Page 102 of Bitter Burn
Please let this fucking work.
I say it like a Hail Mary, like a liturgical recitation. I may be a sinner, but I think God would be interested in what I’ll burn on his altar if he helps me out.
When Cashel returns with his usual serene expression restored to his face, my breathing is even and regular, and I’m feeling a lot better about things.
“Apparently, my old friend Barbara has not been as faithful to me as I have been to her.” Cashel sounds genuinely saddened by this. As if his saints didn’t shoot her in the head with no preamble or warning. “She’s sent a packet of information to a reporter. After the anonymous email that went out before the conclave, the reporter is obviously intrigued.”
“That’s a shame.”
Cashel doesn’t sit this time, only regards me with a beatific expression of compassion and forgiveness. “I know you sent that email, Mr. Trevena. I felt it was a rather feeble stab at things, but even feeble stabs have a compound effect given enough time. That said, I had expected better from the infamous Sea Hound. The legend is larger than the man, perhaps?”
I approximate a shrug as best I can with my hands pinioned behind me. “Perhaps.”
Cashel’s foot soldier comes back in at a jog, whispering in rapid-fire Italian to Cashel, and Cashel’s mask abruptly drops. The gap-toothed smile, the twinkling eyes, all of it extinguished in an instant. There is only a collection of features devoid of any humanity, bereft of all emotion, with empty, empty eyes.
Even I find it chilling, and I’m generally immune to such feelings.
Cashel slides those empty eyes to me. “Is this your big play then? Your ace in the hole? Freeing them now is pointless, and I need you to understand exactly how much, because you are still here, at my mercy, and I will find them again. And it will go worse for them because of what you have done. Make him suffer,” he says to his underling and then leaves in a flutter of tassels and a flash of red shoes.
A metal door slams from somewhere I can’t see while Cashel’s man approaches me. He looks neither excited nor dismayed to be tasked with torturing me—something that endears him to me a little, because I’ve been in that situation more times than would be considered civilized.
It’s too bad then that he has to witness my real ace in the hole.
“I could just break your nose and some fingers, and we could call it a night,” he offers. His voice is the voice of someone who’s hoping to clock out of work early.
“We could,” I say back cheerfully. “Or I could kill you instead.”
He laughs. I laugh. And then the handcuffs drop to the floor as I stand up.
His expression is almost worth the trauma and tribulation of working the pick out of my forearm, something that never seems to get easier anytime I do it. But I’ve never regretted having the plastic tool embedded under my skin—surgical grade for strength, plastic so as not to make a fuss around any security machines reactive to metal—because it’s saved my life three times now, and I’m hoping to make it four.
I step toward him, nearly naked, sharp, bloody pick in hand.
“I’m ready to call it a night when you are,” I tell him.
Thirty-Four
Tristan
Our rescuers are polite to the point of sadism, treating Isolde and me with such deferential concern that I think Isolde is ready to fling herself from the back of the delivery van that’s currently taking us to parts unknown.
“It’s fine, truly,” she says, her jaw tight as a rescuer probes a blooming bruise at the corner of her mouth. She’s already been checked for a concussion, force-fed a sports drink and a protein bar, and given a handful of anti-inflammatories. The bullet wound streaking the outside of her arm has been cleaned, glued, and wrapped. And if she had things her way, she’d still be back in the dank Italian warehouse we’d been brought to, personally murdering every single saint who’d attacked us in the church.
Which would have been mostly unnecessary, as many of them who’d accompanied us here to Rome were dead now, thanks to the painfully courteous people in this van and the three other vans following it.
“Thank you,” I say again to the leader of the rescuers, a man with deep olive skin, thick black hair, and wire-rimmed glasses named Valter. He looks familiar to me, but the itch of memory gets worse the longer I look at him.
“Det var så lite,” he says lightly, waving a hand.
I squint, unable to place the language.
“It’s Swedish,” says Isolde. And then: “He was at my wedding.”
Shit. Right. That’s where I know him from. He sat in the back row with the quiet demeanor of a distant cousin or an acquaintance from work, nothing noteworthy about him. That said, there was no one I watched more closely that day than Mark and Isolde, nothing I noted more than how easily they spoke their vows or how fiercely they kissed. It hadn’t been my best day of work, observationally speaking.
“I was at your wedding,” Valter says. “Mark and I are old friends. We came of age together, you could say, back when he was new at his agency and I was new at mine.”
Ah. So he is an acquaintance from work. Just the kind of work that comes with several degrees of security clearance.
