Dark Heart (DARC Ops Book 3) (20 page)

“I’m fine,” she said, clearing her throat. “I just need to get out of here.” She sniffed again and raised her head, looking around.

“Do you need any help?” Jasper asked.

“You’re busy.”

“Never too busy for you. Where do you need to go?”

“Hey,” came a loud, strong voice. A cop, walking up to them with a puffed chest. “Youse two need to go. We’re closing the whole floor down.”

Jasper turned to absorb the cop’s spewing, standing between him and Fiona.

“Who are you?” asked the cop with a kind of twisted smirk.

“We’ll get going in a minute,” said Jasper.

“I asked who you were.”

“I don’t care. I’m talking to my friend here.” He tried his best to pronounce the words as evenly and calmly as possible. But mouthy cops made that a difficult task.

“I don’t care about your friend, Pal.” He was standing inches away from Jasper now.

“Who are
you
?” Jasper spat back at him. It wasn’t the wittiest of comebacks. But anything was better than what he really wanted to do, which was to respond with something other than words.

“I know who he is,” said Fiona. “Officer Elgin. Right?”

He looked a little confused. “Yeah, you read my badge.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And last year I helped the doctor extract a broken cucumber out of your rectum.”

There was a distinct and audible sound of the wind getting knocked out of naughty Officer Elgin. And a look, a priceless expression that had gone from feigned confusion to legitimate devastation. Like he’d been kicked in the balls. Or kicked somewhere else and with half a boot sticking out like that most unfortunate cucumber.

It was all the man could take, just that one simple line, that kill shot delivered so deftly by Fiona. It was damned impressive. And Jasper had seen some great snipers in action.

“Wow,” was all Jasper could say. What else could anyone say after that? Especially the cop, who had made his escape, walking away from them with a slight waddle like it was the after-effect of an even greater humiliation than what Fiona had doled out.

Meanwhile, she had stood up from the chair without saying anything, her face looking a little proud, but her legs still standing with a slight unsteadiness.

Jasper took her arm. “Come on, I’ll walk you out.” Her legs and even her arms appeared weak and almost twitchy. “Are you okay?” He wrapped his arm around her and held her up against his side. “I can help you walk to—”

“I’m okay, I’m okay.” She started walking with him. “Thank you. I just need to snap out of it.”

“Snap out of what?”

“
This
,” she said, pointing to her teary red face. “My God. I’m usually pretty good in, you know, crisis situations.”

“Well, you’re getting hit on both fronts here,” said Jasper. “It’s okay to need time.”

“Thanks again for the tea.” She smiled weakly and then took a sip. “Are you still doing that surgery today?”

“Not me personally,” he laughed and immediately felt like an idiot. “But . . . you mean the prince?”

She nodded, snuffling.

“We don’t have a choice. And, with the way his heart is,
he
doesn’t have a choice.” Jasper watched as another wave of detectives entered the crime scene, bending the police tape over their heads as they ducked in. “This is totally . . . Aside from this, from a cybersecurity standpoint, we’re just about totally secure. And we’ll have guards watching the room, of course.” He turned back to Fiona, who, despite the tears and the running eyeliner, looked as beautiful as ever. “Again, I’m just . . . I’m so sorry about your sister.”

“Well, it was expected, so . . . I guess that’s why I’m so surprised it hit me like this.”

“You can expect something like that. But you can never really prepare
for it.”

“I thought I had.”

He watched the way she bit her bottom lip, how she put on her brace face. A life in the medical field can add emotional calluses, but she was still fragile. “I’ll be in town for at least a week after all this.”

Fiona nodded, her lip still sucked in. She might have been grieving, and there might have just been a murder, but she looked sexy as hell. He felt immensely guilty for even thinking that. But it was the truth.

“I want to see you,” she said, her eyes looking up into his.

“Can I call you tonight? See how you are?”

She reached her arms out for him, like a little girl needing a hug. And he answered, sliding his body against hers and holding it warmly. She sighed, long and loud, as Jasper felt the top of her head come to a rest against his chest. He bowed his head to hers, and kissed her just once, very gently and politely, just below her hairline.

They’d come a long ways, through a number of years, from zero to sixty with his bed bath rub-n-tug, and now, back to a sweet politeness. But there was something extra. Something deeper. And the way she breathed into him, and melted into him, he knew she could feel it too.

He held her longer than he’d expected, until a voice from outside the embrace said, “Jasper?”

Jasper felt Fiona unclasp. He turned to greet the great spoiler.

“Sorry to interrupt,” said Jackson, whose expression did not match the words. “Can I get you to take a look at the body, in the morgue?”

Jasper agreed to the grim task with a simple nod. And then he turned to check on Fiona, who looked disturbed and deep in thought. “I’m sorry,” he said. Sorry on behalf of Jackson, and having to hear about “business.” Sorry for the whole damn thing, really.

She shrugged like it hardly mattered. She kept up that brave, pretty face, for Jasper’s sake or probably even her own. “I’ll be fine,” she said.

I
t was
after her talk with Wendy, and an awkward elevator ride where she’d tried avoiding all the inquisitive glances and small talk of her concerned coworkers, and after the shivers that came on when she was alone in the parking garage, after she crossed through its cool darkness and wafting chemicals, after her footsteps faded at her parking space, when she finally thought of it: Vic. Their awkwardness in the stairwell. His guilty and exhilarated expression. And of how stupid she was to have not mentioned any of it to Jasper when she’d had the chance.

While she might have had the chance, having the ability was another thing. The incident with Vic seemed to have vacated from her mind, blasting away with the same speed as their crash course in the stairwell. It began and ended inexplicably, and faded away with equal mystery. A floating, fleeting thought that was forced away to make room for other, more important thoughts. More immediate thoughts. A new death to worry about. Dr. Wahl. And then Jasper. A new life to hope for.

She thought of that life on her way back to the elevator. The moment had called for it, a need for at least some type of optimism. Whether it would be a reborn friendship, or perhaps something more substantial. She kept thinking, unsure about the details, but happy to be distracted even just temporarily. But then came another distraction. In the parking garage. Behind her. Footsteps.

It sounded like the stride of a man, a quick and heavy clunking.

Fiona sped up her stride, hoping to stay ahead of whomever had just been gaining on her. In the back of her mind she could see him, Vic, Victor, the mad Russian, knife in his hand, its blade gleaming through the darkness of the garage. Maybe there was still a bit of Dr. Wahl’s blood dried onto it.

Maybe she’d better stop thinking so hard.

But keep walking . . . Just keep walking.

She started moving even faster when the garage filled with the sound of a happily whistled melody. A morbidly sappy tune. Some Italian overture that was way too bright and cheery for the dank, dark garage. Of course it had to be the clichéd whistling madman who was following her.

In the elevator, with her finger mashing the “close” button, she waited impatiently for the doors to slide shut, waiting for what felt like an eternity. Unlike her last trip, the elevator was empty. It was just her . . . and potentially the whistler if the doors had shut any later than they did.

“Hey, wait!”

Click.

She was alone, safely alone, finally. She needed the time to play it through in her head, to find the wording, find how she could do it without accusing a coworker of murder. There was just something unsettling about Vic—beyond the whistling, if that had been him. When he stormed into the stairwell, it looked like he was fleeing some unpleasant situation. A prank, he said. But there seemed to be nothing funny about the way he was acting.

She wanted Jasper to know about it. Just a heads-up. That’s all. Maybe he could observe Vic, or assign someone to tail him. Or was such stalking, and her need to go track down Jasper, completely unnecessary?

She took a public elevator to the fifth floor, trying to avoid running into anyone she worked with. And then a service elevator down to Basement 4, the morgue, a place she hadn’t been to in years. Or maybe even longer, because she would have remembered how dark it was.

And quiet. How utterly, creepily quiet.

Stepping off the elevator, she might not have expected to see Jasper right away, but at least someone. Or at least hear them. Instead, after she walked down a narrow corridor and past a row of receiving and exam rooms, the area seemed completely dead. And why was it so dark? It seemed to run so counter to what she’d expect for a morgue, the harsh lighting, ultra-clean surfaces, maybe even a morgue technician or two actually present and working.

“Hello?”

Her voice surprised her, how little and scared it had become.

She had always been a little hesitant to take part in any task associated with the morgue. It usually wasn’t her business and she was glad for it. She’d seen her share of dead bodies, certainly— including today’s—and she was no stranger to death. It wasn’t a fear of death or corpses, but of how they were systematically sorted and stored. It was the whole institution that that creeped her out, the architecture and design of the rooms, the way one led to another, the theme getting darker and more horrifying with each turn, from the receiving room to the operating tables, to the incinerator, and finally, to the meat coolers. Refrigerated storage, and then the freezers—slabs of frozen coffins for those unidentified or needing long-term preservation. The truly dead end of the process.

Fiona didn’t dare get that far.

Something was seriously wrong.

The place seemed vacant, as if any activity—including maintenance and cleaning—had ended months ago.

“Hello?” she called again. But it was unanswered. Futile.

She should probably get the hell out of there.

She should look back in the elevator, check the room list. There were other basement levels, other locations for the hospital’s currently operating morgue. There had
to be. Because this place looked as active as one of its intended guests.

So where were they? Where would Dr. Wahl have been wheeled to?

And where was Jasper?

Her need to see him had been increasing by the minute. She sped up her pace and was halfway down the corridor, with the elevator doors in sight, when what dim lights there were suddenly went out entirely. There was a low buzzing sound and she looked up at the fluorescent panels, watching them flicker and then turn a greenish-brown color. And then black, bathing the corridor in complete darkness. There was nothing, not even an exit sign or safety lighting to guide her out of that Godforsaken place, that lair, a literal death trap. She resorted to running her hands across whatever sticky substance was on the wall, hating every inch of it and using the faintest touch of her fingertips along the painted brick.

Her phone!

She stopped in her tracks and reached into her pocket.

Please have enough charge . . .

It turned on, creating a small dim halo of light around her hands. Sanctuary. She made it larger with a few swipes of her thumb, switching on the flashlight function, which lit up the greasy tile floor next to her running shoes. She moved it forward, to light up her path and look toward her escape, but the light lit up another pair of shoes.

Shoes? It didn’t make sense. Nor did the black pant cuffs rolled up over them. It didn’t register. Or at least, she didn’t have time for to register, before her hand felt something hard and fast, something slapping the phone away with a single blow. No more light. No more tiles or shoes and pant cuffs. There was just an invisible set of hands, beyond her own, that could return at any minute.

A burst of ice-cold adrenaline throbbed through her body. An explosion of energy, like the release of a spring, pumped her legs down the hall, opposite the presence, and opposite to what was left of her phone’s light. In solid darkness now, and running even faster, her hands held straight out and blocking, expecting, and willing to crash into anything. Anything was better than whatever she was running madly from.

Until whatever it was her head slammed into. A hard solid mass that felt like the front end of a bus, whatever it was sent her to the ground instantly, holding her head, crawling on a dusty, cold floor, feeling her way around a wall, a doorway. She was in a room now, huddled up with her knees to her chest while the pain from her head radiated in hot waves of nausea. And then the lights came back on, faintly at first. She could see their dim glow along the side of the door frame, getting brighter, closer.

No. Not the hall lights. He had her phone, her light. Whoever that fucker was. And he was getting closer.

She stuck her leg out and, with her foot, caught the end of the door. With the flick of her toes she started it in motion, the heavy door moving slowly at first, but steadily, and quietly, swinging all the way to the frame where it met her hands, where she could guide it more softly and quietly into place with hardly a sound.

She wasn’t sure what kind of room it was, only that there was at least a door separating her and her attacker. All she could do now was move back, on all fours but in a sitting position, crawling backward like a crab along the wall until she could bump into a better hiding spot. Or, better yet, if she could come across any type of weapon. An old, discarded scalpel, ideally.

But all that was there were piles of grit and whatever disgusting debris she was happy to not be able to identify in the dark.

She came to a sudden stop, her back thumping up against a wall. She collapsed there, out of breath, out of her mind. The pain from her head waved back like some giant ocean swell, her head expanding with it, ballooning out and then shrinking, expanding and contracting, agony and then numbness. Through the cycles, whenever the pain faded, she had some time to think.

How, exactly, in the
fuck
did she end up here?

With her head leaning back against the wall, she opened her mouth wide, hoping to take away as much sound as possible from her panting. She could feel the hyperventilation coming on, the increasingly shallow breathing. Her heart thumped against her ribs, the strumming of blood against her eardrums. Such a strong heart. It would be a pity if it was forced to stop working before its expiration date. She was a nonsmoker. She avoided fatty and fried foods. She was a runner. And she was an organ donor. Maybe they could transplant it into that Saudi prince instead of whatever gadget they were going to use.

Bang-bang.

Two hard knocks
on the door broke Fiona away from her increasingly delirious line of thought. And then came a rattling, shaking sound.

And then quiet again.

More panting from Fiona, her hands gripping and releasing clumps of her pants—sweaty hands, gripping again. More pain coming back and filling her skull. And between that and the beats of her thumping heart, she could hear . . . whistling?