Sin and Sacrifice (19 page)

“
You
liar!”
she shouted, reaching into
the waistband of her jeans to snatch the gun out. Bringing it up,
shaking to the point the barrel wavered three or four inches in any
direction, she aimed it at him.

He put both hands out this
time. “I have to explain--”

“
I've heard
enough
from you! Is your
name even Rhett? Is it? You've been lying to me this whole time!”
The shrill edge to her voice carried through the alley.

“
We can't do this here,
Evelyn. You're going to draw too much attention,” he said, taking a
cautious step closer.

“
Stop! Don't you dare move
another inch.” Clenching her teeth, furious and hurt, she tried to
steady the gun. Rhett had abused her trust—trust that she should
never have given him—in ways that threatened to shatter her. Fear
ticked along her pulse like a mad insect, racing to and fro, to and
fro.

He stopped, palms still up
in surrender. “There are things you don't understand,
Evelyn.”

She cut him off. “I
understand what you
are
. That's all I need to know. You've been lying since the very
beginning. What did you all do, decide to have you 'rescue' me, so
that I'd trust you and lead you to my sisters?
Bastard
!”

The whole sordid plot
unfurled before her eyes; a daring save, a charming 'agent',
selfless acts of protection. They'd planned the entire thing from
the beginning. She felt sick beyond anything she'd ever
experienced.

He cocked his head and
looked confused. “I thought you said you didn't have any
sisters?”

“
Stop playing games!” She
railed at him, angrier by the second that he continued his ruse. If
he was a Templar, then of course he knew she had sisters. Sisters
they pretended they were going to rescue. Evelyn didn't know what
happened to the girls, but she suspected they couldn't get in
contact because they'd been hounded worse than she'd
been.

“
I'm not playing games.
Evelyn, come back to the hotel--”

“
No! I'm not going
anywhere
with you.” The
gun wavered, centering on him.

“
I don't know what you're
thinking--”

“
I saw the tattoo,
Rhett.”

His eyes narrowed in a
calculating way. “So? What's it mean to you?”

What did it mean? Death and
destruction.

“
It means you're one
of
them.
You've
known all along. Did you participate in my torture, even?” Nausea
gripped her hard. That he could have such a cruel streak after
making her feel safe unnerved her. The duplicity was so extreme
that she could hardly wrap her mind around it.

“
Do you think I'd have
risked my ass, rushing into that basement to save you, if I'd been
a part of it? Lower the gun, Evelyn.” He took a step closer and had
the audacity to look affronted.

“
Don't,”
she hissed. “Don't do it.”

“
You're not thinking
clearly. Just stop for a second and listen to what I have to
say.”

“
I don't need to listen. I
know what you want.”

“
What is it you think I
want? Besides sisters you told me you
didn't have.”

“
How could you have done
this? I trusted you, Rhett.” Evelyn choked back a fresh sob that
started to rise up her throat. “Was it you that sent me that text?
No wonder the boat found us so fast. You were telling them where we
were the whole time.”

“
I did
not
tell anyone our location. What
is it you think you know about the tattoo, Evelyn?”

“
It doesn't matter what I
know. Or how. It matters that you all lied, thinking I'd lead you
to my sisters. You don't actually have them in your custody, do
you? That was a ploy and a lie like the rest.”

Rhett looked perplexed.
“Have you forgotten I came under gunfire? That I almost took a
bullet head on for you?”

Evelyn couldn't believe how
realistic his confusion seemed. It antagonized her further.
“Staged, like your fake concern and your kisses.”

“
You're crazy if you think
I was faking
that
. There's some kind of miscommunication going on here,
Evelyn. Just take a second to breathe. Let's go back to the hotel
and figure it out.” He closed the distance by a foot. Cautious,
careful. Watching her eyes.

“
Don't. Take. Another.
Step.” She clipped out each word with a shaky voice. Her insides
were a mess of tension and stress.

“
Or what, Evelyn? I know
you won't shoot me. You can't stand there and tell me you haven't
felt the same thing between us that I have since we
met.”

“
No.
That was nothing. And it was certainly nothing to you. If you
really thought I wouldn't shoot you, you would have just come over
here and grabbed the gun by now.”

“
You don't believe
that--”

“
Don't tell me what I
believe!” She took a step back, gripping the gun with both hands.
The muzzle shook like she was having mild seizures. Through the
gloom, she could see people passing the end of the alley in
periphery. They were alone, but they wouldn't be alone for long.
He'd probably alerted Christian. Maybe even Dracht and
Dragar.

Of course he
had.

“
Give me the gun, Evelyn.
Let me take you somewhere safe so we can figure out what's going
on.” He stretched out a hand. Coming closer.

The crack of debris under
his boots sounded so loud to Evelyn just then. Every one of her
senses seemed exacerbated by the strain of the moment; the green of
his eyes was greener, his hair more golden. She could hear him
breathing, hear the rustle of of his shirt when he moved. The gun
felt heavier, less steady. Cold. Hard. And much deadlier when it
bucked in her hands the second she pulled the trigger.

Chapter Eight

Dracht glanced down to the
paper in his hand. The license plate number matched the one of the
van parked in the lot of the decrepit church.

“
It's the same one,” he
said.

“
I'll bet they've got them
in the basement again,” Dragar said, rechecking the rounds in his
clip before sliding it into the gun. “There has to be another door
leading down there besides having to go through the
front.”

Two other men in the back
of their own van made final preparations. All were dressed in black
to blend in better with the night. They wore shoulder holsters
under their jackets. Each had a belt on with additional supplies:
minor explosives, mirrors, stun grenades, heavy
sedatives.

Dracht looked out the
windshield from the driver's seat and brought the binoculars up to
scan the outside of the building. It was the fourth time he'd
checked for security. They'd gotten word only an hour ago that the
van had been spotted. Dracht didn't want to waste a second closing
in. With any luck, they wouldn't arrive to find the women moved to
another location, like the last time.

“
Anything?” Dragar
asked.

“
Nothing. I think I see
stairs at the back but no one's guarding them.”

“
That'll be the door
directly to the basement we need,” Dragar added, then spoke over
his shoulder to one of the men in the back. “Raoul, bring the bolt
cutters just in case.”

“
I'm on it, boss,” Raoul
said, taking the bolt cutters out of a bag on the metal
floor.

“
If we're going, we need
to go now. There's only about an hour until daylight,” Dracht said,
lowering the binoculars.

“
Then let's go.” Dragar
pushed open the door and got out.

On cue, the other men
exited at the same time, leaving the doors cracked so they wouldn't
alert anyone on guard at the church to their presence.

Four hulking shadows
crossed the street and swarmed the back stairs, descending one at a
time.

Dracht stood to the side
and let Raoul cut the chain wrapped through the door handles. He
wasn't sure if that was a good or a bad sign. Either the group of
men wanted to make it hard for anyone to get in, or they'd already
vacated the premises. The van could be a decoy to make them spend
time here while the group interrogated the women somewhere
else.

The church, on the
outskirts of Athens, was an older monument that had not gone
through renovations in some time. Thin spires rose high and sharp
against the black sky, like needles trying to pierce heaven. A
large cross threw a shadow down onto the sidewalk from the moon.
Stained glass windows depicting scenes from the bible lined every
wall. Several had been broken out from vandals who had no care for
religion or sacred places.

After Raoul painstakingly
removed the chain, Dracht opened one of the doors and listened; in
the distance he heard water dripping and a strange metallic noise
that creaked rhythmically. The men around him stayed quiet, keeping
an eye out in different directions so that they weren't taken by
surprise.

Dracht made eye contact
with Dragar. At the go-ahead nod, he crouched and went in; for such
a big man, Dracht could move with predatory speed. One spare, lone
light bulb swung from the ceiling on a string, casting eerie
shadows on a long basement with discolored, pocked walls and thick
wooden support beams. Gun drawn, he swung it left and right, ready
to encounter anything.

The sight that greeted him
when he passed a support beam that had been blocking his view was a
shocking study in premeditated violence. A black woman hung from
her wrists, head sunk down against her chest in death. Naked, her
toes dangled at least a foot from the cold, concrete floor. A pool
of blood sat beneath her, dripping down from the hole in her chest
where her captors had cut out her heart.

This must be
Genevieve.

“
Mother of god,” Raoul
whispered somewhere behind him.

In this business, Dracht
had seen a great many things. Vicious, ugly things. Torture, death,
dismemberment. The impact of this girl's death hit him strange and
hard and for reasons he could not understand. It felt like
something precious had been lost, the light of goodness doused by
something evil. This woman should not have died.

Dracht knew and understood
that instinctively. The quiet noises the others made assured him
that they felt the same thing he did. Unexplainable. Odd. Unlike
any other death scene he'd come across in his lifetime.

He wondered if the men
who'd found the blond behind the nightclub had the same
reaction.

“
Room's clear,” Raoul said
after a cursory sweep.

Dracht lowered his gun,
mouth thinning in disapproval and disgust.

Dragar stepped past him,
weapon down at his side. He made a wide circle around the girl,
looking for other clues and signs. Dracht knew Dragar well and he
could see and sense the same disturbance about this death that he
himself felt.

Raoul and Benecio came to
stand at his flank. Their unease was unusual and
palpable.

“
Go check the church and
the back steps to make sure they aren't circling around to trap us
in here,” Dracht said.

Raoul cut one way and
Benecio cut another.

The drip of blood made no
noise, but it grated on Dracht's nerves nevertheless.

“
This is different than
other killings, hm?” Dragar said, bringing up what Dracht hadn't
said into the open.

“
Yes. You feel it,
too?”

“
I do. I want to have her
examined by a private physician and see if they find anything
unusual. Besides the obvious. There's something here we're
missing,” Dragar said.

“
It doesn't look like
they've killed the other women yet, unless they've done so between
this stop and another.” Dracht brooded over the fact that the
murderers were keeping one step ahead of them and they hadn't saved
Genevieve in time.

“
They could have split off
into two groups. Rhett said there were four of them in the room
when he got Evelyn,” Dragar replied. He came to stand next to
Dracht facing away from the dangling woman.

Dracht hadn't thought about
them splitting off into two groups, but it made perfect sense. “If
they've done that, then there's even more here than we
thi--”

Raoul came back into the
gloomy basement at a run, cell phone in his hand. “Christian just
called. He said we need to fly back to Port Said immediately.
Rhett's been shot.”

In the underworld of
politics and religion, men of power had resources at their disposal
other people did not. Such as the private jet that swept Dracht and
Dragar across the Mediterranean toward Egypt; such as the team they
left behind to take care of the deceased Genevieve. Dracht had left
specific instructions that she was to be handled like a precious
jewel or face the consequences of his wrath. He'd called the
mortuary holding the other one, Galiana, and expressed his desire
for them to keep the body in cold storage rather than cremate her
until he had some answers.