The Cardinal Bird - Book 1: Reverse Harem Series (The Cardinal Series) Read online

  "Malyshka is right. It is time to go." He took two lumbering steps towards me and grabbed my arm, steering me towards the stairwell.

  "Hey!" Brock growled. "Don't manhandle her."

  Aleks kept walking but looked back towards Jace. "What does that mean? Manhandle? It can't mean what I'm thinking. The Boulder wouldn't say something like that."

  Jace, Aleks’ normal go-to for translations, just turned his head. "You're on your own. You won't translate for me. Why should I translate for you?"

  Aleks then glanced to CJ who held his hands up. He gave Aleks as stern of a look as he could manage. "Hey, I want to know what you guys were talking about earlier just as much as he does. It’s not nice to have secrets from your own team."

  Aleks, seeing his first choices weren't going to talk, swung his head in my direction. His arctic-blue eyes were nearly glowing in the lighting. "Malyshka?"

  I choked on my own spit.

  Jace was on my other side now, swinging his arm up and around my shoulders. He gave me a reinforcing squeeze. "Don't fall for it, Callie!"

  Jace reached forward and opened the door for us. We started an awkward, three-man shuffle to down the stairs.

  I tried not to give in. I really did. I didn't want to explain what manhandle was. I kind of liked the way that Aleks took charge and lead me down the hall. I didn't want him to stop doing it since Brock had already implied that it was a bad thing. I worried that if I explained it, Aleks wouldn't do it anymore. It was nice to not be treated like a fragile china every now and then.

  My resolve was set, but downfall came when I glanced back up. Though we had continued to walk, Aleks had kept his heavy gaze on me. I gulped.

  "Uh..." I started, ready to explain.

  Aleks' grin was triumphant as Jace groaned. "Callie!"

  "Manhandling is when you..." I trailed off, not knowing the Russian word for it if there was one. It had never come up in conversation before, so I hadn’t learned it. I thought about how to explain it. "Well, it's when you are rough with someone."

  "Oh! Like BDSM," Aleks said with a nod.

  "NO!" the stairway reverberated at us from behind, too many voices mixing together to decipher. One voice had said, "Of course you have that lingo down."

  I tilted my head sideways a bit. "BD what?"

  There was a collective breath of relief.

  "You know," Aleks said. "Like when a guy—or a girl, I guess—is dom--" a hand was slapped over Aleks's mouth, cutting off the rest of what he was going to say.

  I figured it would be Brock's hand but was surprised to see that it belonged to Jace.

  "Okay, let's go. You're in Callie-Time Time-Out." Jace hauled Aleks back, yanking him by the hand on his face and nearly upending me in the process. Thankfully, Aleks released my arm at the last second so that I didn't topple down the stairs.

  Duhduhduhduhduhduh, deedeedeedeedee.

  Something went off, stopping us in our tracks. Everyone looked around, patting at their pockets and trying to pinpoint the sound. It sounded like an alarm.

  "Yeah, that's mine," CJ said, fishing through his pockets. "Must've set an alarm and forgot."

  Everyone started to continue forward again. The alarm still echoed around the stairwell as CJ tried to get to the device and silence it. Jace was just reaching to open the ground floor door when CJ swore.

  I thought CJ cursing was somewhat unusual based on what I knew of him so far, but I was ready to just roll with it. I didn't really know him all that well, to be honest. That plan stopped though when everyone else treated CJ’s swearing like an impending apocalypse of doom.

  "What is it, CJ?" Karl asked in a very serious, calm voice. It sent shivers up my spine and goosebumps along my arms.

  "That's not my phone. That's my iPad," he said, now digging with renewed vigor through his duffle bag.

  "So?" Jace asked.

  "So," CJ said, stretching the word out. "That's what I used to set up our surveillance last night."

  The last of the fuzziness that I had been fighting flew from my brain. My mind was comprehending things quickly, knowing what CJ was implying because it was what I would've done myself. If he had set an alarm for the surveillance, it could mean that there was trouble.

  The aches and pains melted from my body as the situation sank in. We were on the ground floor, right next to the last door before the lobby.

  My eyes went big and round. I tuned out the conversation in the stairwell as CJ continued digging around through his bag to try to silence the alarm that had seemed so innocuous earlier. Now it sounded like a blaring train horn, echoing in all directions on the enclosed stairwell.

  There was a soft thumping sound that at first, I thought came from one of us, but the more I thought about it the more I felt that wasn't correct. It seemed muffled, not soft. I tilted my head to the side to concentrate. In between the sounds of CJ's alarm, I could hear it. It was strange, somewhat familiar...

  My eyes flew to the door in front of us. The noise was coming from it.

  Chapter 12

  Callie, what is it?" Jace asked from beside me.

  There was shifting as if others in the stairwell had heard his question and were looking my way. No one else spoke up, thankfully.

  I didn't answer Jace’s question. I couldn't. Not really. It was hard to even breathe, let alone speak. For some reason, the noise on the other side of the door was raising chills all up and down my arms. These were instincts that I'd honed out of necessity, and they had saved me too many times to count.

  The hair on the back of my neck stood up on end, and, whatever it was that my body recognized that my brain didn't, I at least realized that it was bad. Very bad.

  My heart was in my throat. With everything in me, I didn't want to, but I took a step forward. I leaned up against the cold, black door, putting my ear against it.

  Thump...thump......thump…thump.......thump..............thump…

  The closer my ear came to the door, the better I was able to hear. I concentrated, able to focus now that the stairwell was silent. It sounded like something soft hitting something hard. Maybe a fist?

  But it wasn't someone beating on the door. It sounded too far away. In fact, it sounded like it was getting farther away.

  "Callie...what's wrong?" Jace asked again, but his voice was more urgent this time as he gave me a small shake.

  "Shh!" Brock said. His head was cocked to the side as well as he seemed to concentrate. "I hear it too."

  There was another hush among the guys that gave me some clarification to the mystery sound, and suddenly my eyes widened. The sound wasn't getting farther away, it was just getting softer...weaker. The rush of knowledge was terrifying, taking my breath away as my mind finally connected the dots that my body already had. I knew that sound!

  It was the sound of someone beating futilely against something hard.

  It was the sound of someone losing the fight of dying.

  I leaped away from the door like it was trying to light me on fire. I looked at the handle. There was no way to lock it or barricade it from here.

  "We have to go," I said, feeling disconnected with my body. My emotions were all over the place. Any fever, aches, pains...they evaporated, my mind moving at a rapid pace, clearer than it had been so far this morning. Adrenaline was surging through my veins, and yet I was calm as I spoke. "They found us."

  Jace grabbed my arm, yanking me backward up the stairs. My feet didn't even touch the ground, which was probably a good thing since my eyes hadn't left the now ominous black door.

  Just on the other side of that were Nikolai's men, if not Nikolai himself. At this moment, they were choking someone, probably for information or maybe even for the fun of it. If they tracked us here, they had to have known what floor we were on.

  You’re a killer, Callie.

  Some innocent person was out there dying just because I stayed at the hostel they worked at. I remembered the voice of the young guy last night that had been so timid he couldn't even say whether or not the hostel served waffles for fear of incurring Aleks' "wrath."

  We got farther and farther away from the door.

  Was it him, that timid receptionist teenager, that they were choking?

  Finally, I found my voice. "We have to go back--"

  "We can't," Karl said. "CJ checked the surveillance. There are more than a dozen men out there. We can't incapacitate that many men with our numbers. Not and try to keep you safe. They might have kill-orders, whereas we don't."

  Keep me safe. My fault. It was my fault.

  I kept my eyes on the door, just waiting for it to open. I couldn't hear the death throes anymore, but I could feel them. Just like I had many times before as someone beat on the side of the tank when they realized they were going to meet their end inside its dark, cavernous depths.

  "But, someone's dying," I whispered.

  There was silence all around me. I looked up. The guys carefully avoided my eyes as they exited on the first-floor landing. Even Aleks looked away as he ushered Jace and me through the doorway. He kept his gaze down on the door below, his gun in his hand.

  "You knew," I realized.

  "Callie, it's too late for them," Jace said softly, not meeting my gaze either.

  I could hear the guilt in his voice. I could see it on all their faces...in their postures. But...my mind wouldn't let me focus on that. It just wanted to lash out. It wanted to protect itself from the guilt of yet another death on my conscience.

  I went to say something but was interrupted by a soft ffzzzzt ffzzzzt.

  I looked back down over my shoulder to the ground floor door. It was the same as it had been before, but it seemed even more menacing now.

  Aleks' eyes widened, and he pretty much hauled both Jace and me out the door with one arm.

  "What is it?" Karl asked.

  "Suppressor," Aleks said, closing the door softly just as we heard the door from below open up. Aleks held a finger up to his lips, his leg braced in front of the door to keep it closed, and his other hand with his gun aimed at about chest height at the door.

  It was tense and deathly silent as we listened with bated breath. CJ's face was lit up, a beacon in the dark as he watched his screen.

  We heard the sound of far too few footsteps heading up to the third floor.

  "About half of them went up to our floor. The others are in the lobby," CJ said in a hushed voice.

  "They won't be up there long. Too many still to risk the lobby." Karl's eyes flashed around as he looked out the window behind him. "Are there any guys outside?"

  CJ swiped through his screen. "As far as I can tell, no, but we don't have many cameras set up out there either. There isn't anyone by the vans at least, but they could have snipers."

  "It was his style. Ivanov’s," I said, confirming CJ’s fears.

  "We may not have any other choice," Karl said making a quick decision. "We have to take the window. We have to jump ...Aleks?"

  "In it," he said, trading places with Brock and Jace so that he could step up to the window. They took over his job of watching the door.

  "On it," Jace corrected, reflexively. His face was serious, and he didn't really look like he was worried about Aleks' English at a time like this. His heart wasn't in it like it usually was.

  Aleks knelt down by the window, assembling an entire rifle from his duffle bag in about ten seconds flat. He nodded at Karl who opened the window for him. Aleks slid the long, black barrel of the rifle out through the opening. His eye went up to the scope.

  "CJ, murder your light," he said as he used the gun to slowly scan the surroundings like a spotlight of death.

  The hallway became pitch black.

  There was thumping from upstairs, and I could only assume they had discovered that we weren't there. My heart leaped back into my throat. It wouldn't be long now.

  CJ confirmed it not a moment later, risking a glance at the bright screen to see what was going on. "Guys we need to move. They've figured out that we're not there. They could be radioing down to the people on the ground floor."

  "One second," Aleks said calmly, not letting the mounting urgency affect his aim. "I have one more building to clear."

  The entire situation was going so fast. I felt like I couldn't breathe.

  "Clear," Aleks said, interrupting my thoughts.

  We were really doing this.

  Aleks looked absolutely deadly. He stayed crouched down right where he was though, keeping an eye scanning the surroundings. The lethal black rifle looked comfortable in his hands, like a lion on the prowl, confident on its throne at the top of the food chain.

  "Alright," Karl said, bringing my attention back to the situation. "Blackbelt, you're up first. See if you can find a safe way down. We're only one floor up."

  I looked around. Who had a black belt?

  To my slight surprise, Brock stepped forward as Karl opened the window the rest of the way. They both waited until Aleks gave them a nod before Brock climbed up onto the sill. Karl kept a grip on his arm to yank him back inside if needed.

  Brock was crouched and looking down to make sure he was clear to jump. For three long seconds, I was terrified that Aleks had missed something. Brock was a sitting duck up in the window like that. My heartbeat sped up, and my hands trembled. What if someone shot him, right there in the window? Was I going to have Brock’s blood splattered all over my face, just like Kaz's had been?

  Finally, though, Karl released him, and Brock shifted and disappeared from view. I didn't hear him hit the ground, but if he was a black belt, he would know how to deafen the sound of his landing, despite his large build.

  Karl waited a second before nodding.

  Karl studied the hall. "Okay, CJ, you got your comms on?"

  CJ gave a stilted nod.

  "You're up then. Take Brock with you to secure the vans. Wait for us there."

  CJ nodded once more and then soon he too was leaping from sight.

  I was still in a mixture of disbelief that this was all happening. Were we really about to jump off the second story of a building into possible sniper fire? Granted, if there was a sniper, they probably would've made themselves known by now.

  Sounds boomed from above us, much closer this time. They must be checking on the other floor now.

  Karl peaked down to make sure it was clear before he turned back to those of us that remained. He scanned our faces before coming to a decision.

  "Okay, Callie," Karl said. "You're next."

  Jace gave me a pat on the back. "Don't worry. The snipers probably aren't just waiting for you. Not how Ivanov works, right? Said so yourself. Ivanov doesn't do loose ends. They'd have been picking all of us off by now. No survivors." He gave me a nod that was probably meant to be reassuring, but it didn't do much to help since I was now terrified.

  I felt sick. I hadn't even thought that the snipers could've seen the others jump and just been waiting on me before taking a shot. I thought that no shots meant no snipers.

  But Jace was wrong. That was exactly how Ivanov worked. He would certainly want to make sure he tied up the loose end that I represented, but he also wouldn't leave any other survivors either.