Black Ice - Anne Stuart [60]
She was gagging, and he didn’t blame her, but he couldn’t afford to be gentlemanly about it. He’d come in the back way, over the roofs and through the storage room window, and he’d go back that way, taking Chloe with him, if he had to sling her over his shoulder and carry her.
She stopped trying to scream, and he let go of her mouth long enough to grab his coat from the bed before pushing her from the room, closing the door behind them.
And out into the icy dawn of the Paris streets with the stink of death still on them.
14
Chloe was in shock, the first piece of luck Bastien had had in a long while. She was past the point of speaking, of protesting, of doing anything but moving with him in blind obedience. He stopped long enough to wrap her in his coat, and then he moved on, keeping hold of her limp hand. If he let go of her she’d probably just stand in the middle of the street until they found her.
He moved fast, in and out of alleyways, backtracking. Why the hell had they killed the girl and then not come after them? Maybe it was a simple mistake—if they’d sent an outsider they might have thought she was Chloe. Or maybe they’d killed the girl as a precaution, then went looking for them, and they’d somehow managed to miss each other in the night.
That was the least likely—he didn’t believe in lucky breaks. His sixth sense told him there was no one watching them as he moved Chloe through the dawn-lit streets. Maybe they thought he’d bring her in himself.
Poor little American idiot, caught up in a game that was way over her head. Both sides wanted her, and he knew his own organization well enough to know that both sides wanted her dead. She was a liability—she’d seen too much, and the sooner she was disposed of, the better.
The traffic had begun to pick up, the sun was rising over the rooftops when she suddenly froze. He knew what was coming, and he held her as she vomited into the street. Her roommate’s body wasn’t the first dead person she’d seen—she’d been there when he’d killed Hakim.
But her time with Hakim had momentarily inured her to reality. She’d had enough time to recover her equilibrium, to start thinking for herself, and the sight of her friend’s brutally murdered body would have hit her full force.
She’d stopped, and he handed her a handkerchief to wipe her face as he hailed a taxi. One pulled up fairly quickly—despite the hour and the neighborhood and Chloe’s obvious distress the taxi drivers of Paris were well trained. They could judge the cost of a patron’s clothing from a block away, to know whether they were worth stopping for.
He bundled her into the cab and followed her, keeping his arms around her and her face tucked against his shoulder. The fewer people who saw her, the safer she’d be.
“Where to, monsieur?”
He gave an address in the fifteenth arrondissement, then leaned back. The driver took off, weaving through the burgeoning traffic with expert ease, but Bastien could see him watching them in his rearview mirror.
“Your girlfriend drink too much?” he asked. “I don’t want her puking on my seats.”
A legitimate enough concern, Bastien thought. “She’s done for now. She’s not my girlfriend, she’s my wife. She’s three months pregnant and having a hard time of it.”
He felt her jerk in his arms, but he put his hand to the back of her head and held her down.
The cabdriver nodded knowingly. “Ah, that’s the worst part. Don’t you worry, madame, it doesn’t last the whole time. My wife can’t keep a thing down for the first three months, and then she can’t stop eating. We’ve had four children, and it’s always the same. Is this your first?”
So many questions, Bastien thought. “Yes,” he said. “Any advice?”
That set him off, and for the next ten minutes Bastien got a lecture on everything from the food cravings of a pregnant woman to the best positions for sex when the