Hearts On Fire (The Santiago Trilogy Book 3) Page 11

  “Timer’s set. The rest of this baby’s gonna blow in sixty seconds,” yells a tall guy, sprinting away from the rubble of the front porch and leaping into the driver’s seat.

  “Eve!” cries a voice.

  “Anna!”

  I can't believe my eyes, and part of me doesn't want to, as my best friend slides into view. In the dim glare of the interior light, her appearance is shocking. Her pretty face is bruised and tear-stained and her blond hair is a tangled halo of blood. She’s barelegged, bare-footed and clutching Joseph’s navy jacket to her body.

  Joseph sets me down and we throw our arms around each other, swapping stories with the currency of tears alone. She’s shaking so hard, the vibrations are ricocheting under my skin.

  There’s a jerk as the car accelerates away from the house.

  “Ten seconds,” yells the driver.

  “Brace yourself,” murmurs Joseph from the passenger seat as we hit a hundred down the quiet country road.

  “Why, what’s–?”

  A second later, the remains of the safe house vaporize under a guise of burning flame and debris. The force of the explosion skids our car off the road and our driver has to fight hard to right us, tugging expertly at the steering wheel to pull us out of a spin.

  “Jesus,” I hear him mutter as Joseph checks his iPhone.

  “Anna, I–?”

  “No talking.” She brings a trembling finger to my lips and shakes her head. I can’t comprehend the suffering in her eyes. I’ve never seen anything so raw. “Not yet. Not until I can process it for myself.”

  My gaze meets Joseph’s as he thrusts a bottle of water into my hand. For once, his face isn’t a blank wall of expression and my heart bleeds agony for her. What kind of nightmare did they rescue her from?

  “I’m so sorry, Anna,” I croak. “If it wasn’t for me, none of this–”

  “No.” Her blue eyes are flashing at me through the darkness now. “This is not your fault, I will never ever blame you for what they did. I love you, Eve Miller. Forever and always.” Her hand slips into mine and squeezes gently. She’s so thin I can feel every precious bone in her hand.

  “How did you know how to find me?” I ask the men up front.

  “Mateo.” Joseph is checking his phone again. “He filled us in.”

  “Is Dante waiting for us at the jet?” Is that who you keep waiting on a message from?

  Silence.

  “Dammit Joseph! Tell me where my husband is!”

  I hear Anna exhale sharply. “Husband? What the fuck, Evie? Don't tell me you actually married that monster?” Her hand slips from mine and I feel her rejection as acutely as Dante’s absence. “He was a fucking animal in there tonight. I watched him murder five men without even blinking. He’s no better than the bastards who raped me!”

  Another silence, as we all sit there reeling from her words. Joseph is half in profile, the tips of his blond buzz cut catching in the moonlight, but I can see how tight he’s gritting his jaw from here.

  “I wish I could rationalize it to you, Anna…” But she’s already turned her back on me. I can hear her crying softly into the leather seat.

  Why is love so cruel? Why does it have to rip at the seams of our lives like this? How can I feel right in Dante’s arms when the consequences of us being together hurt the ones I love? Still, the white lines in the middle of the road feel like inverse arrows, leading me in the wrong direction and away from him.

  “How did the meeting with Petrov go?” I’m throwing out wild guesses again. It worked with Rick Sanders a couple of weeks ago.

  Joseph tenses. “It…went.”

  “Did they kill each other?”

  “Not yet.”

  There’s a pause. “I saw my father.”

  He whips around so fast his elbow knocks the steering wheel and we veer off the road again, the tires skidding in the dirt to a volley of rough curses from our driver.

  “Where?”

  “He was part of the group that attacked the safe house.” Anna is watching me too now. “He came into the forest to find me. He was shouting all this stuff out. He said he wanted to talk.”

  He told me everything was a lie, but I think he wanted to kill me as well.

  I can see Joseph processing this. I can tell he doesn't like it. “Myers is in deeper than we thought,” I hear him mutter to the driver. “And where the fuck is the leak coming from? Petrov only knew about our involvement with the op a couple of hours ago. There’s no way Peters could have scrambled a chopper in time.”

  “You think Agent Peters is double-crossing us?” I say with a gasp.

  “He’s the most likely suspect. Or he was...”

  “Evie, do you think your father had something to do with me?” Anna finally speaks, her voice cracking under the strain of this potentially fresh heartbreak. Once upon a time, he’d been a father figure to her too but all that got crushed under the weight of revelation in Miami. Petrov let me keep a copy of the photos. She saw for herself how far my father had fallen.

  “How can a good man have such bad intentions?” she whispers.

  Can a bad man ever be good? I try to take her hand again but she moves it away.

  “Update from Die Wallen,” I hear Joseph say, opening up his laptop. “Area in lockdown. Sixty dead. Eleven from our side. We’ll extract the bodies from the morgue in the morning.”

  Sixty?

  The death toll settles over the vehicle for a moment before it merges with the rhythm of the tires on the asphalt. We’ve been keeping within the speed limit since the house detonated. There’s been a steady stream of sirens passing us in the opposite direction and we don't want to draw attention to ourselves.

  Eventually we turn off the main road and all bets are off. The SUV gives another lurch as our driver puts his foot to the floor to make up for lost time. I recognize the road from the way in yesterday. We’re only a few miles out from the private airfield. I strain my head to see if I can catch a glimpse of any other vehicles but all I see is night.

  We pull up alongside the jet and both men are out of the car immediately.

  “Stay here,” orders Joseph, and I watch him jog over to talk to the three recruits standing by the aircraft steps.

  “Is that the jet that’s taking us home?” asks Anna.

  I nod and force a smile before turning back to the window. I’m learning that uneasiness is a cloak for all seasons in my life with Dante. Something’s wrong. Joseph keeps rubbing his hand across his jaw.

  “I don't want to go back there,” she announces softly. “I don’t ever want to try and slot into a nice normal life again. It’s all a façade, anyway.” A bitter note starts to curdle her voice. “The job, the car, the white picket fence… How can I pretend when I know that underneath it all is this other existence of hell?”

  Tears prick my eyelids. “I felt the same way last year. There can be a beauty in the chaos, though. The lines are never as clear cut as you think.”

  “I don't care about any of it. I just want to forget.”

  We stare at each other, both trying to remember the girls we once were in college.

  “Do you really love him that much, Evie?” She says, taking my hand again.

  I shudder in relief. “I couldn’t even quantify it. How do you measure the air that you breath and the darkness that shapes your light?” My breath hitches again. “We’ll take you anywhere you need to go, just so long as there’s a hospital. We need to get you checked out.” I want to ask more, to find out what really happened to her, but she’s in no shape to answer questions tonight.

  “What about you?” she asks. “Where will you go?”

  I go to say home and then stop. My home is where Dante is. Outside, Joseph is slowly making his way back to us, eyes fixed to his cell phone again. I scramble out of the vehicle to meet him.

  “Where is is he, Joseph?” I demand, hobbling up to him. “No more bullshit. I’ve just been chased through a forest so my adrenaline is like liqu
id fire right now.”

  “Honestly? I don’t know.” He lifts his head and I stop dead. For the first time ever his face is an open book of emotion. I can read everything – the pain, the concern, the regret.

  He looks like he wants to say something else. I wait for him to continue, even though I don't want him to. His expression is rocking me enough, but something tells me that in the next few moments my whole life will be capsizing.

  “He’s not coming.”

  “What do you mean he’s not coming?”

  “I fucked up. I couldn’t talk him around.”

  “I don't understand,” I stutter. “The mission was successful. We have Anna.”

  “You know there were always two parts to this.”

  “Sevastien.” I reel away from him and shut my eyes. He promised me we’d seek our vengeance together.

  “That’s my assumption, from what my men are telling me. There was a car chase near the Damrak and Dante was driving the second vehicle. We lost the tail after that but reports of a massive crash are starting to filter through to the news channels.”

  “So he could be dead or dying or…” My agony is insurmountable. I can't even grasp the foothills. “Where’s Petrov?”

  “Halfway back to Russia.” There’s a pause. “Time’s running out, Eve. We need to get going. We only have a limited window with the airspace before we’re open to detection. It’s the deal we made.”

  “So that’s it?” I stare at him in disbelief. “You’re all going to leave him in the middle of Amsterdam to die so you can save your own asses!”

  “This was his choice, not mine,” he counters roughly. “I pulled every manipulative string I could think of, Eve. You better believe that… I even told him about the baby.”

  “You what?” And he still didn’t come back to me? “What about loyalty?”

  “This is fucking loyalty!” He’s up in my face now, yelling out every word. “This is me standing here telling you this shit. This is me carrying out his last fucking wishes to protect you, and to get you out of this place before hell opens up and swallows us.”

  “Too late,” I say, limping back to car. “Hell is right here on this asphalt with you saying those words to me.”

  “Where the fuck are you going? Did you not hear what I said? We need to be in the air within the next five minutes.”

  “I’m going back to help him. If he’s not leaving Amsterdam, neither am I”

  “Like fuck you are!”

  All of a sudden I’m being pinned into submission by a thick chain of muscle.

  “Get off me, Joseph!” I yell and scream like a banshee, as he drags me back toward the aircraft.

  “Think of the baby,” he pleads. “I’m begging you, Eve. Don't struggle. Don't make this harder than it already is.”

  “He said we’d do this together,” I say with a moan, my body going limp. “I can't believe he’s doing this. I can’t believe he’d just leave…” I trail off as two pinpricks of light start winking at me from the opposite end of the runway.

  “Cops,” he hisses in my ear, spotting them too.

  “No, wait.” I’m held spellbound as the pinpricks widen to white pinholes. “They’re not blue and red. They’re not flashing.”

  We watch together as pinholes transform into something neither of us expected to see, accompanied by the harsh sound of an inferior engine revving at full capacity.

  “Oh my God, it’s him! It’s him!”

  Joseph lets go at me and I run in the car’s direction, ignoring the gnawing ache in my ankle, my need to reach him surpassing the strongest painkiller. Twenty meters out, it skids to a haphazard stop by the side of the runway and the driver’s door swings open.

  “Eve!”

  I’m half-crying, half-laughing when I hear him roaring at me. He sounds angry, exhausted, relieved. Shirt torn, blood oozing from ugly gashes to his head and arms… Every part of him seems battered and bruised but it doesn’t stop me leaping into his embrace, linking my arms, my legs and my heart around his body so tightly that I hear him groaning; reinforcing our unbreakable bond as he plunges his bloodied face into the side of my neck and cradles me close to him.

  “You came back.” I’m so dizzy with relief, I plaster every inch of my body to his. We breathe each other in for a few moments before he finally speaks.

  “Always,” he murmurs, arms tightening as he struggles to get a cap on his own emotions. “Now get on the fucking plane, Eve Santiago, or else…” I can feel his fingers digging painfully into my ass. It’s my first, delicious punishment. The first of many I hope.

  “Or else what?” I say, grinning at him.

  His fierce scowl wavers for a split-second. “Or else the twenty or so cop cars hot on my tail will be watching me fuck the shit out of you on this runway.”

  22

  Eve

  I slide to the ground and we approach the jet, arm in arm. He’s more injured than he’s letting on. There’s a sinister red stain spreading out from underneath a rip in his shirt near his rib cage and he’s hissing under his breath with every movement.

  “Leave us for a minute, mi alma,” he murmurs as Joseph approaches. The mask of indifference is back on the Texan’s face but his blue-grays are the iciest I’ve ever seen. The moment I step away from Dante’s side, he’s smashing his fist into the side of his jaw.

  “What the hell are you doing?” I cry out as Dante rocks backward but his hand flashes up to stop me. I then watch in horror as he takes another brutal punch, this time to his cheek, without any hint of retaliation, slapping his hand against the side of the aircraft steps to steady himself

  “Eighteen years,” grunts Joseph, standing over him. “Go ahead, knife me in the fucking guts all you want, but if you ever make me say shit like that to Eve again, you and me are done. Circumstances be damned, if you go rogue one more time I’ll kill you myself. We’re fucking soldiers you and I, brother. We live and die by the rules.”

  Dante’s hand flashes out again, this time to catch his arm as he raises his fist for Round Three. I hold my breath, more for Joseph’s sake than anyone. Is this the part where my husband reveals his true nature? Any other man would be dead by now.

  “I don’t live by the rules,” says Dante calmly, crimson streaming out of his mouth. “You knew that the minute you came on-board with me.”

  “Maybe you should start instigating some for all our fucking sakes.” Joseph shakes him off and we watch him stalk back to the SUV to help Anna.

  “Get on the plane, Eve,” he says, spitting blood at the ground. “You and I have our own shit to deal with. I’d prefer to do that thirty thousand feet above sea level and without Amsterdam’s finest taking pot shots at us.”

  He knows about the baby.

  I nod and turn to follow Anna up the steps. Once inside, she curls up into a fetal position in one of the plush cream leather chairs and starts crying again. Hurrying into the bedroom at the back of the plane, I return with a blanket, tucking it around her bare legs as Dante pushes past me. I watch him catch Anna’s eye but neither of them say a word to each other. Moments later, I hear the same bedroom door slam and I know that my judgement awaits for me in there.

  “Can I get you anything?” I say to her, “Water, tea…?”

  She shakes her head and doesn’t look up.

  “I’ll look after her,” drawls a voice from behind me. “Like Dante said, you have your own shit to sort.”

  “Looking after my friend who’s been kidnapped and assaulted for three days is included in that category,” I fire back, bristling with resentment.

  “Please Eve,” says Anna beseechingly. “All I want to do it sleep.”

  I straighten up but I’m still torn with indecision. “If you need anything, please come and find me. I don’t know where we’re going–”

  “Nairobi,” states Joseph brusquely. “There’s an excellent private hospital there.” He reaches around me to hand Anna a couple of pills. “Valium and painkillers. Hol
d on in there, honey. We’ll get you some help soon.”

  Honey?

  “Okay, fine. Nairobi it is.” I give Anna a quick, reassuring smile but I know when I’m not wanted. Reluctantly, I creep up the aisle to accept my fate. “By the way, he totally deserved it,” I mutter to Joseph as I pass, and I’m rewarded with a slight quirk of his lips.

  Dante is still in the shower when I enter the bedroom. The aircraft is starting to rumble away from its blocks so I take my place in one of two chairs next to the window and fasten my seatbelt. A minute later, he’s stepping out from the en suite in fresh blue jeans and black T-shirt, his full-sleeve tribal tattoo glistening with water droplets.

  He takes up the seat adjacent to me, collapsing into it with a groan and rests his eyes briefly. Up close, his face is a mess. There are deep lacerations across his forehead, and the imprints of Joseph’s fists are swelling fast.

  “Can I get you some ice?”

  “Not yet.” Exhaustion is flattening his words to a deeper baritone.

  Once the plane is airborne, there’s a knock at the door.

  “Come in,” he rumbles and one of his recruits enters carrying a medical kit. He must have some kind of doctor training because he sets to work immediately, pouring iodine into the worst of the cuts and stitching up the gaping wound under his ribcage. Feeling like I’m intruding, I rise to my feet to return to the cabin.

  “Sit down,” says Dante, dark eyes swivelling to me. “You’re not going anywhere unless I say so.”

  With a sigh, I sink back into my seat.

  “All set, jefe,” announces the recruit, packing away his supplies.

  “Could you have a look at my ankle too?” I say, piping up as he turns to leave. The guy shoots a questioning gaze at Dante who nods.

  “How did you twist it?” he asks, watching like a hawk as the recruit gently removes my right Chuck and peels off my sock.

  “You didn’t know?” I glance up in surprise.

  He frowns. “Know what?”

  “The safe house was breached tonight.”