Unforgiven (A Cyn and Raphael Novella Book 3) (8 page)

They didn’t waste their self-imposed hour-long wait. By the time Pascal’s call came in—one hour almost to the minute—they were already sitting in Raphael’s Learjet at the airport.

“Someone’s impatient,” Jared noted. Cyn shrugged. Pascal’s impatience wasn’t much of a surprise. What
was
a surprise was the voice that greeted them when Jared pushed the button to activate the speaker phone on the jet.

“Raphael?”

Cyn’s gaze shot to Raphael at the hated sound of Alexandra’s voice. It wasn’t enough that she’d betrayed her brother yet again. She had to rub salt into the wound with her little games.

“Raphael, please talk to me. I know you’re listening.” Alexandra’s plea ended with a very convincing little hitch in her voice. But then she always had been an excellent liar.

Raphael’s jaw clenched. “Alexandra,” he acknowledged.

“I’m sorry, Raphael,” she sobbed openly. “He made me go with him! He threatened to start killing guards, to kill
you
. I didn’t know what to do!”

Raphael’s eyes closed briefly, as if in pain, and Cyn wanted to reach through the phone line and strangle the bitch. He’d done
everything
for her. And this was how she repaid him. Again. Cyn should have let him execute her the first time, except . . . She’d been right to talk him out of it. He’d never have forgiven himself for killing his own sister.

“Put Pascal on the phone, Alexandra,” Raphael said, not bothering to respond to her feigned distress.

Soft sounds of crying could be heard over the speaker, and then Pascal came on, his voice full of smug confidence. “So, what’s it to be, Raphael? Your sister or your money?”

“We’ll be at Westlawn Cemetery in Del Rio, Texas in four hours.”

“Del Rio,” Pascal repeated slowly. “I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you cross the bridge into Mexico and make it Acuña instead?”

Raphael and Jared exchanged a look, and Cyn knew that Pascal had just given away something important.

“Not the most pleasant rendezvous location,” Jared commented.

“Jared! I knew you’d be listening. Juro, too, I bet, huh? Hey, big guy, you there?” he called, the jab obviously aimed at Juro. “So what’s wrong with Acuña?” Pascal continued when Juro ignored him. “You afraid of a few drug thugs?”

“Vampire business is best conducted in private, Pascal,” Jared reminded him.

“Don’t want anyone to see the great Raphael brought low, huh?” Pascal laughed. “All right, then, there’s an old church in Acuña. Guadalupe something or other. It’s got a big white bell tower. You can’t miss it. It closes at sunset, but I trust you can handle a locked door.”

“Four hours,” Raphael said abruptly, clearly tired of the game. “We’ll be there.” He was reaching to disconnect when Pascal’s voice came back at him.

“Make sure the money’s in cash. U.S. only.”

Raphael didn’t dignify that with a response. Everyone on the plane knew this little farce had nothing to do with money.

“You know the place?” Raphael asked Jared once he was sure the phone line was dead.

“Vaguely. Churches aren’t exactly my thing. That one’s old, open mostly to tourists these days. There’s a new cathedral in town that does the real business. But he’s right. Late at night, the place will be deserted, and the streets will be busy enough that we won’t draw any attention driving through town.”

Raphael nodded. “Juro, have your team set up on this side of the border. They need to hold our escape route open.”

Juro didn’t say anything, but he didn’t look happy. And Cyn wasn’t the only one who noticed.

Raphael smiled slightly. “We’ll take two additional guards and a second SUV, but it won’t make any difference. We all know this confrontation isn’t going to be about numbers.”

Cyn listened to this exchange and tried to make sense of something the others clearly understood. If Raphael thought that the number of warriors at his back wouldn’t matter, then that meant he was expecting to meet a master vampire, or maybe even another vampire lord. But despite his enemy’s obvious duplicity at every turn, Raphael seemed to be expecting a stand-up fight. That seemed crazy to her. If the enemy vamp was powerful enough to meet Raphael in a one-on-one, he wouldn’t have bothered with the charade of Alexandra’s kidnapping in the first place, would he? All he would have to do is step over the boundary to Raphael’s territory and wait for him to come calling.

But that’s not what the enemy had done. They’d gone to all this trouble because they wanted Raphael in Mexico, in Enrique’s territory, or more to the point, away from his own. They obviously thought by getting him down
here
, they could defeat him. But why would they think that?

Cyn stood, drawing the attention of all three vampires. “You guys haven’t changed,” she said thoughtfully. “You still think your enemies play by
your
rules. But they don’t. There’s more to this than meets the eye. Alexandra’s the bait, sure. But what’s their game? When the trap springs, what’s going to happen?”

They all gave her identical blank looks, and she was not reassured to realize that they didn’t know the answer to that question any more than she did.

Chapter Five

DESPITE THE CHANGE in rendezvous point, they still flew into Del Rio, Texas, in order to avoid the hassle of Mexican Customs. Traveling by private jet had its advantages, but avoiding Customs wasn’t among them. Any of the vampires traveling with them were capable of influencing the mind of a human Customs official, but it wasn’t worth the effort in this case. Acuña, Mexico was a short ride over the International Bridge from Del Rio. The city still had a relatively strong tourism industry, thanks to its proximity to the U.S., but like almost every other Mexican city these days, it was increasingly plagued by the violent activities of various criminal organizations, mostly centered around drugs. This was bad for the local economy, but, as it turned out, good for a vampire meet that might very well come down to a bloody battle of its own.

Despite that dubious benefit, however, Cyn wasn’t happy that they were meeting in Mexico. There were too many uncertainties, too many ways the encounter could go wrong that had nothing to do with vampires. It was unlikely that anyone would try to accost Raphael or any of his vampires—and even less likely that they would succeed—but she would still have preferred to be on the U.S. side of the border.

Seeming to sense her unease, which he no doubt did, Raphael put an arm around her as they walked to the vehicle waiting for them on the tarmac in Del Rio. It was the usual SUV, but without the blackened windows and, unfortunately, without the bullet-proofed exterior.

He leaned close and whispered, “I love you, my Cyn.”

“Don’t say that,” she muttered. “They sound like the last words of the condemned man.”

He gave her a puzzled grin. “You really
are
worried! There’s no need.”

“We still don’t know what’s waiting for you over there. And you know as well as I do that it’s not going to be Pascal and Alexandra alone in a church.”

“It’s not,” he agreed, standing back and letting her slide into the back seat ahead of him. “But it won’t be as bad as you think, either.”

Juro was already behind the wheel, and he took off as soon as Raphael’s door closed. The bridge into Mexico was only a short drive away.

“How do you know?” she demanded, as they left the airport. She knew she was being a pain in the ass, but was too worried to let it go.

“Because, my Cyn, if there was a true threat waiting for me, I’d sense it by now.”

“You mean, like Enrique himself?”

He nodded, but his expression made it clear he thought that possibility unlikely. “Enrique would never involve himself at this level. He knows he can’t defeat me in a challenge, and there’s no reason for him to try. Even if he succeeded, he could never hold my territory as well as his own.”

“But you suspect him of somehow being involved in this.”

“At this point, it’s almost a certainty rather than a suspicion. The fact that Pascal insisted on meeting in Mexico is damning. But Enrique’s participation is most likely only that of a facilitator. He thinks to save himself by betraying the rest of us, by giving my enemies safe passage through his territory.”

“Bastard. Do we get to kill him?”

“He’ll die, but not by my hand. And not tonight.”

The SUV was suddenly awash with bright light as they turned onto the International Bridge and approached the border crossing. It was Saturday night, and despite the late hour, there was a line of cars heading to Mexico, mostly young people wanting to party on the lawless side of the border. Cyn eyed the revelers in the cars they passed and hoped for their sakes that they all made it back. As unsafe as the border towns had been back in the day, they were a thousand times worse now. There was no bribe big enough to stop a hail of bullets.

“God, I hate this,” she muttered. “And if you suggest that I wait over here, I’ll shoot you myself.”

Raphael laughed, his head thrown back in pleasure. It made her smile, because it was so unusual. Raphael wasn’t exactly solemn. He’d loosened up a lot since he’d been hanging around her. But his laughter was typically more restrained.

They passed the border checkpoint without incident, which was no more than she’d expected, and were soon making their way down the traffic-clogged streets of Acuña. The street was a typical tourist trap, lined with retail stores and restaurants, with a white steeple visible in the distance. Pascal was right. It wasn’t tall by modern standards, but most of the other buildings in Acuña were no higher than two stories and some even less than that, which made the steeple easy to spot.

The church they wanted was on the edge of a mostly residential neighborhood. There were few lights showing in the houses, and even fewer on the street itself. Their two SUVs swung into the small parking lot behind the church. Juro shut off his engine, and silence descended as Raphael’s guards in the other SUV did the same.

They sat for a moment without speaking. Cyn used the time to conduct a visual scan of the dark parking lot. She was sure the vamps were doing the same thing, but using their super-duper vampire powers to do it more efficiently.

Juro looked up and met her eyes in the rearview mirror, giving her a small nod of reassurance before shifting his gaze to Raphael.

“My lord?” he said.

Raphael drew a deep breath, a sad look marring his handsome face. “Alexandra is here,” he confirmed. “And ten others,” he added, almost negligently.

“Ten?” Cyn repeated, wondering why she was the only one alarmed by this.

“Five of them masters,” Raphael continued.

“That’s their game then,” Jared observed tightly.

“What?” Cyn demanded. “What’s he talking about, Raphael?”

Raphael tightened his arm where it lay over her shoulders. “My enemies know, or they suspect, that they cannot defeat me one on one. None of them is strong enough. So they think to combine their powers and destroy me that way.”

“They’re going to try to
kill
you tonight? And you knew it?”

“I suspected,” he said dismissively. “But have no fear, my Cyn. There is not enough power in that church to harm me.”

“And he’s not alone, Cynthia. He has the three of us at his back.” Juro winked at her in the mirror, and Cyn smiled, despite their situation. She couldn’t hold a candle to either Juro or Jared when it came to raw power, and she knew it. But Juro never failed to credit her as part of Raphael’s protection detail.

“Right,” she said. “So how do we play this?”

“Very simple,” Raphael said, regarding the church—and the vampires waiting inside it—with a dark, menacing gaze. “We go in there and destroy our enemies before they destroy us.”

“Fuckin’ A,” Cyn agreed.

PASCAL STOOD IN the shadows of the empty church, his hands clenched into fists at his sides as he fought to contain the excitement churning through his system. His mistress, Violet, had just gotten a call from the vampire she had stationed near the border crossing. Raphael was on his way to the church with only one extra SUV and what looked like two extra guards. Of course, Jared and Juro would be with him. And his human mate, he thought dismissively. She hardly counted for anything. He’d thought for sure that the vampire lord would show up with a full security team, but his mistress had known better. She understood Raphael in a way Pascal never would. Power called to power, especially when it came to vampires. But then, he had power of his own, didn’t he? A very special power that had drawn his mistress to
him,
making him part of her grand plan, a plan that was going to make him rich. He would be living his dream soon, with money and beautiful women to spare.

“Will Raphael be here soon?”

Pascal ground his teeth silently. Now
there
was one woman who would
not
be included in his dream life. Alexandra was beautiful, but she was also a major pain in the ass and possessed of an unhealthy fixation with her own fucking brother. He didn’t know exactly how old she was or where she’d come from, but he was beginning to suspect it was one of those cultures where sibling marriages were looked upon with favor.

“Pascal?”

“Yes, Alexandra,” he said with forced courtesy.

“Was that her minion who called? The one at the border crossing? What did he say?”

Pascal closed his eyes, seeking patience. He’d told her a million times that his mistress’s name was Violet, but Alexandra persisted in referring to her only as “she” or “her.”

“Yes. Lady Violet’s minion called to advise that Raphael was crossing the border.”

“He’ll be sorry for what he’s done to me,” she hissed with such viciousness, in such a drastic shift of mood, that Pascal shot her a startled glance. “I can hardly wait to see his face,” she snarled.

Apparently, one could safely add schizo to Alexandra’s list of sins. No wonder her brother had locked her up.

“Pascal.” He stiffened at the melodious sound of Violet’s voice. It was so different from Alexandra’s petty whining, he thought, as he hurried to her side.

“Mistress,” he said, bowing his head and staring at his feet.