Read Online Alicia Myles 2 - Crusader's Gold by David Leadbeater - Free Book Online Page A

further worsened her chances of catching up to them.
    Still, it needed to be done.
    “During the last job,” she said quietly. “Somebody gave away our position at the last minute.”
    All the men sat upright.
    “I know.” She acknowledged them. “Goes to what I always say. You just can’t trust a mercenary or a criminal. Or anyone, actually. And that,” she flicked her thumb rapidly, spraying blood across the floor, “is how I always know who done me fucking wrong.”
    With a leap she was among the men, touching no one, but springing from chair to chair, lethal blade twirling around her open hand. Within eighteen seconds she was done, standing behind them now on the opposite side, breathing slowly and smiling slightly.
    The men blinked and looked shocked, uncertain what had happened.
    Then, one of them toppled from his seat; somehow dead, somehow unable to voice his agony or even move until that moment of expiration.
    Kenzie wiped her blade off on a piece of rag she found on the warehouse floor. “The lesson ends,” she said. “Don’t ever try to cross me. Bitch about me all you want, I like that. But plot against me and I’ll stick a stiletto through your eyeball and into your brain. Or I may use the katana. My choice.”
    The men were quiet, staring mostly at the facedown man and the thin trickle of blood that had begun to leak across the floor, doubtlessly from one of his eyes or maybe both. Kenzie knew from experience that what shocked and disturbed them most was not that she had killed one of them as they watched—it was that they had been watching and hadn’t seen her do it. The fact and the fear remained lodged inside their heads that it could have been any of them.
    “Lesson learned?” Kenzie asked the rhetorical question. “I have eyes and ears among you. And I will weed out the traitors. And if it’s you, you will die badly. Ajax—”
    She turned to her right-hand man.
    “The pictures?” He was smiling.
    “The pictures.”
    Kenzie turned her back on her men, allowing them time to digest and re-evaluate. There was nothing like a show of deadly violence to rally a disparate team of mercs. Nothing she knew of anyway.
    Ajax hooked up a laptop to his smart phone and brought up the pictures in question. The stained glass window with the silhouetted images of Crouch and others studying it filled the fifteen-inch screen. Kenzie flicked between them for a while, zeroing in on various parts, and then asked Stefanov to link his own smart phone to the same laptop. One of the only reasons she had so far kept in the background, limiting her actions mostly to surveillance and fisticuffs, was to allow Crouch and Co. to find the treasure first. It was all a part of her plan. You don’t take an art thief down before he steals the Mona Lisa . You take him out on the Champs Élysées, or even more preferably make sure you’re flying the plane on which he later makes his escape. It was the same with Crouch. Too much action and violence now would cause her problems she could ill afford. Problems that might stop her from later acquiring the treasure. By any means necessary.
    Stefanov had been filming proceedings. Video replay would work better in this situation, she thought. It would give a better indication as to exactly where Crouch and his team were looking.
    “Top row,” Ajax finally ventured. “I think.”
    Kenzie kept her silence but tended to agree. The treasure seekers were definitely studying something in one of the top two rows. But that was eight different choices, and at least six of them were a mystery to her.
    “Disappointing,” she murmured.
    Stefanov nodded beside her. “You want me to—”
    “I want you to start an investigation. Find out who this new player—Riley—is. Everything about his past and future. Go now.” She waited until Stefanov stalked away, not liking assumptions being put in her mouth. Then she turned to Hawke. “Go with him. And use every contact our submissive Ninth