Rook yanked her hip to bump his, to shake her up. “Give yourself a break. You’ve had a lot coming at you.” The nod she gave in the dark read to him as noncommittal, so, as they strolled on, he continued, “I mean, beyond the obvious mill you’ve been through this past week, some of the things you learned about your mother …? Those are going to take you a while to digest.”
“Yeah, I know.” She felt her throat constrict and swallowed hard, which didn’t seem to do much good. How could Rook know her so well, be so attuned as to see through her armor? To get it—that it wasn’t really the murder case per se she was stuck on at that moment. But he didn’t know the depth of it. Rook couldn’t know that right then, she wasn’t walking through a storybook park across from Victor Hugo’s home, holding him while he hummed “Stardust” off-key. In her mind, she was back in that hospital room feeling relief that her mother had been working as a spy to serve her country, only to have the rug pulled from under her by the words she couldn’t shake.
She could still see Tyler Wynn regarding her from his pillow. The old CIA man saying her mother was one hell of a spy. And how “the sense of mission it gave her fulfilled her like nothing else could. Not even her music.”
Nikki completed the rest of the thought herself: Not even me.
Tires screeched. Light blinded her and shook her from her reverie. She and Rook were getting ambushed—boxed in at the street corner—sandwiched between two dark Peugeot 508s with blacked-out windows and their high beams frying them.
Rook moved quickly and instinctively, sliding to step in front of her. But footsteps approached from behind them, too. Heat pivoted to see the man from before, the whistler, rushing toward them, his bad leg miraculously healed. Four others—two muscle men from each car—converged from both sides, grabbing for them. By reflex, she reached for her hip. But her gun was back in New York.
In a flash, two of them enveloped Rook and dragged him to one of the vehicles while a third man appeared from the passenger seat and pulled a cloth sack over his head. Heat dodged the first of the other pair when he reached for her, but the one coming up from behind, the whistler, bagged her head, also. Disoriented and surprised, she felt the powerful arms of the other two goons wrap her up in a bear hug and lift her feet off the sidewalk. Nikki kicked air, squirmed, and hollered, but the big men had her overmatched.
They bundled Heat into the backseat of the other car and wedged her between their wide shoulders when they got in. Her shouts mixed with the scream of rubber on pavement as the Peugeot accelerated. The car had started roaring up the block, when she felt a sharp stab in her upper arm.
TWELVE
When Heat woke up, she couldn’t move her body. She tried to figure out where she was. It was too dark to see, but she knew that she was lying on her side, nearly fetal. Her knees felt cramped, pulled up to her chest as they were, but when Nikki tried to extend her legs, she couldn’t; the soles of her shoes were up against a solid wall. A shiver ran through her. This was exactly the position in which she had found Nicole Bernardin inside her mother’s suitcase.
Her arm itched where the needle had pierced her, but when she tried to reach for it to give it a scratch, something stopped her. Heat didn’t need to see to know what caused that. She was handcuffed.
To find out how much range of motion she had, Nikki gave the cuffs a tug. And then came a bizarre sensation that made her wonder if she was hallucinating under whatever drug they had injected her with. The handcuffs … tugged back.
“Oh, good, you’re awake,” said Rook. “Can you do me a favor? Your right elbow is digging into my ribs.”
Still foggy from her sedation, it took Nikki a moment to process all this. Wherever she was, Rook was there, too, wedged beside her. Or under her. Or a bit of both. She drew in her right arm as close as she could to her body. “How’s that?”
“Heaven.”
“Rook, do you know where we are?”
“Not sure. They gave me something to knock me out. I felt a little prick.”
“Would you stop?”