Ice Blue (Ice 3)

He shrugged. So beautiful, so cold. “Then I suppose I’ll have to leave you here…I can make it fast and painless—you won’t suffer. But I’m not leaving you to talk.”

The room was like an ice locker; the chill that emanated from him reached into her bones. If she exhaled she’d probably see her breath. But she couldn’t breathe.

“I’ll be ready.”

He watched her go, staring after her for a long, contemplative moment. He’d told her nothing but the truth. In the long run the pride of one California princess was a small price to pay for the safety of thousands, maybe millions.

Though in truth she wasn’t that much of a princess. She might be connected to Hollywood power and status, but there was none of the air of privilege and entitlement he found in most of the beautiful women he met, both American and Japanese.

But then, she wasn’t, in fact, a beautiful woman. She was pretty, an odd sort of thing. Pretty eyes, pretty soft mouth that he would have liked to explore, warm skin and gentle curves. Pretty, but unremarkable. The perfect Japanese bride his grandfather had chosen for him would make mincemeat out of her.

But that was a different life, one Taka would deal with when the time came. For now he was on assignment, and all that mattered was getting what he’d been assigned to get, no matter the price.

He grabbed his small duffel bag he’d found in the closet and headed out into the hall. He could hear her shower running, and he paused, wondering if beneath the steady beat of the water she was crying again. She’d been dry-eyed when he’d come back into the bedroom. Had he done enough to her to make her cry?

He shook his head, moving on down the stairs. She was tougher than that, he reminded himself. She’d pulled the tattered remains of her dignity back around her, shutting out of her mind what he’d just done to her. Right now he had to stop thinking of her as anything but a liability. Did she have any other bombshells hidden? Two kimono and a book. They could just be the last remnants of a life, or something more important. And in a situation where nothing was as it seemed, he was guessing Hana’s legacy was more important than Summer thought.

He made fresh coffee, finishing up the sashimi in the refrigerator. He heard her come down the stairs, but he didn’t turn, reaching into the refrigerator for the heavy cream. “Do you want some coffee?” he asked in a neutral voice.

“No.” Her voice was equally expressionless, and when he glanced at her her face was calm, set. He looked at her, remembered the wild, keening sound she’d made when she came, and shoved that mental door closed a little too firmly.

She was dressed in baggy black jeans and a loose black T-shirt—the same kind of clothes he’d always seen her in. Who would think such a soft, responsive body hid beneath all those layers? Assuming she made it through the next few days alive, she needed to find someone who could take proper care of her. Someone to put her into better clothes and give her the kind of sex she needed.

Sex was no longer an issue, and he had to push it out of his mind. He had no doubt given her the first real orgasm—hell, the first two or three orgasms she’d had in her life. She might hate him for it, but at least now she knew that she could.

She waited until he moved out of the way, then opened the refrigerator and reappeared with one of her pink cans of soda and a tub of yogurt. He thought he’d have to make her eat, but she seemed perfectly calm and collected, finding a spoon and eating the yogurt as she stood in the kitchen as far away from him as she could.

Summer was practical—that was a good thing. She wasn’t going to weep and wail. She wasn’t going to acknowledge what had just happened between them at all. Women everywhere were good at the silent treatment, and it made it easier for him to concentrate on how he was going to get the two of them to Bainbridge Island as fast as he could.

Preferably before the Shirosama broke Summer Hawthorne’s teenage sister into a thousand little pieces that no one could ever put back together again.

So far they’d left her alone. Jilly sat on the narrow cot in her cell, perfectly comfortable despite her overwhelming craving for junk food.

As it was, they kept bringing her cloudy water that she didn’t want to drink, and piping the Shirosama’s creepy voice into the small room through invisible speakers. Invisible, because if she’d found them she would have smashed them.

She didn’t know what they expected from her. The droning voice went on in half a dozen languages, none of which she understood. She was relatively conversational in Spanish, but with the Shirosama’s accent the words were almost impossible to decipher, and if they were anything like the English version she didn’t want to know what he was saying. Just a bunch of New Age gobbledygook that made her long for the predictability and safety of science. She was pursuing a double major at the university—chemistry and physics—and the kind of pseudo-science mumbo jumbo he was spewing through the tiny speakers was grating on her nerves.

She stretched out on the cot, considering her options. They’d dressed her in the white pajamas that reminded her of a kung-fu mental hospital, given her a handful of granola bars, which she despised, and told her to await the Shirosama’s attention. She’d await it, all right. The old gasbag wasn’t going to get a thing out of her, and if he thought her parents would sit still for anything happening to their favorite daughter he was in for a rude awakening.

It wasn’t fair that she was the favorite, but then, as Summer pointed out to her, life wasn’t fair. Ditzy Lianne could get away with a lot in her pursuit of a higher consciousness, but when it came to her second born she could pull her head out of the clouds long enough to be a tigress. And no one should ever want to mess with Ralph Lovitz—he could terrorize the Mafia. One puffed-up, self-deluded cult leader would be child’s play for him.

Really, there was nothing to be nervous about. The True Realization brethren were far too interested in where Summer was, but since Jilly could honestly say she had no idea, it shouldn’t matter. Though when they started going on about some Japanese urn, her kidnappers lost her completely.

They’d told her this was a retreat, a safe haven for her, and she couldn’t dispute that the mysterious Petersens seemed to have been holding her as a drugged hostage. Not a whole hell of a lot different than being trapped in the Shirosama’s pajamas, without the benefit of chocolate.

She was in no particular hurry to get out of there; her father would eventually make his holiness wish he’d never been born, and for now she had nowhere else to be. If she was blessed with one thing, apart from her brain, it was her overactive imagination, and she could stretch out on the cot for many happy hours, daydreaming. Waiting for the time that Ralph Lovitz was going to tear his holiness a new one.

In the meantime, though, she’d kill for an Egg McMuffin.

13

The mind was an amazing thing, Summer thought, staring out the window as the sprawling southern California landscape sped by. Her sister was in the clutches of a messianic sociopath, people were dying and yet Summer was able to sit in the car beside her betrayer and not scream. Amazing.

>

She still didn’t know why he’d done it. He’d found out what he needed to know; after, there was nothing to be gained by stripping her down to such an elemental level. Maybe just to prove he could.

And maybe if she survived this she’d eventually have Takashi O’Brien’s head on a pike.