123B MORENO DRIVE, November 18
Forty-five. "Grrgh." Forty-six. "Rargh."
An incoming call sent my phone dancing across the kitchen floor. Isis scampered away to the safety of the cat-flap.
"Rrgh." Forty-seven. "Nngh." Forty-eight.
The phone jiggled across the tiles with another call. Fuck it.
Push-ups abandoned, I snatched it up. Unknown number.
"Hi, Jay." Sweet voice. Familiar. Kinda like a little bird tweeting. "I got your number from Hamish."
Ya rab. I knew that voice.
"Leila?"
How did Hamish McCloud even have my number? Unless...of course, Sylvia Fucking Payne gave it to him.
"We didn't get to talk at Casper's fundraiser! You looked amazing! I thought you were working in Saudi. You back in María for good?"
Where to start? I had so much to tell Leila. But, sorting through the cobwebbed clutter at the bottom of my brain didn't bring up a single thing I'd wanna tell her. I was supposed to have gotten outta jail, gotten a motorcycle, gotten Leila back, and she'd have fixed my shitty spiraling life.
How fucking stupid that sounded three months later, now that Mamá was dead, and my whole world was Dante.
"Um...can I call you back, Leila? Kinda...in the middle of something right now."
"No problem. Do you want to get coffee sometime?"
"Sure. Bye."
I resumed my push-ups, Leila sinking back to the depths of my brain, my headspace refilling with its endless loop of fanboy reveries of Dante.
Forty. "Rrgh." Forty-one. "Nngh."
Stiletto heels clicking into my peripheral vision startled me. My palm slipped in a pool of my own sweat, sending me crashing to the kitchen floor in a panting heap. Isis took the opportunity to rub my nose in it, literally.
"Get your ass outta my face, cat!" I swatted Isis away only for Slinky to suddenly appear outta nowhere at the sound of clicking heels. She decided to leap onto my back for a little ride. Had it been forty or forty-one push-ups? Fucking cats.
The shiny black stilettos trotted over and stopped directly in front of my face. "Very healthy."
"It's a habit." One. "Nngh." Two. "Grrgh."
Sylvia tutted. "The cats, Jason, not the push-ups. They look well."
They were cats. Of course the fuzzball motherfuckers looked well. "What can I say? I'm good at weighing meat carefully into containers. Nngh." Three. "Nngh." Four. "Grrgh."
Heels clicked away as Diablo and Lover shot out from under furniture, razor-clawed minions greeting their demonic mistress. "Take a breather, Hercules. We need to talk."
Fuck.
I leaned back against the kitchen cupboards, Isis sniffing at me before skittering away in disgust. Seriously, fuck her.
How deep in shit was I? I'd cleared parole, so there was no way Sylvia could put me back in jail. I was officially not crazy because of the pills, so she couldn't threaten me with another Mercedes Asylum haircut. The best option was to come clean.
So, I decided to lie like my life depended on it.
"Look, I was nowhere near Sirius Labs when—"
"Shut up, Jason. Vincenzo Russo told me everything. You went rogue and took a bullet getting intel from Sirius Labs, then you followed Dante back there days later."
God damnit, Vinnie.
"We'll put the fact that you've been trespassing on confidential police work aside for now. We need to talk about her."
My jaw snapped open and closed. "Her?" I squeaked.
Sylvia couldn't know about her, could she?
"She goes by a few names in the States, but in Saudi she's known as Mira al Assad."
Mira.
The sound of her name made my heart detach itself from its blood vessels and start crawling its way up into my throat.
Mira.
Me and the other Alcor security guys had always referred to her as Sayidaty. I'd only ever uttered her name in secret, moaned it into her pillow in ecstasy in the dead of night. To hear it from someone else's lips seemed like sacrilege. Or a Demon's incantation.
Mira.
"Rayan has given us new information. There's a high probability that Mira al Assad is the head of Alcor. She came to the States twenty years ago, as founder and CEO of Lazarus Industries. There was a...a...there was a failed merger with McCloud Technologies around then."
I'd never seen Sylvia stumble over words before. She was scared. Scared of Mira al Assad.
"I know you didn't have high enough status in Alcor to meet her, but did you overhear anything about her?"
My hands began to tremble. I coulda come clean. I coulda told Sylvia everything. Every disgusting little thing I'd done with her.
But I lied, again. Was I ever gonna stop lying for her, even after what she'd done to Mamá?
"Only the highest-ranking Alcor members get meetings with her; none of the guys on my team had ever seen more than glimpses. She's kinda...like a legend. They say she's a martial arts expert. They say she's got a biotech lab in Riyadh for secret experiments. They say she's a biomedical genius."
My stomach writhed. She'd kill me for talking about her. She'd warned me the cost of betrayal when she took Mamá from me. What else could she take from me?
"They say she's...a mass-murderer." Burning puke suddenly began to churn its way up my gullet. "They say she...summoned a demon to do her bidding."
Shakes took me over so fucking hard. I slammed my back against the kitchen cupboard to dampen the quivering of my limbs, like she could hear my treachery from six thousand miles away.
Sylvia raised a perfect eyebrow; she was committing my actions to memory to torment me with them later. Whatever fucked-up expression was plastered on my face had told Sylvia everything. I didn't even have to talk to betray her.
"We'll stop her, Jason, I promise. Any ideas?"
I took in a lungful of air. Breathed it out. Took in another. "If she's sent Zaki to oversee the Demon Star project, then it means everything to her."
"Demon Star?"
Fuck. The Don had been right; I was a brick. Every gang had a blunt brainless instrument like me.
"I got a tip-off. From a friend."
"A friend called Rocco Genovese, no doubt," Sylvia scoffed, seemingly chill with the fact that I'd given her a new lead by snooping on her case. "What did the Don say?"
"He saw the logo on equipment: Demon Star."
"He's sure it wasn't demonstrator? Like a prototype?"
"No. Demon Star."
Sylvia whistled through whitened teeth. "Hell of a brand name. Someone needs to fire the Vogel Technologies marketing team. Now, keep taking, Jason."
This fucking woman.
"Don Genovese is in a protection deal with Vogel, where the Genovese Family maintains security partrols on all joint Alcor-Vogel activities until Demon Star is launched. But the Don doesn't like the risk now that I told him María PD is hunting Alcor. He wants out."
"So we make a deal with Genovese Family for a tip-off on Ibrahim Zaki's whereabouts, we arrest him, and close down the project. Genovese Family get out early, and still get paid by Vogel. Easy."
It was my turn to scoff. Like it would be that easy. "You won't arrest someone like Zaki. He's—"
"Don't tell me, Jason. A legend? A demon? That's how your bosses kept you in control all these years. By making you think that they're superhuman." She bent down and patted my sweat-slicked shoulder, before wiping her hand hastily on a dishcloth. "Push-ups and rage aren't going to kill Mira al Assad, Jason. Being smart will."
She knew that I was going to Riyadh to kill her? Of course she knew. Sylvia Payne knew everything.
"Rayan told me about your kamikaze mission." Then, a murmur. "Please don't go to Riyadh to die. I'm not saying this as a María PD Inspector."
"You're saying it as my landlady?"
"As your friend, Jason."
Sylvia Payne was suddenly my friend? She couldn't be. Perhaps I'd been so inside my head that I hadn't realized that I'd been making friends. Not that I needed friends where I was going. "All I want is to end Alcor."
Sylvia turned to me. "That's all you want?"
I wanted Dante. More than that, I wanted Dante to realize that he was allowed to want me too. I'd abandon revenge in a heartbeat if Dante would have me. We'd heal faster together. I just had to make him see that somehow.
"I know it hurts, but please keep away from Dante. For his sake."
The Demon help me. My most secret thoughts weren't written in my features, they were a flashing neon billboard slapped onto my face.
"You don't know anything about me and Dante."
She let out a tired breath. "I know that you had a plan. You wanted to get a motorcycle. To patch things up with Leila. To get your life back."
It didn't make sense. There was more to it than motherly concern for Dante. Sylvia wanted to keep us apart for some other reason. Had Sylvia given Leila my number to distract me away from Dante? Like that would ever work.
"Dante's...confused, Jason. He's in a bad place. You've become friends, but it's all...temporary. Whatever you think is happening between you, it's not real."
I kipped up from the kitchen floor and hit the shower. Fuck Sylvia Payne. Dante wasn't confused. What we had was real. Dante was just scared of what he was feeling, scared of letting go of Steph, scared of people like Sylvia and Vinnie shaming him for wanting someone they didn't approve of.
Next move: ignore all the worthless advice that Sylvia had ever fucking given me. I was gonna put Stephanie Grey's ghost to rest by taking down Zaki, destroying Demon Star, and ending her.
Then, nobody was gonna think me unworthy of Dante.
HUERTAS ISLAND, November 22
My target crouched behind a tree. Her skin-hugging black clothes made me lose her in the underbrush over and over as I zig-zagged in silent pursuit. She stopped, statue-still, her night-vision binoculars trained on the white wedding cake of a building that peeked over the security wall beyond us.
What was this place, and what could she see in there? Casper Vogel? Zaki?
A slam against my ribs. I tumbled across the clearing, pain lancing up my side from a brutal kick. A wiry arm pressed hard against my Adam's apple. The metallic warmth of blood coated my throat. Fuck. I'd bitten my tongue in the chaos. I squirmed like a fish on a hook, my lungs emptying in panic.
Then the pressure on my neck was released and I was shoved forward, staggering into a jungle of ferns. I turned to face my attacker: Sergeant Gabi Mendoza. She looked somewhat pissed with me.
"No fucking way, Red Demon. Not again! You have no idea how much shit Sylvia gave me the last time you muscled in on a mission!" She shoved me backward, sending me toppling onto my ass. "Go home!"
"Listen, I know how Zaki fights. I can help the extraction team to—"
"Shh!" Gabi jerked her head toward the blackness between us and the treeline. "Someone's following us."
She stalked into the darkness.
The rustle of leaves.
A muffled cry.
The roar of "¡Hijo de puta!" and Gabi reappeared from the gloom, dragging a furious Rayan by the collar. "I cannot fucking believe this. Two stowaways."
"Ya rab, Rayan!" I knew I was reckless but damn, looked like Rayan had a death-wish. "What the fuck are you doing here?"
He wriggled outta Gabi's iron grasp and straightened his collar. "I want to see that ibn al kalb Zaki go down."
"You should be in one of your Daddy's security bunkers hiding from this Zaki guy!" Gabi raised her arms heavenward, then steered Rayan away from the security wall with a prod of her baton. I trudged through the leaf-litter behind them, following blindly until the murk of the forest parted to reveal black steel: a María PD van glinting under moonlight.
"In the meatwagon, niños."
"You can't make me!" Rayan whined.
"Maybe not." Gabi grinned back at him. She wrenched open the van door. "But Gloria can. Can't you, baby?"
In the darkness of the meatwagon smiled Gloria Hernandez. Big, beautiful, and busy polishing an assault rifle, Gabi's girlfriend had biceps like cannonballs and a penchant for breaking femurs.
Rayan and I sat meekly in the back seat with our arms folded on our laps.
Gabi toyed with the radio. "Extraction, do you copy? This is Mendoza, over."
"Roger, Comms. This is Garcia with the extraction team. Extraction location at the spa on Huertas Island identified and monitored, over."
So the white marble monstrosity where Zaki was staying was Casper Vogel's spa. Decent security, known only to exclusive billionaire assholes, it was a pretty good place to hide an international criminal.
"Copy that. Russo should be taking out all alarms and door keypads in the building any second now. Move in when we give you the green light, over and out."
Russo?
Dante was there. Creeping around Vogel's spa with Zaki close by. My flesh started to crawl.
I called to Gabi, "Sergeant Mendoza, permission to approach closer to the spa to get a visual on Dante Russo?"
"Denied."
"Why hasn't he reported back?"
"Relax, Romeo. Dante identified two escape routes for after he takes Vogel's security system down; I can see one of them from the security gate. I'll know when he's out." She tapped at a video screen on the meatwagon's dash. "See?"
I peered at the exit; a fogged basement window just about big enough to crawl through. "It's fucking tiny."
"Dante's intel showed that this basement bathroom is unguarded and leads to the security gate, which Dante can scale easily. He'll be fine."
Dante was the best. I couldn't just hang around his every mission like a bad smell, fretting about his safety. But my mind began to unravel, just like it had done when I'd found Dante in the river, unconscious and hypothermic.
Gabi was getting nervous too; she messed irritably with the channels on the meatwagon's radio. I kept thinking that it would crackle to life and ring with Dante's voice telling us that he'd killed the security system, and was en route back to María PD.
But it didn't. Dante was taking too long.
He shouldn't have even been on this job. He was intel, not extraction. Sure, he was a decent fighter, but he wasn't trained like I was. I didn't wanna think about what Casper Vogel's men would do to him if they found him. If I could just give him some cover until he escaped. Even if I got stuck there, I deserved to deal with Zaki, not have Dante do it.
I'd been saving my two best—and only—weapons for Riyadh, but Dante's safety dwarfed everything. I slid a sneaky hand into the breast pocket of Hamish McCloud's borrowed suit, checking for my two Alcor throwing stars. Once sure they were stowed safely, I tugged at the van's door handle.
Locked.
Gloria sprawled in the passenger seat, one hand on Gabi's thigh, one on a rifle stock. There was no way to sneak outta the meatwagon and stalk to the slab of wedding cake that was Casper Vogel's spa without Gloria flattening me.
Fuck it. Dante needed me more than I needed to keep Gloria from busting my ass.
"Gabi? I don't feel so good." I took a deep breath, grabbing at my throat. "Think I'm gonna puke."
"Don't give me that shit, cabrón," Gabi snapped.
I wasn't faking it. My stomach was bubbling like crazy. Didn't hurt to put on the theatrics, though.
"Gabi?" Gloria leaned into the back seat. "He looks...green."
"Ya haraam!" Rayan shrunk against the van door in disgust. "Don't puke near me!"
"Joder." Gabi slid frustrated hands down her face. Then, she clicked the van's door lock-switch. "Dante hasn't given the green light. The extraction team's window is getting smaller. Go find your boy, Jason. See you back at María PD."
"I owe you one, Gabi!"
I launched myself outta the van and crashed through bushes toward the wall. After years of climbing María Cathedral's clock tower, the chipped bricks and crumbling mortar of the spa's security wall were nothing. I sailed over it, on my way to Dante.
Security cameras swiveled and red lights on keypads winked. Dante hadn't cut the security system. I needed to create a diversion to give Dante more time to work his magic, I told myself, not to direct the attention of murderous Vogel assholes away from him.
"Freeze!"
OK. So, security was seriously fucking tight in this place. Two Vogel security guys appeared behind me, pistols pointed at my head. Charity Graves stalked between them.
Desperate to swivel my eyes toward the foggy basement window to check for Dante, I strained my ears in case I'd hear the tinkle of glass from a shattered window, or the pound of Dante's sneakers on a battered fire escape. One single focus burned in my mind: giving Dante more time to get outta there.
Charity took a step back, ushering the guards toward me. "The guest will get spooked if he finds out there's a trespasser. Kill him."
The guest musta been Zaki. I felt a twinge of dissatisfaction then. I'd wanted to die further along the path to taking down Alcor's rotten empire. I'd wanted to die knowing that Dante was OK.
Staring down a gun barrel, the whole idea of going to Riyadh to seek revenge suddenly seemed like the most dumb vainglorious shit.
The Vogel guys cocked pistols.
I closed my eyes.
A fire alarm rang out from the building with a screech that tore at my ear drums.
I opened an eye.
I was alive. The red keypad light at the basement door winked green in my peripheral vision.
Looked like Dante had just killed the security system and set off the fire alarm, which had unlocked all the doors. The place was gonna be awash with a María PD SWAT Team in minutes.
No time to think of a more elegant solution, I threw myself toward the basement door, confident that the Vogel guys wouldn't open fire in a small corridor and risk accidentally killing each other with ricocheting bullets.
I was wrong. Charity lunged after me, narrowly missing her guards' bullets which embedded into the spa's white wedding-cake marble and rang off steel railings. Maybe these guys figured that death wasn't as bad as Casper Vogel's ire at finding a trespasser during Zaki's visit.
As I skidded through corridors it dawned on me that this was the dumbest idea ever conceived. Who escaped pursuers by running into an enemy building, let alone one about to be swarmed by a SWAT Team?
Now woulda been a fucking great time to black out and rely on the Demon to save me. But whatever holy water the pills contained, that shit was actually working. The Demon slumbered on.
I dodged past boxes and packages lining the corridors, tossing them in my wake. The sound of gunfire echoed behind me.
Somehow I stayed alive.
A scream rang out; one of the men went down, a victim of a stray bullet. They were at least being helpful by maiming each other.
Another guy went down. I hurtled through a thick wooden door, its keypad lock disabled under the screech of the fire alarm. Slamming a stiff bolt-lock in place, I prayed that the door would hold for a minute or so.
Holy shit.
I found myself in a garage. But not any old garage. Lamborghinis, Maseratis, Porsches gleamed in neat rows. Looked like I'd hit Casper Vogel's toybox.
Wasn't gonna lie; hot-wiring cars wasn't my forte. I scanned the garage for a vintage car that might cooperate. Then, my eyes landed on a mound under a black tarp. My heart skipped a beat.
Small, sleek, a dash of red perched on smooth wheels, its gorgeous form teased me. I crept toward it and tugged at the tarp, the black nylon rippling away to the floor, my breath whipping back down my throat in a gasp.
Allahu Akbar.
A motorcycle. Not just any motorcycle. A Ducati super-bike. And, if there was one thing I was really fucking good at, it was hot-wiring super-bikes.
I ripped off the red protective case from the switch connector electronics. A slim black cable followed a winding path from the ignition switch to the engine. Dante's pliers separated the ignition switch's wires from the others in the bundle with ease. I cut the wire, jamming each end into the ignition sockets, and held my breath while I pressed the ignition.
The bike roared into life just as Charity shot the bolt-lock off the garage door, slamming it open. Accelerating hard, I drove at her. She threw herself outta the way with a yelp before she had a chance to aim.
I skidded along the shadowy basement corridor, emerging at the steps to the lawn. The security gate lay in the distance, beyond a winding gravel drive fringed by ornamental gardens.
Vogel men poured out from all sides of the building like ants. Shots rang against the Ducati's glorious red paintwork as I forced it over manicured lawns and sculpted flower beds.
Fuck, it was so good to ride.
Where the hell was the SWAT Team? Where was Dante? He'd disabled the security system, but looked like he hadn't given the green light to storm the place. Zaki was gonna be evacuated by Vogel Tech, and all this shit woulda been for nothing.
There was one way to force Zaki outta the spa, away from Dante.
I turned the bike around and skirted close to the basement door, Vogel guards almost on top of me. The shortest of pauses was all I needed to reach into my jacket, pull out a throwing star, and toss it behind me.
Incendiary.
Boom, baby.
The explosion was deafening. My ears rang as charred splinters of wood and chips of marble showered down on me, the bike taking more damage as I accelerated outta falling debris toward the security gate. It was locked; I was gonna have to climb outta there.
Seconds away from ditching the bike, a thud came from the wrought iron railings of the gate. It shuddered once, twice. Could it be..?
I drove hard at the gate as it toppled forward and crashed into the gravel of the pathway, the nose of a María PD battering ram emerging through the dust on the other side. A SWAT Team van lumbered in. My bike hurtled toward them, directly in their line of fire.
If they found me, they'd know that Gabi and Rayan had let me muscle in on the mission. Gabi, Rayan and me would all feel the pointy end of Sylvia's stiletto heel, and I'd be back in jail for obstruction of a SWAT Team operation.
I swerved through the narrow gap between the van and the security wall, and hit the road to Ángel Bridge before the SWAT team sprayed the entire spa complex with bullets.
I was out. But I had no idea if Dante had made it out with me. Had the chaos of the explosion given him the cover he needed to escape?
I ditched the bike in the tiny María PD parking lot, signing myself in through checkpoint after checkpoint, feeling more sick the closer I got to Sylvia's office. Was Dante still stuck at the spa? Had he alerted the SWAT Team, or, losing time, had they just taken the decision to move in? I didn't wanna to find out.
Loitering outside the office, I could see Gabi's body through the strip of glass in the door. She looked fucking pissed, gesturing animatedly to someone across the office, I guessed Sylvia. They were probably reeling from the reckless shit I'd just pulled.
Maybe they were talking about Dante. Was he still trapped? Was he alive? My throat tightened, my heart smacking against my chest at the thought of having busted into the spa to help Dante, only to leave him hurt and alone to face Zaki's wrath.
Sylvia caught me burning myself up outside the door. She beckoned me inside, her face inscrutable. I swallowed down on a dry throat, tears pricking at my eyes.
What had I done to Dante?
Someone else was in the office, nestled into a chair in the corner, facing the wall. The figure turned as I entered. Black eyes peeked out from under a mat of hair, widening as they locked onto mine. Somehow it took me moments to realize that it was him.
Trembling and pale, but no less otherworldly than he always looked, Dante stepped toward me without his usual grace, as if seeing a vision. I musta looked the same as I stumbled toward him.
Wordlessly, like two magnets, we slid into each other's arms.
"Their guns were pointed at you—"
"I thought you were trapped—"
"I set the off the fire alarm off but—"
"I was so scared I'd left you—"
We uttered frantic whispers, each checking the other for injuries. It hadn't occurred to me that Dante could have seen me from a vantage point at the spa, or from any number of cameras.
"You're OK," he breathed into my neck, before bursting into quiet laughter. "You were amazing, Jay."
"We're amazing together." I pressed my forehead to his, basking in the tingle of his skin against mine. "You know it."
Maybe it was relief, or the adrenaline that was still coursing through him, obliterating his fears. But Dante trailed shaky hands along my jaw, and pressed his lips to mine.
The shock of it made my breath stall. Didn't take long for me to melt into him for another kiss, and another.
"I won't go to Saudi." A kiss to his jaw. "And we'll be together, OK?" Another, to his neck. "Everything will be OK, I promise."
I didn't know if he truly trusted that I'd make everything OK, but that moment Dante musta thought me capable of anything, because he kissed me again, deep and long and perfect.
The spell was broken by the click of heels and a waft of Chanel.
"Jason Torres, you're under arrest for obstruction of police work."
Translations
Ya rab - Arabic, "Oh my God"
Sayidaty - Arabic, "my lady"
Hijo de puta - Spanish, "son of a whore"
Ibn al kalb - Arabic "son of a dog"
niños - Spanish, "children"
cabrón - Spanish, equivalent to English "bastard" in this context
Ya haraam - Arabic expression of pity or shock
Joder - Spanish, "fuck"
Allahu Akbar - Arabic, "God is great"