Gina Takes Bangkok (The Femme Vendettas) (34 page)

“Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

Though Wakai had trained himself to repress his emotions, even he couldn’t ignore the lump he felt in his throat. “Thank you so much for helping Victoria and me. I swear I’ll make it up to you.”

“We’re brothers,” Jarun said. “I’m sorry I didn’t help you sooner. Now get yourself out of there. I’ll be in touch once I have her in a safe place.”

“Just be careful.”

“You know me,” Jarun replied, and disconnected.

Wakai set aside his phone and wheeled to the elevator, relief rolling through him. If there was one person in the world he could still trust, it was Jarun.

Tasanee pressed her feet to the rough brick wall of her cell as she gripped the chain, her slender legs quivering with effort, her body dripping with sweat, as she tried to pull it free from its anchor. Yet, she barely managed to loosen it. With a choked sob of frustration, she fell to the floor and kicked over the electric lantern that was her only source of light. She lay there, panting on the bare stone as bloated flies buzzed around her attracted to the scent of fear and pain and death.

Swatting them away, her gaze drifted to the bloodied hook that hung from the ceiling on the other side of the chamber. Victoria hadn’t hurt her. Hadn’t so much as laid a finger on her. Instead she’d spent the previous night watching the horrors inflicted on the Burmese boy, felt the warm flecks of his blood splatter on her. She’d begged Victoria to stop, pleaded with her first to let him go, and then to just let him die. The torture had gone on for hours—until finally, finally, the boy had expired and he was spared what Wakai’s sister had done to him, then.

She’d wanted Ryota. His quiet voice and gentle touch. But it became too much to think of him and listen to the sounds from across the room, and she’d curled into a ball, clapped her hands over her ears and tried to block it all out.

Beyond her cell, she heard a rusted metal door squeal open, and she dragged herself into a squat. She heard the click of Victoria’s crutch as the woman made her way down the stairs, then a voice spoke, deep and gravelly, infused with a rural Cambodian accent. “What are you doing here?”

Then that low drippy sweet voice from last night’s nightmare. “Not happy to see me?”

“Surprised to see you back so soon.”

“John didn’t call you?”

Tasanee heard the man spit. “No. He finally getting off his ass”—there was a mean chortle at the cruel joke—“and doing something?”

“That’s why I’m here. Got to take a video of the brat. Proof to Montri she’s still in one piece. What are you doing here?”

“What the fuck does it look like? Guarding. You sure you weren’t followed?”

“I kept one eye on the rearview mirror the whole way here. Besides, the last couple of miles it’s open road. Nobody could have followed unless they were invisible.”

The man grunted, apparently satisfied.

“So you fed and watered her yet?”

“She’s got a bottle in there. She didn’t want to eat anything.”

After what she’d witnessed, Tasanee doubted she’d ever be hungry again.

“Well, might as well get to work then. Don’t want her looking too skinny in the video.”

Tasanee retreated to the corner of her large, airless cell, huddling there as she heard a heavy bolt pulled back. It opened to Victoria, her body scrubbed clean of blood, wrapped in an attractive amber sundress, perfume covering the stench of another’s agony which otherwise would have clung to her.

“Good morning.” She smiled, waving away the flies with a newspaper as she hobbled into the room. Although he worst of the gore had been washed down a drain in the center of the floor, Tasanee could hear the slight stick of the woman’s feet to the stained stone floor. “Time to prove to your father that you’re still alive.”

Tasanee stifled a whimper of fear as Victoria shuffled closer with the tabloid.

“Take this and hold it in front of you.” Victoria gave the paper an impatient wiggle. “I don’t have all day.”

Tasanee did as she was told, and Victoria held up her phone. “Have anything to say to your Daddy?”

She shook her head.

“Not even after what you saw last night?” Victoria prompted. “Don’t you want to tell him about all the fun we had?”

“My father knows who you are,” she replied. “So does Vincenzo Zaffini.”

“The Italian’s dead,” Victoria said and clicked, then stepped back and aimed the phone again.

Tasanee knew it was likely, but still it hurt. “The Pink Stilettos will come after you. Kannon Takahama, too.” And so would Ryota.

Victoria clicked and moved to get a different angle. “No, they won’t. They work for Montri, and unless we get everything we want, when we want it, we’re going to start mailing little bits of you back to your daddy. So, you see”—click!—“one way or another, you two are going to be reunited.”

Tasanee’s fists clenched on the newspaper to keep the tears away. Her father would not see pictures of her giving into these bastards. He would see her strong, and worthy of him.

Her silence seemed to bore Victoria, and she dropped her phone back into her purse. “I think that ought to do.”

As Victoria turned to go, Tasanee couldn’t stop herself. “Why did you do that?” she blurted. “Why did you torture him?”

The woman looked over her shoulder, her crutch pivoting on the wet grime. “If I were you, I’d be more worried about myself than a dead fisherboy.”

“But why?” Tasanee repeated. She could understand gangland violence. She grasped the concepts of threats and intimidation and the elimination of rivals. She even fathomed the necessity of torture to extract information. Even in the brutal circles her father ran in, she’d never heard of the depravity she’d witnessed.

Victoria leaned on her crutch. “From the time I was a little girl I remember wondering the same thing. Why I needed to hurt and destroy things. Why it made me feel so good to throw poisoned food to stray dogs, then watch them as they died in the gutter. I knew it wasn’t normal. I knew that everyone except my brother was afraid of me. Even my own mother used to wince at the sight of me. That’s why I went in search of answers. In search of others of my kind. And I found them. We’re rare, but we have the common instinct to find each other. And I learned the reason we do what we do. It’s because that’s what we were made for.”

Tasanee shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“How could you?” Victoria thumped her way to the door. “You’re not a rakshasi.”

The outskirts of Bangkok couldn’t have been more different from the heart of the metropolis. Here, the skyscrapers and urban sprawl thinned to small wooden houses set along the edge of the jungle, connected by narrow dirt tracks and ancient canals, each with its own orchard or rice field farmed by the same family for generations.

Pulling onto the shoulder of the muddy road, Kannon got out of the SUV, looking across the tropical farmland at a distant ruin, its crumbling brick structure overgrown with vegetation and tree roots. According to Kittyjack, it was a former Portuguese trading house, now centuries old. Right now, he was downloading all the rest of her intel.

“I see it,” he said into his phone.

“Thenhappyhuntingkiller,” Kittyjack chirped.

Above him her drone flew back towards the city, its rotors a faint hum in the still country air.

“And here I was thinking you had some kind of sixth sense,” Jarun grumbled as he, Gina, and Ryota followed him out of the vehicle. “Turns out you just cheat.”

“I do what works,” Kannon replied, as he scrolled through the drone photos of the place on his phone. “And what works allowed me to catch you twice and rescue Mr. Montri.”

He looked at Gina, who was leaning over the hood of the vehicle as she scanned the Portuguese ruin through binoculars. “What do you see?”

“Not much. Victoria’s car is parked out front, and so are a couple of Land Rovers. Your buddy Ek might even be there.”

If he was, there was about to be a rematch. Hopefully, bullets penetrated the giant. Gina lowered the binoculars, her face tight with worry. He did not need to see her like that.

“Any dogs?” Kannon slid off his mirrored sunglasses. The last thing he wanted was reflection off the lenses to give them away.

Gina checked. “Nope.”

“Then the three of us will go on foot,” Kannon instructed Jarun and Ryota, before turning to Gina. “As soon as we have her, you drive in and pick us up. Agreed?”

Gina rounded the truck to stand beside him, shielding her eyes from the sun. “And what happens if they get away with her?”

“They won’t,” he said. He wasn’t entertaining any other possibility. He’d get this job done, and he’d focus on getting Gina into his life. And not the Gina facing him right now. She wore cargo pants, a gray t-shirt and hiking boots. When
The Pink Pussycat
sunk so had her wardrobe, and she’d replaced it with this practical junk. Her hair was back in an utilitarian ponytail and she didn’t have a lick of makeup on. She still had a beautiful face without it, only she wore makeup for fun or when she was taking herself to a place of fun. This…this was as if he had a different woman with him. Then—and he could see how much effort it took—she tugged up the corners of her mouth into a smile.

“Wanna kiss for luck, baku?”

He glanced across at Jarun and Ryota, standing a short ways off. He figured Ryota suspected the relationship between Gina and him wasn’t entirely professional, but Jarun didn’t know anything. And he wanted it kept that way for now. The more people who knew that he cared about Gina, the more vulnerable she was.

“Don’t need luck.”

Gina’s smile wavered. The next thing, the lip would come out.

“Things go sideways in there, don’t come after us. Leave.”

The lip didn’t come out. Instead the chin came up. “To hell with that.”

“You need to be around to make another plan.”

“If I’m not willing to leave Tasanee behind, why would I leave you behind?”

“I’m not an innocent, that’s why.”

“Neither am I.”

He didn’t know what to do so he glared. That had its usual effect. Her grin was blazing. “As I see it, there’s only one solution,” she said.

He waited. She got up close so her perfect breasts made contact with the sleeve of his suit. “Don’t screw up.”

Each of the three words was said with her lips puckered and pouty. He felt his whole being contract with the need to grab her up and kiss her. More than that. Plant himself inside her and feel the soft clench of her around him, listen to her noises—

“Third date,” he said. “Then you get your kiss.”

The fact that nobody was in sight meant one of two things. The rakshasas were either sloppy, or hiding, lying in wait to ambush anyone who attempted a rescue. Seeing as they were experienced guerrilla fighters who prowled the dense jungles of their mountain homeland, Kannon’s money was on the latter, and he whispered as much to Ryota and Jarun as they observed the ruins from behind a fallen log.

It had taken them the better part of an hour to make their approach, staying low as they made their way along the bank of an irrigation canal, then creeping though a grove of jackfruit trees, to get to their present position, a few hundred feet from the crumbling brick walls of the trading house. Getting this close hadn’t been much of a challenge, but ahead of them was a flat overgrown grass field.