Fire and Ice - Anne Stuart [41]
She spun out of his way, knocking people aside, sprinting through the terminal. She could hear the noise behind her, the shouts, but she didn’t stop, she just kept running as the crowd swallowed her up.
There was no mistaking the sign for the ladies’ toilet, and she didn’t even hesitate, running inside as she shoved the wad of yen into her jeans. The room was almost empty—two of the eight stalls were in use, and she ducked inside one, locking it, trying to catch her breath. And then she turned, to look at the ceramic hole in the floor with utter despair. There was no way she could use that while she was wearing jeans. She was just going to have to wait.
Wait to pee. Wait to catch her breath. Wait to see whether they were going to find her in the ladies’ room, whether Reno was now a pulverized spot on the floor of the terminal, whether she was going die in the next few minutes.
One thing was certain. She wasn’t getting a taxi to Narita airport without finding out that Reno was still alive. It was that simple.
And he’d probably kill her when he found out she didn’t go.
Too bad. She’d had enough of running for her life, and she wasn’t running out on Reno, no matter how much he wanted to get rid of her. She was in it for the long haul.
And he was about to find out just how tenacious she could be.
10
Takashi O’Brien had his choice of two options. He could either go back to the tiny island off Hokkaido, find his furious wife and tell her that the one person she loved most in this world, besides him, had been murdered. Or he could find out what the hell had happened to his sister-in-law, and why Reno hadn’t been able to keep her alive.
He was used to lying, used to living in a shadow world. He just wasn’t used to lying to Summer anymore.
Something was up with his great-uncle, as well. Usually he could go to the old man to find out what was happening, but his instincts, which had saved his life countless times, told him to keep away. The office in London didn’t know shit, except that Jilly had been killed, and until he found out who, and why, and how and made them pay, he couldn’t face his wife with the truth.
In the meantime, all he could do was keep his head down, and find the man who should have been trusted to keep her safe. Reno. And then beat the hell out of him.
Jilly waited as long as she possibly could. People came and went, the baby-light voices of young Japanese women filling the tiled room and then leaving it in silence again. There was no sound of chaos from the main part of the terminal—whatever had gone down out there was over and done with. And she couldn’t spend the rest of her life in a Japanese toilet.
She emerged from the stall, cautiously, but the room was finally empty. She was planning to open the main door just a crack, to see whether it looked safe, but just the moment she reached it, it slammed open as a group of chattering women pushed inside. They stopped talking when they saw her, an uneasy silence in the room.
“Sumimasen,” she murmured, slipping past them.
She’d been in the bathroom for at least a couple of hours. Unfortunately it looked as if it wasn’t always rush hour in Tokyo. The main hall of the train station was almost empty, just a few random people at the vending machines.
The first place she looked was where she had last seen Reno, with Kobayashi looming down on him. The center of the hall was empty, and there was no blood on the floor. That proved nothing—the Japanese would clean everything quickly so there’d be no trace to offend the travelers. For all she knew Reno was in pieces somewhere, never to be found again….
“What the fuck are you doing here?”
She couldn’t help it. She flung her arms around him, holding him so tight it was a wonder he could breathe. Oddly enough he didn’t complain, he just stood there, putting up with it.
She finally let go, pulling back. He looked in reasonably good shape—a cut across one cheekbone, just under the teardrops, and he’d lost his sunglasses, but he was in