Ciphers, Matt Rogers [a court of thorns and roses ebook free TXT] 📗

white. Then Slater saw the blood pouring out from between the man’s fingers.

He’d been wounded.

Everything happened at once.

Slater raised his MP7 and pumped the trigger.

He got three shots off.

All fired low, because that was literally the only trajectory he could muster in time. If he’d raised the MP7 up to head height, the man would have battered it out of his hands before he could pull the trigger. So all three bullets caught the guy in the stomach and gut, surely tearing his intestines and liver to shreds, so how the hell was the guy still advancing?

It threw Slater off. He couldn’t believe someone could defy the laws of physics like that. The survival mechanism was an incredible thing, because suddenly the enormous man was in his face and simply seized hold of the gun and jerked it upward and smashed it into the underside of Slater’s chin, knocking a tooth clean out of his mouth, nearly splitting his tongue.

Slater went down like he’d been shot.

It damn well felt like he had.

He fought the urge to vomit, and through the mask of pain he clawed desperately for his weapon. He still had three fingers on it, but a particularly vicious bolt of pain seared through his head and threw off his equilibrium. His whole world swum, and he caught a glimpse of the huge silhouette looming toward him.

He found a grip on the MP7, and scooted backward away from the giant, but he was so dizzy, so faint, so…

The huge man dropped toward him.

Slater rolled. It took all the effort he had.

But the giant hadn’t been dropping a blow.

He’d collapsed.

The man came down right next to Slater, rolled over to a seated position, and scooted up against the wall behind them. He opened and closed his mouth, but all that came out was silence. He looked down at his gut, and seemed to notice the three bullet wounds for the first time, and let out a moan. He clasped both hands to the skin, trying to stem the bleeding.

He wasn’t dead.

But he was incapacitated.

Slater got to his feet on shaky legs, and now he did spit out a mouthful of blood. He probed the inside of his mouth with a finger and found the gaping hole where a tooth had previously resided. His tongue was lacerated, but he hadn’t bitten it off. All in all, he was badly rattled, but it was nothing that would keep him permanently out of the fight.

He loomed over the big man, breathing hard, shocked at how close he’d come to losing.

It wasn’t an ordinary occurrence, but this wasn’t an ordinary situation. He and King were brutally disadvantaged, forced to fight against near insurmountable odds, but they were still here, and maybe they had a chance to—

Right beside him, the curtains parted, and a gun barrel pointed squarely at his face.

He held his breath.

Jason King slipped inside and regarded the big man at Slater’s feet.

‘I realised who that is,’ King said. ‘It’s Rick Whelan.’

Slater said, ‘Are you hurt?’

‘My rib. You?’

‘My mouth. And I might be concussed.’

Everything felt distant, detached. He’d experienced it before, but it never made the sensation any less strange. He was depersonalised, a common side effect of a concussion. Waving his hand in front of his face sent a strange response through his brain, like the whole movement was taped on a time delay. Early in his career, it might have thrown him off so drastically that he wouldn’t have been able to continue.

Now, he barely thought about it.

He realised Rick Whelan was still breathing, and together he and King exchanged a wordless look.

Time to make him sing.

64

King crouched down first, squatting so his face was lined up with the big man’s.

Rick said nothing. Most of his conscious effort was directed toward staying alive. He still had both hands pressed on his bullet wounds, but he seemed to be doing a respectable job of stemming the bleeding. King couldn’t help but be impressed by the man’s fortitude.

King said, ‘Last we checked, you were in Grand Cayman.’

Rick stared straight ahead. Said nothing.

Slater crouched down beside King.

King said, ‘You’re better off talking to us.’

‘And you’re better off putting a bullet in my head.’

‘That’s true,’ King said. ‘But we’ve never been the sharpest tools in the shed.’

‘You think I’m going to give you anything?’

‘You giving us something is the difference between bleeding out here on this cold floor and getting patched up at a hospital.’

‘Either way, my life is over.’

‘One option gives you at least some semblance of hope for the future, doesn’t it?’

Rick stared rigidly forward.

‘Come on, Rick,’ King said. ‘Slater and I aren’t stupid. We knew that crushing one of the biggest crime families on the East Coast was going to have consequences. We got back from a job in Nepal a few months ago, and we had some spare time, so we followed it up. Found that most of the major players in the Whelan family, the ones with business smarts and ruthlessness in spades, had fled. Including you. So did you really go to Grand Cayman, or were you here the whole time?’

‘Here,’ Rick said.

‘Because you’re intelligent, and you knew we’d be chasing up any remaining leads, so you left a paper trail overseas while you lay low here and licked your wounds and figured out where to go next.’

Rick shrugged. ‘Something like that.’

‘I know you,’ King said. ‘Better than you think I do.’

‘And you know us,’ Slater said. ‘We were the motivation for all this, weren’t we?’

‘Not my motivation. I don’t let petty emotions affect me. Never have, never will.’

‘For Gavin?’

‘Yeah,’ Rick said. ‘He’s a little more impulsive. He fucking despises the both of you.’

‘And you don’t?’

‘I told you how I feel.’

‘You did,’ King said. ‘And I believe you. Every piece of intel we got on the Whelans after we dismantled them indicated that you were the glue holding the entire operation together. Is that accurate?’

Something very close to pride flared in Rick’s eyes.

Which had been King’s intention the