Ultimate Weapon (McClouds & Friends #6)(148)

The shocked gaze of the man holding the gun on him skittered over to the spectacle. Val felt the relentless pressure of the gun barrel against his head waver for an instant—

Val flung himself backward against Henry, ignoring the flare of pain, forcing the man to shift his bulk, brace himself—

Now!

Val ran up the wall in three big steps, and flipped his body over Henry’s head. Henry shouted, and tumbled backward. They crashed to the ground together. The impact knocked Henry’s grip loose.

He grappled for Val, flipping him over with a roar of rage, and pinned Val beneath his huge, muscular bulk. Val heaved, struggled…and pushed with his thumb against the stone on the ring he wore, Tamar’s ring, that released the spike. Short, but razor sharp and wickedly pointed.

Henry’s grip slipped on Val’s bloody wrist. Val wrenched it loose with a shout—and stabbed the small spike into Henry’s carotid artery.

Gouts of hot blood splattered him, rhythmically. Henry choked, convulsed, stared down into his face, a look of betrayal in his eyes.

Val crawled out from under him, grabbed Henry’s gun, and clambered to his feet, blood-drenched and swaying.

He pointed it at the man whose job it had been to hold the gun to his head and asked a silent question with his eyes.

The gunman shook his head in reply. His wide eyes darted, from Georg’s corpse to Henry’s, to Tamar, and back to the gun in Val’s hand. The place was silent, but for Val’s breath sawing in and out of his mouth, and the moaning whisper of the wind. Heavy brocade drapes billowed and swirled. Candle flames leaped and flared.

He lifted his hands, pointing his gun in the air, and began to back warily toward the door, boots crunching and sliding on the broken glass. He stumbled over his colleague’s dead, bloody body. Caught himself, without even looking down.

“I’m gone,” the gunman said. “I’m out of here. I was never even here at all.”

Val nodded, and waited until the other man had slunk out the door. His running footsteps retreated. The silence was absolute.

Val turned to Tamar. She sagged in her ropes, eyes closed, face deathly pale. Blood streamed from her nose. More trickled from the corners of her mouth. Georg lay still, though his feet still twitched. Bloody froth foamed from his mouth. His face was blue, tongue protruding.

She’d pulled some poison trick. A kamikaze move. Ah, God.

All the times in his life that he had numbed himself to endure some atrocious thing had not prepared him for this. He was a helpless child again. Staring at the end of the world, lying on the bathroom floor.

Then, to his astonishment, her eyes fluttered open. They focused somewhere beyond him, and widened. She sucked in a bubbling breath.

“Watch out!” she cried.

He jerked to the side, and the bullet grazed his hip, plowing a deep furrow to join his other wounds. Novak grinned from his pool of blood on the floor, thin neck straining, and lifted his Walther PPK to try again.

Val emptied Henry’s Taurus into the old man and kept pulling the trigger compulsively even after the gun was empty.

He glanced wildly around the room. “Anyone else? Anyone?”

No one moved. No one spoke.

Val stumbled over to the dead man, the young one, who lay on his back with Val’s knife sticking out of his throat. He yanked it out and lunged toward Tamar.

He put his arm around her slender body as he reached up to saw at the rope. Just a few passes of the blade severed it, and her slight weight dropped into his arms. She was covered with tiny rivulets of blood. Small wounds, from the shards of flying glass.

He gathered her up, looking around for a place to lay her down that was not strewn with glass. There was none.

He dropped to his knees and cradled her.

Her eyes opened. Her gaze was still sharp. “Don’t…k-kiss me,” she croaked in a halting whisper. “I’m poisonous.”

Despair slammed through him. “Oh, f*ck,” he said, his voice high and shaking. “You are killing me, Tamar.”

Her lips twitched. “Melodramatic,” she whispered. “Idiot.”

Their eyes met, full of pain and longing. She hitched in a shallow breath and said her daughter’s name with a whispering sigh. “Rachel,” she said. “András has her.”

Her eyes commanded him back into action.

“Yes,” he said thickly, smoothing back her sweat-stiffened hair. “I understand.” He pressed a kiss to her damp, icy forehead. “There’s glass everywhere,” he said, helpless. “I don’t know where to put you.”

“Fuck the glass,” she croaked. “Get…Rachel. Move your ass.”

He cleared a spot on the rug as best he could with his boot and laid her down gently. Then he forced his shaking legs to bear him over to the bloody carnage on the ground to scrounge for loaded weapons.

Rachel. The last thing that he could do for her.





Chapter


29




Connor stared out the windshield. His eyes burned like coals.

The atmosphere in the taxi had the tension of a bomb countdown.

There was nothing to say. It had already been said, repeated, hashed out, torn apart, attacked, picked to pieces. They were so on edge that anything anyone said annoyed the shit out of all the others, so they had collectively subsided into a gloomy, self-protective silence.