touching his hair, his face. Her back to the camera, slender and straight as a blade, the perfect curve of her hips swelling out as she straddled him.
His own face to the camera, his feelings revealed. Transfixed by her beauty.
He cut out as much of it as he could and still satisfy the filthy old satyr, and was trying to connect to the Web when the split second realization came to him. Air moved in the car that should not move. Tiny movements, plays of light and shadow, out of place. He froze.
A small sound. No. He reached for a gun that was not there.
Too late. A cold circle of metal pressed against the nape of his neck.
“Hello, Janos,” Hegel said.
Chapter
18
Tam stood by the door, people swirling around her, and watched Val’s tall, broad shouldered form stride briskly back to the parking lot.
Anxiety clawed at her. A presentiment of doom. She wanted to run after him, grab his hand, beg him to stay close.
Grow the fuck up. He’d been right to call her on that silly tantrum about Donatella. He’d nailed her right to the wall. His specialty.
God knows, what he’d done with Donatella was nothing she hadn’t done herself. Get-it-over-with sex to further whatever other agenda she might have. Like staying alive, for instance.
But she had to pull herself together, get back to work. She needed to organize her poison and drug supplies for tomorrow’s charade with Ana. Devise a plan for getting into the clinic and decide what she would do once she got there. She had to be smart, focused, ruthless.
She ran up the stairs. When she turned out of the staircase into the corridor, two men waited. Guns appeared suddenly in their hands.
“Don’t move,” one of them said.
They flanked her, seized her by both arms. A pistol jabbed, brutally hard, into the small of her back. She refused to gasp at the pain. The faces of the two men were unreadable. “Who—”
“Quiet,” one of them hissed.
They dragged her to the end of the corridor and into the emergency stairwell, then up two flights. They stopped outside the first door in the hall. One of them rapped on it.
“Come in,” said a familiar voice. The door opened.
Georg sat on the bed facing her, his legs wide, his hands on his knees. His ruined teeth had been capped. Their bright, unnatural whiteness gave his predatory grin a surreal effect.
Georg barked out orders in Hungarian for his men to leave. Tam was left standing before him, clutching her briefcase and purse. Forcing herself to smile. She hid her fear with the ease of long, hard practice.
He looked better than he had four years ago. He’d been a bald, scarred monstrosity during her nightmare sojourn with Kurt Novak. Since then, the scars on his face had been smoothed out with surgery and time. Instead of the twisting, ropy red worms crawling over his face, the scars were thin, silvery irregularities in his pallid skin. He looked like a man whose face had been taken apart and put back together not quite straight. One side of his mouth pulled up in a permanent smirk; one of his eye sockets was smaller than the other, the eyelid pulled too tight. His hair was buzz cut very short. He was thin, his prominent cheekbones blade sharp. His electric blue eyes glowed hot in deep eye sockets, like the headlights of a car in the dark.
A car that was about to run her down.
She sensed the vicious strength of his madness. She saw it in his eyes, his smile. It had started before she met him, and it had ripened to fullness since then. Her skin crawled. Her mouth was dry.
“Georg,” she said warmly. “What an unexpected pleasure. I had no idea you were still alive.”
Right. Such a delightful surprise. As if she hadn’t been dragged at gunpoint to his door. Whatever.
“I almost wasn’t,” he said. “I was confined to a prison hospital for almost a year. Old Novak got me out.”
“That was good of him,” she said. “And I never knew.”
His smile widened. “You couldn’t have known. You would have found a way to come to me. After what we shared, I was sure of that.”
She funneled her shudder of disgust expertly into another burst of projected warmth. “And how did you know that?”
“Because of what you did for me.” He said the words as if it should be obvious.
Hmm. This was a puzzle. As far as Tam knew, she had tried with every effort at her disposal to kill his scrawny, milk white ass. Under the circumstances, however, it seemed unwise to say so. Bursting his mad fantasy bubble would seal her doom. She was in no rush for that.
“And what exactly did I do?” She ventured a secret smile, as if they were playing a flirtatious game.
Georg smiled back. “You did for me what I was too weak to do for myself. Kurt was so strong, I could not see past his strength to realize my own. But you saw it. You saw my potential.”
“Yes,” she said obediently. “Yes, I did.”
“It was meant for me!” Georg waved his arm around. “The money, the power, the whole empire! But I would never have been anything but Kurt’s servant if you had not freed me.”
A deep breath. She took the plunge. “It was a huge risk,” she said slowly. “But in the end, it was worth it. Look what you have become.”
“I am grateful,” he said solemnly. “I nearly died for it, but thanks to you, it was Kurt that died. And you are like his widow. You were born to rule at the emperor’s side, but instead of being Kurt’s consort, you were meant to be mine, Tamara. Do you see? Do you feel it?”
She widened her eyes, as if in wondering realization. Her destiny revealed. “Ah. Yes. Now I understand.”
He got up and walked slowly toward her, circling her. “You did not know, but I have been protecting you for years,” he said.
Her knees weakened as she thought of Rachel. “Me? Really?”
“I told old Novak you died. That I had seen your bleeding body.”
She let her jaw drop in theatrical amazement. That would explain why she had survived for so long. It had always seemed improbable to her. Too good to be true that the old man had ignored her for so long.
“I didn’t know,” she whispered. “I thought no one knew where I was. But I might have known I could never hide from you.”
“I hear you have an adopted child,” he said. “This is of some concern to me. I hope you understand what a commitment of time and energy it will be to stand at my side and help run the global organization that I have in hand. To say nothing of how much it is about to expand.”
Tam gave him a supremely casual shrug. “Don’t worry about my priorities,” she assured him. “I’ll make arrangements
