Seeds of Iniquity (In the Company of Killers, #4)(33)

Niklas jumps to his feet, sending the wheeled chair rolling away behind him, but he doesn’t go any farther.

“Victor—”

“Just wait,” Victor says to me, still staring at the screen, but even his nerves are beginning to unravel a little, I can tell by how much wider his eyes are now than they were moments ago.

Dorian, attempting to back away from her with his hands up in surrender, trips over his chair and nearly falls, but catches himself just before.

“What the—you crazy f*cking bitch!”

A muffled shot zips through the space and Dorian’s body jerks to the right, his left hand coming up to cover the wound on his shoulder; blood seeps through his fingers. He yells out and stumbles backward, tripping over the chair again but hitting the floor this time. Struggling on his way as he backs toward the wall, he looks up at the camera, at us, and I want desperately to rush down there and help him, but I know that I can’t.

“You f*cking shot me!” He glares up at the tall blonde beauty standing over him with his own gun; waves of pain rolling through him, manipulating his features. “Stupid bitch! You f*cking shot me!”

“Confess,” she demands with the gun pointed at his face again, “or you die and Tessa dies.”

“I did! I confessed!” He finally makes it to the wall and throws himself against it, needing it to hold him up. His long legs in dark pants are stretched out before him with black boots on the ends—between them are a pair of black six-inch heels.

“Last chance,” Nora says, looking down at Dorian over the barrel of the gun and the silencer attached to its end.

Dorian’s wide eyes dart to and from Nora’s face and her finger on the trigger.

It takes us mere seconds to get to the room, punch in the code and burst inside with guns drawn. But Nora doesn’t flinch; she keeps her eyes on Dorian and the gun pointed at his head.

“If any one of you shoots me,” she warns, “there’s an eighty/twenty chance that my finger will squeeze this trigger the rest of the way and that wall behind Dorian Flynn will look like a Jackson Pollock.”

None of us makes a move.

“CONFESS!” Nora says stridently, and although I’m standing far behind her and can only see her back, I know her face is twisted by furious demand.

I look at Victor standing next to me with his gun pointed at Nora. I know he could take her out with a single shot and somehow keep Dorian from getting killed. I know that Victor is better than anyone in this room when it comes to aim and timing and speed. But he doesn’t want to shoot Nora. He wants to know Dorian’s secret as much as Nora wants him to confess it.

Niklas drops his gun to his side—his is the only one without a silencer.

Reluctantly, I do the same.

A thuddup sound echoes through the room.

“FUUUCCCK!” Dorian cries out again as Nora puts another bullet in the opposite shoulder. “Fucking bitch!” he roars, doubling over with both hands covering his wounds, his arms crossed in an X over his chest.

I start to move forward, but Victor pushes me back with the length of his arm jutting out at his side.

“ALL RIGHT! FUCK! ALL RIGHT! I’LL TELL YOU!” Dorian raises his head, pressing it against the wall. His chest rises and falls rapidly underneath his black shirt. Sweat has beaded on his forehead, dripping down the sides of his face. He can hardly keep his body upright as his back begins to slouch farther; only the soles of his boots grounded against the floor, his knees bent, keeping him from sliding down all the way.

“I’m an independent contractor for U.S. Intelligence,” Dorian confesses to the shock of everyone in the room—all but Nora, who looks proud and strangely relieved. He looks across the room at us. At Victor. “But it’s not what you think,” he says, fighting through the pain. “I’m not here to betray you, Faust”—he pauses to catch his breath—“I never was…it’s not what you think…”

Victor says nothing. Not even his demeanor appears to have changed, but on the inside I feel it’s a much different story.

“Put the gun on the floor and kick it aside,” Victor tells Nora, his gun still trained on the back of her head.

Nora’s arms raise out at her sides in surrender; the gun sliding down onto her index finger as she releases her grip on the handle. Slowly she takes two steps backward away from Dorian, crouches, and then places the gun on the floor. She rises back into a stand and kicks it gently away from the easy reach of her or Dorian.

With her hands still raised she turns around, a smile dancing on her face, her long, silky blonde hair tumbling over her shoulders and partially covering one brown eye.

“Niklas,” Victor says without moving his hard gaze from Nora, “tie her up. Hands and feet and torso. And make certain there is no way she can get out of it.”

“Gladly,” Niklas says with his trademark smirk and then leaves to get whatever he plans to use to tie her up with.

Minutes later, Nora is bound to her chair so tight by several yards of paracord that the only thing she can seem to move anymore are her fingers, and her head.

No one said anything while Niklas tied her up, and still the air is rife with silence several minutes later. Dorian, clearly in a lot of pain from two gunshot wounds, even manages to keep his discomfort confined to facial expressions and body language.