Tony was looking at him with the most awful contempt.
“I’m sorry about your father, Anna,” Hunt added.
His words seemed to reverberate in the living room. Before Anna could stop her brother, Tony jumped out of his seat and came at him. Hunt ducked the first punch, blocked the second, and jabbed Tony in the chest before he could throw another one.
“Back off, Tony,” Hunt warned, feeling the adrenaline flowing through his body. He was getting mad too. He was here so that they could come up with a plan to find their daughters. If Tony needed to be knocked on his ass to realize they had to work together, Hunt was happy to oblige. But before this could happen, he had to let them know Leila was his daughter. He had no idea how they would react.
Tony’s face was red with anger, the veins in his neck bulging. His fists were clenched, and Hunt guessed he wasn’t about to back off despite his warning.
“How dare you talk about my father?” Tony roared. “He’s dead because of you.”
Tony telegraphed his next move and swung his fist toward Hunt’s chin. Hunt stepped back, and the fist missed by a couple of inches.
“Stop it, Tony!” Anna yelled, but to no avail. Tony grunted and threw a hook that Hunt parried with his forearm and countered with a pistonlike jab, catching Tony flush on the chin; he followed with a right hook that slammed into Tony’s cheek. The sound of bone against bone, with flesh caught in the middle, echoed off the living room’s windows. Tony took three steps back, a dazed look on his face.
“Goddamn it! Stop it, you two!” Anna screamed.
The commotion prompted Tasis to barge into the room with his MP5 swinging. Hunt raised his hands.
“We’re fine, Mauricio,” Anna said.
Tasis looked at Tony. For a moment, Hunt wondered if Tony was about to ask Tasis to execute him. But a subtle nod from Tony sent his enforcer back into the corridor with a loud sigh. It was obvious to Hunt that this wasn’t the outcome Tasis had hoped for.
“Have a seat, Tony, please,” Hunt pleaded. “Can we focus on the reason why I’m here?”
“This thing between us,” Tony replied as he sat, his eyes glinting with a fury Hunt had rarely seen, “it isn’t over.”
Anna questioned whether she’d done the right thing contacting Pierce. Clearly her brother wasn’t ready to see him; she wasn’t sure she was ready either. What she truly wanted to do was hide in a corner. The humiliation she had suffered at the hands of this man, especially at the trial, continued to weigh heavily on her shoulders.
Terrance Davis, the man she had fallen in love with, was ruthless but tender and compassionate at the same time. Pierce Hunt, on the other hand, was a mystery to her. She didn’t know him at all, and certainly anything resembling trust between them had gone out the window when he betrayed her. For months after his treachery, she had been a total emotional wreck. Her appetite gone, she had lost ten pounds within a few short weeks. She thought all this was behind her, but seeing him again, here in her brother’s house, brought back painful memories. A ton of questions popped into her head. Was any of the intimacy they had once shared genuine? Did he really love her? If so, how could he have been so cruel? For her, it would have been impossible to fake the craving she had felt for him.
Good God, I was such a fool.
She wished, in a quieter, more secret part of her mind, that he had truly loved her. That would mean that he would have at least suffered a little when everything fell apart. Not that any of that mattered. Anna took a deep breath and pushed aside her needs and uncertainties. “Can we talk?” she asked.
“I’d like to say something,” Hunt said, “but you’ll have to keep your cool. Especially you, Tony.”
Tony opened his mouth, but Anna beat him to it.
“We’re listening.”
“I was with your father when he died.”
“How—” Tony barked but stopped when Hunt raised his hand.
“Let me finish, then I’ll answer your questions.”
That shut Tony up, but Anna knew there was a fight raging inside him.
“Your father was being transferred to a safe house when his motorcade got ambushed this morning. I was part of his protective detail.”
“The newspapers said you were suspended after what happened in Chicago,” Anna said. She didn’t know what to think anymore.
“Today was my first official day back on duty.”
“You’re DEA scum,” Tony hissed. “Why were you part of his protection detail?”
“Vicente agreed to testify against Valentina Mieles, also known as the—”
“We know who she is,” Tony cut in. “She’s the bitch who kidnapped my daughter—”
“And mine,” Hunt said softly.
“What are you talking about?” Anna asked, confused.
“Leila’s my daughter.”
Anna felt a massive jolt of electricity shoot through her body. For a moment, she forgot how to inhale. Hunt’s words were so shocking that they froze her frame but thawed her heart. Could it be true?
She studied his face for any sign of deceit but didn’t find any. His jaw was set, but his eyes revealed his vulnerability.
I’ll be damned. He’s telling the truth.
Hunt watched the color drain from Anna’s cheeks.
“Un-fucking-believable,” Tony said from the sofa, even though his tone betrayed the fact that he did believe it.
“So, as unreal as it sounds, Leila is Sophia’s best friend,” Anna said.
Everybody fell silent as they realized how awkward this was.
“I was supposed to bake them blueberry muffins, for God’s sake,” Tony said, his voice choked with tears as he raked his fingers through his thick black hair.
Hunt could see Anna had a thousand questions for him, so he said, “Leila’s mother, Jasmine, is my ex-wife. She left me after I testified at your father’s trial. She’s married to Chris Moon now.”
Anna nodded but didn’t say anything for a long minute.
“You had a family while we were together.” It wasn’t a question, more like a statement of fact.
Still, Hunt replied, “I did, and for what it’s worth—”
“I don’t want to know, and frankly, I don’t care,” Anna said, even though they both knew it wasn’t true. “Can we focus on getting our girls back?”
Sensing they had reached some kind of uneasy truce, Hunt sat down in an armchair facing Tony. “If the Black Tosca kidnapped our daughters, it makes sense she’s the one who ordered the hit on the motorcade too.”
Tony rubbed his face and said, “She called me half an hour ago.”
Why didn’t you lead with that instead of picking a fight? Hunt wanted to physically shake some sense into Tony, but he willed himself not to give in to his frustration. That would be counterproductive, to say the least. Instead he asked, “What did she say?”
Tony hesitated.
“Tell him, or I will,” Anna prompted.
By the tense look Tony gave Hunt, it was obvious that whatever the Black Tosca had told him made him nervous.
“She wants my head,” Tony finally said, making a cutting gesture across his neck.
“So your head for both our daughters?” That didn’t seem like a bad trade to Hunt. Tony probably disagreed. Or maybe not.
“As much as I fucking hate you, Hunt,” Tony said with a disarming sincerity, “I’d be willing to do it to save them.”
For some reason, Hunt believed him.
“But you don’t think she’ll hold her end of the bargain.”
“Do you?”
Hunt shook his head. There was a chance she would, but it would be stupid to bet his daughter’s life on it.
“There’s more,” added Anna, looking at her brother.
The bulging vein in Tony’s neck was now throbbing at a frantic rate. “If someone doesn’t deliver my severed head to her within the next forty-five hours, our daughters will be burned alive.”
Our. Daughters. Will. Be. Bu
rned. Alive.
Tony’s words were like a sledgehammer, beating him down with every syllable. Hunt’s mind whirled. Images flicked at him with tantalizing clarity. He could see Leila, savagely beaten, with a tire full of gasoline around her neck. Only once before had he felt anything like the intensity of the fury now erupting deep inside his gut.
Gaza, 2007. The kidnapping of Cole Egan.
Hunt remembered vividly the events that followed his friend’s abduction. McMaster had been right: to find his friend, he had left carnage in his wake. In fact, he had committed some truly atrocious acts in order to reach Cole before the Hamas terrorists could kill him. In order to make peace with his past, with the things he had done, he’d sworn to himself he would never kill or torture another person in cold blood again.
The promise.
This was why he had left the military and joined a federal law enforcement agency. With the DEA, the rules of engagement were better defined. It was also his hope that conducting antidrug operations in the United States would be less chaotic than hunting down terrorists overseas. On the contrary, the moral and ethical dilemmas he faced almost every day as a DEA special agent were often tougher than the challenges he had faced fighting terrorists abroad.
The delicate touch of Anna’s hand on his knee brought him back to the present.
“We need your help, Pierce, and I think you need ours.”
He slowly lifted his head to look at her. She must have seen something in his expression because her eyes widened, and she froze. A frown appeared, drawing her eyebrows together. She removed her hand from his knee and sat straighter.
“What?” he asked her.
He saw her shiver. “There’s darkness in you that scares me.”
Hunt felt it too, and he embraced it. Whatever the cost, he would find Leila and Sophia.
“Sometimes you need darkness to see the light,” he said, knowing the next forty hours would be pitch-black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Stafford, Virginia
Pierce Hunt. Text message.
Simon Carter recognized the ringtone; he would have ignored it otherwise. He opened his eyes and blinked at the naked woman sleeping beside him. With the exception of the few smile lines around her eyes, his wife hadn’t changed at all since he had first fallen in love with her fifteen years ago. A glimmer of moonlight streamed in through a couple of broken blinds, highlighting the side of her face and the top of her shoulder. He kissed her lightly on her forehead and got out of bed without disturbing her. He picked up his phone from the charging station and went down to the kitchen. He foraged through the fridge and found a pot of leftover chicken à la king. He prepared himself a plate and put it in the microwave. While it heated, he poured a tall glass of ice water and gulped half of it down.
The last time Hunt had contacted him was to let him know he had been transferred to the Miami field division in Weston. Carter was happy for him. Hunt was a good man, well respected by his peers. True, his decisions in the field were highly intuitive, often very rash, and his complete lack of political correctness offended the higher-ups, but no one could argue about the results. Hunt always led from the front, and Carter had learned many important lessons from him. If Carter had become a good team leader, it was mainly due to Hunt’s mentoring.
Carter opened Hunt’s text message and saw it contained a multitude of attachments, all of them fingerprints. Hunt’s message was short, direct, and to the point.
Carter read the text message twice. The ambush in Miami had made national news. The US marshals had lost good men in the attack, but there had been no mention of Hunt’s involvement. His friend was in deep shit and needed his help. Hunt had left instructions on how to contact him.
The microwave beeped, but Carter ignored it. He wasn’t hungry anymore.
“It’s getting close to midnight, baby,” his wife said from behind him. “Are you coming up?”
She was three-quarters of the way down the stairs. There was nothing he wanted more than to cuddle up with her under a pile of blankets, but Hunt’s message meant he needed to head back to the office.
“I’m sorry, Emma; I need to go,” he said, brandishing his phone.
Her worry was apparent. “Be careful, okay?” She had been a close friend of Scott Miller’s wife, and Scott’s death during the Chicago drug raid had shaken her, made her aware of just how dangerous Carter’s job was.
“Always,” he said, scooping her up in his arms.
Emma wrapped her arms around his neck and let him cradle her against his chest. His lips trailed across her hair and down to her neck.
“I love you,” he whispered in her ear. “I’ll be back in no time.”
Though Carter drove with his habitual care, his mind was preoccupied. Rumors that Tom Hauer—the current acting administrator of the DEA—wanted to shut down the RRT program and replace it with regional special response teams—SRTs—bothered him. If that were to happen, each major domestic office would be required to maintain its own operational SRT, and chances were he’d be asked to relocate. He and Emma were happy in Stafford. She had found a job at one of the local schools, and they were less than an hour’s drive from her parents. Carter loved his in-laws—both former CIA case officers—and he knew how much his wife cherished her time with them. If his team were disbanded, where would the DEA send him? Since he was the main breadwinner, he and his family wouldn’t have any choice but to go where the DEA wanted him to go.
The other thing that troubled him was Hunt’s email. A quick check into the DEA’s network had indicated there was now an arrest warrant for Hunt. Apparently one of his rounds had hit a bystander during the ambush on Vicente Garcia’s motorcade. If this was true, why the hell did Hunt refuse to turn himself in? Why had he run? Something was amiss. Running went against everything Hunt stood for.
He needed to speak to Hunt. And soon.
But, for now, he’d give his friend the benefit of the doubt and check those fingerprints.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
Miami, Florida
Physically speaking, Anna knew everything about the man sitting next to her. The man she’d known as Terrance Davis wasn’t classically pretty, but he was ruggedly sexy. His hard-to-look-away-from, piercing blue eyes were warm and understanding, but they could also become as hard as diamonds in the span of a second. He had dark brown hair that he liked to keep short. But what she remembered the most—and missed even more—were the tight bands of well-defined muscles layered across his flat stomach. Hunt had the body of an Olympic swimmer.
She used to know what Terrance Davis liked in bed, what worried him, and what made him happy. She knew what made him tick and what made him laugh. But what about Pierce Hunt? What did he like? What made him sad?
Pierce Hunt’s eyes were different too. In his eyes burned an intensity she had never seen before. These were the eyes of an apex predator ready to do anything to get what he wanted. And since they all wanted the same thing, Hunt was exactly the type of man they needed to save the girls.
Three knocks on the door steered her attention away from her ex-lover.
This time Tasis was kind enough to announce his presence by knocking on the door before he entered. His MP5 was slung to his side and not pointed at Hunt’s head, which, in Hunt’s opinion, was a nice improvement. He was also carrying a sealed white envelope that he gave to Tony.
“From our friend at the MDPD,” Tasis said before moving out of the room.
Tony glanced down at the envelope and took a deep breath.
“The video of our daughters’ kidnapping,” Tony explained.
The man was clearly shaken. His hands were unsteady as he tried to rip open the seal with his thumb. His fingers fumbled, and he dropped the envelope on the hardwood floor.
“Fuck!”
Before either Tony or Anna had time to pick up the envelope from the floor, Hunt had his ceramic knife in his hand. He flipped the blade so that the handle was presented first.
&nb
sp; “Take this,” he offered.
Tony’s face hardened, his eyes traveling from the knife to Hunt’s eyes. His lips parted, and it looked as if he wanted to say something, but after a long moment, he accepted the knife and used it to slice open the envelope. Tony pulled out a piece of paper and a thumb drive. He read the letter quickly and handed it to Anna, who read it, then gave it to Hunt.
Hunt glanced down at the note.
I’m very sorry, Mr. Garcia. Please know the whole department is actively searching for Sophia and her friend. Here’s the video we talked about.
It didn’t come as a surprise that Tony had men inside the department. What alarmed Hunt was the fact that he had access to someone high enough in the hierarchy to release a video that Detective Milburne had said was missing. But that was an issue he’d deal with later, if at all. For now, it served his purpose as much as Tony’s.
In an unexpected gesture, Tony handed him back his knife and said, “I’ll have to speak to Mauricio about this.”
Hunt sheathed his knife and asked, “You gonna play the video?”
“I’ll get my laptop,” he said, leaving Hunt alone with Anna.
Hunt didn’t mind the silence, but Anna was fidgeting in her chair. She looked at him, and he couldn’t help but wonder if her thoughts mirrored his. He confirmed they did when she finally asked, “What chance do you think we have of finding them?”
He didn’t want to lie to her, but he didn’t want her to lose faith either. “The next forty hours or so are crucial. The police are doing everything—”
She cut him off sharply. “I couldn’t care less about what the police are doing. What are you gonna do about it?”
He replied with total honesty. “I’ll find the bastards who did this. I’ll hunt them down. Then I’ll give them one chance to tell me where the girls are before I start manipulating their bodies in ways they weren’t meant to be manipulated.”
His answer seemed to satisfy her because she gave him a slow nod, and the worry in her face lessened slightly.
Hunt Them Down (Pierce Hunt Book 1) Page 12
