The last thing Nick needed was for Russell to get hurt on his watch. The man was an accountant — not that there was anything wrong with accountants. Nick was a financial guy himself, but he’d also gonethrough BPD’s notoriously difficult academy, and he’d spent weeks in the field with Ronan at MIS, facing off against men every bit as dangerous as Matis Juska.
As far as he knew, Russell had no experiences in high-risk situations. The operation to find and rescue Alexa was delicate for any number of reasons. They needed to keep Russell busy, keep him involved, but keep him out of the way.
He wondered if Russell would argue the point, but the other man nodded in agreement.
“How long will it take?” Russell asked.
“No way of knowing,” Ronan said. “We might get lucky and catch a break early on. We might not get anything.”
Russell’s shoulders slumped.
Declan shuffled through the papers. “Let’s split them up.”
21
Alexa was crouched on the floor, her face close to the vanity cabinet, when she heard the keys outside the door. She hurried to close the cabinet door and crossed the room to the wall under the window.
Her fingers were bloody, and she wiped them on her jeans, hoping the man who brought her food wouldn’t notice. Maybe he’d think it was from her split lip.
She waited for his instructions to face the wall. They didn’t come and a few seconds later, the door swung open to reveal Matis Juska.
She shrank away from him instinctively, her gaze frozen on his eyes. She had stared into them in the parking garage in the moment before he’d tried to kill the man she loved, had stared into them again asshe’d lost consciousness in the van. They were as cold now as they’d been then, except now there was something else in them, a shine of disgust that made her sure he’d kill her without a second thought and enjoy every moment of it.
His gaze raked her body dispassionately. “So, you are alive and well.” His voice was deep and surprisingly smooth, almost pleasant, with a pronounced accent.
She didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t describe herself as “well” but her lips were frozen shut, the trauma of her previous confrontations with Juska forcing her body into fight or flight mode.
“You have a visitor,” he said.
For a split second her heart soared.
Nick.
But no. That was foolish. She’d been in this room too long. They wouldn’t let Nick here to see her, and Nick would never come here unless he did it with guns blazing, determined to get her out.
“You will behave.” Juska’s eyes focused in on her split lip. “Or there will be more where that came from. Much more.”
She swallowed the bile that rose in her throat.
He stepped out of the room and she heard themurmur of voices outside the door. A moment later, Frederick Walker stepped into the room.
He was smaller than he looked on TV. There he’d been imposing, a gray-haired man with the bearing of a diplomat, his face lined, tanned just enough to hint at good health rather than vanity.
Now she saw that he was only about five-feet-eight-inches tall, his physique slight though not necessarily weak. His navy suit was tailored to perfection and she noticed that he didn’t touch anything when he came into the room, didn’t so much as lean against the door as he studied her from across the small room.
“Miss Nash.” His voice was like whiskey, smoky and dry. “I trust you’re being well cared for.”
“If you call well cared for being kidnapped, drugged, and kept prisoner in a bathroom.” She was surprised by the sound of her own voice. “Sure.”
“This is hardly my fault.” He almost sounded wounded.
“Are you saying it’s mine?”
He sighed, an expression of something she almost would have called regret passing over his features. “If only you’d left it alone. It had been over ten years. You’d survived. No — you’d thrived. Why rock the boat?”
“I think what you really mean is why hold your son accountable for a crime when he’d already gotten away with so many,” she said. “Did you think it could go on forever?”
Pain sliced through his features before he recovered. “I don’t expect you to understand a parent’s love for their child. It is… well, it eclipses all else. Even when one knows one’s child is an abomination, one feels compelled to defend him. It’s beyond reason, even for a practical man like myself. Beyond self-preservation.”