Operation Swift Mercy (26 page)

“Oh please, Summer. Like It’s not killin
’
you to know too,” Willow rolling her eyes
drolly
. “Come on, M
ercy, tell us...I bet he’s hung like a horse,” Willow said leaning closer across the table to ask.

Mercy had never seen the playful side of Willow, and maybe it was only coming out now because she’d had a few glasses of wine, but she liked her like this. Her somewhat
cynical
front was gone, and Mercy was enjoying her rather dry wit.

“I don’t know why you’d be so
fascinated
—it’s not like you both don’t have pretty hot looking husbands.”

Willow gave a loud snort and waved a
dismissive
hand in the air, “Well that of course goes without saying, but Maloney’s always been a quiet one, and you know what they say about the quiet ones?” Willow
nodded
at the women around the table as she took a sip of wine.

“That they’re hung like horses?” Mercy asked.

“Exactly.”

“Well, let’s just say, he’s not lacking in any department so far as
I
can tell,” Mercy said, with a shake of head as the sisters giggled together like school girls, not a mother of two and an award winning Investigative reporter.

By the end of the meal, Mercy had to admit this sleep over thing was pretty cool. The women, relaxed by the wine and good food, chatted and giggled their way through a
myriad o
f subjects, until the bottle was empty and the food all gone.

“Okay, next stage, movie and popcorn,” Summer declared as they
finished
clearing the table.

“What movies have you got? “
M
ercy asked heading towards the
lounge room
.

“Well,
let’s
see, we have Wiggles, Dora or The little
M
ermaid.”

“If I hear one more wiggles song, I’m not going to wake up Geoff, I’m going to hit him over the head,” Willow groaned. “I spent the last week stuck in a motel room with your kids and the Wiggles—not going there again.”

“Ha! I’m saving them for when you have kids. Share the love, I say,” and Summer grinned at her sister
’
s groan.

Chapter
Twenty-One

“Do you hear that?” Del asked, as they sat around reminiscing about their glory days.

The men insta
ntly stopped talking to listen
.

As the sound of rotor blades grew louder, Tate reached behind the driver
’
s seat
in the wheelhouse and
grabbed a set of binoculars, searching the sky to get a look at the chopper they could hear in the distance.
“Not one from around here,” he told the others, still watching the tiny spec high in the sky.

Chase felt his stomach drop in alarm. “You sure?”

There were a few choppers stationed on islands further across from them, but they weren’t a common occurrence this far out.

“Yep. It’s big—not a tourist flight.”

Chase swore loudly, and paced the deck of the boat. “I knew I shouldn’t have left her.”

“Calm down bro,” Tupper said, taking the binoculars from Tate to get a look. “
We
don’t know for sure if it’s anything yet.”

“I need your phone,” Chase said, holding his hand out towards Tate.
“We need to tell them to get down in that storm cellar, and lock the doors,” he said, k
eying in his number, then swore again. “No
answer
. God damn it!” 

Del took out his phone and hit a button, snapping the phone shut when it obviously went to message bank as well.
“Willow hasn’t replied to the last two of my texts either.
Tupper, get on the radio and get a boat out here pronto—we need to get back there,” Del said seemingly just as anxious about leaving his family unprotected back on the island while they were floating around out here.

Chase stared after the fading sound of the chopper and fought the urge to jump off the side of the boat and swim back…he had to do something—sitting here watching a potential threat heading towards the woman he was in love with was killing him.

****

In the end,
While You Were Sleeping
, won out over the
Wiggles
.

“D
id you hear that?”
W
illow asked, pausing the
DVD
and listening intently.

“It might be Emily, don’t wait for me, keep watching,” Summer said as
she got up
and started towards the bedrooms to check on the kids.

“Good time for a t
oilet break, I’ll be right back,
”
Willow said, getting to her feet.

Mercy
eyed
Chase
’
s phone
on
the coffee table
and resisted the urge to
check
for
message
s
.
She wasn’t brave enough to face the wrath of Summer if she got caught
.

“I think I’ll
take that
, thanks Mercy,” a deep voice said from behind the lounge. Mercy spun around and felt her heart begin to race.
Nikkos?
But how?
The shock of suddenly discovering the man she’d been running from in the same room as her, seemed to be having a numbing effect on her brain.

He moved around the lounge and walked towards her, reaching out to snatch the phone from the table
, shoving
it in his pocket.

Why are you sitting there?
A voice inside her screamed.
Run, run!
But she couldn’t
. S
he was frozen to the
spot
,
even
though
her body yearned to run.

Dragging her by the arm, he yanked her to her feet and stared down into her eyes. His gaze was dead—cold. How had she ever imagined this monster had loved her? She ached for the warmth and gentle love that she saw when she looked into Chase’s eyes.
She’d never see them again.
Nikkos had found her and now she was going to die. Part of her was already weeping at the fact.

“I was beginning to think I’d never find you,” he said quietly
.
“You’ve caused me a lot of trouble, and you know how much I hate being inconvenienced.”

The sound of a child crying snapped her from her bemused state. Emily and
Ruby
!
“What have you done with the others?”

Her gaze fleeted to
the hallway and found Summer and Willow
holding a
child each, followed by two large men with guns pointed at them.

“Let them go, Nik
kos
.
I have what you want, they don’t know anything about this,” Mercy pleaded.

“Oh, I don’t think that’s entirely true. I happen to know for a fact this lovely
lady is
Willow Sheldon,
and she’
s
a journalist. Oh, by the way, Josh Maknee wanted to pass on his best wishes—but unfortunately he met with an untimely death before he could do so.”

Mercy saw Willow pale at the news and felt ill.
Everything she feared would happen, was now happening. People were
dying
because of her. “Just let them go. Take me with you and I’ll give you the evidence, I’ll hand it all over to you.”

“Ye
s, you will. Y
ou’
ve
already caused me quite a few headaches. Luckily, I’ve managed to
catch things before they got too out of control, but I’m going to need you to meet with certain officials to reassure them you have no idea what you saw and that
,
in fact
,
you were simply lying to get revenge on me after we ended our relationship.”

Mercy didn’t care anymore about right or wrong, justice or making the bastard pay, she just wanted him to let her friends go. “I
’ll do it.
I’ll do whatever you want. Just please, let them go, Nikkos,”
Mercy begged.

“I can’t do that. I need
them
to ensure
you
say exactly what I tell you,” he said with a shake of his head. “If you don’t, I’ll kill them. Do you understand?”

She sent a glance across at Summer and Willow and saw a mixture of fear and rage etched on their faces. “Yes.”

“Good,” he smiled, reaching out to touch her hair gently. For a moment he stroked it, but then without warning, he
threaded
a handful of hair around his wrist and twisted it painfully, making her cry out in pain. “You will never
know how disappointed I am in you, Mercy. I had great expectations for you and I,” he sighed, seemingly oblivious to the pain he was inflicting as he wound the strands tighter around his hand and tugged until he got sick of his game,
then
pushed her away.

Three more men came into the room, after having apparently conducted a thorough search of the
main house and finding no more prisoners.

“Where are the men?”
Nikkos demanded, coming over to stand over Mercy, his expression thunderous.

“They’re not here,” she told him trying to keep her voice calm even though inside she was shaking uncontrollably
.
“They’ve gone away on a business trip. They won’t be back until the end of the week,” she lied easily, almost surprising herself. “That’s why we’re all staying here.”

Nikkos stared at her, trying to determine whether she were lying or not. “We need to find a secure place to hold them,” he finally said, still holding her gaze coldly as he spoke to his men.

“We found a storm shelter downstairs,” one of the men offered.

“
Perfect.
Lock them
down there
until we
’re ready to depart
,” Nikkos snapped, waving a hand for the men to take them downstairs.

She didn’t like the thought of being locked away in a reinforced room designed to be impenetrable during a cyclone or bad storm. They needed to be in a room upstairs where there was a chance to escape through a window.

“Nikkos, no. There’s children—they’ll need access to a bathroom. Don’t send us all down in there,” she pleaded.

“Don’t argue with them, Mercy,”
Summer said briskly, grabbing her arm and pushing her ahead of her out the door. There’s a bathroom down there
—w
e’ll be fine,” she assur
ed
Nikkos
sarcastically
.

D
amn it
,
Summer
, she thought
, frowning
.
I was trying to find us a way out of this!
Accepting the inevitable, that they would be locked downstairs and she had no idea what so ever how she was going to get them o
ut of this mess, sh
e followed the other women into the vault like room with a defeated feeling of gloom rapidly filling her.

The door swooshed closed with barely a sound and the room was instantly silent. No outside noise penetrated the room at all.

“Oh thank God!”
Willow sighed.

“I know. I was so worried they wouldn’t put us down here. I wasn’t sure how I was going to get them to do it if they decided on a bedroom upstairs,”
Summer sighed
in apparent relief
.

Mercy stared at the women as though they’d lost their minds.
“You
wanted
to get thrown down here into this box?”
S
he asked shaking her head in disbelief.
In truth it was far from a box. It was actually huge, easily able to fit
a dozen people
comfortably. There was a large bathroom and even a small kitchen—it was practically a
self-contained
flat built below the
main resort.

“That’s right,” Summer agreed.

“Why?”

“Because, thanks to our paranoid husbands, when they built this storm shelter, they also included an outside escape route,” Willow announced, heading to a storage cupboard and opening the door with all the flourish of a model
showcasing prizes on a game show
.

Sure enough there inside was a door built into the brick work.

“Well, let’s go then—before they come back.”

“I
’ll go out and check that no one is out there—if we give away the fact there’s a door here they’ll move us. I’ll be right back,” she said and slipped through the doorway and down a dark looking corridor.