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Rive chuckled. “Or I could just put a bullet in your head now and take the drive off your corpse.”
He tossed the drive a couple of times into the air, letting the last little bits of daylight reflect off its shiny surface. The wind had grown still, and he’d actually started sweating under his T-shirt. Not that it had grown hot, but nerves were threatening to shatter his calm façade. He was ready for this to be over, but there was one more act left in this farce.
“True. You could do that. But then you’d have to waste a lot of time getting a hacker to break through the encryption while praying that the information wasn’t damaged in the process,” Max stated.
“Fucker,” she muttered under her breath. “I don’t have time for this bullshit.” She turned her attention to her helper and waved to Hudson still on his knees. “Get him up and send him over to the shithead.”
The goon didn’t look excited as he tucked his gun into the back of his pants and roughly grabbed Hudson’s arm, hauling him to his feet.
“Walk,” the man grunted, giving Hudson a shove toward Max.
Hudson irritably waved a hand and called him something Max couldn’t quite catch, probably didn’t want to know in the first place, before he hobbled across the dozen or so yards that separated Max from Rive’s group.
“Max, I really hope you’ve got a better plan than this shitty exchange, because I don’t see how we’re going to get out of this alive,” Hudson whispered as soon as he was within earshot.
Max gently took Hudson’s wrists in both of his hands and pulled him close, positioning the older man behind him. “I want you to stay behind me. If bullets fly, I want you to take cover behind this column base and keep your head down.”
His old friend looked at him as though he’d lost his mind. There was more to his plan than hiding, but now was a really bad time to explain the finer details. Hudson simply needed to trust him.
Besides, the column base and positioning of the other large stone blocks nearby were more than big enough to shield Hudson. He’d spent a lot of time picking just the right spot for cover if things went wrong.
Things weren’t going to go wrong.
Everything was going to work out. It wasn’t just his life on the line.
With one last reassuring smile, Max patted his friend on the shoulder and turned to face his sister. As he moved, another set of car lights moved across the entrance and Max’s smile grew into something a little more wicked.
Now the party was getting started.
“Who the fuck is that?” Rive snarled. Her head whipped from the entrance to Max and back. Rive and her men scattered to the left and right, moving out of direct view of anyone entering the mortuary while Max remained in plain sight.
“Someone who has a stake in this,” an older woman’s voice called from the entrance to the temple.
A chill ran down Max’s spine. He hadn’t heard that voice in decades. Had thought he’d never hear it again. She sounded older, and there was a slight accent that he didn’t remember from his childhood, but it was still her. His mother.
“What the fuck!” Rive seethed. “You called her? You fucking called her?”
“I thought we were due for a family reunion,” Max sneered at his big sister. “Especially since you’re both so eager to kill me over a tomb that might not even hold a single ounce of treasure worth selling. Nice to know what my life is worth to my sibling and mother.” Max offered a sarcastic two-finger salute as Katona Zsuska—formerly known as Lauren Smith, aka his mother—walked into the hall, accompanied by Mironov and a handful of other armed goons.
Lovely. A quick count showed that Katona had brought the same amount of muscle as Rive.
“Max? What the hell is going on?” Hudson demanded in a rough whisper behind him.
He leaned against one of the column bases and rested his elbow on the top of the remains of the column. He pointed to Rive. “As you know, that’s my older sister, who abandoned me.” His finger then moved toward Katona. “And that’s my mother, who also abandoned me. Normally, I’d introduce you to my father as well, but rumor has it my mother abandoned him to a firing squad.”
“Yeah, yeah. You win the fucked-up family award. No arguments from me.”
Katona stopped just inside the hall. She was just as slim as he remembered, but as he’d told Ed, a life on the run tended to create that slender, hungry look on a person. Her hair was darker than he remembered, but he wasn’t sure if it was the lack of sunlight or the fact that she’d dyed it. Probably hair dye.
