Black Scorpion (52 page)

“Complete the trade, Little Brother!” Dracu raged, still holding Scarlett over the railing. “Your woman for your relic! Come on, I don't have all night!”

Michael watched him push her further over from twenty feet away, too far to mount a charge or do anything before Vlad released his hold and let her go. The darkness broken only by the spill of emergency lights left both of them in the shadows lit by the splash of flames rising off the Strip.

“You want love, you can have it! I want power, I want
life
, I want
the relic
!” Dracu cried out in a rage, so intense it drew a roar from the tigers straining the limits of their tethers. “That's why it was never truly yours to possess. You're not worthy of its power. You're no Caesar! You're weak, predictable, so much less than I'd thought you'd be. You disappoint me, Michele, just as you must have disappointed our father; a weak, frightened, deceitful soul back then, just as you are now. A victim yet again. You can learn something from me, you truly can. I'll never be a victim again. I'd rather die.”

Thoughts flooded through Michael's mind; clashing, colliding, contradicting each other. All lived out in a moment's time that defined everything that had become his life and his fate.

“Choose, Little Brother!” Dracu taunted. “Choose!”

Michael climbed back to his feet, conscious of the tethered tigers snapping at him, ignoring them even though they were dangerously close. He started across the floor toward Dracu, meeting Scarlett's fearful gaze, trying to reassure her as he reached down toward his shirt.

“No, Michael,”
he saw her mouth in the flickering light of the flames beyond.
“No…”

“I've chosen,” he said to Vlad Dracu, anyway.

Michael tore open the buttons on his shirt, exposing the harness Scarlett had given him so he might always wear the relic over his heart. Hesitating no longer, he reached toward the slot tailored to the relic's precise specifications. But it seemed to resist his efforts and it took all Michael's strength to finally pluck it free. Taking the medallion in his grasp, ready to give it to his half brother.

Before he could hand it over, though, Scarlett reached up with a single hand and dug her nails deep into Vlad's face, raking downward across his cheek and splitting his paper-thin flesh in four neat lines.

Dracu's hands lurched upward in reflex and pain, Scarlett released from his grasp in the process. She dropped, clawing for the rail but missing and just managing to latch a single hand onto the ledge to which the rail was fastened. Michael rushed to her, slamming an elbow into the face of a still shocked Vlad and then hurling him to the floor, pocketing his medallion in the process.

Michael pressed his torso against the railing with hand stretched over the steel, reaching down toward Scarlett who was groping desperately for the ledge with her free hand to join the other there. But the wind this high up had caught her, shifting her legs about and keeping her from finding a second handhold.

Michael canted his own body over as far as it would go, fingers dangling just short of her. “Reach up! Take my hand!”

Her free hand clutched at the air above her, flailing for purchase. “I … can't.”

“You can! Trust me!”

She continued struggling to lift her second hand, the one in place on the ledge starting to slip.

“It's over, my brother,” Michael heard from behind him.

He stole a glance that way, saw Vlad rising from the floor not far from where Michael had smashed his phone to pieces. His half brother raised his pistol in a trembling hand, as blood dripped from the four neat gashes forged down his cheek all the way to the floor.

“Help me!” Michael said to him. “I'll give you anything you want,
everything
, just help me!”

“I already did, Little Brother, years ago when I birthed the Tyrant in you. But it wasn't enough, so I win,” Vlad said, with surprising calm. “You don't have to give me anything. It's already mine.”

Spoken an instant before the largest of the tigers pounced on him from behind. Having somehow broken free of its tether, it took Vlad down with claws and teeth already digging in, spraying a thick curtain of blood into the air.

Michael turned away, back toward Scarlett. Starting to lower his body over the rail, risking his balance to expand his reach to her. Hearing that rail creak and then feeling the concrete mounts start to give under the additional strain of his weight, as he started to lower a second hand to join the first, until his shoulder balked at the effort and he gasped in pain.

“No, Michael, don't!”

“I'm nothing without you!”

“You'll die!”

“I won't. Just grab my hand!”

Her eyes fastened on his, the life draining out of them, as he felt himself almost slipping with his hand still outstretched, nearly to her.

“Take my hand!”

“I can't!”

“You can!”

Scarlett gritted her teeth and finally got her free hand stretching up in line with Michael's. Grazing his fingers when she slipped just enough to make him lurch farther downward to grab hold of her hand in a quivery grasp.

“I've got you, I've got you, goddamnit!”

But his final lunge had been too much for the railing to take. The first of the rivets bolting it to the concrete burst free with the force of gunshots, further weakening the rail that was now wobbling under his weight.

“I've got you, baby,” he still said. “Just hang on tight and give me your second hand. Come on, you can do it.”

Scarlett looked up, her legs swaying in the wind beneath her. “Michael…” Spoken on an empty wisp of air that barely reached him, as she watched the rail start to cant over the edge just moments away from tearing free altogether.

“We can do this!” Michael insisted.

“We'll both die.”

“No! I can do this, I can save you! You've got to let me save you!”

“No, Michael,” she said, tears rolling down her cheeks now.

“Give me your other hand!”

“I can't.”

“You can!”

“I won't, I won't let both of us die. Let go, Michael. Please.”

“No!”

“Let go. For both of us.”

“Give me your hand or I'll come down there and get it!”

Scarlett looked up at him, their stares meeting as she eased her first hand from the ledge. Her expression the emptiest of any he'd ever seen when she pulled her second hand from his grasp.

The moment froze in Michael's mind, seen hazily through a dreamlike cloud, a sight too horrible to bear. Scarlett seemed to hang in the air for a brief moment, their gazes meeting and holding again, before the night swallowed her and her shrinking shape dropped into the flame splattered night below.

*   *   *

After pulling himself back up over the teetering rail, Michael didn't turn away from the sight below, not right away. He continued to stare downward, as if hoping Scarlett might magically reappear. What just happened wasn't real,
couldn't
be real, any more than the memories of the massacre of his family at his half brother's hands all those years ago.

Michael finally backed off, still reluctant to turn away as if that would acknowledge the awful reality he refused to accept. The stairwell door burst open ahead of a flood of Seven Sins security personnel and animal handlers armed with tranquilizer guns they fired in a continuous stream at the still tethered tigers. The big one who'd broken loose, now soaked in Vladimir Dracu's blood, charged them and was met by a fusillade of actual bullets fired by the security guards.

After the animal was down, they rushed toward Michael with guns still drawn.

“Mr. Tiranno?”

Michael continued to gaze out into the night, toward nothing.

“It's okay, Mr. Tiranno,” the guard said, stretching a tentative hand out to take Michael's shoulder, while other guards tended to Vlad. “We've got everything under control. It's over.”

Michael winced and finally turned from the night. “No, it isn't.”

 

P
ART
S
EVEN

AFTER

 

Without victory there is no survival.

Winston Churchill

 

ONE HUNDRED THIRTEEN

I
NDIANA

Michael stood in the back of the cortege, the mourners crowded around Scarlett Swan's grave site beneath a sea of black umbrellas to shield them from the drizzle of rain. Michael stood in the open, well back, not even feeling the drops soak his hair and clothes. Alexander had left him to himself, lurking somewhere close, but out of sight to provide the space Michael needed.

It was my fault.

He didn't shirk from his responsibility, mourning not just Scarlett but the fact that he'd failed to heed her warning their final time together.

“We're tempting it,
I'm
tempting it by being close to you. There's no place for me in this, no place for anything that comes between you and that relic. That's why it must be worn against the skin, close to the heart.”

So she'd made him the harness and now he would indeed think of her every time it held the relic safely in place, as it was now. Michael had promised to keep her safe, too, to protect her, to make sure nothing ever came between them. And now he had failed, lied, and Scarlett had paid the ultimate price for that. He should have listened to her warning and sent her away, to someplace safe far away from him. Her suspicions and fears had been proven right, but they'd been spoken with a kind of grim acceptance, as if Scarlett knew there was nothing Michael could've done to change anything.

Because of fate, the fate he was destined to fulfill.

Michael felt the outline of the relic's gold beneath his shirt. He loved and hated it at the same time. Loved it for the destiny he now understood and accepted, hated it for the price that destiny had brought with it.

At the grave site, Michael heard the priest reading from the Bible, something about finding meaning and purpose in death. That's what he needed to do here to make Scarlett's death mean something. Not just to ease his own guilt, but to justify her faith in him and do everything he could to make a difference in the world.

“Haven't I saved your life twice already?”

But he couldn't save it a third time, any more than his father could return to his first true love in Romania. He was the Tyrant now and forever, a tyrant for good. His vast resources and power all focused toward the singular purpose of honoring Scarlett's memory and sacrifice. And no one would, or could, stop him. Not Vladimir Dracu, Max Price, or anyone else. Because he was the Tyrant, reborn into something entirely different than conjured by his dreams or his nightmares.

“One might say being a knight in Armani armor is bad for business,”
Naomi had said to him barely a week ago, that felt more like a lifetime.

And so that was what he would be. A Tyrant Knight.

“Michael,”
he thought he heard Scarlett call, expecting to see her when he twisted around.

But no one was there.

“Mr. Tiranno?”

Michael swung back, not realizing the funeral service had ended, the participants scattering across the cemetery lawn. A middle-age couple stood before him holding hands, their eyes red with too many tears already shed.

“We're Scarlett's parents,” the woman said, squeezing her husband's hand tighter. “She told us so much about you. She loved you very much.”

Michael swallowed hard, nodded. “Thank you,” was all he could say.

Scarlett's father reached inside his suit pocket and came out with a Seven Sins stationery envelope. “She said if … anything ever happened to her to give you this.”

Michael reached out to take it, for a brief moment holding the envelope in unison before Scarlett's father let it go.

“I'm glad we got this chance to meet,” Michael told them both. “I loved her, too. Very much.”

*   *   *

Michael waited until he was back in the car with Alexander to open the letter. It had started to rain harder and drops dappled the windshield, quickly closing off sight of the outside world as Michael unfolded the page of Seven Sins stationery contained in the envelope.

Michael:

If you're reading this, it means something bad has happened. I know what you must be feeling, but always remember what we both know about fate now. You should feel no guilt or sadness, at least not for long, because whatever's happened was as inevitable as you coming to possess the relic to begin with. And that's what this note is about, to share something I never knew how to say before. But it's something you need to know, no matter how hard it may be to believe. The molecular chemists who analyzed the relic weren't just unable to establish its chronological origins, they found something that makes no sense … or too much. They found something
organic
, Michael. Your relic is
alive.

She signed it “Love always,” Michael reading that final salutation while grasping the medallion beneath his shirt, as the tears began spilling from his eyes.

 

ONE HUNDRED FOURTEEN

S
ARDINIA

Aldridge Sterling returned to his yacht aboard the launch. He'd spent most of the day making arrangements meant to forever erase his connection to Black Scorpion. Vladimir Dracu was reportedly dead, Black Scorpion's cells being eradicated across the globe.

Everything going according to plan.

Sterling shorting the U.S. dollar hadn't paid off, but the profits he'd made in gaming stocks that had plummeted after the explosions throughout Las Vegas more than made up for it. But even that told only part of the story, a small part. The strategic fall of Black Scorpion's forces across the world had left him with a vast sum of invested capital, distributed among hundreds of offshore accounts, he no longer had to share or account for. A multibillion dollar fortune that was now his free and clear, and with no record for the authorities to trace.