Wrath's Storm: A Masters' Admiralty Novel by Mari Carr (desktop ebook reader .txt) 📕

“No,” Jakob agreed.

“Uh, pretty sure we should call the police,” Walt added.

“Keep me apprised.” Then the phone line went dead as the vice admiral hung up.

“Why aren’t we calling the police?” Walt asked.

Jakob swung his legs off the side of the bed. “Help me to the bathroom.”

Walt slid an arm around his waist. They made it to the bathroom in time for Jakob to vomit into the toilet rather than on the bed. Walt sat on the edge of the tub next to him, silently passing him a wet washcloth when he stopped heaving.

Jakob sat back, leaning against the cool wall. He glanced down at his shoulder. A tiny pinprick incision point and a little bit of swelling. Given how much it hurt, it should have been a massive gaping wound, a broken bone, something.

“No police,” Jakob said, addressing Walt’s comment from several moments ago. “Because they will only get in our way.”

“Okay. So we just wait?”

Walt’s voice expressed exactly how horrified he was by that idea. Sitting here doing nothing while Annalise was…

Jakob couldn’t think about it too hard. Couldn’t let himself imagine what she was going through wherever she was.

“We’ll get her back,” Walt murmured. “We’ll find her.”

Walt was a good doctor. He knew what to say and how to say it. There was no denying his reassuring words and tone were on point.

Regardless, Jakob did not feel comforted.

“Call the desk. Get security footage,” Jakob gasped. “I think I know…”

“You know who injected you?” Walt was already on his feet, pulling Jakob up too, to take him back to the bed.

When Jakob walked down the street, people usually cleared a path around him—he was big, intimidating. In the chaos on the sidewalk, someone had walked right into him, colliding with him hard enough for it to hurt, and to knock him sideways into Annalise. That had never happened to him before, but given the crowd, he attributed it to the throng of people and disorder.

There’d been a sharp pain when the man barreled into him. He’d assumed he’d caught him with hardware from a bag strap, a jacket buckle, or something like that. He’d looked back to see exactly who, or what, had hit him. He had a good mental picture of a medium-height blond-haired man striding away from him through the crowd.

Then Walt had gone to help the woman, and he and Annalise had followed…at least until he started to feel sick. Annalise helped him get away from the crowd, where he’d told her about the pain in his shoulder and arm. She’d been worried he was having a heart attack and then…and then there’d been a wave of pain so intense, it had dropped him, wiped out everything else. He’d slid to the ground, unable to think beyond the pain, his whole body tensed and cramped.

He told Walt this in fits and starts while the other man was on hold with the hotel manager.

The venom from the ant—an ant—had rendered him worse than useless. Annalise was gone, and he knew she wouldn’t have left of her own accord. Walt had alerted the hotel, had been the one to search for her. Jakob hadn’t been able to do more than stagger first into the lobby, then up here into their room.

Jakob’s fear for her and guilt, along with all complete rational thought, was wiped away as a fresh wave of bone-breaking agony took him.

Twenty minutes after Walt had hung up the phone, there was a knock at the door, and Walt went to answer it as Jakob struggled to stand. According to Walt, the hotel general manager had said they needed to check with their legal counsel before releasing any security footage.

Walt opened the door, and Jakob cursed silently.

Because the man who walked in wasn’t from the hotel.

Tall, heavily muscled, with short-cut hair, the man radiated danger. Jakob had expected Hungary to send one of the harco—a knight.

Instead, they’d sent a security officer.

If the knights served as the law-and-order enforcement of each territory, the security officers were the spies and assassins. Jakob had turned down a position as a security officer. He’d had enough of that life, and joining the Masters’ Admiralty had given him the push to change the path of his own life. He’d been tired of being the bad guy. He’d wanted to be the good guy for once.

Vadisk Kushnir was born to be a security officer.

Jakob was a large man, but Vadisk made him feel small. And it wasn’t merely the man’s height that made him so intimidating. Vadisk was, without a doubt, the most muscular man Jakob had ever seen in his life. Vadisk had twisted slightly as he entered the room due to his broad shoulders and tree-trunk-sized biceps. If he was green, he’d be the Incredible Hulk.

“Hi, I’m Walt, the one you were speaking to on the phone, were you able to talk to—”

“No,” Jakob said, interrupting Walt.

“No?” Walt looked at Vadisk, his shoulders tightening. “As in, no he’s not here with the hotel’s security footage?”

Vadisk eyed Walt.

Jakob eyed Vadisk.

Walt turned and mockingly thumped his head against the wall. “This is going to take forever if both of you are going to do the silent and dangerous thing.”

Jakob didn’t have time to respond because another wave of pain turned his world on end. He dropped back to the bed, blind and deaf to anything but pain for a few moments. The sound of his own agonized breaths were the first sounds he heard. A moment later, he was able to tune in to the conversation.

“This needs to be administered with imaging,” Walt declared.

Vadisk scowled. “We don’t have a CT scanner.”

“Damn it. Langston and I were going to make a portable one of those next, but…” Walt sounded unsure, which was unlike him. “I can’t blindly inject him with a nerve blocker.”

“Then we will put him someplace safe. You come with me and we will find Dr. Fischer.” Vadisk’s English grammar was good, though his