CHAPTER SIX

SWISS

 

 

Swiss smelled blood. Human blood.

After being released from work early, she had thought to return to Hell to check in, but the smells stopped her. The sounds had sickened her.

Visually the city didn’t look much different, but it sounded all wrong and smelled of desperation. Anxiety built in Swiss’s body, tensing her muscles as she tried to comprehend everything hitting her radar.

She hadn’t encountered most of it before—at least not since gaining her upgrades. It was dark shit, though. Broken bones and bleeding veins and slap of flesh on flesh—and those cries were definitely not the cries of pleasure that usually filled Reno’s night.

People were being tortured out there.

Dom’s video had done exactly as he’d hoped. It had scared the shit out of Reno’s rich and powerful, and it seemed those rich and powerful were responding by throwing their weight around.

Swiss hated that her mind immediately went to The Aqueduct. She still hadn’t checked in with Gideon about the incident that had set off his panic response. All she knew was that Gunnar had taken a McGee henchman there, which meant the bar was definitely on McGee’s radar. The Aqueduct wasn’t the safe ground it once was. It had been breached.

Swiss seriously needed to find the time to corner Gunnar and ask him what he was thinking when he walked Deacon through those doors. He’d totally fucked with Swiss’s homeostasis. Gideon was good enough to take care of any trouble riffraff might bring, but he wasn’t a one-man army. He couldn’t handle a full clan.

The urge to move closer to The Aqueduct was strong, but Swiss resisted. What was the point? Nothing had truly changed. If there was a problem, Gideon’s comm would alert her and—

Swiss stared at her comm, wondering if she was seeing things. The display flashed Gideon’s name in red. That meant injury. The night before it had flashed yellow, indicating a panic response. But red? Gideon was in actual trouble. It wasn’t her imagination.

Swiss barely remembered to walk into a blind spot before going super nova in the direction of the bar. Everything around her moved into extreme slow motion as she navigated with what would seem super speed to others, although Swiss perceived her own actions in what seemed normal time. That meant that five minutes later—her time—she was running up the street adjacent to the back alley of Ash’s bar. However, when she checked her watch, only a few seconds of actual time had passed.

Swiss heard the sickening crack of lead hitting bone in the alley.

“Bach,” she whispered into her comm. “I need an assist. Can you shut down the surveillance around The Aqueduct. I have some assholes beating down a friend of mine.”

“Give me a second,” Bach said in her ear, then he went quiet for several precious seconds.

Swiss inhaled as she waited for Bach’s cue. Her acute senses told her all the blood in that alley was Gideon’s. He hadn’t gotten a defensive hit in, which meant the attackers must have blindsided him.

The sick sound of flesh striking flesh bounced its way down the alley, hitting Swiss’s ears in a flutter of sound.

“Tell us how you know Richard Abba!” a male voice roared.

Wait, what? Why in the world would these guys think Gideon knew Dom?

There was the wet slap of bloody spit splashing on the cement followed by Gideon replying, “Tell me where you learned to hit like a fish.”

One of the men let out a humorless laugh. “Oh, hear that? He’s still a funny man.”

The next strike was to the abdomen, which Swiss could tell Gideon absorbed like the trained marine he was. Swiss inhaled deeply, trying to get a read on everyone’s mental state. After several breaths, she realized the man delivering the punches was getting off on it—a true sadist. And he was getting exactly what he wanted out of this ambush, because Gideon’s breathing was ten shades of wrong, crackling with every inhale and exhale. He had blood in his lungs and needed a doctor. The beating had to stop now, yet Swiss didn’t know if she had enough control to subdue without killing.

She couldn’t go in full force. She needed full restraint. One hit. That was all she could allow herself if she wanted to keep her sanity.

Swiss rolled her shoulders, trying to release the building tension. “Bach, how are we on cameras?”

“You’re good to go,” Bach replied after a brief silence. “Cameras are offline.”

Taking a deep, allegedly cleansing breath, Swiss stepped out of the shadows, putting a little bit of sex in both her walk and her talk as she moved into the scene in front of her. “What’s with the beat down, boys?”

Gideon glanced up her way, one eye already swelling shut, but both eyes very pissed off. He recognized her immediately, and she could see the look of frustration that crossed his face when he realized she would be saving the day. Injured as he was, Gideon’s ego wasn’t happy to see her.

Gideon recovered quickly, however, spitting on the shoes of his closest assailant before answering her. “These guys think my business is their business.”

The three attackers had Gideon on his knees with his hands cuffed behind his back. Seeming confident that they had him contained, all three men turned to face Swiss as she approached.

“Turn and walk the other way, little lady,” the shot caller said. He was the only one without a weapon in his hand. The man to his left had a lead pipe, and the other man had a knife. They all had guns tucked away.

Swiss kept moving forward. “Oh, I don’t think you understand. You’re beating up my employee right now, and I didn’t give you permission to do that. Do you understand the position that puts you in?”

All three men came to attention and focused on Swiss more seriously as Gideon spit up another wad of blood.

“You saying you own this bar?” the shot caller asked.

“No,” Swiss said, coming to a stop ten feet away from them. “I do not own the bar.”

“So he works for you on the side?”

Swiss dabbed her finger in the air in the direction of the shot caller. “So you’re the smart one.”

Gideon actually chuckled, and rasped, “Relatively speaking.”

The medic in Swiss didn’t like what she heard. At all. Gideon wasn’t at death’s door—he would be fine so long as he didn’t take any more hits—but that didn’t mean Swiss wanted to prolong his suffering by playing cat and mouse with these guys for too long.

Still, Gideon was a witness, which meant she needed to watch her use of upgrades and keep things light.

Swiss swallowed back the metallic taste creeping up on her tongue. “Untie him.”

The men laughed.

Swiss looked to her friend. “Gideon, why have they tied you up?”

“Because he has answers we want,” the shot caller answered for him.

Just then Bach’s voice piped up in her comm. “Okay, the three guys you are dealing with right now are Julius Hanover, Blake Jepson, and Mario Rivera. Julius is the one who just spoke and Blake should be a tall man with a beard, if that helps.”

It did. Blake had the pipe—well, two pipes. One in his hands and another tenting his pants since this was his kind of foreplay. Mario had the knife, and Julius was running point.

“What answers do you think my man has?” Swiss said, looking at Julius. “Because I can assure you he knows nothing I don’t.”

“Looks like someone on Team McGee sent them,” Bach said in her ear. “Not sure why, although Gideon did knock out one of their men yesterday at the bar.”

In front of her, Mario tapped Julius on the arm. “Man, maybe she’s the unidentified number on the call list. It would make sense”

“I’d listen to him, Julius,” Swiss said. “Mario’s not as dumb as you think.”

Julius went for the gun under his jacket, leveling it at her. “How do you know our names?”

Swiss lifted her mouth in a one-sided grin. “Because you’re sloppy, greedy foot soldiers. Especially Blake here.” She tapped her hip to indicate where Blake’s chub was showing through. “Combining business and pleasure? Really?”

She saw Julius’s finger squeeze, her mind effortlessly calculating the trajectory of the bullet and slowing time as she leaned out of the path of three bullets fired in rapid succession. Heart-heart-head. The guy was government trained.

Once the bullets passed, Swiss returned to real time.

“Trust me when I say you don’t want to try that again,” she said calmly.

Next to Julius, Swiss sensed Blake going from wood to rubber in the space of a few heartbeats as he realized Julius had just missed three point-blank shots. As the dumbest of them all, even Blake’s lizard brain had picked up on the fact that shit didn’t get much deeper than what he was standing in.

“What the fuck?” Julius said, twisting his gun to the side and looking at it like an imposter. He was mid-blink when Swiss moved forward and twisted the weapon from his hand. By the time his blink was complete she was standing in her original position holding the warm metal like a dirty rag.

“Let’s try this one more time,” she said. “Why did you ambush my employee? Or should I tell you why you did it and why you’re going to regret that choice for the rest of your life?”

Julius stepped forward, reaching for his gun. “How did you—”

The audacity of the man’s approach had Swiss’s primal brain roaring. Not knowing what she’d do if Julius actually tried to attack her, she gripped the gun and shot one leg out from under him, forcing Julius to take a knee.

“Tut-tut,” she said lightly, even as turned to liquid fire inside her. “That’s not an answer to my question.”

Julius was trained enough not to make a sound as he went down. He’d likely been shot before. Good.

“Let me make the situation here very clear,” Swiss said. “Gideon works private security. For me. The number he messages, that you find so suspicious, is mine. And I am not Richard Abba.”

Swiss dropped the gun then, and when all eyes across from her tracked the falling gun in reflex, Swiss made her move in semi-super speed. She disarmed Blake first, stripping the pipe from his hands before he knew it was gone. Then she used it to smash Mario’s knee. Before Mario’s face even registered the pain, she swung back around to ball-bash Blake before walking behind each man, removing their stowed guns, and tossing them to the side.

Keeping the pipe in one hand, Swiss returned to real time, retrieved Mario’s knife, and cut Gideon’s restraints as Blake and Mario wailed. Good thing the bar was soundproof.

Swiss crouched in front of Gideon, checking him for injuries. “Can you get up?”

The guy was wild eyed. She didn’t blame him, but she could play it cool and reinforce that he hadn’t seen what he thought he saw.

“I…uh, yeah,” he managed.

She helped Gideon up, handing him the pipe once he had his legs under him, and turned him to face the incapacitated men. Well, semi-incapacitated. Julius attempted a hobbling getaway, and before fully thinking it through, Swiss threw the knife in her hand his way, landing it in his leg tip first. This time Julius did scream as he went down, once again joining Blake and Mario on the ground.

Swiss looked over the downed men and motioned to Gideon. “I need to get this guy to a hospital. I hope you don’t mind. But before we go, I’m going to let him show you how a marine hits.”

Gideon’s body was stiff with damage as he looked at the pipe then back at her, contemplating what she was offering.

“It’s up to you,” she said with the indifferent gaze of a soldier.

Gideon’s jaw clenched, his eyes humiliated as he gripped the pipe and swung down into Blake’s ribs like a man chopping wood. The effort may have hurt Gideon as much as Blake, but Swiss let her friend go to town on the men who ambushed him. It was insta-karma and she wasn’t going to stop it unless Gideon was actually close to killing one of them.

So she stood to the side and monitored with more than a little jealousy, counting broken ribs and watching the periphery for witnesses until Gideon sagged and leaned onto the pipe like a cane. “I think I’m ready for that hospital now.”

“Let’s do it,” Swiss said, walking up and draping his arm over her shoulder. “I’ve got you.”

“Thank God,” Gideon muttered, then passed out where he stood.

With her new strength, Gideon’s dead weight was barely noticeable as she slung him over her shoulder and carried him to the nearest ER.