J Ward - Crave

His car and driver were waiting for him in the underground parking facility, and when he got into the rear of the sedan, he groaned.

Shallow breathing kept him conscious as the flaring pain grew volcanic… and then gradually subsided as the car eased forward.

From up front, he heard the driver say, “ETA eleven minutes.”

Matthias closed his eyes. He was not entirely sure why he was making this trip… but he was being drawn to the northeast United States by a compulsion not even his rational side could deny. He just had to go, even as he was surprised at the need.

Then again, just as his number two had found his target, Matthias had also located the soldier he was after personally, and this long flight back over the ocean was because he wanted to look the man who had saved his life in the face for one last time-before the bastard’s corpse was buried.

He told himself it was to confirm that Jim Heron had indeed died.

There was more to it than that, though.

Even if he didn’t understand the whys… there was much more to this trip for him than that.

More than anything, Grier was furious at herself. As she pounded over to her Audi, weeding through the other cars and getting heckled by a knuck dragger or two, everything came into sharp focus: where she was, what she’d done earlier at the courthouse, who she was trying to save.

Isaac had broken that guy’s arm. In front of her and a hundred other people. And treated it with the same degree of shock and panic as someone hanging up a phone.

Like he did that every day.

And then he’d accepted money for it.

Coming up to her sedan, she got her key fob out and deactivated the alarm. And as she caught her reflection in the glass of the driver’s-side door, she thought of her brother.

The kind of wild buzz that had driven her to come out here reminded her of the night he’d died.

Grier had been the one to find his body and her resuscitation efforts had made no difference… because he’d been dead before she’d started them. But she’d kept up the pumping on his chest and the breathing into his mouth anyway.

The paramedics had had to drag her off his body. Screaming.

And the thing was, in death, as well as in life, he hadn’t cared about all her efforts to save him. He’d been transfixed by his final fix, a haunting look of ecstatic pleasure frozen on his pasty gray face, his driving addiction fulfilled.

Recklessness took a variety of different forms, didn’t it.

She’d always prided herself on being the responsible one out of the pair of them, the one who had excelled at school, and worked hard to get ahead, and never done anything that her parents would have disapproved of. She’d certainly never, ever tried illegal drugs. Not even once.

And yet here she was, putting herself and her career at risk on the off chance she could talk a total stranger into going straight. If the police had shown up-or did, there was still time for that-getting arrested as a spectator would have had her booted from the Massachusetts bar faster than she could say, “But, Judge, I was only there for my client.” She’d already put up twenty-five grand, which would hardly break her bank… except how much farther could those funds have gone if put to use on some program for at-risk youth?

As her head started to pound, she regarded her actions since around nine a.m. with a clear eye. And what do you know, she saw not so much someone doing good in the world, but an out-of-control woman who was-

Daniel appeared on the far side of her car, his ghostly face dead serious. Get in, Grier. Get in the car and lock the doors.

“What?” she said. “Why-”

Do it. Now. Her dead brother seemed to focus on the air behind her right shoulder. Damn it, Grier-

“I remember who you are.”

She squeezed her eyes shut. Oh for God’s sake, this just kept getting better, didn’t it. The meth head was back.

Turning around to give her erstwhile suitor another-

The man grabbed her arms, and with a shove that left her teeth singing, pushed her up against the car face-first. As he held her in place with his body, she was reminded that men were in fact built differently from women: They were a hell of a lot stronger. Especially when they were high and desperate.

“You’re Danny’s sister.” The breath on her cheek was hot and smelled like roadkill in August. “You showed up a couple of times at his place. What happened to him?”

“He died,” she croaked out.

“Oh… God. I’m sorry…” The addict seemed honestly sad. In a Tim Burton, distorted-netherworld kind of way. “Listen, can you spare some cash? Rich girl like you… hafta have some cash on you. But only if you can manage it.”

Uh-huh, right. She knew she was going to give him what he wanted whether she liked it or not-which was how, in spite of the way he phrased it, a mugging worked.

Rough hands rummaged around and her purse was ripped off her shoulder. She thought about yelling, but the weight bearing down on her rib cage made anything more than shallow breaths impossible, and besides, she had parked way around the side in the shadows. Who was going to hear her?

As her wide eyes tracked the departing cars and trucks that were so close and yet so far away, she had an absolutely absurd memory of the opening scene from Jaws-where the woman was being dragged under by the shark and saw the glowing lights of houses on the shore.

“I’m not gonna hurt you… I just need money.”

With his body still forcing her against the car, he dumped the contents of her bag on the muddy ground, her cell phone, wallet, keys, everything pouring free. And then he tossed her sixteen-thousand-dollar Birkin bag over the hood of the Audi.

Stupid bastard. He could have gotten more for that on eBay than any cash he’d find in her wallet.

Half of her mind was in a panic, the other part icy calm, and she went with the latter, because she was nothing if not her father’s daughter: This freaked-out addict was going to spin her around at some point because he was going to want her jewelry, and when he did, she had a good chance of kneeing him where it counted.

Even if she had to pretend she wasn’t about to throw up all over her shoes-

The weight crushing against her wasn’t so much removed as it was vaporized, gone as if it had never been: One second she couldn’t breathe. The next, she had all the oxygen in the world.

As she dragged in a tremendous gulp of air and held on to the car roof to keep standing, grunts sounded next to her.

Pushing herself around, she had to blink a couple of times to understand what she was looking at-but no amount of wait-maybe-I’m-not-seeing-this-right changed what was going on: Isaac had come out of nowhere, pinned her assailant to the ground, and was giving the guy a root canal the hard way.

Namely with his fist.

“Isaac-” Her voice cracked and she coughed. “Isaac! Stop it!”

Louie the PI’s voice echoed through her head: That SOB could be a murderer.

“Isaac!”

She was expecting to have to jump on him or call for help to get him to stop the beating, but as soon as it started, it was over. Isaac quit the Rocky routine on his own, flipping the man onto his stomach and wrenching his arms back to immobilize him.

Nothing was broken this time.

And Isaac wasn’t even breathing hard as he glanced over at her. “Are you okay?”

His eyes were sharp, his expression deadly and calm, his voice even and polite. It was obvious that he was in total control of himself and the situation… and it dawned on her that he might possibly have saved her from something awful. With addicts, you never knew what they were going to do.

“Did he hurt you?” Isaac said. “Are you okay?”