Shock Waves (5 page)

“What else am I to think?” Weariness stained Ethan’s voice, a note of frustration at odds with his normal confidence. “The
evidence speaks for itself.”

Evidence. God, how she hated evidence. So many people believed only what they saw, what they felt, never realizing things of the flesh could be manufactured.

Things of the heart could not.

After everything she’d been through with Dave and Adam, all the lessons her grandmother had tried to teach, the confir
mation of Ethan’s thoughts should not have hurt. She should have been immune. It should have slid off her like ice
pellets
against glass.

Instead, the truth penetrated the surface and stung.

Ethan Carrington saw only what he wanted to see, only what he let himself see. For him the world was black or it was white. There was no room for gray. For possibility.

For her.

“You could have
believed
me,”
she said quietly, pulling away from him. She didn’t want to feel his heat. Didn’t want
to wonder what it would feel like to put her hand to his thigh, see if his body was still as hot as before. Because deep inside,
where all those broken edges sliced to the bone, she knew the truth. This man
would never believe her. Never trust her.

Men like him, who needed to see the brilliant colors of a sunrise before they believed in dawn, never did.

* * *

You could have believed me.

Ethan shoved the softly spoken words aside, refused to dwell on the lingering sting.
As a prosecutor he’d trained himself to
pick up subtle signs. He knew the mouth could speak lies, but
the body could not keep them. An eye would twitch or the
nose flare, lips might open slightly before speaking, a tongue would dart out for a nervous lick. Sometimes it was the hands that gave away the truth, a slight twist, the tapping of a finger, clenched fists.

But through the limousine’s dim lighting, he saw none of that. Easy to miss, he told himself. Lighting could be used to play amazing tricks.

Her voice, though. There was no accounting for her voice,
low
and throaty,
disturbing him on a level he didn’t trust.

She’d cried when she learned of Brinker’s death. He’d felt the hot sting of her tears for himself. He’d put a finger to her face, needing to know if the catch he’d heard in her voice had been real or just another act. Another lie.

Her skin had been so cool he’d been unable to take his hand away, not when she’d barely felt alive.

He’d long been a man who prided himself on his instincts. Rarely was he wrong. Only once, actually.

His jaw clenched as the memory rolled over him. The in
nocence and trust. The betrayal. The aftermath. Lives had been destroyed, some reshaped forever, others snuffed out.

And Ethan had learned. Brutally. Completely. He knew how
to discern truth from lies. He knew better than to lower his
guard, let a pair of bottomless blue eyes get to him.

But Zhukov wouldn’t know that. He would think Ethan was the same trusting fool he’d been five years before, when the two of them had played chess deep, deep into the night.

“How long have you known him?” His gut twisted on the question, but he ignored it. He lived for cross-examinations, that moment when the suspect cracked. He knew what it took. Compassion, softness, weren’t part of the game. But, God, never before had he felt this tickle of disgust.

So he pushed it aside.

“Did you just meet him?” he asked, when she said nothing. “Or did you know him before, when he called himself Dimetri?” When he’d lived in the United States, pretending to be an Eastern European war orphan, a man who’d come to the country of freedom in search of the best education possible.

He’d fooled them all.

The limo swerved, throwing Ethan against the door before coming to an abrupt stop. The window didn’t reveal a traffic light as before, but the inside of a brightly lit warehouse. A line of men moved toward the car, all bearing assault rifles.

Adrenaline surged. This was it. He heard the car doors slam, the low rumble of conversation in a language he recognized but didn’t understand, the shuffle of footsteps.

But Brenna Scott said nothing. No sharp intakes of air, no noises low in her throat, not even a change to her breathing.

“What did he promise you?” he asked silkily. Frustration pushed him on. He needed a reaction, damn it. He needed the truth now, before he stood face-to-face with Jorak. “Did he seduce you with promises of riches or with his body?”

Nothing.

Nothing from her, that is. His own body went tight, his breathing hard. He knew what Jorak Zhukov did with women like Brenna, how he manipulated and lied, violated. Sweet words of seduction. Heated looks. Skillful touches.

Revulsion spit through him so fiercely, he almost gagged. The thought of that man putting his finely manicured hands on her soft skin, poisoning her with empty promises, filled Ethan with dark urges he didn’t understand.

Or maybe he did.

I love him, Eth. I love him with all my heart.

“Damn it,” he roared, realizing too late he’d fallen into his own trap. He was the one who’d cracked, who’d lost control. Not Brenna. “Tell me—”

The door swung open and one of the guards shoved a gun in Ethan’s face. “Get out.”

He squinted against the rush of light. He slid his legs to the concrete, just as the guard grabbed his arms and jerked them behind his back. They thought he was going to put up a fight. They were wrong. Escape would not get him what he wanted.

“Your turn, sweet thang,” one of the guards bit out in a heavily accented voice, and Ethan swung around to find the big man reaching for Brenna. She sat against the far door, frozen, like a small child in front of an oncoming freight train. Blond hair tangled against her face, drawing his attention to the bruise at her jaw. Her eyes, those bottomless pools of pale blue, were huge and dark, sickeningly vacant.

Ethan reacted without thinking. “Brenna—”

The guard shoved him back.

“Don’t touch me,” he heard her say in a voice that sounded nothing at all like that of the woman he’d met alongside the banks of the James.

Something inside Ethan snapped. His plan, his restraint, he wasn’t quite sure. He spun from the guard and charged toward the open door, but got only two steps before a third guard slashed his submachine gun against the back of Ethan’s knees. They buckled, and he went down hard.

“Don’t hurt him!” she shouted, but the men only laughed.

Ethan pushed to his knees and blinked to clear his vision, tasted blood. Through the foggy haze he saw the far door swing open and Brenna tumble onto the concrete. Just as quickly, another guard yanked her to her feet.

The sound she made barely sounded human. She staggered, tried to pull away, but the man grabbed her wrists and pulled them behind her back, forcing her breasts to thrust outward.

“Leave her alone,” Ethan growled, a command which earned a swift kick in the gut. He sagged, fought the crippling rush of pain. He didn’t know who Brenna Scott was or how she fitted into Zhukov’s plan, but he couldn’t sit back and watch her suffer. Even if she did work for Zhukov.

“It’s me you want,” he insisted. “Zhukov said she wouldn’t be hurt.”

“And you believed him?” This from a fourth voice, one that rang with authority. Ethan twisted and found a man standing at the front of the limo, bright light spilling around him. He wore army fatigues, with his green pants tucked into high black boots. A beret sat slightly askew on his head.

“The woman is of no value to Zhukov.”

The man, clearly the one in charge, laughed. “Since when is a woman of no value? A man can always find a reason to keep a woman around.”

Ethan’s blood ran cold. If Brenna was who she claimed to be, a woman guilty only of the crime of trying to help a stranger, then she should have no further role in this vendetta. But if she’d lied, if she really was connected to Jorak, on his payroll or an occupant of his bed, then her purpose was far from over.

He swung back toward her, stared at her frozen expression. He’d seen that look before, on the mother of an eighteen-year-old who’d been brutally raped and murdered. She’d sat in the courtroom and listened to testimony day after day, listened to the officer describe her daughter’s apartment when they’d found her, the blood, the stench, the position of the nude body. She’d listened to Ethan as he’d grilled the defendant, recounting in excruciating detail what must have gone on that night, when the punk had broken into his ex-girlfriend’s apartment and decided to teach her a lesson about breaking up.

It was an expression Ethan had never forgotten, one that had been etched into his psyche. One he’d hoped never to see again. An expression he’d understood from the mother, but not from this woman who’d stepped from behind an ancient sycamore and plied him with dire warnings of a future yet to come.

“We must go now,” the man in charge barked.

Brenna’s gaze met Ethan’s, stark, isolated, as powerful as though she’d reached out a hand, grabbed his wrist, held on tight, and deep inside, something twisted. Hard. He lunged to his feet and again moved toward her, but again two of the guards jerked him back. This time he was shoved away from the limo and into the bright light of what appeared to be a hangar. Two small planes—Cessnas, he thought—sat to the right. To the left, cool night air spilled in from a huge open door.

He saw the plane first, the sleek little private jet waiting on the tarmac. A Gulfstream, he thought. Top-of-the-line. Fast. Long range. Then he saw the men, the circle of heavily armed guards surrounding the jet. And without doubt he knew they were about to change their mode of transportation.

* * *

Stars. They surrounded him. Brilliant pinpricks of light glowing against a sky so pure and dark and endless it looked like a tapestry of black velvet. The moon hung like a suspended sickle. Venus glowed blindingly bright.

“Where are they taking us?”

The question was soft, emotionless. He resisted the urge to turn and look at her, didn’t trust what he might find in the disturbing blue of her eyes.

You tell me, he wanted to say. But didn’t. “South.”

He felt her lean closer, out of the corner of his eye saw her face move near his. She didn’t look at him, though, just peered by him through the small airplane window. Her seat belt prevented her from getting much closer. “How do you know?”

He thought about saying nothing, letting the question just
hang there. But he needed answers from Brenna Scott, information she would not give him if he gave her nothing in return.

“See back there?” A rope bound his left wrist to her right,
leaving one hand free. He gestured toward the darkness trailing
behind them, where stars glimmered like diamonds.

She leaned closer, bringing with her a subtle scent he didn’t
recognize. Perfume, maybe, but nothing commercial. “They’re bright.”

“Do you see the Big Dipper?”

“I think…” The ends of her hair brushed his shoulder. “There, right? Low on the horizon behind us.”

He suppressed a faint smile. Carly had never been able to
make out the constellations, never seen the point. “It’s in the northern hemisphere,” he said, “which we’re moving away from.” He turned toward the front of the plane, not realizing how close her face was to his. Skin brushed, cheek to cheek, hers soft, his rough, mouths alarmingly close. Their eyes met.

She pulled away.

He tensed, and deep inside something thrummed in a way he recognized as trouble. “Up there,” he indicated, again gesturing with his hand. “The stars ahead of us aren’t as bright,
meaning we’re traveling south.”

She leaned forward, squinted against the night. Jorak’s men
had dimmed the lights in the luxurious cabin, but track
lighting
ran up and down the aisle between the leather seats. They sat toward the back, just in front of a row of munitions crates.
Two guards stood outside the locked cockpit door, assault weapons ready.

It had yet to dawn on them that Ethan wasn’t putting up a fight.

“Away from the
United States
,” Brenna muttered.

To
Mexico
. Just as she’d predicted.

“How’d you learn to do that?” she asked. “Read the sky like a map.”

This time Ethan didn’t fight the smile. It formed by itself, seeping from his chest and curving his lips. “My grandfather.” As a young boy, his father’s father, the distinguished senator had taken his namesake on weekend camping trips. The two of them had played soldier, the elder Ethan providing an early
glimpse of hard lessons his grandson would one day learn at the Virginia Military Institute. And from Jorak Zhukov.

“Senator Carrington?”

Incredulity softened her voice. He glanced toward her, found curiosity glowing in those eerie fairy eyes. It was the first spark of life he’d seen since the guards had touched her. “That surprises you?”