Page 74 of Velvet Vaughn

Anja’s voice cut through the passage like a blade. A second later, she was there, one hand locking around the man’s wrist and twisting until he grunted and dropped whatever was in his hand. She drove her knee into the back of his leg, and he buckled. Between the two of them, they had him facedown on the concrete in less than four seconds.

“You good?” she asked, breathing hard, one knee planted on the base of the man’s spine as she cinched a set of flex cuffs on his wrists.

“Yeah.” Leo’s chest heaved. His hands were shaking. “He had a needle—two.”

“I saw.” She glanced toward the loading dock as footsteps pounded closer and lifted her gun. Remi, who’d been monitoring things from the Escalade, rounded the corner, dragging a second man in a rumpled funeral-home uniform by the collar, blood running from the captive’s nose.

“Found this one trying to slip out the back.” Remi shoved him onto the ground beside David, though Leo would bet his next paycheck that wasn’t the man’s real name.

David twisted his head enough to meet Leo’s eyes and sneer. “Should’ve let your friend die of a heart attack.”

“Curtis.” Leo’s stomach clenched.

“He’s alive.” Anja’s eyes stayed locked on the attacker. “Lydia’s with him. The paramedics are real this time. I doubt that whatever they gave him was meant to kill. It was meant to move you.”

Leo looked down at the two syringes lying a few feet away, untouched, and a chill worked its way through him. Vic had died of an apparent suicide, Tim of an apparent heart attack. And in this narrow, bleach-smelling passage, someone had tried to make his death look like the same kind of tragedy.

Remi crouched and checked the second man’s pockets, coming up with a burner phone, a laminated funeral-home access badge with a name that wouldn’t match any employee roster, and a glass vial half-wrapped in a handkerchief. He held it up to the light, careful not to touch the residue smeared along its rim.

Anja’s gaze lifted from the man pinned beneath her knee to Leo. “They didn’t come for Curtis. He was bait.”

“Bait for what?”

“For you.” She shifted her attention back to the man on the ground, and her expression turned glacial. “Somebody wanted you alone with no witnesses. And they were willing to put an older man’s heart at risk to get it.”

Down the passage, sirens rose over the last of the fire alarm’s shriek, and beyond, Lydia was still wailing her husband’s name.

#

One second Leo was watching Anja size up the two men in the loading dock, probably deciding which one would crack first. The next, the world kicked sideways and took him with it.

The explosion tore through the corridor with a concussive boom that slammed into his body and launched him airborne. Heat flashed across his skin. The world became concrete, noise, and violent motion before he hit the ground hard enough to drive the air from his lungs.

Beside him, Anja crashed down, one arm thrown across her face against the shower of debris, and Remi smashed into the opposite wall with a grunt that sounded more furious than hurt. Dust and smoke surged through the narrow space, and for ten full seconds, Leo’s ears rang too loud to hear anything but a high, thin whine.

“Anja.” His voice came out muffled. He crawled in her direction. “Anja, talk to me.”

“I’m okay.” She pushed up onto her elbows, blinking grit from her eyes, scanning the passage before she’d fully caught her breath. “Where’s—”

The flex cuffs lay on the concrete, sliced clean through.

Both men were gone.

“Damn it.” She was on her feet in an instant, sprinting for the loading dock entrance with Remi half a step behind her. Leo followed, his knee screaming with every stride.

The dock door hung open onto a strip of alley behind the building, empty except for a dumpster and scattered broken glass. There wasn’t a getaway car or footsteps to follow. Whoever had cut them loose had known precisely how long they had.

“They’re gone.” Remi braced a hand against the doorframe, breathing hard, a thin line of blood tracking from a cut above his eyebrow. “They had someone waiting.”

“They had a contingency in place in case they were caught.” Anja stood in the open doorway, hands on hips, scanning the alley in both directions. “The explosion was to buy thirty seconds.”

“It worked.”

“That it did.” The words came out clipped and hard, aimed at herself as much as anyone. “The syringes are gone too. We might’ve been able to get prints from them or at least find out what they were trying to inject into Leo.”

By the time they made it back to the courtyard, it looked more like a war zone than a wake. Fire trucks blocked the driveway, lights strobing red and white across the mansion’s limestone facade. Two ambulances idled near the main gate, and paramedics tended to Curtis on a gurney while Lydia hovered at his side, one hand clamped over her mouth. Uniformed officers moved through the dispersing guests, trying to impose order on over a hundred mourners who’d just lived through an explosion.

An officer with a clipboard intercepted Leo before he’d gone ten feet. “Sir, I need you to stay in this area. We’re getting statements.”