Wicked Temptation (Nemesis Unlimited) (31 page)

This wasn’t just desire she felt for him. She … cared. Deeply.

It almost felt like …

Like love.

Her mind reared back from the thought. Not love itself. But to love
him,
a man who could shut her out so easily. Who already had one foot out the door. Could she allow herself to walk that path that surely led to heartbreak?

Did she have a choice?

“In fact, next time I—” He suddenly took hold of her arm and led her quickly down the platform. The absolute stillness of his expression meant only one thing: danger. Close at hand.

“What is it?” she asked, her voice pitched low.

“Two Les Grillons men. Don’t look back. We don’t want them knowing we know they’re following us.”

Cold fear clasped the back of her neck, but she kept walking. Their bags were still on the train platform, but that didn’t matter. To her surprise, Marco walked right past a gendarme.

“We could ask for help…”

But Marco shook his head. “They’ve surely already paid the local law to look the other way. Only thing we can do now is outrun them. Soon as we leave the station, they’ll know we’re on to them, so move fast.”

He hastened them down the steps of the station and led them into the outer edge of the town itself. The pair of footsteps behind them picked up their pace, as well.

“Ready to run?” Marco whispered. He threaded his hand with hers.

She nodded.

“Now.”

Then they were off, speeding down the narrow lanes of the town. They threaded their way past carts and pedestrians, men driving wagons and women carrying baskets. She heard cries of outrage behind them as the Grillons men collided with some unlucky passers-by.

A train whistle sounded.

“That’s ours,” she gasped as they continued to run. “We need to get back.”

“This isn’t a footrace to our train,” he said, leading them down an alley. “The Grillons men will do anything to keep us from getting on. We’re running as far as we need until we’ve got a good spot to turn and fight.”

A chill swept down her sweat-slicked back.

“But—”

“No talk. Just run.”

To her surprise, he took them through one of the gates of what had been the medieval wall surrounding the town. It opened onto a dirt path, and farmland. Beyond the fields, she could just make out the train track leading north to Paris. Hayrolls were scattered around the field. Marco ran straight for one of them. There was a cart also in the field, but for some reason, Marco seemed to reject that as a place of cover. They had fifty feet of open ground to traverse before reaching the first hayroll.

She gasped but didn’t slow when the first shot rang out. The ground just to the side of them exploded in a small hail of dirt.

Dear God, she was being
shot
at.

It seemed an eternity, but she and Marco finally reached the hayroll. At which point, he pushed her into a crouch behind it, then crouched down himself. Her heart thudded even harder when he pulled out his gun and took aim at the pursuing Grillons assassins.

Another whine and small explosion of dirt as one of the Grillons men fired. She winced and pressed close to the tightly packed hay. When a moment had passed, she peered out from behind the hayroll to see that the Grillons assassins had tipped over the cart and were using that as their shelter in between shots.

But Marco didn’t shoot back. He seemed to be waiting for something. Then she realized—their bags were back at the train station, and that likely meant that most, if not all, of Marco’s ammunition was in his gun. She counted the chambers in the cylinder of his weapon. He had five shots total, if he wasn’t carrying any bullets in his pockets.

Every one of his bullets were going to have to count.

He waited until a Grillons thug fired, then Marco shot back. Judging by the curse in French, Marco’s aim had been very good—but not quite good enough as two sets of bullets were discharged from the Grillons’ guns.

Four bullets left in Marco’s weapon.

She didn’t have a gun of her own—and wouldn’t know how to fire it anyway, never having had any experience with firearms in her life. And she doubted, even in these circumstances, if she could actually shoot at another human being. But there had to be something she could do.

Her gaze fell on an empty bottle lying in the hayroll’s shadow. The remains of some farmer’s lunch, no doubt. She grabbed the bottle, not entirely certain what she planned to do with it. Impossible to sneak around behind the Grillons thugs and hit them with the bottle—she didn’t have enough cover, and would likely be riddled with bullets halfway before she reached the men.

Yet there was some way to use the bottle …

She waited for a pause in the assassins’ shots, then poked out just enough from behind the hayroll to throw the bottle up into the air.

Just as she’d hoped, one of the killers thought she and Marco were attacking. The man broke cover and shot the bottle as it arced in the air—leaving himself exposed.

Marco fired. His bullet pierced the assassin’s chest. The thug went down before the last pieces of broken glass hit the ground.

Both she and Marco retreated behind the hayroll. While illness clogged her throat at seeing another man killed, logically she understood that if the thug hadn’t been brought down, he would’ve killed both her and Marco. It was a difficult rationalization, but she clung to it in the midst of terror.

Marco nodded at her.

Another train whistle sounded. It would be leaving for Paris in just a moment. Yet she and Marco were still pinned down by the other Grillons assassin, who fired now with greater speed.

She looked around for something else to throw at the thug and serve as a distraction. But a handful of hay wasn’t going to do much.

Down the slope of the field, the train started to leave the station, slowly at first. Soon, it would pick up speed.

She watched as Marco shot once at the remaining Grillons assassin. And as soon as the man returned fire, Marco let off another round. The man screamed.

“Time to run again,” Marco said. He grabbed hold of her hand once more, and together, they ran down the field toward the train tracks leading out of town.

She jumped when more bullets whizzed past. A glance back revealed the Grillons thug kneeling on the ground, one hand clutching his wounded thigh, and the other pointing his gun at them as they fled.

Tucking her violin case under her arm snugly, she ran full out toward the tracks. She tore her hand out of Marco’s grasp to pull up her skirts and give herself more freedom of movement. She ran faster over the fields, Marco just steps ahead of her. More gunfire exploded.

None of the enemy’s bullets hit. Yet she didn’t feel comfortable until they finally reached the low fence between the farm and the tracks. Marco leaped the fence and helped her over just as the train began to gain speed. Marco jumped up onto the small platform between cars, then pulled her up.

She bent over, gasping, but lifted her head enough to see the field vanish, leaving one dead and one wounded Grillons assassin behind.

He guided her into the seating compartment, tucking his gun away. They received some curious looks from the other passengers, what with both she and Marco panting and windblown, and probably smelling of gunpowder. She didn’t care. They’d gotten away. For now.

“It isn’t going to stop, is it?” she asked once they sat.

He didn’t insult her by telling her everything was going to be fine, or feed her some other palliatives. Instead, he said, “Not until the job is done.”

The fuse, which had been lit long ago, was burning lower and lower. Until the inevitable explosion. She had to wonder if she and Marco would be safe, or if they’d be caught in the blast.

*   *   *

Odd to be back in Paris again. It felt as though she’d been gone for an eternity, but it couldn’t have been more than a few days. Yet while the city was as glamorous and grimy as ever, everything had changed.

The last time she’d arrived in Paris, a powerful crime syndicate hadn’t wanted her dead. Now danger crept in every shadow, in each alley, in every sudden movement she caught from the corner of her eye. She’d thought she’d entered a new world with Nemesis, but this was far beyond even that. Her only constants were her violin and Marco.

But he, too, unbalanced her. Now they were more than client and Nemesis agent. They were lovers for now, and perhaps when they returned to London. And they were something else—though
what,
exactly, they were to each other, she couldn’t fathom.

And her heart, her traitorous heart, that murmured to her of feelings he couldn’t reciprocate.

Oh, God. Did she
love
him?

She … did. He knew her better than anyone. Understood her. Accepted her as she was. And he was a man of dark honor and principle. Supremely capable, but with a core of sensitivity he likely didn’t show to many. But he had shown her. Making it all the more impossible for her to ignore the growing feelings she had for him.

Nothing could ever come of it. And she would never tell him. It would only serve to push him away faster.

Right now, he was her protector. She wasn’t too proud to acknowledge that she needed his protection, more than ever.

Instead of disembarking the train via the platform, he led her onto the tracks, then through an exit used only by the station employees. They emerged into an alley crowded with cargo-laden drays, and men shouting at one another as goods were taken from freight cars and loaded onto wagons for delivery. The ground was slick and muddy, and the air was thick with the smell of horseflesh and smoke.

She kept her gaze alert for any signs that the working men were disguised Grillons agents. Marco did the same. But no one shot at them, and as they pushed on from the alley onto a main thoroughfare, nobody followed, either.

“Where are we headed?” she asked as Marco walked purposefully away from the station.

“Old safe house,” he answered. “Intelligence stopped using it years ago when they thought the location was compromised.”

“But it’s secure now?”

“Been empty for five years. If French intelligence had been keeping eyes on it, they’ve long since stopped.”

For all the supposed romance of Paris, she didn’t like walking its boulevards anymore. Not when every shadow could conceal the means of her or Marco’s death. She still couldn’t erase from her mind the image of the Grillons assassin’s chest, red with fresh blood. Too much like Devere. She wished she’d never seen what happened to the human body when shot. That was knowledge that couldn’t be unlearned.

Illness took many lives. But so did violence.

Marco seemed entirely unmoved by the fact that he’d killed someone. He appeared more concerned with keeping her safe. Two sides to the same coin. A complex man—thoughtful, passionate lover, and cool-eyed operative. Which was the real him? Both.

They moved farther from the station, heading into a suburban neighborhood comprised mainly of homes and small workshops. He turned down a narrow lane—making her nervous, but she had to trust him—then stopped outside the boarded-up door of an old, derelict building. The words
L. CAILLARD, FABRICANT DE JOUETS
were painted in fading letters onto the brick façade.

Marco glanced up and down the lane. It was empty. Quickly, he pried back the boards covering the door. After testing the door itself and finding it locked, he speedily picked it, then let himself and Bronwyn in. He closed the boards behind them, as well as the door itself.

Inside, light filtered through in dusty bars from the partially covered windows. Bronwyn’s footsteps left tracks in the grime that had accumulated on the floor. Shelves lined the room, and on the shelves were dolls in moth-eaten lace dresses, rusted toy soldiers, and cobweb-filmed wooden horses. A toy shop, or so it had once pretended to be. Now it was an abandoned pretend toy shop.

Marco walked to one of the shelves and pulled the head off a slumped puppet. A thin piece of metal stuck out from the bottom of the head, and he inserted it into a piece of decorative molding on the wall. There was a click, and one of the shelves swung open, revealing a darkened hallway.

“Reminds me of Nemesis headquarters,” she murmured.

“Not a surprise.” He entered the hallway, and she followed him. “Nemesis learned some of its tricks from me, and I learned mine from Intelligence. I, Simon, and Lazarus started the whole Nemesis operation six years ago.”

“That wasn’t so long past.” She was newly wed six years ago, and utterly unaware that there might be a Nemesis, let alone people in need of them.

“Been a long six years.” They moved from the hallway into a single room that held a bed, a table, a washstand, and not much else. The moths had extended their efforts to the curtains that hung in the lone window.

A singularly unimpressive room.

“I was the one who scouted the headquarters’ location,” he continued, surveying the space, “and I installed the secret door. Acquired my trade from Intelligence. Which gives us such lovely sites as this one.” He ran a finger over the table, leaving a trail behind in the dust. “Pretty and luxurious, it isn’t, but it’s secure. Doubt anyone in Paris even remembers this place exists.”

“And thank God for it.” She sat down on the bed, and the springs complained. “Being shot at ranks as my new least favorite activity.”

In the half-light of the safe-house room, his expression turned grim. “Wish I could go back and kill that second bastard.”

“I don’t.” She rubbed her arms and looked away. “It … I don’t like it when you’re violent.”

“Me, either.” He crossed the room to crouch down in front of her. “But if I ever had scruples against it, I wouldn’t be here now. Neither would you.”

“I know. I just wish … it didn’t have to be so … ugly.”

“You’ve seen what the world’s like now. It’s a damned ugly place.”

She finally turned her gaze to him. “Do we have to make it worse?”

“Survival doesn’t mean making things worse. It means we live to see another day.”

“I wonder if Les Grillons rationalizes it that way, too.”