Chapter 17

Chapter Seventeen

D ahlia forced herself to exhale slowly as she closed her eyes, blocking out visual input as she focused on auditory.

"Drink?" Sinaver asked.

"No, but thank you." The Spaniard's tone was calm, almost relaxed.

"Did you travel far?"

There was a beat of silence. "We're not friends, Abduramanov. You hired me one time, and now we exchange information. Nothing more. Nothing less."

Hired? Hired him to do what?

The Spaniard spoke Russian almost fluently, but sometimes the grammar was a little off. Like someone who'd learned the language but didn't speak it enough, or spend enough time around native speakers to polish those final rough edges away.

"I want to know more." Sinaver had lost the polite host tone. "I want a list."

"That's unfortunate because you're never going to get it."

Another tense silence. Dahlia opened her eyes, scanning the monitors. Sadly, there wasn't a camera in the office.

"That's what I want," Sinaver said coldly. "In exchange for the Ukrainian and the American."

" The American? Only one?" The Spaniard laughed softly. "You've done something stupid, haven't you?"

"They were trying to escape by boat. We had to blow up the boat to stop them."

"You arrested them, but they escaped, found a boat, and were about to leave?" The Spaniard's tone dripped with contempt.

"No." It sounded like Sinaver's teeth were gritted. "They'd already run when we went to arrest them."

Wood creaked, and Dahlia pictured the Spaniard leaning forward.

"How did they know?"

"What?"

"How did they know to run?"

Dahlia tipped her face up, eyes wide in question. Vadisk was looking down at her. He grimaced, shaking his head slightly. She looked to Montana, who had no idea that the Spaniard had just started a line of inquiry that might lead them to figure out that Sinaver's phone was being mirrored.

Dahlia gingerly took her phone out of the passport bag still strapped around her stomach and typed out a summary of what the Spaniard had just asked.

Montana slid over to her—literally sliding his feet across the floor rather than picking them up and risking the sound of footsteps—and read her message. His lips moved in a silent curse, and then he was frantically tapping his phone.

"There are two likely options. First, they're listening. Have they ever been in this building?"

Dahlia squeezed her eyes closed. She knew he didn't mean, "Hey, they might be here right now literally listening to us talk," but her heart was beating so hard and fast in fear and anxiety, she felt slightly ill.

"Second, someone told them. Are any of your men poor?"

"Listening? No, that can't… Poor?" Sinaver sounded shell-shocked.

"Are any of the men in your militia poor enough that they would accept a bribe? Fifty-thousand rubles in exchange for a warning?"

Sinaver didn't reply. Dahlia was lightheaded with relief that the questioning had veered off in the wrong direction.

Someone cleared their throat. "If I let you take them, I don't get my money," Sinaver said, and the words sounded practiced. This meeting wasn't going the way he'd thought it would, so he was falling back to the mental script he'd prepared.

"You don't need the money. You want to punish them."

"This society is immoral. What they do is disgusting."

"You've said that before, but I think we both know that you blame them because otherwise, you'd have to admit that your blackmail is what caused the resort to close, the tourists to leave, and your town to die." The Spaniard's voice was amused, condescending.

Ha, that's exactly what she'd thought, though she hadn't been able to say it to Sinaver's face.

"Are you one of them?" Sinaver demanded. "Is that how you know?"

Dahlia shivered, and above her, Vadisk tensed.

The silence that followed had a menacing quality to it. She'd experienced this kind of silence before. Belize's Maya Forest was one of the most incredible places she'd ever visited. It was alive with sounds in a way boreal and temperate forests weren't. Birds trilled and shrieked while monkeys warbled and hollered, those sounds layered atop the constant buzz of insects. The noise was intense and constant.

Until it wasn't.

Until everything but the insects went quiet. The instant dread she'd felt when the silence fell was a hindbrain instinct that told her sudden silence was bad.

The Nature Conservancy guide she'd been with had frozen, slowly scanning the branches of nearby trees as she whispered a single word: jaguar .

The presence of the forest's apex predator had muted the smaller animals, and the silence the dangerous big cat evoked had been thick and hot with menace.

It was the same heavy, dangerous silence she felt coming from Sinaver's office.

Dahlia gripped Vadisk's calf, his muscles like rock under her touch.

Eventually, the Spaniard spoke. "I am not one of them." There was a wealth of dark emotion in those words. "But I'll be what ends them."

Dahlia's breath caught, and she dug her nails into Vadisk's calf.

"I want some of them," Sinaver said. "Give me a list and I'll take care of them."

The Spaniard snorted. "No."

"Then tell me why? Why do they exist, why are there always three?"

"Good questions, and I'm fairly sure I know the answer. But I did unspeakable things to learn those secrets. I won't give them to you for free."

"If you want the—" Sinaver started.

"You don't have them." It wasn't a question. "You killed one, but the other two escaped. You're playing for time, hoping your band of racist morons downstairs finds them."

The Spaniard was both intelligent and quick-thinking. Not good, since he'd just declared he planned to take down the Masters' Admiralty, and probably the Trinity Masters too.

"They cannot escape," Sinaver said after a hard silence. "There are checkpoints on the roads, no way to fly out, and every harbor is being watched."

"I almost envy your stupidity," the Spaniard said mildly. "They have resources and connections you can't imagine. If you don't have them now, they're already gone."

Dahlia wanted to bang her head against the wall. They were the opposite of gone. They were in the lion's den, and their escape plan rested on?—

"You wasted my time," the Spaniard rumbled, anger lacing his words. "Pious asshole."

Footsteps thudded, hard and fast, and then Dahlia heard a gagging sound. Gagging…or choking.

Their escape plan required Sinaver, and she was fairly certain the Spaniard was currently killing their intended hostage.

Vadisk must have come to the same conclusion. He shoved his hands into his pockets and shot her a sharp glance. Dahlia rolled out of the way of the door, fetching up against Montana's legs. He looked down at her, eyes wide in question.

"The Spaniard is killing Sinaver."

Montana cursed, grabbing the gun as Vadisk yanked the door open.

"Eyes," he snapped.

Dahlia had no idea what that meant, but Montana did because he crouched, wrapping a hand around the back of her head and pulling her face against his shoulder. There was a loud bang.

"A flash grenade," Montana whispered to her.

That explained Vadisk's warning about covering their eyes. Then Montana was up and moving. Dahlia scrambled to her feet, the gun Vadisk had given her clenched in one hand. She cleared the door and stopped, taking in the dramatic tableau.

The Spaniard had Sinaver pinned to the wall by the throat. The man's toes barely touched the ground. Sinaver's hands clawed at the Spaniard's wrist and arm, his eyes blinking rapidly.

The Spaniard too was blinking hard, but his head swiveled just enough for him to look at them through narrowed lids. His gaze pinned her, and Dahlia sucked in a breath. His eyes were bright summer blue, almost startlingly vibrant. But the emotion there was rage. Pure rage.

Vadisk stood at the Spaniard's back, arm outstretched, the gun pointed at the back of the man's head. Montana was in position on the other side, his body angled, knees bent, gun held in both hands. His face was calm, his eyes locked on the Spaniard.

"Drop the knife," Vadisk ordered.

It was only then that Dahlia saw the knife in the Spaniard's other hand, the tip pressed to Sinaver's gut, indenting the fabric of his shirt.

"Here to save him?" the Spaniard asked mildly. "Or…" He laughed. "Or do you need him to escape?" He squeezed, and Sinaver's rasping breaths cut off with a gurgle.

"Let him go," Vadisk ordered.

"No. I don't think I will." But the Spaniard loosened his hold, Sinaver now sucking in desperate lungfuls of air.

"We both know that when I shoot you in the knee, the pain will drop you before you can stab him." Vadisk switched to English. "Be ready to shoot him in the knee."

It was clear that he'd understood that. Add "understands English" to the short list of things they knew about the man.

Montana nodded, and the Spaniard's gaze shifted between Montana and Dahlia.

"True," the Spaniard said in Russian, answering Vadisk's statement, "but if you do that, maybe I'll be in too much pain to talk." Slowly, the Spaniard turned to look back over his shoulder at Vadisk.

Vadisk was smiling slightly. "If we shoot your other knee too, maybe you'll cycle past the point of being in too much pain to talk, to being in so much pain, you'll say anything to stop me."

The Spaniard laughed slightly. "I'll put away the knife, how about that?"

"Drop it and kick it away," Vadisk ordered.

But the Spaniard flicked open a thigh pocket on his pants and started to slide the knife inside. He must have had a sheath in there because?—

"Stop," Vadisk ordered, and though Montana had no way of following the conversation, either Vadisk's tone or what the Spaniard was doing made him take two quick steps forward.

The Spaniard's hand disappeared into his pocket, and in the next second, the world went white.

Dahlia fell back, forearm over her eyes. There was no accompanying boom the way there had been when Vadisk threw the stun grenade, but the searing white light had rendered her blind.

For one horrifying moment, she wondered if the light could have damaged her already compromised eyes and now she was fully blind, decades ahead of when she'd anticipated. Terror shook her as she mourned the sudden loss of something she was already losing. She thought she had more time, more years.

God, all this time, she'd thought she was prepared to lose her sight.

Now she could see nothing was further from the truth.

Dahlia sank to her knees, listening to the sounds of pounding footsteps, forcing herself to use her other senses. Her men were in danger. Now wasn't the time to fall apart.

Vadisk raced after the Spaniard, his vision spotty. The instant he'd seen the Spaniard pull something out of his pocket, he'd closed his eyes, but his eyelids weren't enough to block the flash, only mute it.

Vadisk bounded into the hallway, racing for the stairs.

He skidded to a stop when the Spaniard stepped out of a recessed doorway, gun raised and pointed at him. Vadisk froze, his own gun clenched tightly in his hand.

"I'm not going to shoot you," the Spaniard said quietly. "And I don't have the resources to take you and your spouses with me now that Abduramanov and I are no longer working together."

Vadisk would tear this man limb from limb before he would let him take Dahlia and Montana.

"Why?" he demanded. "Why do you want to destroy us?"

"Heard that?" The Spaniard's head tipped to the side, the movement somehow menacing, given the only exposed part of him was his eyes. Vadisk cataloged the physical features he could see, knowing every bit of information would help. The Spaniard's brows were thick and dark, his skin tone darker than Vadisk's but not the Mediterranean bronze he always associated with people from Spain.

"This didn't go the way I'd hoped," the Spaniard said, "but I think maybe it's time I send a message."

Fuck.

Vadisk braced himself to take a bullet. He was dead center of the hallway and there was nowhere to go for cover. The closest doorway was the one the man had emerged from.

The Spaniard smiled, the corners of his eyes crinkling. "I'll tell the militia you're here on my way out."

Again, Vadisk cursed. He had no idea why the boom from the stun grenade he threw—which, unlike the one the Spaniard used, had both light and sound—hadn't brought the militia running. It was possible that the building was just so big that they hadn't heard it. Whatever the reason, they were lucky Ivan hadn't shown up wielding a rocket launcher.

The Spaniard was going to ensure that luck ran out.

The other man's smile disappeared. "I have a message I want you to deliver."

"What message?"

The Spaniard's voice dropped to a dangerous rumble. "Tell your admiral I said ‘hello'."

Nikolett answered the ringing phone without looking.

"Hello?" she mumbled, groggy from the painkillers Elena kept injecting into her IV. She'd hoped not to need any, but her leg had started swelling and the pressure was almost unbearable where it pulled at the sutures.

"Lock yourself in," Vadisk ordered.

Nikolett sat bolt upright, no longer groggy.

"Nik! Lock yourself in," he shouted.

"What's happening?" she asked as she swung her legs out of bed. She nearly passed out from the pain that flared from first the movement, and then having her leg lower than the rest of her body, which made the throbbing so much worse.

"The Spaniard is after you."

Nikolett was rarely surprised, but that did it. "Me?"

"Yes. He said to say hello to my admiral."

Nikolett rose, grabbing the IV pole beside her bed and using it as a crutch as she walked to the door.

"Are you in your office?" Vadisk demanded.

"No, but I'm headed that way."

"Fuck. Who's there right now?"

"No one." There was no one else here. Normally there was one knight or security officer in her home at all times, but there had been yet another crisis, and she'd had to send out the knight who should have been here to deal with it. She'd activated the house's lockdown and set all the house alarms, but still…she was the only one here.

Vadisk growled. "What the hell, Nik? There is no way Grigoris okayed this."

She reached her bedroom door and pressed her hand against the security panel in the wall. It scanned her print in a split second, and then unlocked.

She hesitated. "If I activate panic room mode, I'm trapped in here."

"Do it," Vadisk demanded, sounding out of breath.

Nikolett took a quick breath, then activated panic room. A series of successive heavy thunks echoed as steel bolts shot out of the doorjamb into the steel-core door. Metal rattled as heavy shutters slid down over the windows. The air-conditioning system cut off for a moment before starting up again, except now it was a closed system that wouldn't heat or cool the room, but would continually filter the air and test for chemical agents.

"Locked." Nikolett turned back to her bed, moving without thinking, her focus on Vadisk and what was happening rather than her injury.

Pain shot up her leg, shocking and sudden, and she collapsed onto her hands and knees, dropping the phone. Alone and with no one listening, she indulged in a few whimpers before picking up the phone.

"Are you safe?" she asked, her voice tight. Hopefully Vadisk hadn't heard her pathetic whimpering.

"No."

"What do you need?"

"We're about to… Yes, that will work." Vadisk switched to English halfway through, clearly no longer speaking to her.

"What do you need?" she repeated.

"We need a ship waiting at the rendezvous point in the Black Sea."

"You found a way out of Crimea?"

"Yes, but it's going to be messy. We're taking the Minister of the Interior hostage."

Nikolett took a second to process that. "We'll deal with it," she said after a moment.

"I'm not going to kill him," Vadisk offered.

"Good idea." Nikolett started to crawl back to the bed, shoving the phone and IV pole forward with each step. "You think this Spaniard is behind the attacks here?"

It seemed coincidental to the point of ludicrous to imagine that the issue of the Crimean blackmailer, which had started long ago, could be related to her current assassination issues. Though the Spaniard hadn't been the blackmailer, so maybe…

"I don't know," Vadisk said brusquely.

"Did you recognize anything about him? Is he a member of our territory?"

"No, he's not a member."

"How do you know?"

"He said he wasn't, and he wasn't lying."

Nikolett finally made it to the bed, hauling herself up onto the mattress. She had to set the phone down to use both hands to help lift her injured leg, teeth gritted.

"Okay, we ready?" Vadisk said in English.

"Be careful," Nikolett said in the same language.

"You be careful. The Spaniard is coming for you." Vadisk continued in English, probably for the benefit of his spouses.

Yet another enemy. Fun. But why would he be after her…

"Wait," Nikolett said, propping herself up on one elbow. "What did he say, exactly? About me?"

"‘Tell your admiral I said hello.'"

"It might not mean your admiral," a feminine voice said faintly in the background. Dahlia, Nikolett thought. Vadisk's new wife. She briefly recalled the way Eric had reacted to hearing her name in the meeting, the way it had reminded him of his dead wife.

"What?" Nikolett and Vadisk said at the same time.

"I was listening. When I realized you ran after him. He said ‘your admiral' but he used the formal, plural form of ‘your.' Ваши, not ваш."

Nikolett's Russian wasn't good, but Vadisk cursed. "Fuck, you're right."

"His Russian wasn't perfect," Dahlia went on, "but it was good."

"Fuck," Vadisk cursed. "Time's up."

"Be safe," Nikolett said. "I'll call Hande and make sure there's a ship waiting for you."

The line went dead, but Nikolett's phone rang immediately. Grigoris. He would have gotten a notice when she activated the lockdown. He was probably either on his way or already outside and unable to get into the house. She pressed her hands over her eyes, as if that would help her brain sort through and assess the new information.

The Spaniard wasn't a member, but he knew details about the Masters' Admiralty only a member should know.

He'd levied an implied threat at "your admiral," but the grammar used could mean he wasn't actually talking about Vadisk's admiral, aka her .

For a moment, Nikolett was truly and completely overwhelmed. There were too many threats, too many terrible things headed her way.

It was time to change that.

Her successive, increasingly ridiculous but deadly assassination attempts were officially hindering her ability to do, well…anything. It was time to turn all her resources toward finding the person who wanted her dead, especially if that might lead them to the Spaniard. And that meant asking for help from outside her territory.

But it didn't mean asking the Spartan Guard or the fleet admiral for help.Lately, she'd been considering reaching out to Antonio Starabba, the admiral of Rome, to send people from Cohortes Praetoriae to help protect her as well as investigate where the threat was coming from.

Once, not very long ago, she would have turned to him, and not only because it was the practical thing to do. Whatever trust they'd shared had fractured six months ago and finally shattered when he'd decided at that meeting in Dublin to marry her off.

He'd have to be told about the Spaniard's parting words, but she wouldn't tell him about how many times she'd almost died. If the two things were related in any way, her investigation would uncover the connection.

Nikolett locked down the helpless feeling of being overwhelmed and answered her still-ringing phone, speaking to Grigoris who was, in fact, outside. Wearily, Nikolett dragged herself back to the control panel by the door to lift the lockdown.

Ten minutes later, she was in bed once more. Her leg had been bleeding—probably from when she fell—so Nyx changed the dressing, Elena arriving when the vice admiral was almost done. Now her freshly bandaged leg was elevated on a pillow.

Elena went to inject something into her IV, but Nikolett held up her hand. "No, I can't pass out. Not until Vadisk and his spouses are safe."

"Just something to take the edge off?" Elena urged.

Her leg felt like it was three times its normal size, and also on fire. "Small dose," she conceded.

Grigoris was fiddling with her TV, speaking quietly into a headset. A second later, the screen blinked on. A slightly pixelated map appeared.

"The Trinity Masters were able to re-task a military satellite to watch what's happening," he said. "This is a live look at Crimea. Specifically, Vadisk's location."

"We're going to watch the escape in real time?" Nyx asked.

"That's the plan."

Nikolett didn't believe in any sort of higher power, but she clenched her fists, trying to will Vadisk the luck and skill he'd need to escape.

Grigoris zoomed in, and though it was grainy, they watched as a white van tore down what looked like a highway, police vehicles with lights flashing chasing after it.