was still bleeding. Corpses didn’t bleed. She was sure someone had given her a drug to stop the bleeding but removing the bullet would have started it again. Was she still bleeding? Still pierced by metal?

God, she was in so much pain, and the ache in her heart was worse than the bullet wound.

“Hello?”

Someone was supposed to be here to take her to Chelsea. She and Chelsea were supposed to be free of their father now.

“Hello?” She felt weak, but then her body had been so close to death that no one would suspect she was alive.

Where was Ian now? Had they arrested him? She wasn’t stupid. She knew what Eli Nelson was trying to do. He wanted to “distract” a CIA operative. What better way would there be to distract him than to kill him?

The trouble was, her husband was damn hard to kill.

God, if she found out he’d been arrested and killed while in custody, she would lie back down and she wouldn’t need drugs. She would die, just fade away.

Why did Ian Taggart have to be the one man in the world for her?

Charlie took a breath, her head still groggy. She needed to get to her sister. She hadn’t seen Chelsea for months. What if their father had hurt her again? What if he’d killed her? She had to see Chelsea, make sure she was alive.

And she had to save Ian. She had to find a way.

But first she had to find the light switch.

She tried to move her good arm and felt cold metal at her fingertips. Her hands began to shake in a way that had nothing to do with the drugs she’d taken.

The lights weren’t off in the room. She wasn’t in a room.

She sent her hand out, desperate to prove her instincts wrong, to prove she wasn’t trapped in a box.

All she found was more metal. She wasn’t trapped in a box. She was trapped in a coffin.

The scream that came from her throat nearly split her ears. She was fourteen years old again and trapped in that box her father would lock her in when she rebelled. Sometimes, she wasn’t alone in the box. Sometimes a rat or a snake had managed to find its way in and Charlie had to kill it with her hands or feet. She could still remember that snake biting her over and over and over before she’d found a way to kill it. Luckily it hadn’t been venomous, but she hadn’t known that.

She smashed her hands against the walls that held her and screamed the way she had when she was a kid.

No. Not the same because now she screamed a name.

Now she screamed for her husband. The husband she’d betrayed.

She felt her whole body jerk back and then light flooded her vision.

“Shut the fuck up, Charlotte, or you won’t see your sister again. You can’t see her if I have to kill you.”

She went utterly silent. She’d given up everything for Chelsea. Everything. Because Ian Taggart had become her everything. Tears blurred her vision as she started to be able to make out shapes. A dark figure loomed over her.

She forced herself to sit up, every muscle achy and twitching. Her stomach rolled and suddenly there was a trash can in front of her as she began to heave.

There was a long sigh. “The drugs will do that to you. An unfortunate side effect.”

Eli Nelson, the man who had promised to save her if only she would do this one little teeny tiny job for him, stood next to her in his suit designed to attract the minimum of attention. Everything about the man was calculated to make him look as bland and normal as possible. From his average height to his nondescript hair, he fit into the crowd.

She’d decided Eli Nelson was the devil.

She finished emptying her stomach and turned, her legs dangling. She looked at her left shoulder. A bandage was wrapped around her.

“Yes, dear, I rather thought I should have them take the bullet out before you woke up. I couldn’t have you unable to run. The pain must be excruciating. I congratulate you on your fortitude.”

“Who took it out? They suck.” She now had one more scar on a body full of them.

Nelson’s lips lifted in a ghastly imitation of a smile. “I took care of it. I didn’t want to leave any pesky evidence behind. I have a man on the inside here who let me in after all the formalities were over. The sutures might not be perfect, but they did the job.”

God, would she ever stop shaking? It was so cold. Had it really been hours ago that she’d been warm in Ian’s arms? Now she was here. She recognized where she was.

A morgue.

She was in a morgue because she’d died and now she was alive again. Lazarus in high heels. Her clothes were covered in blood. What the hell was she going to do now? She couldn’t think about the future. All that mattered was the answer to one question. “Where is Chelsea?”

Nelson gestured to someone behind him and the door opened.

“Charlotte.” Her kid sister shuffled in, her braces scuffing across the floor.

Chelsea was all of twenty-two years old, but she seemed so much younger. She was thin and weak because their father kept her that way. To their father, Chelsea was nothing but a tool to get Charlie to do what he wanted. Despite the fact that they were technically adults, their father still ruled them with an iron fist. After he’d found them and kidnapped them from Mama, he’d made it impossible for them to leave Russia. Until Eli Nelson had shown up with his devil’s bargain. Now Chelsea was here and they could run. They could hide.

Would he find them?

“Your father is dead,” Nelson said bluntly. “I kept up my end of the deal. MI6 will likely find his body in a couple of days and they’ll believe that everything is over. Eventually they’ll figure out that your dear papa wasn’t the one trying to buy uranium, but for now they’ll believe what I want them to believe. Thank you, dear. That little bit of chaos wouldn’t have been possible without you.”

With shaking hands, she clutched her sister, pulling her behind her body in case everything went to hell. “I don’t understand.”

Nelson shrugged a little. “You aren’t supposed to. You did a halfway decent job leading Taggart around by his dick, and I appreciate that. You’re looking at me like I’m going to kill you. If I had wanted to kill you, I wouldn’t have faked your death. I would have made it real. Do you understand how complex this was? No, dear, I want you alive. You’ve proven to be very resourceful when it comes to information retrieval. I could use you in the future. In fact, I want you to start tracking a few key players, including your beloved.”

Ian. Ian wasn’t dead. She breathed a deep sigh of relief. If Ian had been dead, she might have crawled back into that coffin-like box and let the madness take her. “I thought this was a play to kill him.”

Nelson chuckled. “Oh, no. I never sacrifice a pawn until I need to. Right now our mutual employers are working so hard to deal with Mr. Taggart’s issues that they’re not looking at me, and that’s how I want it for a while. I have some plans for Mr. Taggart’s operatives that require that his attention be aimed elsewhere. Not that you need to know what my plans are.”

No. She was just another of his pawns, exactly like she’d been for her father.

Nelson handed her a set of keys. “There’s a BMW in the parking lot with new passports, plane tickets, and a briefcase with fifty thousand dollars inside. Contact me when you settle in the States. I expect great things of you, Charlotte Dennis.”

She almost said it, almost corrected him. Her name was Taggart. She’d been Charlotte Marie Taggart for thirty-two days, and she would never have another name because she would never take another man. She belonged to her Master and always would.

Nelson turned and started out the door. “You should hurry, dear. Your corpse will be missed soon. It’s not every day one just goes missing. I’m leaving enough evidence behind to point to your husband or the family who so dearly loved you. I wouldn’t want Taggart asking too many questions after all. Scotland Yard will suspect Taggart, and Taggart will suspect your recently deceased father and his men. My guess is I went easy on dear old dad. I just slit his throat. I bet Taggart would have done something worse.”

He whistled a little as he let himself out of the morgue, his cronies following along behind. The door shut with a little swish and they were alone.

“Charlotte, are you okay?” She asked the question in the language of their childhood, the language of their mother—English. Their mother had baptized them with American names. She’d managed to run, to get away for years, before their father had found them again. For years all they had spoken was Russian. Except in their secret places. When they were alone, they had kept up their English. Their true language. When she’d heard it, she’d known she was safe.

Chelsea. She had to think of Chelsea. Chelsea was completely helpless, and her husband could take care of himself. “We have to go. He’s right. I can’t be found here.”

“They drugged the night guard and apparently Nelson has some of the employees on his payroll. We have a few minutes. Is your arm okay?”

“I think it still works.” They would be a pair. Chelsea with her limping walk and she with a bullet wound in her arm. Yes, they were real physical threats.

“Charlotte, do you think he’s really dead?” Chelsea asked, the question ringing in the near-silent room.

Vladimir Denisovitch. Their father. Their abuser. The man who had beaten Chelsea so badly that her legs had never been the same again. The one who had turned Charlotte into a trained killer because no one would suspect such a soft girl. “I don’t know.”

She wouldn’t believe it until she saw it. But her father’s death would only solve one of her problems. It probably opened up a hundred more, including the fact that her husband would eventually suspect she’d been lying to him. She’d worked so hard to gain his trust, and it was all shattered now.

“Are we going back to the States? I want to go home, Charlotte. Not to where we lived, just back to America. But what if Dad’s men find us?”

“Then we’ll have to kill them.”

Chelsea looked up at her, and for the first time Charlie saw the deep strength in her sister’s eyes. For so long, Chelsea had been her burden. She loved her sister. She’d also sacrificed most of her life for her. But now, Chelsea reached for her hands and steadied them. “Did you really marry that man? Ian Taggart?”

“I love him.” At least one person in the world should know the truth. “I didn’t mean to. It was stupid, but I love him.”

“Can we go to him?”

And risk Nelson taking them all out? God, would Ian even speak to her after everything she’d done? “I don’t think so. I don’t even know where he is. I’m not sure why Nelson thinks I’ll be able to track him. Ian is an operative and a damn good one at that. I think I need time to figure everything out.”

She needed to find a way to be worthy of him. If she walked back into his life now, he might actually kill her. Her husband was a dangerous man, and she’d placed him and his entire operation in peril. He would take that seriously. There would be no light spankings followed by a little withheld orgasm.

No, his sub had betrayed him. He wouldn’t trust her again.

Unless she found a way to make it up to him.

Chelsea nodded. “Then we take our time and we get strong. I want to be strong now. I’ve figured a few things out. We’ve been trying to get out of this world, but we can’t. It will always pull us back in. We will always be Denisovitch’s daughters. We can shorten and Americanize our last name all we like. The men like Nelson will always know and they’ll want to use us.”

“We have to stay away.” She’d been trying to get out for years, but she’d become known for everything her father had trained her to do. He’d found her again at the age of thirteen and hadn’t waited long to start teaching her what it meant to be his daughter. He hadn’t had any sons, so he’d treated Charlotte like one. She’d run her first long con at fourteen. She’d made her first kill at the age of fifteen. Robbed her first bank on her seventeenth birthday. She’d done it all because her father would have killed her if she didn’t, but the stains were on her soul all the same.

And when she was twenty-six, she’d finally figured out what love was when a man who looked like a Viking had taken her in his arms and shown her an entirely different world. A world where she could trust someone enough to submit to him.

“He won’t let us. You heard what he said. He expects you to call him.”

Charlie nodded. “Yes. Me. Not you. When we get back to the States, you’re going to college, and I’ll handle this.”

Her sister held on to the table and looked her straight in the eyes. “I am done with letting you ruin your life. Hear me and hear me now. I know you think I’m just a cripple.”

“Chelsea, no.” Her sister was fragile, but she never meant to make her feel bad about it. Since their mother had been killed, Chelsea was her whole life.