Fire and Ice - Anne Stuart [82]
“But Reno…” she protested.
Reno must have heard her voice. He looked away from his grandfather, into her eyes, and it was the face of a stranger. A dealer of death.
“Take her,” he said.
Taka clamped his hand on her arm, but instead of dragging her away, he took her over to face the dying oyabun. He bowed low, and out of instinct Jilly did, too, her eyes filling with tears.
The old man smiled faintly, and he murmured something, but it was too soft for Jilly to hear or understand, and then Taka was pulling her away, and there were tears running down his face, her cool, emotionless brother-in-law.
And then she didn’t have time to think, or to cry, or even to breathe, as Taka dragged her through the back of the room, out into a darkened corridor.
She didn’t waste her time arguing. She could smell the chemical odor of gasoline and something else, and she knew, even without asking, what was going to happen. There was no pulling away from Taka’s iron grip, and when they reached the bottom of the endless flights of stairs and crashed out into the bright winter dawn light, she collapsed in the dirty, packed snow.
“Reno…?” She was gasping for breath. “You left him behind!”
“Summer would kill me if anything happened to you,” Taka said, not even winded. “And Reno can take care of himself. We’ve got to keep moving. The place is going to blow. Uncle had charges set all over the place.”
“Why?”
“So there’d be no chance Hitomi’s men would take over the family. Ojiisan’s men were honored to die with him.”
“Not Reno!” She scrambled to her feet, ready to race back to the building, but Taka caught her easily.
“Reno can take care of himself,” he said again. “In the meantime, you need to get the hell out of here. There are going to be a lot of questions, and I don’t want you around to answer them.”
“Please, Taka,” she begged as he dragged her away from the building. “Let’s just go back and make certain.”
“You’ll forget all this,” Taka said. “This was just a short nightmare that’s no part of real life.” There was a small gray car outside on the street, and he pushed her into it. She had no idea whether he’d brought it or stolen it, spur-of-the-moment. All she could see was the compound, the smoke curling out of the upper-floor windows.
They were three blocks away when the explosion hit, so powerful that the car skidded beneath the shock. The streets were almost deserted—Taka didn’t slow down, and his face was grim.
“You can’t just drive away!” she cried.
“Yes, I can.” He didn’t even blink when the fire engines raced past them, heading for the warehouse. His face was set in stone, and if she couldn’t see the marks of tears on his face, she’d have thought he was without feeling.
“What if he dies?” she whispered.
“Reno has nine lives. At most he’s used up six of them.”
“And Ojiisan?”
“He’s gone,” Taka said, his voice flat and emotionless. “You were honored to have even been in his presence.”
“But what did he say to me? What were he and Reno talking about?”
“I couldn’t hear,” Taka said, but she didn’t believe him. “And it no longer matters—it’s over. Next time maybe you’ll listen to your sister when she tells you not to visit. We’ll come to you.”
She slumped back in the seat, closing her eyes. At that moment she wanted to strangle her intractable brother-in-law, but there was nothing she could do. She was going home, bloody and bruised but in one piece, and sooner or later she’d get over it. Get over Reno. And move on with life.
In the meantime, all she could do was something she seldom considered. She prayed.
Reno closed the old man’s eyes, then took a step back. Kobayashi still held him, and he was sobbing, his great chest shaking with it. “We need to leave, Kobayashi-san,” he said patiently. “He wouldn’t have wanted you to die with the rest of them.”
“My place is here,” he said with great dignity. “I served him in life. I will not abandon him in death.”
Reno nodded. He was running out of time, and his grandfather’s words still echoed in