him. “Go ahead, Janos. Bleed. Do you need me to drive?”
“No,” he growled.
“Do not, I repeat, not faint behind the wheel with my kid in the car,” she warned. “Or I will rip your head off your neck. Is that clear?”
He made a frustrated sound. “Be silent. We will talk later.”
He stopped responding to anything she said after that, maintaining a silence that drove her insane, but it wasn’t long until he pulled into the strip mall lot. He pulled in next to a BMW SUV, and began transferring her diaper bag, purse, and jewelry case from one vehicle to the other while she pried Rachel out of the car seat.
As if it was a done deal. Arrogant dick.
He jerked open her door and held out his arms for Rachel. Tam shrank back, clutching the limp child to her chest. “Actually, this is the part where Rachel and I thank you for your help, and wish you a very nice life,” she said. “Good-bye, Janos. Please don’t keep in touch.”
The steel in his dark eyes was utterly at odds with his goofy disguise. “You need help,” he said.
“And you think you’re helping me?” she flared. “By messing with my babysitter? Turning the cops on me, slandering me to Rachel’s adoption agency? Trashing my passports?”
“I did my best for you and your daughter back in that shuttle,” he said. “Draw your conclusions, but draw them fast. If you want to fight me, you will lose. You are strong, but I am stronger. You have your poison trinkets, I have knives and guns. You have a child who needs rest, perhaps medical care. Think, Steele. If I wanted you dead, you would be dead. Don’t be a fool. Get in the fucking car, and stop giving me trouble.”
She assessed her options in a split second. She could call the McClouds for backup, but if these men had gotten so close to her, chances were they already knew about her connection with the McClouds, which meant that Rachel wouldn’t be safe with any of them.
Nor would any family be who was looking after her.
But she could not deal with this alone and unarmed. With a toddler in her arms, she was toast. If she’d needed any further demonstration of that, she’d gotten it this morning.
She was just so tired, so rattled. She needed so badly for Janos’s offer of help to be real, she could not trust her own instincts. After all, Georg Luksch had paid him to drag her in, for God’s sake. And the man had a hidden agenda the size of Hong Kong. She could feel it like a subterranean earthquake, rumbling in the depths. And whatever the hell his agenda might be, it could not possibly be good news for her.
But God, she was tired. Inside and out. Tired of being alone, relying only on her own strength, her own energy. And already well into an adrenaline crash, as if some part of her had decided that the danger was past and she was safe to have her meltdown here and now. Hah.
She looked around. It was the crack of dawn, it was really cold, they were in a desolate, deserted strip mall where nothing would be open for hours. Rachel was shivering in her arms.
Janos waited, challenging her with his eyes to look inside him and find a lie. She blinked at the stinging fog of tears and looked, hard.
She did not see one. Fuck it. He’d saved their lives, even if he’d messed with them first. She let out a jerky breath and handed Rachel to him. “All right,” she whispered.
Chapter
10
Val slouched in a chair by the bed, grateful for the warmth and silence of the hotel room. Steele cuddled her child under the blankets.
He was immensely relieved that he had not been compelled to use force. He did not want to hurt her, and she was so quick and strong, it would have been inevitable if she had resisted. With the child already so traumatized, it would have been unpleasant, to say the least.
Steele was not doing well. Her lips were bluish, her eyes shadowed, her face an ashy gray. She hugged the child tightly to her body, stroking and murmuring. Rachel’s closed eyes looked sunken in her pinched white face.
He, on the other hand, was keeping his long coat on, oozing blood splotch and all, to camouflage his erection. An inconvenient physiological reaction to combat stress. He was sure that Steele would not be surprised by it, but also not amused in her present mood. He had no desire to hear what she would say. Imagining it was enough.
“How is she?” he asked.
“Better. She’s calmed down and breathing more deeply now. And she’s almost asleep, so shut up,” was Steele’s caustic reply.
Val sighed and flung his head back. His face itched from the glue, his scalp from the wig. The cotton batting stuffed inside his nose, lips, and cheeks irritated him beyond belief. He wished he could shower to get the cloying stench of marijuana and patchouli out of his nose, but getting naked under a deafening stream of hot water was unwise. If she slipped away now, he no longer had the RF tag on her jewelry case to follow. The first thing she’d done when she’d gotten to the hotel room was to pry the thing out of the case and flush it down the toilet.
He got up and headed to the bathroom, leaving its door wide open so he could see the path to the room door. How had the other team found her? He peeled off fake facial hair and soaped his face as he pondered it. As yet, Novak had no reason to think that he would not comply with the terms of their bargain. It had to be Hegel, PSS.
He pried and spat the cotton out of his mouth into the toilet, flushing it, not about to leave that much DNA where anyone could find it. He rinsed and spat again, thinking. No one but him had the codes and RF frequencies he had tagged Steele’s stroller and vehicle with. Hegel knew where she lived, but how could he have known about her trip to the airport in time to get a local team in place? The Taurus she drove had never been tagged. And she would have noticed if anyone was following her on a lonely highway at night.
The only explanation was that Hegel had marked him, not her. That the B team had located her by following him. But how? He’d taken care of the usual things before he left Budapest. New laptop, new phone, new organizer. He had changed every piece of luggage, footwear, clothing.
He’d used every trick he knew to shake followers, checking repeatedly to make sure he was clean. To the point of outright paranoia.
Val stared into the mirror, trying to form a matrix, but he was too exhausted. He looked haggard, his face carved out and shadowed with stubble. He hadn’t slept since before he went to Budapest. It showed.
It was hot in the room. Steele had turned up the heat to the maximum to get the baby warm. He popped a sweat under the coat.
Fuck the erection. It wasn’t as if she’d never seen one before.
He had to deal with the wound. The bullet had ripped through the fabric of his coat and torn a bloody furrow across the meat of his upper arm. It stung, but he’d taken far worse.
He shrugged off the coat and the bloody shirt, and hissed through clenched teeth as he washed the shoulder with soap and hot water. The sink was spotted with pink, but the wound barely oozed at this point.
He went out and retrieved the medical kit from his bag. Steele and the child were both asleep, at least apparently. They needed it.
He
