Nautier and Wilder (7 page)

The large head nodded as the ex-boxer, Jones Morley, read the silent look in Rudy’s
eyes. The weapon he carried with its silencer attached came up as Rudy moved away
from the other man.

A second later, a heavy pop sounded behind him, and Rudy knew he would never have
to worry about Chester screwing up again.

The nerve of him anyway, blaming an innocent child for a mistake that should have
never happened.

“I hardly think my precious little Asta was at fault in the least,” he said as Jones
followed him from the room. “What do you think?”

“Asta’s no dummy,” the other man stated, bringing a glow of pride rushing through
Rudy. “I kind of doubt she would have rented the vehicle if she was told specifically
not to do so.”

Moving ahead of him, Jones quickly opened the door leading from the office and stood
back as Rudy stepped through.

“Get rid of the body,” Rudy ordered the two men waiting outside. “Then return to the
house.”

Striding from the office, Rudy left the building and walked quickly to the black SUV
his driver, Danny, was standing beside.

The moment the doors to the office had opened, his nephew, Danny, was striding around
the vehicle. Tall and imposing, Danny was as much a bodyguard as a chauffeur. Dark
Italian heritage was reflected in his features, while strong American stock was reflected
in his tall, stout body. Before Rudy could reach it, his door was open, the comfortable
leather interior and an even more comfortable silk-skinned mistress awaiting him inside.

The mistress held no appeal for him tonight, though. The potential for disaster was
rising with each minute that Andre hadn’t called him to report he had the gems. Every
second those jewels were out of his possession, the closer disaster came in the form
of some very nasty members of the Russian Mafia.

The Mackay woman would end up destroying Rudy’s base of power if he wasn’t extremely
careful.

Or rather, the woman’s family would.

That damned brother, Dawg, and her cousins, Rowdy and Natches, and the men and women
they called friends who were part of the Department of Homeland Security were dangerous.
Especially that little misfit Timothy Cranston.

They were a force no criminal wanted to call the attention of. Rudy’d lost a very
influential lawyer and a rather promising family member he was very fond of to the
Kentucky natives.

His niece Marlena Genoa, and her sponsor back into the family, Gerard Andrews, had
been taken out with such efficiency it had been shocking.

They had gone to Kentucky to seek retribution against Marlena’s ex-fiancé when he
had broken their engagement five years before. Neither had returned, and Marlena’s
body had never been found.

Poor Marlena. First her father had turned against the Genoa family, effectively ensuring
she was no longer part of the base of power and wealth Rudy controlled. Then, she
had let the prominent fiancé she had managed to snare slip from her fingers. Which
wouldn’t have been so bad if she hadn’t promised to secure him, and his father’s prestigious
law firm, for the Genoa family. When a promise was made, it must be kept. Or retribution
must be established and restitution made. Once John Walker broke their engagement,
the Genoa family demanded restitution, a small portion of the promised funds and prestige
John Walker would have brought to the family, or Marlena had to seek retribution to
prove she was strong enough to be part of the Genoa family in an age of betrayals,
double dealing, and technological deceptions.

The family needed insurance that she would never do as her father had and turn on
them—turn evidence over to the authorities and attempt to destroy the family. She
was to have killed John Walker and Sierra Lucas before the life insurance policy she
had taken out on him, and he had forgotten about, expired. The funds would have been
given to the Genoa family, and the blood on her hands would have given at least a
small assurance of her loyalty.

She had done neither. She had instead gotten a highly successful and very beneficial
attorney killed and she had ended up, most likely, under Timothy Cranston’s control.

A very, very bad place to be.

If Rudy wasn’t very careful, if his son wasn’t even more careful, then they would
soon find themselves facing that bastard Cranston and those hick Mackays in the worst
possible way. That was something Rudy intended to avoid at all costs.

He’d had the family investigated after Marlena’s disappearance and Gerard’s death.
What he had learned made him wary. The shadowed vendetta that had played out against
his organization for a year afterward still had the power to keep him awake at night.

The authorities had watched his family much too closely, his sources among the law
enforcement agencies began disappearing, but when his son had been jerked out of England
after leaving the family and nearly imprisoned, Rudy had known they had made enemies
the family could ill afford. Word on the street was that the Genoa crime organization
had shaken the wrong tree in Kentucky and they were going to pay for it.

It was a tree he had no intentions of shaking again in a way that meant he, or anyone
in his organization, could be identified.

The only good thing that had come of it? Homeland Security had pissed Andre off enough
to return home and ensure that they could never do so again. He was now learning the
ropes and moving in as Rudy’s right hand. And a very effective right hand he was.

The bodies Andre disposed of were never seen again. There was no evidence to lead
back to Rudy, Andre, or the family, and no loose lips spilling family business secrets.

It was a good life.

Unless those gems weren’t in his possession when the owners came looking for them.

Resignation burned a hole in his gut.

Fuck. He was going to have to go after a Mackay.

He wasn’t frightened of the Mackays, but he was definitely on guard against them.

So much so that he would have gladly let the disappearance of those stones go, unless
the Mackay girl tried to sell them. He would have washed his hands of them if the
men arriving soon to collect them would have been willing to do the same. Or if perhaps
they would have taken the task of collecting them from Kentucky.

That wouldn’t happen, though. At least, not until they wiped every last trace of the
Genoa family from existence.

Yes, this definitely had the potential to be very, very dangerous. And that potential
was growing by the minute.

SIX

A
ndre Genoa stared at the hotel from the driver’s seat of the dark gray van with a
growing sense of fury as he disconnected the call he’d just taken.

Son of a bitch. He didn’t need this, not right now. Not at this point in the game.

“Marcel says she’s just called for a bellhop, Dennis,” he told the man he’d chosen
to retrieve the jewels. “You’ll go up. When she answers the door, load her belongings.
Maneuver her cart into the elevator first, where Marcel will be waiting for you. He’ll
block her while the doors close. Take the cart to the room service elevator and out
the back entrance. I’ll be waiting for you there. We’ll just take everything, then
go through it later.”

Dennis was the less violent of the two men, and the one known to be the most protective
of his daughter and wife. He was Andre’s best bet in ensuring Piper Mackay wasn’t
harmed.

“Got it, boss.” Nodding his head, Dennis opened the door and slid from the front passenger
seat.

As the door closed behind Dennis’s bulky form, Nate Ryan, his best friend and partner,
moved into the seat, his gray eyes narrowed against the lights of the vehicles moving
along the busy street as Andre pulled out of the parking space and headed toward the
hotel’s back entrance.

“This doesn’t feel good, Andre,” Nate murmured as they turned down the small street
used for deliveries. “It doesn’t feel good at all. Who chose Marcel to head to the
hotel ahead of us?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Andre murmured. “Rudy didn’t say anything about sending extra men
in.”

He hoped it was just indigestion, but something warned him this task was a hell of
a lot more dangerous than the Mexican food they’d eaten earlier.

Marcel tended to give him indigestion, though. The man was a self-important moron.
His arrogance had only grown in the past year, after Rudy and Boris Cheslav had chosen
him as an emissary between the two families. Marcel had saved Boris’s ass a few years
back when he’d learned that a relative of the family working an important drug buy
was actually a DEA plant. Boris had immediately moved the other man into the upper
level of his organization.

When Boris had approached Rudy with the request to handle the jewels coming into the
city, he’d revealed the fact that Marcel, Rudy’s third cousin, was actually one of
his men, and would be their contact during the transaction. Which meant Andre couldn’t
get rid of him, as much as he would love to.

Marcel was fucking untouchable until the agreement Rudy had made with the Russian
family was completed. If the other man disappeared, then the suspicious, highly paranoid
Russian might just slip the leash his own son had on him, and strike out at the Genoa
family. They couldn’t risk that.

Pulling the van into place, Andre glared at the back entrance of the hotel, willing
Dennis to hurry, to complete the theft of the girl’s belongings quickly.

“A fucking Mackay,” Nate sighed beside him then. “What are the chances?”

What
were
the chances. For a man that didn’t believe in coincidence, he was suddenly being
given supposed proof that they existed.

“The chances are pretty much fucking nil,” he growled. “After we get back, find out
why she’s here, and start tying up loose ends. I want to know every fucking move she’s
made, everyone she’s talked to, and every breath she’s taken since she made the decision
to come to the city alone. Dawg Mackay is too fucking paranoid to let one of his sister’s
travel here without a baby-sitter. And Timothy Cranston would die and go to hell before
he’d let one of them travel anywhere alone without a shadow.” He turned and glared
at Nate. “I haven’t found her shadow yet. That means, she doesn’t have one.”

Nate’s expression hardened. “Someone playing with us again?”

“That’s what my gut’s telling me.” Andre made the realization in a flash. “Someone’s
definitely playing with us, and I want to know why.”

* * *

The planner Jed had scrawled his number in lay on the table next to the door, where
Piper had thrown it after having to force herself not to call him. Again.

She wanted to call him.

She wanted to rail about the decision to travel to New York alone, and she wanted
to curse Eldon Vessante to the pits of hell, and she needed someone to listen to her.
Unfortunately, she couldn’t think of anyone she could call whom she could trust to
keep the details to themselves.

Even Amy, the friend whose sister had given her a ride to the train station, couldn’t
be totally trusted. If Amy even suspected Piper might be harmed, or had been, then
she would call Dawg in a New York minute.

Amy might not know Dawg. She may not have a very high opinion of him after some of
the stories Piper had told her about his protectiveness, but Amy had become a good
friend over the past few years. She returned to Somerset each summer just to see Piper’s
new designs, and over the course of those visits, they had become close.

Besides, Amy also trusted her sister, Gypsy, and Gypsy was a female version of the
Mackay men. Pure military, tough, and suspicious. She would convince Amy to call the
Mackays, if she didn’t just call Natches herself.

The only bright spot in the night was that she had been able to get a ticket on a
train departing in two hours. It would put her in Louisville five hours later, and
from there the price for a rental car home wouldn’t give away the fact that she had
been in New York City.

Dawg would have pups if he ever found out she had traveled there alone. He was so
damned protective and controlling of his sisters’ lives that he had even fully vetted
their roommates at college. She and her sisters had become so disgusted over the choices
he had given them that they had opted to just share an apartment together.

Piper hated it.

She hated having to look over her shoulder at every party she went to and every event
she attended. Even worse was how often her dates and potential lovers looked over
their shoulders.

The few men Piper had actually considered sleeping with had run so damned fast once
they’d realized who she was related to that there hadn’t been a chance of finding
out whether they were as compatible as she had thought they might be.

The men who hadn’t run had been far too much like the male Mackays for her to even
consider, once she realized the traits they shared with her family members. She was
terrified of ending up with a man just like Dawg, or worse yet, a man who reported
to him.

That would be so humiliating.

She couldn’t imagine anything worse than being in a relationship where she couldn’t
trust her lover to have more loyalty to her than he had fear of her brother.

Would Jed really fear Dawg, though?

She couldn’t imagine that happening, but she could imagine him reporting to Dawg simply
because he believed her brother would have the right to know what she was doing, when,
and where.

She glanced to the planner again as she finished packing her duffel bag with the items
she’d bought before leaving for the meeting with the bastard who had tricked her into
coming to New York. She’d literally upended her purse to get all the little packages
of stones and colored glass into the duffel, and stuffed all the fabric and notions
in after them.

It would serve Eldon right if she did tell Dawg exactly what he had done. Dawg and
her cousins would be in New York City so fast no one would dare realize they were
gone. And they would beat the skinny, rat-faced little pervert to a pulp.

The thought of it was immensely satisfying, but she knew she could never do it.

Shaking her head at the pleasurable image and heading across the room to collect her
planner, she was brought up short by a knock on the door.

The bellhop was quick. She had called the front desk and asked them to give her an
hour before sending him up, but she didn’t mind leaving a little earlier than she
had planned. It would give her a few extra minutes to settle onto the train and feel
a little sorrier for herself.

Mockery curled her lips. If there was one thing she didn’t do well, it was feel sorry
for herself.

Dawg wasn’t really a prison warden, though in the past year, she admitted, there were
often times she accused him of being one.

Checking the peephole quickly, she saw a large form dressed in the familiar hotel
jacket and quickly opened the door.

For the second time that night, her world went to hell.

She had seen Eldon’s attack coming; she wasn’t expecting this one.

The second the door parted from the frame it slammed inward with such force Piper
found herself thrown back into the room, where she crashed into the room service cart
delivered earlier.

Dishes and food were suddenly flung across the floor as the cart took her weight,
and Piper let out a piercing scream.

Don’t be quiet,
Dawg had always advised her and her sisters. There was nothing an attacker hated
worse than having attention called to his actions.

And evidently it was the truth.

“Shut up, bitch.” Enraged, the apelike figure dived for her as Piper fought to scramble
away, using every breath she had to scream her lungs out.

A heavy fist caught her shoulder, causing her face to slam into the side of the dresser.

For a moment, her senses were rattled, light flashing before her eyes and exploding
in vibrant color as she fought back the dizzying darkness gathering beyond the lights.

A hand attached to her upper arm with bruising force, jerking her from the floor as
a hoarse demand was growled in her ear.

“Where is it?”

Where was what?

She screamed again, struggling against him as she tried with every blow to bury her
fist or a foot into his balls.

Her knee connected, drawing an agonized grunt a second before she was thrown into
the wall hard enough to send her bouncing to the bed.

Voices were raised, outraged, cursing.

Piper was struggling to make sense of it as the sudden explosion of a weapon discharging
shocked her senses into an abrupt return to reality.

Every bone and muscle in her body hurt.

Dizziness assailed her, washing through her and weakening her as she struggled to
lift herself from the bed.

Was she shot?

Oh, God, Dawg would kill her if she managed to get shot while escaping to New York.
She would hear all kinds of “I told you so”s. Her sisters would of course blame her
for the additional security that would follow. . . . Who the hell were those men rushing
into her room?

Oh, God, they were big. . . .

There were too many of them. . . .

Too big, and too many.

Darkness rushed over her, drawing her into a pit of icy nothingness. The complete
lack of sensory information was like being buried alive.

She was aware, yet she wasn’t.

There, yet she wasn’t.

And one question haunted her through it all: Exactly what was it her attacker had
been demanding?

Where are they, you little cunt?

Where was what?

Who?

“Lady? Lady you okay? Someone call an ambulance; she’s hurt. She’s hurt—”

She’s hurt.

Who was hurt?

Oh, yeah—it was her.

She was hurt.

Then the darkness deepened; that nowhere place grew, sucked her in, and enfolded her
until nothing and no one else could penetrate.

* * *

Jed came awake instantly, before the first, faint vibrating tremor of the phone against
the wood nightstand eased away. The second vibration didn’t have the chance to begin
before he flipped the cell phone open and brought it to his ear.

“Booker,” he answered.

“Jed Booker?” the male voice asked, faintly quizzical, highly uncomfortable, and not
yet fully mature.

“It is.”

“My name is Bret. Bret Jordan. You don’t know me, but I found your name in this lady’s
journal—”

“Piper.” He was out of the bed instantly and dressing. “What happened?”

“Well, me and my friends were staying at this hotel in New York City when the lady
in the room next to us started screaming. When we ran to her room this guy was beating
the crap out of her. He got away with her purse, but her day planner was still lying
on a table and it had your name in it. If you know her, the doctors really need some
info.”

“Where is she?” Jed growled the single word, having dressed as the kid made his explanation.

He was given the name and address quickly as he jerked his boots on his feet, grabbed
his weapon and keys, and headed for the door.

“Look, are you family or something?” he was asked then. “They really need to treat
her, but she’s unconscious—”

“Comatose or unconscious?” Jed was in the pickup he kept parked at the inn for those
times when he needed something besides the Harley.

This was one of those times.

There was a moment’s mumbled conversation. “Man, the nurse won’t tell me. She says
family—”

“I’m her brother,” he lied instantly. “Her only family. Now, is she comatose or unconscious?”

“Here’s the nurse.”

The nurse was, fortunately, more informative.

Identifying himself as her brother to the nurse, he waited what seemed like an eternity
as she found the doctor. Pulling from the inn’s parking lot, he drove at the legal
speed limit until far enough from the inn to avoid drawing Timothy’s attention, then
hit the gas and increased his speed.

Until he hit the highway he wouldn’t be safe from detection, just from being stopped
for speeding. Sheriff Mayes’s deputies would immediately report the truck speeding
if they saw it, just as any Somerset cop would report directly to Chief of Police
Alex Jansen.

As he got to the city limits, the doctor finally, thankfully, took the phone.

Piper was stable, thank God. He wouldn’t have to call Dawg after all. She was currently
severely bruised, concussed, and unconscious, but in stable condition. The hospital
needed permission to treat her, though, the doctor explained.