The Salvation of Vengeance (Wanted Men #2) (37 page)

Nika checked her mirrors for the hundredth time as she merged onto the freeway in Eva’s Mercedes. Guilt ate a hole through her heart. How could she have been enjoying Vincente when Caleb was out there with Kevin? She should have known something was wrong when he didn’t return her text, and then again when he didn’t answer Eva’s call. But they’d just shrugged it off, thinking he was getting laid.

Her hands shook as she hit Kevin’s number again. He was doing this on purpose. She knew it. Not answering her call. Letting her stew.

“Not gonna give up, huh, slave? Figured it’d be something like this that’d get you outta that fucker’s bed.”

Kevin’s voice over the Bluetooth she’d synced so as not to kill herself had Nika swallowing the bile that pushed into her throat. The sound was so much worse than the scariest horror movie.

She ignored his actual words. “Please don’t hurt him anymore, Kevin.” Begging had never worked before, but she tried anyway. “Please don’t. He’s never done anything to you. This is my fault, not his.”

“Not true. But that’s in the past. This here
is
all about you.” A terrifying calm had settled in his voice that was unfamiliar. “And you’re gonna fix this. Aren’t you, Niki?”

Why wasn’t he furious? Cursing her? Calling her names? “Yes. I’ll fix it. Please, tell me where you are. I can meet you out front and we can forget about Caleb. Okay?”

There was a hair-raising pause. “You serious about that offer?” He sounded like a small boy who’d just had a shiny toy truck dangled in front of him.

“Ye—”

“Don’t you fucking dare, Nika!”

She stifled a cry at the sound of her brother’s furious shout in the background. “Yes! Yes, Kevin, I am! I’m serious. Where are you? I’m coming now. I’m already in the car. Give me the address, so I can put it in my phone. I’ll be there as fast as I can. Just promise me you’ll meet me outside and forget about him.”

“Nik! You stay the fuck away—” Caleb’s warning was cut off, replaced by a howl of pain that Nika felt straight through her heart.

“Kevin!”
she screamed, the car swerving as she neared hysterics. “Don’t! Whatever you’re doing, stop! I’m coming right now! How do I find you? Please stop!”

“How do I know you won’t bring that fuckin’ guard dog with you, you dirty cunt? How the fuck could you—”

She cut him off, terrified if he got going, he’d take his anger out on Caleb. “I’m alone. I swear to God, I’m by myself. I know better than to bring anyone with me.”

“You better be. Because if I see anyone other than you, the next time I sink this blade into your brother, I’m gonna do it in his chest. You got that?”

“I s-swear. I swear, it’s j-just m-m-me.”

He gave her the address, and she was able to input it into Google Maps without losing the call. It took her a minute to do so and not sideswipe the cars on either side of her, but she finally saw that red flagpole that would lead her to Caleb.

All the while, Kevin was muttering. “You’ve been a bad little slave, haven’t you, Niki? But I’ll take care of you. You’ll see. I’m gonna try to be good. I promise. Okay? I promise. I got big plans for us. You just wait until I get my hands on—”

“Okay.” She interrupted him without allowing herself to take in any of what he’d said. “I should be there in sixteen minutes. Meet me out front so I know I’m in the right place, okay? Okay, Kevin?”

“See you in sixteen minutes, slave.”

There was a click and then dead air, and Nika was alone with her thoughts again. She bit her lip and tried not to cry. She’d wanted him to give the phone to Caleb so she could tell her brother she loved him and how sorry she was that this had happened.

But she’d tell him soon. And then she’d destroy that monster who’d done this to them. She and her brother would not be one more statistic.

“Please, God,” she prayed in a last-ditch effort that she might be heard. “Let me free Caleb. I know we’re not your favorite people, but please help us through this.”

God?
she continued silently.
If for some reason this backfires on me, please help Vincente.

“Please help him.” She voiced her plea on Vincente’s behalf to be sure it was heard. “I don’t know why you haven’t helped me, but please help him. He’s been through enough. I love him so much, God. I’m so in love with him, and I never told him. Why didn’t I tell him? Sophia? If you can hear me, please help your brother. Let him know somehow that this, and your death, wasn’t his fault.”

She shut up, coughing to release the tightness in her throat.
Jeez.
The stress was clearly getting to her. Talking to herself, hoping that dead people could hear her.

Would she be able to hear Vincente in the next hour? If this all went wrong, would she see how he reacted when they showed up and he was too late to save her? That just made her more determined to have this go right. She had to be smart and careful. Dammit, she wished she could apologize to him for choosing to save Caleb over listening to him. For wanting her brother to live more than she wanted Vincente to be free of guilt.

But her whole past year had been for her brother. Everything she’d been through she’d done for him.

How could she not follow through now when it mattered the most?

Would Vincente mourn her if they didn’t make it? She knew he would, but would it be as a friend mourns another? Or as a lover mourns the loss of his or her other half?

As she would have mourned him had the tables been turned. Thank God it would be over before the boys arrived. She wouldn’t have been able to go on if Kevin hurt Vincente. Or Gabriel. How could she live knowing she’d been responsible for taking Eva’s husband, her baby’s father, away from her?

She swallowed a sob. Eva. Her sister. Soon to be a mother. “Please let me see that baby, God. And I’ll go talk to your man—I’ll talk to Father Michael, like Eva wanted me to. I promise I’ll see him every week and let him convince me you don’t have it out for me, if only you’ll help me do this right.”

And so it went on, for the next sixteen minutes—Nika begging a deity she wasn’t sure cared to help her in any way he could. When she was a half a block from the little red flagpole on her phone’s GPS, she brought Eva’s car to a halt at the curb in front of a redbrick warehouse that looked as if it would crumble with one good gust of wind. She killed the engine and pocketed the key fob. After checking the weapon to be sure it was loaded as Caleb had shown her so many times, she tucked it into the back of her pants, pulled her blouse over it, and then got out of the car. She looked around at the deserted street. How could any street in New York be so barren of human bodies in the middle of the day? Normally, there would be a few, even homeless, scattered around. Not today.

She took that as an omen. There would be no witnesses to see her shoot her husband.

Going down an alley, barely feeling the grime and who knows what else beneath her bare feet, she poked her head up and almost screamed at the sight of Kevin not fifty feet away. He was pacing in front of a large old building that had a door huge enough to fit an airplane through it. He was patrolling closer to a smaller entrance that was propped open by something she couldn’t see.

At a dead run, she went back the way she’d come, zipped across the street, and continued on half a block when she reached the street over—she passed by three people who barely glanced at her. Backtracking, she came to a chain-link fence and had to run along it another twenty feet before finding an opening to sneak through. So many things cut into the soles of her feet—bottle caps, stones, broken pieces of brick—but she barely felt them around the adrenaline streaming through her veins. She made it to the side of the building Kevin was in front of, panting and breathless, and tried the first door she came to, half expecting to see him round the corner. Locked. Cursing and sweating, she moved along the hot brick wall and almost stumbled when she saw this door was being held open a crack by an old paper coffee cup. She pulled it open just enough to slip through, her feet registering cold as she entered a vast space filled with what looked to be shipping crates. She blinked to adjust her sight to the sudden gloom and tried to get her breathing under control. The stench of stale smoke made her stomach turn over as she took out Eva’s gun.

Holding it in front of her, she inched along the corridor the massive crates made up. She wished she could call out Caleb’s name so she had some idea which direction to go in, but she dared not in case Kevin heard her.

Coming up to an open area, she slowed and peered carefully around the crate—

Nika barely caught herself from falling to her knees in denial at what she saw. Caleb was across the way, arms and legs strapped to a metal chair, a dirty rag stuffed in his mouth, face beaten. But it was the fresh blood dripping into his eyes that had fury blowing through her. Kevin had slashed his blade in a straight line from Caleb’s hairline to the top of his right eyebrow.

Nika lurched forward, around cables and lighting fixtures, and fell in front of her brother. “Oh, my God, Caleb. I’m sorry,” she whispered. She tucked the gun in her waistband and went straight for the bindings on his hands, realizing too late that she should have brought a knife. Caleb shook his head violently, eyes wild as he tried to talk around the gag. “I’m so sorry he did this to you. I love you, okay? We’re going to get out of—”

The very familiar feeling of taking one to the side of the head barely registered before Nika was flying across the grimy floor, bumping over leather cords to land in a heap against the side of one of the large containers.

Kevin was there.

“You fucking lied, you dirty whore. Like I didn’t know what you had planned. Don’t you know how well I know you? Didn’t you learn anything from me?”

She scrambled to her feet and withdrew Eva’s gun, but before she could even aim Kevin backhanded it out of her trembling grip. She attempted to dive for it, knowing it was their only chance, but again, Kevin got her first. He wrapped his arm around her middle and lifted her off her feet to slam her WWE-style on the concrete floor. She hit so hard her back seized and her lungs choked in shock. Her head cracked, and the instant warmth spreading around the back of her skull let her know her newly healed scalp hadn’t fared well.

Caleb’s muffled scream of outrage made it through the insistent ringing in her ears and cleared her eyesight enough so that she had the perfect view of her husband’s evil face glowering down into hers. She tried to force herself to relax so that air would fill her lungs.

“I’m going to make you watch me kill him now, Niki.” Kevin sneered; the gouge from her ring the night they’d fought at the hotel was now a fresh scar under his cheekbone. “He’s gonna wish he’d been nicer to me back in Seattle. He should’ve let me into the club. We could’ve been brothers, and I wouldn’t have done this to him. But we aren’t, and you’re the one who’s gonna pay for that.” He plunked down on her stomach, straddling her, causing her to struggle even harder for that just-out-of-reach pocket of oxygen. A hard backhand split her lip. “
Bad
dog,” he taunted as she tasted blood.

White-hot rage suddenly had a steady stream of power inflating Nika’s lungs, and she coughed around it. By the look in his eyes, she wasn’t sure Kevin had the control to let her live long enough to follow through on his threat to kill her brother in front of her. More likely, it would be the other way around. But she
would not
let Caleb watch her die like this. And she absolutely refused to leave him to Kevin’s mercy once she was gone.

Her arm came up, and she landed what felt like a weak right hook to Kevin’s jaw. It must have been stronger than she realized because his head swung to the side. But he came back to rights in such an eerie, unaffected move it made her scream. The shrill sound cut off, however, when he landed his own fist to the side of her head, and then the other, and a third time, so that her head was whipped from side to side, straining her neck from the force of his punches.

“
No!
Stop! I’ll fucking kill you, you sonofabitch! Stop!” Caleb must have bitten through the gag, she thought as blackness swirled, because his words were unmuffled. “Jesus Christ . . . Stop!”

Kevin halted midthrow and looked over. Nika attempted to do the same but couldn’t. She was failing here, so badly. Her head was a mass of fuzzy pain. Her ears thundered. Her neck ached.

“Please, Kevin, just . . . take me. Leave him . . . alone. Please.” She slurred like a drunk but must have gotten the idea across because Caleb yelled at her.

“Nik! Goddammit! Shut the fuck up!”

Kevin turned back to her, his eyes wilder than she’d ever seen them. “Why do you want me to leave him? You anxious for what’s coming for you, mob whore? I’ve missed this.” He came in close. “I’ve killed you, you know. Over and over again. Five times since you left me I’ve killed you.”

Ignoring him, Nika finally got her head to turn and she saw Caleb’s chair was on its side from his struggles. They were eye to eye with about fifteen feet between them.

“You came here—so you
fight
, Nik,” her brother rasped. “You fucking fight harder!”

The command drilled into her brain, pushing a final reserve of energy through her. She had come here knowing what she was up against. She could do better than this.

With a move Caleb had taught her years ago—that should have been quicker but worked anyway—she brought her leg up and wrapped it around Kevin’s neck. She jerked hard so that he fell backward, his head nailing a metal tripod that fell over as he went down. He groaned and was stunned but not unconscious.

Without hesitating, knowing she didn’t have a lot of time, she scrambled, feeling as if she was moving at an angle, to Eva’s gun on her hands and knees. She glanced at her brother but had to look away from the devastation on his face as she picked up the cold metal. She wiped at the blood that was steadily dripping off her chin from her nose and turned, the weapon out in front of her, wavering from the shaking in her arms. Her breath was coming so fast she was seeing fireworks, or maybe those were from Kevin’s hits. She didn’t know anymore. Could barely stay upright.