again. All was well.
He gave the girl a murderous smile. Her face went white. He’d gotten what he needed from her, but the sulky, grasping little bitch hadn’t made it easy. He didn’t like that. He reached over the counter and gave her nipple a vicious pinch that she would feel for the next ten days.
She shrieked and clutched her chest, staring at him wildly.
“Thank you for your help, signorina,” he said pleasantly.
He headed for his car, reflecting that the ice-cream whore was lucky he was so pressed for time. Or else he would have made her earn every last cent of that money, ten times over.
On her hands and knees.
“Is this the only thing you have?” Tam asked for the third time.
Pantaleo, Signora Concetta’s youngest son, gave her a grunt that she could only interpret as a yes, since it was followed by no other options.
She stared at the rusted 1965 Fiat 500. Inside, the upholstery was rotted to stinking gray dust. Shreds of ceiling fabric hung like cobwebs. The original color was impossible to determine. The exposed foam padding of the seats had discolored to deep orange, degenerating into grainy chunks; the dash coated with greasy dust. The backseat had been ripped out to make room for farm tools. Three windows were taped shut and the windshield was cracked and cloudy. A rearview mirror swung forlornly on a piece of duct tape. There were no side mirrors. She could see the ground through the holes in the floor.
The Vespino would have been better. At least it had a certain breezy, kitschy charm, whereas this thing looked post-apocalpytic, a vehicle of absolute last resort. She was tempted for the umpteenth time to just offer a fifty-euro note and ask someone in the signora’s family to drive her to the nearest car rental place, but for the fact that she was reluctant to let them know where she went. It was not healthy for anyone to know her business. In fact, her and Val’s presence here was not healthy for these people. It was high time they moved on and found another hiding place.
“Don’t worry,” Pantaleo said. “Cammina, cammina. It runs, it runs. There’s even a liter or so of benzina in it. Six hundred euro. For seven, I’ll even throw in all the farm tools.”
Uh-huh. Right. Like she was going to be harvesting any olive orchards in the near future. She gave him an eloquent look. He responded with a gap-toothed, can’t-blame-a-guy-for-trying grin.
She reached for her purse. “Three hundred,” she said sternly. “And you are robbing me. Please get all the junk out of it. Now.”
Pantaleo’s grin widened. He threw open the back door and began hauling out armfuls of junk and dumping it onto the ground. He took the money she held out and dug into his pocket for the key. “We have to go to the notary public, to do the passaggio di proprietà,” he said.
For this piece of shit? She gave him a coaxing smile. “Could we take care of that another day? Pretend I borrowed it until then, all right?” God knew she was going to abandon the wretched little turd of a car at the first opportunity. The very minute she rented one.
Pantaleo looked doubtful, but made no protest as she plucked the key from his dirty fingers and slipped it into her pocket.
The whole situation made her very twitchy. Renting a car was an unwanted level of exposure. Georg had to have surmised that she and Val needed one, and there were not so many places to obtain them in this immediate area. All undoubtedly being watched.
At least no one would expect her to be driving a 1965 Fiat 500 held together with nothing but rust. But on the flip side, she would attract attention just by looking so ridiculous in it.
Stop dithering and get to it, she lectured herself.
Truth to tell, she actually had been stalling. She was angry and baffled at herself. It was so unlike her.
It had taken a certain amount of time to prepare her plan of attack for Ana, of course, and to arm the appropriate jewelry pieces. Another reasonably long interval had been necessary to bathe, groom, arm, and adorn herself to her satisfaction. She fiddled uncomfortably with the matching tongue studs that she’d chosen for the occasion. She didn’t like body piercings much as a fashion statement, but the studs were the only weapon for an intensely personal job like this one.
They belonged to a secret, personal category of Deadly Beauty designs called Ultimate Weapons—but only in her head, since she’d never spoken of them out loud to a living soul. They were ideas she had not developed commercially because they were too dangerous. Besides, many of them had no aesthetic component of any kind.
They were just for herself. Her paranoid, fucked-up self.
She put each weapon she designed through a certain algorithm she had developed to estimate the risk factor to the wearer. Any weapon with an over fifty percent risk factor of accidental death went into the Ultimates category and as such, was not saleable.
The tongue studs had a seventy-five percent risk of death.
She just had to make her tongue relax and stop worrying the things, or she could break the capsules prematurely. That would be disastrous. Self-control, Steele.
Yikes. She’d never had such difficulty summoning it.
After she dressed and prepared, she’d taken a few moments to center herself and find that calm, chilly, professional inside her.
Robot Bitch. Right. That was where it all broke down. Because Robot Bitch was nowhere to be found, and without her, Tam was lost and dithering. No other word for it.
Not wanting Val to come back and find her gone. It felt like such a flagrant fuck-you. Not wanting to reject his help, to hurt his feelings, of all crazy things. Not wanting to make him angry. God, since when had she ever given a shit about whether or not she made a man angry?
If said man was not holding a gun to her head or a knife to her throat, that is. There were exceptions.
And this was another exception, God help her. She did care, enough so to box herself in and fritter away precious time hoping he’d get back before she’d gotten around to leaving. So that they could have a proper knock-down, drag-out fight that she could definitively win, forcing him to acknowledge that they’d be better off if she went alone.
Hah. Dream on. That knock-down, drag-out fight was a problematic scenario. Val was bigger, stronger, and quicker than her, though she hated to admit it. Stubbornly unreasonable, too. And very intense about protecting her, which was touching and sweet and manly of him, but oh, dear God, what an inconvenient pain in the ass.
The only way to win an argument with a man strong enough to be worth arguing with was to just slip away and do as she pleased while he was looking elsewhere. Deal with the fallout later. That had always been her policy before. So what had changed?
Never mind. She was afraid to examine that question too closely.
After all, she was calculating cold-blooded murder. If Janos didn’t ride shotgun, he had a small measure of plausible deniability with Ana, Donatella, their Camorra husbands, and the Italian authorities.
And the more streamlined her plan of invading the clinic, the better. For him, too. She understood his desire to monitor the situation so that he could keep her in one piece to help him save Imre, but solo, she could handle this more smoothly.
