Forged in Ash (26 page)

“Just kill me and be done with it,” Jillian said, without straightening or opening her eyes. “They’ll shoot me as soon as you turn me over, so you’ll be as guilty as them when I die.”

“They’re not going to kill you. They just want to ask you some questions.”

“Is that what they told you?” Jillian found enough strength to laugh. “And you believed them? They’re lying. Everything that comes out of their mouths is a lie. They’ll kill me as soon as they have me alone. Just as they tried to do before. Just as they did to my brother. Just as they did to my children.”

Kaity’s hand tightened on her arm and drew her forward and down. Jillian concentrated on remaining conscious and upright. Although why bother? She should let go. Let her head spin up to the stars and her body tumble down the stairs. If she was lucky, Kaity wouldn’t be able to cheat gravity.

If she was lucky, the fall would kill her.

And then lady luck stripped that final hope from her.

“We’re there,” Kaity said, drawing Jillian to a stop and holding her upright by slipping an arm around her waist.

Jillian felt a breath of despair, before it evaporated beneath the lethargy. She opened her eyes, fought to focus. The blurred image of a metal door took shape.

“Who killed your family?” Kaity asked, stopping in front of the door.

Jillian stared at the gray metal, watched it disappear in a flock of dancing black dots. “Your boyfriend and his buddies.”

“When? Where?”

The questions came from a distance. Vaguely Jillian felt the arm tighten. She stared at the ground and watched her blue-and-white pin-striped sneakers shuffle forward.

“The guys didn’t kill your family,” Kaity said. “I don’t know what happened, but I know them. And they don’t kill innocents.”

“Then you don’t know them as well as you think,” Jillian whispered, the effort draining the last of her strength.

The grating
screech
of metal being wrenched apart sounded.

The black tunnel that had dimmed her ears moved into her eyes. Blue sky and grass spun around her, and was swallowed by a bright white haze. The white haze shrunk, framed itself with black.

“Rawls! Thank God! She’s in bad shape. I barely got her down the stairs.”

Jillian’s arms were lifted and something hard pressed against her belly. Suddenly she was light as breath, floating.

“I think she has a concussion, and her eye’s almost swollen shut. Here’s the ice pack. You’re going to check her out, right? She should see a doctor.”

Jillian wanted to laugh. But it was too much effort. A doctor? Like these lying, murdering bastards would tend to her before they killed her.

“I’m handing her off to Cos and staying to help you with the Five-0,” a different voice said. A male voice with a soothing Southern twang.

“No. You need to go with her. You have the medical training.”

“Now Kaity—”

“You’re going with her, Rawls. I’m dead serious. She needs medical treatment. I can handle the cops on my own.”

“Cos will keep an eye on her until—”

“You go with her, or I’m calling the cops and telling them you have her. I’ll give them Zane’s plate number. At least I know the cops will take her to a doctor.”

“Christ, Kait, we don’t have time for this.” The Southern twang was gone, sheer male exasperation throbbed in its place.

The unmistakable sound of a minivan’s sliding door opening sounded and memories engulfed her.

“Take those cleats off Wes. You ripped chunks out of the carpet last time you climbed in.”

“Are we going for ice cream, Mom? Kenya’s dad took us to Baskin-Robbins.”

“That’s the plan. Buckle your sister in.”

“She won’t stop wiggling.”

“Lizzy—”

“Oh God, she’s crying!”

That lovely, floating feeling abruptly stopped. Something hard wrapped around her waist.

“What the hell’s taking so long?”

She recognized Marcus Simcosky’s hard voice and struggled to open her eyes. The bench seat of a minivan came into view.

Flash.

The slow sway of Wes’s hanging head, the flash of his white-gold hair.

“
No. No. No.
”

The sudden searing agony cleared her head.

“Rawls, do something!” Kaity sounded panicked.

Wes’s blond hair morphed into black. The chubby cheeks of childish innocence shifted into the hard, sculpted face of pure masculinity.

Marcus Simcosky.

And he was reaching for her.

No!
Adrenaline hit. She swung her bound hands at his looming head.

“Son of a bitch.” The words were bit out, and then her arms were caged and she was dragged into the van and anchored beside him. “I’ve got her,” he snapped. “Go.”

To her right, from her good eye she saw a flash of movement, and a familiar-looking man with blond hair and blue eyes swung into the van, settling on the bench seat beside her. The sliding door slammed shut.

“What the hell, Rawls?” Simcosky’s voice rose. “You were supposed to stay behind.”

“Tell that to Kait. Go, damn it. The Five-0’ve arrived. We need to ghost it.”

The van started to move. Jillian’s head spun.

“Stop the van,” Simcosky yelled from her right.

The roar slammed into Jillian’s head and sparked a throbbing so vicious it brought the nausea surging up. She jolted forward, dropped her head between her splayed knees and heaved. And heaved. And heaved.

She heard swearing, and a hand cupped the back of her neck, lingered there.

“This is why I came,” the blond, blue-eyed man with the Southern twang said.

He had a name. Jillian knew he had a name, but she gave up trying to remember it.

“Kait was worried about her, with reason, I might add. She said she’d call the Five-0 and give them our plates if I didn’t come along to take care of her.”

“Kait spends so much time worrying about other people, she forgets to worry about herself,” Marcus Simcosky snapped. “Zane, stop the van. I’ll wait with Kait.”

The van kept moving.

“Goddamn it,” Simcosky’s voice rose again. “Zane—”

“The cops are already here,” a calm voice broke in. “We can’t chance them catching sight of her. Besides, the doc told you to lay off that leg for a couple of days.”

Swearing broke out to her right.

“Zane, hand back your water. She’s dehydrated as hell. We need to get fluids in her. Hey there, sweetheart.” The voice took on a gentle, crooning tone. “Let’s sit you back so I can check out that shiner.”

Hands took hold of her shoulders and eased her up and back.

“You called Mac? Right?” the man with the gentle hands and soothing voice said, his voice growing more distant with each beat of her heart. “Call him back; tell him to get hold of Radar. I need…”

She awoke slowly, skimming along consciousness to the drone of masculine voices.

“How do we know she’s not faking it?”

“Because I can tell, and she’s not.”

She recognized the one voice, the Southern one. Although it was missing the gentleness and croon. The other voice—the cold, hard, and brutal one—was not familiar. She wanted to keep it that way. Best to keep her eyes closed and head down. Simcosky’s girlfriend had said they wanted to question her. Since she wasn’t dead, the blond bimbo must have been right, which meant the longer they had to wait for their answers, the longer her lifespan.

So she lay there, still as possible, as the urge to move, to stretch, to ease her battered muscles became a constant itch.

“Did Kait make out okay with the five-oh?”

“Yeah.” It was Marcus Simcosky’s voice. But less loud and angry. “She covered for us.”

“Told you. She’s quick on her feet.”

“When the fuck’s she going to wake up?” the hard, gritty voice demanded, and Jillian knew he was talking about her.

Fingers touched her neck, lingered. Jillian fought to regulate her breathing. Could he tell from her pulse she was awake? The thought sent her blood crashing through her veins. Certainly he could feel
that
. Panicked, she tensed, ready to launch herself up and at him, when the hand fell away.

“She’s awake. You might as well open your eye, sweet cheeks. We’re not going to hurt you.”

Liar.

His voice might be gentle and his hands soothing, but he was one of them. A murdering, lying bastard like Zane Winters and Marcus Simcosky.

Still, it was useless to keep pretending. Best to face her fear and enemy. With a deep, ragged breath she opened her eyes. Or eye. Her vision cut off to the left of her nose.

She was lying down, something soft beneath her head. Her right eye, which was still working, although blurrier than normal, had a hazy view of brown leather—maybe the back of a couch. She couldn’t see anything to her left. When she tried to force her left eye open, a molten poker pierced it. She froze, and the piercing pain settled into a deep, raw ache. After a moment, she released her pent-up breath, reached up, and gingerly touched her eye. The cold of an ice pack chilled her fingers. Holding the ice pack in place, she rolled her head
until she could see to the left. A tall blond man with concerned blue eyes came into view. She recognized him from the television and papers. He was one of the men responsible for Russ’s death.

That concern was just another lie. Like the lies they told about her brother to the FBI and the reporters.

An IV stand caught her attention. Frowning, she forced her blurry gaze to focus on it, to follow the plastic line that ran from the clear bag down to her arm and into the needle that penetrated the vein beneath her elbow.

She jolted up and swayed. Once her head stopped swimming she tried to tear off the tape that held the needle in place.

“Easy.” The blond SEAL stepped around the IV and behind her head. A hand came down on her shoulder and pushed her flat, then he caught the hand scrabbling at the IV needle and pinned it against the couch behind her head. “It’s just fluids.”

And she was supposed to take his word for that?

“Take it out!” Her voice rose shrilly.

“No.” His voice was calm. “You’re dehydrated.”

She tried to reach the needle with her other hand. He caught that one as well.

“Don’t make me bind your hands again.” While his voice might have been calm and gentle, there was no give there.

Her breath locked in her throat, Jillian subsided. What was really in the bag? Some kind of poison? Would it make her death look like an accident?

“I promise you. The only thing in that bag is fluids. To hydrate you. We aren’t going to hurt you.”

Tilting her head back, she bared her teeth at him. “And I’m supposed to believe you? A murderer?”

“Yeah.” He frowned down at her, the fake warmth of concern still firing the blue of his eyes. “About that. Kait says you told her we killed your kids and your brother. What makes you think that?”

She glared back. “Because you did.”

“When?” A second voice asked in such a calm tone it sent a rift of unreality through her. How could he be so calm while talking about the murder of her babies?

Rolling her head to the left, she tried to get a look at the monster who spoke so casually about the murder of children and found herself face-to-face with Zane Winters.

The bastard who’d killed her brother.

“You!” She tried to tear her hands from the blond SEAL’s grip and bolt up, but he easily held her down. “You bastard. You bastard. You killed them. You killed my babies.”

Zane Winters stepped closer, his green eyes shadowed. He exchanged a grim look with Marcus Simcosky. “We had nothing to do with whatever happened to your children.”

“Liar.” The word vibrated with her rage.

“Why are you so certain we killed your kids?” the man who’d murdered her brother asked.

“Because you admitted it. On the television. In the newspapers. You admitted you killed them,” she hissed at him, struggling to free herself from the hands binding her wrists.

“There’s no way in hell I admitted to killing your kids. Not on television. Not to the papers.”

“You admitted to killing Russ,” she threw at him. “You told all those horrible lies about him. Made him out to be some kind of a monster. Your buddies kidnapped me and the kids on the same day! The
same day
you killed Russ. That wasn’t a coincidence.”

A long pulsing silence fell. She could literally feel the tension squeezing the room. Yeah, they couldn’t deny that now, could they?

“You’re talking about Russ Branson.”

“No.” Her voice broke. She hardened it. “His name wasn’t Branson. That’s just another of your lies.”

Zane spun to look at Simcosky, and then turned back to Jillian and took a step closer. “What was his name?”

She tried to jerk her hands loose, every cell, every muscle, every atom in her body wanting to hurt him. Rip out his eyes. Make him pay for what he’d done—what he’d taken from her. “You don’t even know the name of the man you murdered?”

Did he hear the hate in her voice? The rage. She’d never wanted to hurt anyone as badly as she wanted to hurt him. All of them. Right here. Right now.

“We knew him as Russ Branson.”