Phantom of the Wind (26 page)

“You’ve led me a merry chase, Quinn,” the man said softly. “But all good things come to those who wait.” He had laid a hand on Quinn’s thigh. “I have you now and that’s all that matters.”

“Who the hell are you?”

“The man who’s going to take everything you hold dear away from you.”

Quinn had yet to see the maniacal torture device paused above him. At that moment he was staring into a face that could have rivaled that of a god. Unlike Ayo who found men more attractive than women, the Phantom had never paid much attention to the faces of other men, but this man’s countenance was so striking, so handsome, it made Rory Quinn feel inadequate. Even when the smile slipped from the man’s chiseled lips, he lost none of his attractiveness.

“I didn’t particularly mind you plundering my merchant ships,” the man said as he folded his arms over a white silk shirt that fit him like a glove. “What’s insurance for, after all? Actually, in a way I admired you, Quinn. You certainly lived up to your title of Phantom. I even applauded you a couple of times when you up and vanished without a trace while my men were scurrying about trying to catch you.”

“Happy to have entertained you,” Quinn mumbled.

“Oh you did. Quite often.” He bent over his prisoner. “I could have caught you once or twice if I’d really put my mind to it, but I didn’t. I let you get away as free as a bird.”

“So why come after me now?” the Phantom asked. “If you didn’t care about my stealing your cargo. Why now?”

A slow, taunting smile tugged at the man’s lips. One dark, reddish-brown brow quirked upward. “Don’t you know?”

“If I did I wouldn’t have asked,” Quinn snapped.

“I know she told you about me.”

A tremor ran down Quinn’s backbone. He let out a long breath. “O’Shay,” he named the man.

“Collin Patrick Riordan O’Shay at your service,” he introduced himself. “I knew she would have mentioned me to you.”

“In passing,” Quinn said, a muscle working in his jaw.

“Now that I don’t believe,” O’Shay said. “She would have told you about our month of wild passion on the tropical sands of Oceania. Aren’t wives supposed to own up to their husbands on their Joining night?”

Though Quinn knew it was a lucky guess on O’Shay’s part, it nevertheless bothered him that the bastard could know what had transpired between his wife and him.

“She most likely told you I impregnated her during that sweet month.” O’Shay’s white teeth glistened in the darkness of the room. “That was intentional on my part, but unfortunately she lost our child. I’ll take better care of her the next time around.”

“There won’t be a next time,” Quinn denied.

“Oh but there will for I’m going to give you two options, Phantom. In one option, you can sign away your rights to her, putting your messy handwriting to the divorce papers my lawgivers have drawn up or—and I actually loathe laying this option before you myself—you can die and make the sweet darling a widow. Grieving, I’ll grant you, but I will be there to comfort her, just as I comforted her on those balmy nights in Oceania. Have no fear on that account.”

“You’re crazy if you think I’ll sign anything,” Quinn threw at his tormentor.

“I was hoping you’d say that, but you have yet to understand how you will die. Perhaps the knowing of that will change your mind.”

It was then O’Shay pointed to the ceiling of the room and Quinn’s gaze reluctantly swept upward. A frown of puzzlement marred the Phantom’s face until a signal from his captor set the blade into motion. His eyes widened and he sucked in a breath. He’d never seen the torture device before, but he knew what it was. He heard himself whisper the name.

“Aye, a pendulum. An awesome sight, isn’t it?” O’Shay asked. “Quite frightening I’ve been told.”

When the first click resounded through the room, Quinn flinched for—almost imperceptibly—the blade had dropped. He began to breathe quicker, more shallowly, and he could feel his testicles drawing up.

“The blade is made from the finest Ionarian steel,” O’Shay informed him. “It is honed to such a razor sharpness I am told you will barely feel the cut on the first pass but you will experience the sting as it tracks back across the slice.”

Quinn had slowly closed his eyes, the insidiousness of the torture almost more than he could bear without whimpering.

“Are you sure you don’t want to sign the papers, Quinn? I don’t particularly want to see you filleted. I really do have a grudging admiration for you.”

“You’re a sick bastard,” Quinn labeled him.

“I’m a man who wants what he wants and will do what it takes to possess it. In this case, it is Kendall I want. You are an obstacle, but one I can overcome easily enough.”

There was another click and Quinn could not stop himself from jumping. The wire bit into his wrists.

“I tell you what,” O’Shay said. “I’ll tell you a little story. Maybe that will take your mind from your impending agony. You can hear the pendulum’s music, can’t you? Listen closely. She’s whispering to you with every sweep of her pretty blade.”

He had not heard that swishing sound until O’Shay mentioned it, no doubt intending for the mind-altering resonance to writhe its way into his captive’s subconscious. He heard it then, and each swing of the blade sent a trill of fear down Quinn’s back.

“I knew about your lady-love, of course,” O’Shay said. “Morrison has quite an extensive dossier on you, but he didn’t know about Kendall Bryne and—I’m sure you’ll thank me for it—I helped keep it that way. The picture my spies brought back of her intrigued me and I found myself looking at them over and over again, touching them, stroking them. I had my spies follow her, delve into every facet of her past and present. The more I learned about her, the more intrigued I became. I started dreaming of her, fantasizing about her when I masturbated each night.”

“Not only a sick bastard but a twisted one,” Quinn told him.

“I became an obsessed bastard,” O’Shay said. “I wanted to meet the woman who had stolen the infamous Phantom’s heart. But then you jilted her, tossed her off like yesterday’s garbage. You broke her heart, you hurt her, and for that I vowed you’d one day pay. I stepped up my efforts to have you captured because you had made her so unhappy.”

Quinn had nothing to say to that for he knew what he’d done to Kendall.

“When I learned she was going to Oceania, I arranged to be there when she arrived. I met her, knew I had to have her—not just because she was your former lover but because of the unique and lovely woman she is. I wanted her for myself alone and that was what I set out to do.”

“You were a pleasant interlude for her. Nothing more,” Quinn snapped.

“Aye, I’m sure I was, but I was gently courting her as I felt she deserved to be courted and eventually she would have come to me on my terms had you not come back into the picture. I am a patient man. Anything worth having is worth waiting for. I suppose I should have made a concerted effort to woo Kendall but there were more pressing things going on, you understand. The Coalition needed my guidance and I had to concentrate on making sure Morrison found you and got you out of our hair. I certainly couldn’t allow you to get in the way of what I planned later for Kendall. When I discovered she’d lost our child, I was rather relieved. Joining had never been my intention with Kendall or any other woman, but I would have insisted had she carried the babe to term. Although Kendall is a truly exceptional woman and I enjoy relations with her, taking her away from you was far more important to me than anything else.” O’Shay frowned deeply. “Now here you are with her again. That will not do.”

“Aye, well, shit happens,” Quinn said.

“It does, indeed, as you can attest to at this very moment, eh?”

All that had been said over an hour before and the blade was still only one-third of the way down the ceiling on its descent toward Rory Quinn. O’Shay fell silent but Quinn could hear the man breathing. They were alone in the room, just the three of them—Quinn, his captor and the blade. There would be no help coming for no one knew where he was or how he came to be there. The
Raptor
had been sitting right beside the
Lhong Shee
the entire time, its stealth technology so far advanced to the Amazeen cloaking abilities Quinn’s ship possessed. Now the
Raptor
—with even more stunning advancements—was thousands of miles away and undetectable by any scanners save its own.

Quinn had never felt so helpless or without hope in his life. All because of the woman he loved and believed he at last was going to be able to spend his life with.

It hadn’t been about the Phantom’s preying on Riordan O’Shay’s company manifests that had sent Morrison’s men after Quinn. It had been about Kendall.

“She’ll hate you for this,” he said.

“She’ll never know,” O’Shay replied, and got up from the chair in which he’d been passing the time. He came over to the slab, looked up at the pendulum for a moment and then lowered his gaze to Quinn. “I will return your body to her so she can go through the grieving process. She—and I’m sure the Burgon as well—will be grateful to me for finding you but, alas, not in the nick of time.” He looked up at the pendulum then laughed. “I’m sure you appreciate the humor in that statement.”

“The Burgon knows it was you behind the attack on his palace.”

O’Shay blinked. “He can’t know.”

“He does,” Quinn said, sensing the first chink in the man’s armor. “Ben-Alkazar will have told him who owns Tappas Industries by now. I can tell you this though—Ryden Bakari will come after you with everything he has and he won’t stop until you are at the end of his blade. There is nowhere in the megaverse you can go that he won’t eventually track you down.”

“I have stealth capabilities—”

“Twenty-four hours a day?” Quinn asked. “Thirty days a month? Twelve months a year? You can’t stay cloaked forever, O’Shay. You’ll slip up and when you do, he’ll be there waiting and he’ll take your head.”

“I bombed his palace to bring you out of hiding!” O’Shay said. “I had no idea his wife and sons were there. They were supposed to be on Sauria.”

“Shit happens,” Quinn repeated, but this time with a hateful smirk.

“I did not mean to make an enemy of the emperor,” O’Shay said. His eyes were troubled.

“Even had the empress and princes not been there, you destroy a man’s home and don’t think he’s going to be your enemy for having done it? You’re a fool.”

O’Shay began pacing beside the slab, his circuits slow like the swing of the pendulum. His hands were thrust into the pockets of his trousers and his gaze was going back and forth across the stone floor as though he were deep in thought.

“There’s only one way out of this,” Quinn told him. “Let me go and maybe the Burgon will let you slip away.”

“The Burgon might hold you in great esteem, Phantom, but if he does know who I am, he will not stop until we meet one another across the points of our swords.” He lifted his chin. “I am not afraid to meet him on the field of honor. My sword is lethal.”

“As his is as a scytheblade,” Quinn pointed out.

O’Shay stumbled and he raised his stare to Quinn. “He joined the Order of Taibhse?”

“That was where he was right before you massacred his family.”

The news apparently stunned O’Shay for the man turned and left abruptly, the sound of a heavy door closing putting finality to a situation that made Quinn’s bowels loosen. He feared being left to the embrace of the pendulum, of dying in that hideously cold, dark room. His only consolation was that there would be no one to hear his screams of agony as the blade sliced through his body.

Chapter Ten

0517 CMT

They were rendezvoused just beyond the neutral zone where the Burgon had decided to await word of Rory Quinn. They were all there with the emperor—Ruan Cosaint, Gabriel Leveche and his brother Raoul Breva, Cair Ghrian, Taegin Drae, Ayo Taborn, Quinn’s crew and Admiral Tev Ben-Alkazar. Had they the power and force, the New Coalition could have wiped out the entire command of the Alliance by destroying the nine ships sitting in a ring, bows pointed to the center. Joining the
Sekkeen,
the
Turas,
the
Sangunar,
the
Saoirse,
the
Tiogar,
the
Camara,
the
Lhong Shee
and Ben-Alkazar’s personal ship
the
Gehenna
was the
Sláinte
with Captain Liam Breen at the helm.

“If he’s still alive,” the Burgon said over the closed circuit Vid-Screens that connected the captains of the ships and their executive officers, “what are the chances they will have harmed him?”

“The chances are good,” Leveche said. He had once been a prisoner of the Coalition and knew their ways better than the other men.

“Not necessarily physically though,” the admiral injected. “Morrison has a team of psychological interrogators who can so mess up a man’s mind, he’ll long for death.”

The Burgon winced. “And the chances of them doing that to Quinn?”

“I can’t see it,” Ghrian said. “I’m not saying they wouldn’t, but why would they? For what purpose? Does he have knowledge Morrison needs?”

“Not that I know of,” Paton replied. “The only thing that might be of interest to the Coalition would be the escape routes we used and even that would be a stretch.”