The Salvation of Vengeance (Wanted Men #2) (9 page)

Wet? Why was her hair wet?

She saw his hand come away with a bright-red smear on it. It was then she slipped down, sliding like mist into the dark.

Just gave up and floated away from her broken body.

Vincente watched the blood drip off his wrist and felt panic frost his organs. Without hesitating, he whipped out his cell and called Tegan.

“Hey. Gabriel said you might—”

“What do I do for a profusely bleeding head wound?” His voice cracked like a whip.

“Something clean. Firm pressure. Lay them down. Who is it, Vin? Are you okay?” Tegan slipped into MD mode without missing a beat.

“Hang on.” He grabbed a pillow that was half under the bed. Fuck that—it was filthy. He shouldered his shirt off, sliding it behind Nika’s head. With his palm on her forehead, he pulled her back so that his chest acted as the wall against the makeshift press. He needed his hands free to carry her. Snatching his phone back up from the grungy carpet, he talked fast. “I’m fine. Nika isn’t. Are you still at the house?”

“Yes.”

“We’ll get there as fast as we can. Please, T. Be ready. She’s . . . bad.”

Why wasn’t the state of emergency siren wailing in the distance? he wondered as he hung up and stood. How could the hotel and the buildings around them still be standing through the funnel cloud that was warping his thoughts? Nika’s weight barely registered in his arms as he and Caleb got moving.

“You okay to drive?” he asked the biker, whose eyes were locked on his sister. “We’re going back to my place, not the clubhouse.”

“Of course. What the fuck did she mean she ‘saved us’?” Caleb asked as the color slowly, too slowly, returned to his face. “Gimme the keys. I’ll bring the truck around back. Actually, no, that’ll waste time. No one’s gonna bother with questions in this shithole anyway.”

And he was right. Not one person—and they passed by seven of them from the room to the hotel entrance—even raised a brow at the sight of two obvious heavies carrying an unconscious, bleeding woman away. Vincente wanted to rage at that but was too busy trying to tamp down his alarm at how utterly still Nika was.

The second he was in the backseat of his truck, with her body sprawled across him and Paynne flying out of Brooklyn toward Old Westbury, he was on the phone again.

“What’s happening?” Tegan demanded.

“She’s still out. Is that normal? Been about six minutes.”
Please say it’s normal.

“How hard was she hit? Or
was
she hit? Did she fall? I need something here.”

“From what it looked like, she fell back . . .” If she’d simply fallen, would the wound have been so bad? “She was pushed, and the back of her head connected with a wooden dresser.”

“Okay. What else?”

“She’s roughed up. There’s blood on her face, but I don’t think it’s hers. I can’t find a source for it, unless she bit her tongue or something.”
Yeah. When that dead man nailed her in the face with his fist.
The thought had him growling like an animal.

“What? What happened?” Tegan asked at the sound of his rage.

“Nothing. Just . . . reacting.”

“Okay. Vinnie, don’t freak out, but she’s been unconscious a bit long. With a knock to the head, you should only go down for three or four minutes. Now, that doesn’t necessarily—”

Vincente dropped the phone on the seat next to him.

He wouldn’t freak out. He wouldn’t freak out.

Breathing through it, he gently pulled the too-still, too-beautiful body in his arms closer and then thundered to her brother, “Put that fucking pedal down, Paynne! Get us home now!”

After pounding through the door Vito held open, Vincente stormed into the well-lit foyer of the house with Caleb on his ass and made for the double doors that led to the basement. Hopefully no one was—

Around.

Great.
His teeth snapped together when he saw Maks, Alek, Quan, Alesio, Gabriel, and Eva, pacing around the door he needed to use to get Nika to Tegan’s med room. Fuckin’ peanut gallery. Except for Eva, of course. The poor little thing looked as if she was about to lose it. He could see it in her eyes.

Vasily stalked out of the living room, his private physician, Yuri Davidenko, hot on his heels. Vincente relaxed that much more at the sight of the brilliant doc, not caring why he was suddenly there when he hadn’t been when Vincente and Caleb had left. Two docs were better than one.

His steps didn’t falter as he aimed for the already open doors, hoping to push through those gathered. But Eva stopped him with a hand on his arm. Lucky. The only one he wouldn’t double tap on the nose for getting the hell in his way.

“Vincente?”

He looked at a darkly glowering Gabriel. “Later.”

“Is she okay?”

Clearly she hadn’t noticed her friend’s blood-matted hair. Also clear, Tegan hadn’t yammered the details around. Vincente still didn’t look at Eva. He couldn’t.

“She’s unconscious,” he ground out through clenched teeth. “Please, Eva, let me get her downstairs.”

“Yes, of course.” Her voice shook as if she were riding an old-school wooden roller coaster.

Vincente’s arms tightened around Nika, and then he was moving again. Down the wide staircase and through the living area with its massive sectional and mirror-backed bar area. He went left rather than right, which would have taken him down a corridor and past the theater room and two spare bedrooms and eventually onto Maksim’s suite. This way lead to the gym, Maks’s office, and their makeshift infirmary. It wasn’t Yuri’s mini-hospital where surgery could be performed, but it did the trick. He laid her on the metal table and got out of the way so Tegan—who’d pulled over a tray of instruments—and Yuri could get to her. He moved to the end of the table and clamped a hand around Nika’s slim ankle, for some reason needing the connection as he watched the Russian lift that gloriously bright head so he could see her wound.

“Fuuuck,” Yuri cursed, even though his expression remained impassive. “Did she slip away immediately or was she lucid for a time after the hit?” His words were clipped and professional, his English perfect despite his thick accent.

“She was spacey but okay for at least three minutes before she went out.”

The relieved sigh that reached his ears was a godsend, as were the words. “That’s good. Very good.”

Vincente moved up the table, keeping his palm on Nika’s skin the whole way. Her foot, calf, knee, thigh. He pulled her dress down to a descent level and took her hand as Tegan flashed a penlight into her eyes, which were dull and murky beneath her lids. He looked down as he uncurled Nika’s fist so he could hold her hand and saw the USB stick. She’d been holding it so tightly, even unconscious, that it had left an indentation in her palm. He took it and stepped back when Tegan gave him an elbow to the ribs.

“Outta here, Vinnie. Let us stitch her up.”

Her don’t-fuck-with-the-doctor voice had him inching for the door.
Shit.
He didn’t want to leave. He wanted to stay. Be here when she woke in case she was afraid. He didn’t want to leave her, the way he had in Seattle. How could he have done that to her? He’d failed another innocent he should have protected. He’d disregarded what he’d plainly recognized as fear in her eyes the day she’d kissed him. And he’d come back to New York and left her alone to deal with it.

Hadn’t what happened to Sophia taught him anything about not being there?

“Vincente! Out!”

He turned at Tegan’s bark and almost ran Caleb over as he entered the corridor. “What is this?” he demanded, holding up the stick.

The biker shook his head, his eyes on his sister. “I don’t know, V.”

“Let’s find out then. Maks?”

Maksim opened his hand, and Vincente dropped it in his palm. Everyone but Vasily and Eva followed them behind the bar to command central—Maksim’s computer geek’s wet dream of a room. Screens lined the walls, keyboards the counter. Laptops, towers, dials, and buttons covered every other surface. Fucking starship
Enterprise
.

The techie flopped down into a huge black leather monstrosity fit for a king and popped the stick into a USB port. He pointed to the largest screen in the middle of a half-dozen others. “It’ll be here,” he murmured as he tapped away. “File’s only named by a number one.”

Vincente and Caleb, Gabriel and Quan, and Alek and Maks were all silent as they stared at the blue screen. Vasily slipped into the room just as an image popped up. Salvage yard. Chain-link fence. No one around but three Obsidian Devil vests and one lone wifebeater.

For nearly three minutes they watched the crystal-clear images, and in the end, wifebeater was dead. By Caleb Paynne’s hand.

Enough evidence to put the biker behind bars for a very long time.

Everything Nika had gone through—why she’d stayed with her abuser for so long—suddenly clicked into place.

“She went through this . . . for you,” Vincente said into the silence that followed.

“Holy fuck.” Gabriel’s voice was muffled by his hands as he scrubbed them over his face.

“Dude. I’m fuckin’ sorry.”

Vincente turned at the sincerest apology he’d ever heard Maksim utter.

The frayed thread to his control snapped and the overpowering rage he’d been trying to suppress found the outlet it had been seeking.

“Sorry? You’re sorry for him?” he yelled at his friend. “What the fuck for? He wasn’t constantly beaten and who knows what else. It’s not him in there possibly fighting for his life, for who knows how many times now.”

He turned on Caleb, all the vile hatred for bastards like Kevin Nollan spewing out with his words. “In all the times you went to that fucking prison she was living in, you gonna tell me you never saw
anything
to clue you in to what was going down there? Not one thing that didn’t fit? A weapon, or maybe a gag he probably shoved down her throat so she couldn’t call for help? But, hey, who would she have called for?” He left the answer to that one flapping in the breeze. “Why did you not force your baby sister to tell you the reason she stayed with an animal like that? Why did you allow her to hold you off?” he roared. “Because you didn’t want to deal with it? For her? You wouldn’t deal
for her
?”

“Vincente!” Vasily’s voice was sharp, his tone filled with disapproval. He came over and clasped his shoulder, squeezing in warning. “That’s enou—”

Vincente shook off the mitt as the horrors the helpless women in this world went through at the hands of the men in their lives, not to mention strangers, pummeled him. Horrors made a thousand times worse because guys like Paynne, or people like Nika’s neighbors, chose to turn a blind eye to what was going on right under their self-absorbed noses. How could
not one
person have noticed a sixteen-year-old girl getting pushed into a car while walking home from school on a bright, sunny day? He barely blinked at the change in his thoughts. Or had they, and decided it wasn’t their business to get involved? Had they heard Nika’s cries of distress and simply turned up the volume on their TVs to drown them out?

First Sophia. And now Nika . . .

His eyes burned, his voice becoming eerily quiet. “She suffered through his abuse so that you wouldn’t have to live in a cage. Do you get that?”

Gabriel came forward. “V, I think you might be—”

Vincente wasn’t finished. “What did you do for her, Paynne? What did you do to save your sister from that monster? Have Vex look into some bank records, almost a year into the marriage? Yeah. That’s what you did.” His vision shook from the guilt and remorse and self-hatred that suddenly crashed over him. “I would have killed a hundred men for my baby sister!” he thundered. “If I’d found her in time, I would have killed them all!”

A shocked silence fell, and then his friends were cursing, the sympathetic sounds mingling with Vincente’s strangled breaths.

Oh . . . fuck.

“Knew that was coming,” Vasily murmured as he went to stand before Paynne. He grabbed the biker by the jaw with his big tattooed hand and put their faces together. “Despite what was just said, this was not your fault. Your sister was a clear victim here. But it was her choice not to bring you in on the situation. Probably the same you’d have made for her if the tables were turned. Do not disrespect what she did by making this about you. You understand me, kid?”