Page 37 of Blood Game

“It's not about the job.” She didn't expect him to understand.

“It's about finding the truth—the reason someone drove a van into the nightclub, what someone was looking for.” And the other part of it, the reason Cate had been driven off the roadway in France.

“The truth?” he threw back at her, temper slipping. “The truth is Cate was into something that ended badly.” He needed to make her understand.

“The truth,” his voice had gone quiet but no less angry, “is that there are some very bad people out there who are willing to go to extreme lengths to get what they want. The truth is that whoever is behind this is willing to kill whoever gets in their way.”

“You think I don't know that?” she threw back at him. “Every time I close my eyes, I see Brynn Halliday and the others at the Blue Oyster, the blood. I hear those sounds...”

Her color had returned, eyes filled with the pain of those memories, her voice raw with it.

“My choice, my decision. I'm not going back until I know what happened.”

He swore, the words whipping at her, then threw the coffee mug in the sink. It shattered, coffee exploding in a dozen directions.

“It's too dangerous! You could get hurt...You haven't a clue what you're dealing with.” Neither of them did, and that was the hell of it.

Her voice shook with anger. “I'm willing to take the risk.”

“I'm not!”

It slipped out of the box, a cold sweat breaking out between his shoulder blades. He tried to push it back, but it refused to go back—that raw, naked fear that he had let others down, that he shouldn't have been the one to make it out alive, that he couldn't keep them safe...

He grabbed keys and slammed out the door of the flat.

His hands shook as he slid behind the wheel of the rental car. He tried to hold on, but it was there, dragging him back—the pain, the rage, the blood, and the loss, blocking out everything else, like a wound that had been re-opened. He slammed the shift lever into gear, shot out of the parking slot in front of the flat, and hit the accelerator, the rental car fishtailing in the pouring rain.

“What have you done?” Jonathan Callish demanded, staring at the news coverage on the television, when the call was finally picked up.

“She has to be stopped.”

“We didn't talk about this!”

“It was necessary.”

“Necessary?” Callish replied. “Five people are dead, including Cate Ross and that woman from Sky News! You said it would be taken care of. It's not taken care of. You've made a mess of everything. I don't want anything more to do with this. I'm done!”

“You are not done. She was seen entering your gallery. Eventually it will come out that the accident in France was no accident. How long do you think it will take London's finest to connect everything and come knocking on your door?”

CHAPTER

ELEVEN

The English Channel boiled, waves rising up, then crashing down.

The ferry shuddered as it rolled to the bottom of another wave, then climbed up out of the steel gray water, sea spray slamming against the triple-thick glass on the passenger deck before whipping away on a brutal wind.

It was a lonely feeling, the expanse of the channel ahead, the fading lights of Dover off the stern.

Kris stared out across the bow, hands wrapped around the polished steel railing. Other passengers—couples, singles, and obvious late-season tourists—reclined in passenger chairs or fled to bathrooms, faces drained of color only to return a short while later, paler, if that was possible, fresh bag in hand courtesy of the concierge crew, while the ocean beyond the bow rose up to meet a leaden sky.

“The seventh wave is usually the most powerful.”

Cease fire, she thought.

“Or the ninth,” she replied. “Depending on coastal land mass and wind conditions.”

“You know your waves,” James replied.