The Cardinal Bird - Book 1: Reverse Harem Series (The Cardinal Series) Page 8

  CJ nodded and came back to get it before leaving.

  Jace capped the peroxide before swiping everything on the bench back into the first aid kit. He placed that on the floor next to him and put his hand on my shoulder. "Lie down."

  There was no gentle guiding to his actions anymore. He was concentrated, and his smoky voice was commanding.

  I laid back on the bench, Jace's hand a steady presence as he helped ease me back. Two elastic snaps sounded, one right after the other as the powdery and sharp scent of latex filled the space. Rubber gloves.

  His quick fingers, now covered in gloves, rolled the shirt up and tucked it away securely as he got to work. The first aid box rattled around on the floor as he sifted through it. I tried to watch what he was doing at first but then gave up when I realized that it was out of my line of sight. Besides, watching Jace work would be way too intimidating, so I didn't have many other options other than to stare at the ribbed ceiling of the van.

  "Peroxide," he warned me. "Might be cold. Might sting." He tilted the bottle.

  It washed over me in an abrupt wave that lurched and ebbed down my sides. It pattered and dripped to the floor with a splash.

  Well then. I guess we weren't dabbing and toweling anymore.

  "Going to scrub some of the scum out. Don't have anything stronger than OTC painkillers. Want some?"

  I shook my head, rolling it against the hard bench beneath it. The light shifted and danced from the back of the van. I pulled my head up a bit to look. CJ was back.

  "Lean back," Jace growled, scrubbing a wide area surrounding the wound. "You're putting tension on your stomach."

  I dropped back down to the bench without too much of a fuss. I wasn't going to argue with him when he was helping me.

  The van shifted just as Jace pressed the cloth to the bullet hole, causing his hand to dig in. It was like he had pressed a live wire inside me. My body jumped involuntarily as the pain raced through me, sending messages along my neurons that had me sweaty and shaky in a flat second.

  "Shit, CJ," he hissed. "A little warning."

  "Sorry! I wanted to hurry. It looks bad."

  Jace swiped at the wound, deftly switching out the soiled, wet cloth with a new one. "I'm going to need some more rags." He dabbed at the wound, absorbing some of the moisture there. "Also, if you can handle it, you could start cleaning the one on her leg."

  "I'll be back," CJ said quickly, quietly before he left.

  It was maybe thirty seconds before the light shifted again, but it wasn't CJ that spoke up.

  "Sitrep!" Karl's voice snapped, causing me to jolt once more into Jace's pressing fingers. I let out a small whimper this time. I knew that the borrowed shirt and boxers were soaked through now with my sweat, and I had started shaking again but couldn't seem to stop. The wound had been easier to ignore when someone wasn't digging through it.

  "Goddammit!" Jace's eyes were molten lava. "Will people quit doing that?"

  He lifted his hands away from my stomach, correctly assuming that Karl would climb in. The van's suspension teetered as Karl made his way up and over to us. Boots crunching on the gravel, louder than both Karl and CJ had been, stopped just at the back of the van. A cacophony of voices buzzed into an angry swarm of male curses, shouts, and questions. It was too confusing to follow and pick out individual voices.

  "The situation report is: Do not climb up here," Jace said gruffly as he pressed down a little more.

  It felt like he was stuffing a molten ball of metal into me. I was burning up in that one spot and yet somehow freezing cold everywhere else. Bile raised at the back of my throat, but by some great miracle, I managed to keep it down.

  "But I have the cloths," CJ said.

  "You can come up here. Everyone else needs to stay back. You can't keep rocking the van. I think she's going into shock."

  "Everyone else?" I thought, realizing only after Karl answered me that I had said it out loud.

  "Yeah," Karl said, coming into my line of sight. His eyes went down to where Jace was working. They narrowed before coming back up to lock me in their deep blue depths. "You didn't tell us you were shot. That's kind of a big deal. We wrapped up in there, and we're ready to move out to a hospital as soon as we patch you up enough to travel."

  My mind sparked to work through an increasing haze. "No hospitals," I said, but I must have mumbled or something because no one acknowledged it.

  "Twice. She was shot twice," Jace said as hands lifted away, and apparently, CJ took that as his cue to climb in as the van shook once more.

  More gloves were snapped on, and then hands were everywhere.

  "She's cold," CJ said. Some crinkling sounded like plastic being opened and unfolded. Something was draped over my legs.

  "Callie." Karl's voice was strong, cutting through the haze of pain my mind had clouded over with. I turned my head to focus on him. His dark, thick eyebrows were furrowed. "When were you shot?"

  I blinked slowly. Jace nudged something that gave me a little bit of energy. My eyes focused. "Mm... two...weeks?"

  There was more rustling as Jace's hands were busy, but then I also felt something down on my thigh. Rubber fingers. Probing. Then, cold liquid flooding the area, stinging as it met and battled with the angry bullet hole in my leg. It burnt. It had to be the peroxide. Was peroxide supposed to burn?

  "You were at that hotel, weren't you? In Paris?" Karl's voice was distant, filtered through a haze of white noise, but my attention was jarred when he mentioned Paris.

  Paris...hotel. My eyes closed.

  "Okay, pet, you are going to take the main hall to the security room. I need you to access and hack into the system. Take out anyone that's in there." A gun was placed in my hands. I gripped it, unsure and unsteady, but he didn't let go. I looked up to meet his cold, hazel eyes. "And I do mean take. Them. Out."

  I swallowed past the lump in my throat and pulled the gun from him without giving an answer. I didn't want to kill anyone, but what difference did it make?

  I was a spook, non-existent, tricked and coerced into deleting my own history. I had no country. I wouldn't be able to run anywhere that Nikolai wouldn't be able to find me. Not without a passport. His influence was far-reaching, farther than I had suspected initially. And certainly, farther than my last kidnapper had suspected. That was the whole reason for being kidnapped, again. We’d all underestimated Nikolai Ivanov.

  My hands shook as Dell watched me tuck the gun away safely under my dress. As if I wasn't about to kill someone--someone's father, brother, son, friend, dad. Maybe even more than one someone.

  I went to do my part, but his rough calloused hand caught my upper arm.

  He leaned close, as if talking to a lover, his sensual, full lips brushing my ear as his eyes scanned the ballroom. "Do not hesitate, pet. Nikolai will find out, and you will be punished."

  I shivered, thinking of the tank, one of his favorite punishments. Briefly, Kaz popped into my mind, but I shook the thought away. Nikolai had threatened a lot of things, but he would never truly harm his only son.

  Right?

  Chapter 7

  A searing pain from my thigh brought me back to the van. I gasped. The double onslaught from both my torso and leg was exhausting. I hadn't eaten anything substantial for a while and absolutely nothing for about a day, but that didn't seem to matter when the back of my throat filled with bile. Nausea suffused me as my mouth watered, compounding the simultaneous need to swallow and throw-up.

  "Bucket," Karl yelled. Jace and CJ kept working, and the rocking of the van certainly wasn't helping anything as Karl searched for something to place under my mouth.

  I was hot and cold. I was dizzy. I wished desperately for the van to steady out, but I knew it wouldn't make a difference. It was too late.

  I twisted and turned my head as much as possible, which wasn't very much at all. CJ and Jace, in an act of twin telepathy or just random coincidence, guessed what I was about to do and simultaneously clamped their hands down on me to keep me from pulling or injuring anything further.

  Luckily though, Karl was right there with the bucket to catch whatever came out. It wasn't much due to my empty stomach.

  I looked back up at the roof in a daze. My eyes studied the same dips and grooves from earlier as I tried to feel more balanced. Someone, Karl probably was petting my sweaty, smelly, knotty hair. I focused on that instead. It was a new and foreign thing to feel someone touching me in comfort. It made the pain easier to bear.

  Finally, Jace and CJ removed their hands from me, and a full minute passed before I realized the fact. It took even longer for my body to stop shaking from the shock, though there were still small tremors running through me. The pain receded enough for me to notice the feel of dry bandages and medical tape shifting and pulling every time my body shook.

  I laid there, calming down as the van grew still.

  Karl was studying my face, and I had to wonder what he was seeing.

  I was sweaty, smelly, pale, and shaky. Possibly I was bruised too, but I couldn't remember if those had healed up yet. That guard at the hotel in Paris had really done a number on me, wailing away at my face to try to find out whom I was working with. There was at least a new bruise from the van door slamming me between the eyes. I probably looked and felt like the rundown victim that I had always been. Misused and cast aside like a wet, soiled napkin littering the street.

  I met his electric blue eyes and saw a burning emotion in his intense gaze. It was hard to decipher or sort into one single emotion, so I was unsure if it was good or bad.

  "I have lots of questions for you," he murmured. He cleared his throat, speaking louder to address everyone else but maintaining eye contact. "We need to leave now. Aleks, you're too illegal. Brock, I need you with me to help translate. CJ, you too. She needs a hospital, and we may need you to...edit paperwork to fly under Ivanov's radar. We can't let him know she's not dead. She's the closest thing we've come to a lead with him. Hell, we didn't even know who we were looking for until she threw his name in our laps. She gets protected at all costs."

  CJ jumped into action to go to the other van, possibly going after one of the many laptops I had spotted earlier.

  However, my mind was stuck on the word hospital.

  "What if Ivanov comes back to check if she's here?" Brock asked.

  Karl finally broke eye contact as he looked up and to the side, thinking. He pulled a phone out of his pocket and tapped at the screen. "I'm open to suggestions."

  "We could do swapsies," Aleks said with his deep, accented voice.

  "Swapsies?" Brock grumbled.

  "No," Jace said. "He’s onto something. Inventive English, as usual, but a good idea. Put one of the other bodies in the tank and hope Ivanov doesn't come back too soon. Maybe he'll think it's her...if enough time passes."

  What a polite way of saying the body, my supposed body, needed to decompose enough to be unrecognizable as a male.

  There went the nausea again.

  Karl nodded. "Alright, get it done. Let us know if you need help with the lid on that deathtrap." He held the phone up to his ear. "Hello, sir. We're at the sight. No sign of Ivanov, but we may have one of his workers. We're going to need medical help. Discrete medical help."

  There was so much wrong with his statements, but only one of them sent a cold, hard slice of fear down my spine. My hand shot out and latched onto his wrist. "No hospitals."

  I could feel Jace's surprised gaze on me, but I kept my eyes zeroed in on Karl.

  Karl’s big, black eyebrows pinched down in a frown. "One sec, boss." He put his phone to his shoulder and leaned in towards me. "If you're worried about going to jail..."

  "No, it's Ivanov."

  "He won't be able to find you. I promise." He was steady when he said it. It was strong and confident and full of conviction.

  And it terrified me.

  "You can't make that promise. None of you can. You don't know him. You don't know what he's capable of...what he's willing to do to protect his biznes." I spat out the Russian word for ‘business’ because it had a different shade of meaning, a slightly darker connotation in my mind than the English equivalent. A business was a place of commerce and trade for goods or services. A biznes though...it was something suspect and corrupt. It was a trade of the night, secret and unknown. I instantly associated it with every bad memory I'd had since being brought to Russia. Since Nikolai.

  It was something worth more than his own son's life, this biznes of his.

  "You're just going to have to trust us," Karl said quietly but firmly.

  "I don't trust anyone," I replied with conviction, letting the truth fill my hazel eyes. People had tried to teach me a blank face, but it was one of many things I had been unable to master.

  I couldn't lie. I was speaking the truth. Being able to trust someone...that was an ability robbed from me throughout my entire life.

  A frown stole over Jace's face. I could practically feel the same gaze coming from the others as well. Karl must have been thinking whatever the others were thinking too. He was quiet a moment, just studying me before he turned to the onlookers. He gave them a quick, sharp nod.

  Gravel crunched as the sound of several pairs of boots left the area.

  Karl turned back to me. He studied me a moment longer before his face seemed to...soften. "Can I ask you something?" At my hesitant nod, he continued. "You're not just the girl from that hotel in Paris. You're...you're Byte-Syzed...aren't you?"

  I didn't need him to clarify to know that he hadn't been talking about my small stature being "bite-sized." My eyes grew big. "You know my name?"

  "Somewhat," he said with a crooked grin. "You're more familiar with CJ. He was the one you spoke to most of the time."

  "He's Megabyte_1?"

  "Guilty as charged," CJ said.

  I jumped and glanced down as best as I could to see CJ. I hadn't heard him return, and it left me disgruntled, miffed. My acute sense of hearing had been invaluable to me over the years, and it was somewhat an insult to my pride that this happy-go-lucky giant had been able to get the drop on me.

  CJ was looking right at me and smiling a grin that nearly split his face. He had a laptop bag slung over his shoulder and a headset around his neck.

  "How did you know?" I asked. "You couldn’t’ve known. I'm a nobody. I don't exist...anywhere. I made sure of it."

  The air stilled for a moment, but—before my mind could even try to process what I'd said that made such a big impact—Karl continued. "You’re right. We couldn’t find anything about the hacker that was Byte-Syzed. Call it a hunch. When you were so adamant to get that thumb drive, I figured it was just too big of a coincidence that you had evidence saved on it and had been left to die less than 24 hours since we last heard from Byte-Syzed."

  "Plus," CJ added as he climbed in the back again. "I didn't understand it before, but your hacker name makes complete sense. Most hacker names are chosen to make the person more BA, but yours...what kind of guy would blatantly own up to being small. I'm actually embarrassed that I just assumed you were a guy. Girls can be anything boys can be. I was being just a tad sexist." He grinned at me. "I love your hacker name. You're so little," he chuffed me under the chin, a slight blush on his cheeks that somehow managed to dredge up a matching blush on my own pale cheeks.

  I cleared my throat somewhat awkwardly. "My mom gave it to me. Or at least the idea for it. I’ve always been small for my age, and she would call me bite-sized, like a Snicker’s bar."