Thanks for taking a chance on this story. It's action/romance. Apologies for typos and inconsistencies, I couldn't find an editor.
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Part 1
Even if Peter hadn't noticed the long smear of blood on the dock, he would have been on alert. The first time he arrived any place new was always an exercise in careful exploration and counter-surveillance, a search for potential enemies. For
anybody
, really. Anybody who could notice him, anyone he would have to avoid, anyone he'd need to
handle
. Just because at the moment he happened to be on an island surrounded by kilometers of tropical blue sea wouldn't change that.
Obviously
.
Though it belonged to him, this was the first time he'd set foot on Teardrop Cay, a kilometer-long island in Turks and Caicos that was appropriately and uncreatively named for its shape. This island was one of several properties he had purchased over the last few years, as he prepared for... he wasn't sure what.
Retirement wasn't on his radar, not quite yet. It was just a bug Peter got one cold winter in Helsinki: buy an island. Buy isolation. Buy
peace
.
A surprising number of islands were available for purchase at any given time, if one had the funds, which he did. Very few of the water-locked candidates met his strident standards. Peter had finally completed the purchase through a lawyer-intermediary a year before but hadn't anticipated he would be visiting quite so soon.
Nor had he anticipated bringing along a semi-conscious woman, almost completely incapacitated by the combination of concussion, the gunshot wound in her side and meds he'd managed to get down her on their flight to safety. It was pure luck the jet and pilots had been available when he'd called in a favor, and luck that the pilots weren't the sort to ask questions about bleeding passengers. Instead, they had given him the plane's first aid kit and gone about their business. He'd staunched Nina's bleeding with quick-clot as they flew out of Eastern Russia, but she needed someone with a proper stitching kit and prescribing power.
Peter glanced over at Nina, lying still on the bench seat at the back of the little cabin cruiser. Locks of dark hair clung to her clammy face, causing her winter-pale skin to look even more stark.
For now, she was quiet, her restlessness died down with the sway of the boat. With any luck, the concierge doctor his lawyer had booked would arrive before she woke again. Though Peter dealt in pain and death as a matter of course, seeing Nina in pain and not being able to do anything about it made him uncomfortable. She hadn't done anything to deserve her injuries, just taken up the wrong hobby, if one considered freeing people being trafficked into slavery a hobby, which she did. He guessed the hacker in her saw it as a game of strategy to be won, and the thief in her saw it as stealing back innocent lives.
No doubt about it: Nina was a do-gooder.
Peter was
not
. He sighed.
More pressing than her feverish body in his boat was the dried blood on his dock.
Peter scanned the low profile of the island for movement, listened for anything that might be out of the ordinary, any anomaly, but even the birds didn't spend much time out here, so stark was the terrain.
All was still.
He stepped out of the boat and deftly placed the bumpers before securing the rest of the lines, eyes locked onto the landscape, memorizing it.
There wasn't
much
blood on the decking, and the smear had dried to a dark brown-burgundy. It wasn't fresh, but under the hot equatorial sun, it could be from last week or that morning. The stain could be from a large fish that had been caught and gutted on the dock by squatters. It could be from chum someone had been preparing for a shark fishing trip.
Peter's gut told him it was not any those things, however likely they might be. Years of experience informed him it was a smear from someone being dragged from the middle of the dock toward the shore, probably bleeding from a wound on the body rather than the head. Head wounds were messier.
Peter stood and scanned the island again, then a 360degree turn to examine the blue-green waters surrounding. Only one small spot of land was visible from Teardrop Cay, which resided on the far southeast end of the Turks and Caicos island chain, on the edge of the Atlantic.
His island and the house on it had been vacant for five years and on the market for nearly three, partially due to its remoteness and exposure to the sea. He'd been told the nearest island belonged to some Hollywood star whose name the lawyer had clearly expected him to be impressed by. He hadn't recognized it.
Peter stepped into the boat for a last check on Nina. He had positioned her under the cruiser's shade canopy, but her pallid skin was turning pink with heat, fever. The black hair around her head was damp and her lips were flushed as if they had been kissed, hard.
But she was still sleeping, so he tore his eyes away and ghosted lightly up the dock toward the shore to locate the source of the blood stain, if it still existed.
A dirt path set with wooden steps in the steepest sections led directly from the dock up the small hill to the house perched at the top. The pictures he had been emailed really didn't do the landscape justice. It was wild and raw, with craggy bushes and low sage-like vegetation that seemed skeletal in its architecture. Not the lush jungle of the other islands, this one was too unprotected and fully at the mercy of the sea, which went a long way toward explaining why it had been vacant and on the market for so long. Another reason was that it lacked a white sandy beach all of the other islands seemed to have and that typical island buyers wanted.
Peter was not typical.
He found it absolutely perfect, aside from the blood.
Gravel and sandy dirt crunched under his heavy leather boots, entirely inappropriate footwear for the tropics, but he'd just come from Russia where winter had the country firmly in her grip.
None
of his clothes were right.
The house at the top of the rise was a low, single level structure with towering ceilings done in a modern, tropical architecture. The walls were cement prefab pieces shining white and clean against the midday sun. The windows and large sliding doors were all protected with hurricane shutters against the potential of nature's wrath, although half of them were missing the padlock that held them in place. The warm teak window frames were weathered but in good condition. The roof was heat-coated metal, a pale gray to reflect the sun.
A six-foot-deep covered porch wrapped around the entire house, providing the only real shade on the island. The three palms that stood sentry were like an afterthought to break up the stark hardscape of the island.
Peter stepped into the relative dark and cool of the porch and wished he was armed, but he'd ditched his weapons in the river on his way out of Vladivostok.
He turned a corner and saw the front door open to the world with an enormous pool of nearly black dried and congealed blood on the doorstep.
"What the
hell
."
Though he expected the house to be empty now, he crept from room to room, searching and clearing before taking time to survey the disaster. Whoever had left the blood had also tossed his house. Not carefully. Groceries and cleaning supplies had been spilled around the kitchen, and drawers and cabinets stood open. Valuable food items had been left behind.
What
was
this? Was this threat of death and destruction for him or someone else?
If it
was
about him, how could anyone have found him? Peter had been exceedingly careful when purchasing the property, using an identity that was brand new to him and not two but
three
shell corporations to complete the transaction with the local lawyer he had picked out after fastidious research.
No one could have tracked him down so quickly, he was sure of it. The only person he knew to be creative enough and possessing of the resources to find him was unconscious on his boat.
And his brand of enemies wouldn't have
warned
him they were coming. So why the promise of death outside his house on a damn
island
?
What were the chances a first-rate assassin would stumble upon a random crime on his own doorstep?
Peter sighed again and pulled off the long-sleeve shirt he'd been wearing for the last 48 hours leaving him in a sweat-stained black t-shirt. He was desperate for a shower and a change of clothes, and to shave off the beard he'd been growing for the last four months. But the first order of business was getting Nina settled and cleaning up the blood, because the doctor would arrive in less than two hours and it was unwise to give him more to worry about than a woman with a bullet hole in her side.
Peter dumped a bottle of bleach on the mess to soften it up and exited through the back door knowing there was no chance he would contact local police about this.
On the boat, Nina had woken and had an arm draped over her eyes and the hand of the other pressed into her left side just above her hip, below the bandaged wound. Pain radiated off her.
Peter stepped carefully onto the boat. "Nina. I'm going to carry you up to the house. Just relax."
He didn't wait for her to respond, opting instead for expediency given the circumstances.
Her arm moved away from her face as he scooped her body up tight to his. She gasped, but the pain of movement was unavoidable. The doctor would be here soon enough.
Her eyes were squeezed shut and her voice was breathy, effortful. "This wouldn't have happened if I had seen him." Her eyes slid open, both bloodshot and one with a small hematoma on the white of the eye from an impact she'd taken. But he was startled to note the eyes themselves were not brown like they'd been before, in Vladivostok. Now they were green. Light blue-green, like the tropical waters surrounding them.
He adjusted his grip and started the hike up the hill with his cargo. "What happened to your eyes?"
Her eyebrows knit closer together.
"The color."
Her forehead smoothed. "Contact lenses were sticking to my eyeballs."
"Ah." Peter sometimes used colored contacts himself.
She suppressed a grimace and said, "I'm sorry for all this, Hank. It should not have happened. I wasn't being careful."
Hank
. That silly nickname she'd given him, not that he'd ever tell her his real name.
He reached the back door and managed to open it without knocking her head. He'd made up the bed in her room with sheets he'd found in a closet the vandals hadn't gotten into. He'd bought the house fully furnished, and wasn't surprised to see the previous owner had splurged on thread count.
Peter lay her down on the king bed and adjusted the pillow under her head. "The doctor will arrive soon. Just rest, Nina."
"Thank you. Really. I'm sorry."
"It's not your fault, but we can talk about it later." He slid the sheer curtains shut to blunt the brightness in the room and left her to her pain.
He had some serious cleaning to do and far less time than he needed.
****
The house was
trashed
