The anger helped. It made that sick, sinking feeling back off.
Good. Anger worked, so she embraced it. Bastard. Dog. Porcone.
He would pay for that, later. In blood.
The atmosphere in the car for the drive back to San Vito was subzero. Tam did not even look at him, she just stared straight ahead, radiating a bone-chilling cold with more vicious intensity than he’d ever felt from a woman. Or at least, that he’d ever bothered to notice.
“Would you tell me my crime?” he demanded finally, when they were approaching the San Vito exit.
“No crime,” she said, her voice cool, toneless. “I just can’t imagine how you actually managed to go through with it, that’s all.”
“With what?” he demanded. Although he knew.
She shot him a glance that indicated that she knew that he knew and did not appreciate his dissembling.
He sighed and offered it up. “It was some years ago. I was undercover. Investigating a smuggling ring. Her husband was involved. She was angry at him. I needed info. It was unavoidable.”
“Oh, really? I suppose you fought, tooth and claw,” she said.
“No. I did my job,” he said stiffly. “Just as you have always done.”
“Oh, so now we’re throwing whore darts, are we?”
He shook his head. “It was not particularly memorable,” he said flatly. “Nor was it altogether unpleasant. I have no burning desire to repeat the experience. It did facilitate my job.”
“Works with me, too, eh? Smooth, Val. Fucking your targets into boneless submission. What a trick.”
“Bullshit,” he spat out. “After this morning, you know that is not true.”
“How do I know that? With a man as slick and smooth and pretty as you, how could I possibly know that for sure? Gigolo Janos. So you have a date to meet her in Paris, hmm? If you want to go meet her for dinner and cunnilingus tonight at La Cantinola, please feel free.”
He pulled into the hotel parking, muttering obscenities, and grabbed her jewelry case. “Come,” he snarled. “I will walk you to the hotel, and then I must go to Salerno.” He had planned to keep her close to him, but not in this mood. They would end up killing each other.
She jerked the jewelry case out of his hand. “You remember my shopping list?”
“Of course.”
“Then there’s no need to escort me through a crowded parking lot.” She slammed out of the car. “I can escort myself.”
He loped after her and jerked her shoulder around. “Do not be an idiot.”
“Why not? Seems like it hasn’t put you off before.”
He seized her shoulders. “You are playing games, Tamar. Stop it.”
“Don’t maul me, you oaf—”
“It is stupid and out of character for you to be so angry about my past professional dealings with a woman like that. You are using this as an excuse, no? You would rather be angry at me and jealous about Donatella than feel whatever it is you are really feeling. No? About your past, your family? Ana or Stengl?”
The fight went out of her, and the color drained out of her face. “No,” she whispered. “Don’t try to psychoanalyze me.”
“Then do not cry out for a fucking diagnosis. You are acting like a child. If you need distraction from the way you are feeling, I will come to the room with you now and give you one that you will never forget.”
She stumbled away, grabbing the stonework railing that led up to the hotel entrance. “No,” she said unsteadily. “We have work to do.”
“Then go do it,” he said harshly. “I will distract you when I get back. At great length. Count upon it.”
She scurried up the stairs, disappearing into the lobby of the hotel. Val stared after her, his face hot. He was half tempted to follow her up and make good on his promise, here and now. She would protest and fight and scratch and bite, like always…but then…ah, Dio.
He went back to the car, clenching and unclenching his hands to unload the tension. And the guilt.
He had to edit and send another piece of footage, the one from that morning, to Novak. This was killing him. It got worse every day.
He got into the car, booted up, attached the thin cable. Downloaded the footage. He watched it and relived it. The way she moved, the light shining off her body. Her hands, 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