The Reveal

by Julie Leto

  And yet, somehow, once Sean had banished her fear, she found it nearly impossible to latch onto it again.

  She turned the shower to scalding and stepped under the spray. Little by little, other emotions seeped into and out of her pores with the steam. When she lifted her face into the water, eyes closed, images flashed in her brain—images that she’d successfully locked away until now.

  Sean, slumped in the metal chair, his body a broken kaleidoscope of color.

  Yellow and green. Old bruises.

  Blue and purple. Darker. Fresher.

  And red. God, there had been so much red. In every shade from pale pink to vibrant scarlet and shades of crusty brown that had not only possessed a hue but a stench.

  He’d been beaten and cut—nearly flayed open.

  Alive, but only just.

  Brynn forced her eyes open. She gasped, coughing as the water from the shower sliced down her throat. Never in her darkest nightmares had she seen such cold cruelty. She never even watched violent films. It was a natural defense for a woman whose mother had died after being beaten and buried alive.

  Shaking away the memories, Brynn grabbed a tube of shampoo and concentrated on working her hair into a thick, even lather. She counted the circles she drew on her scalp. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. With each rotation, she inhaled and exhaled, forcing away the imagined images of her mother’s body, forbidding them from merging into her memories of Sean’s ordeal.

  Every day during his recovery, he’d hit another milestone. With every victory, she’d celebrated by erasing a bloody picture from her brain. By the time they’d made love by the pool, she’d pushed aside the vivid details of what he’d been through. He’d been so strong. So vital. The task had been easy.

  Now, the gory truth came rushing back. Why?

  She threw back the shower curtain, determined to deal with this emotional upheaval. Frazzled nerves and uncertainty had caused her to overreact with the deliveryman. She couldn’t risk falling apart again. Not when they were so close to crossing the border and finding the truth.

  “Sean?”

  She ducked back under the water, made sure she’d removed the last of the lather. When she was done, she said his name again, wondering if he hadn’t heard her before.

  He did not come.

  Her chest tightened, but she forced herself to remain calm. She grabbed a towel, wrapped her hair then did the same to her body. She opened the door, expected to catch him by the window, so lost in thought that he hadn’t heard her call.

  One glance told her the gut-punching truth.

  He was gone.

  Four

  The stink of rotting fish guts, burnt grease and overripe produce burned the insides of Sean’s nostrils. After so many weeks of fighting pain with every breath, smelly gulps of air were just as welcome as sea breezes and perfumed skin.

  Though now that he’d been hiding amid the refuse for nearly an hour, he would have paid a king’s ransom for one more whiff of Brynn.

  His gaze flicked out of the shadows, away from the restaurant’s kitchen door. Ten buildings down and three stories up, Brynn was safe in their room. By now, she’d read his note and respected his carefully worded request that she trust him and stay put until he returned.

  After she’d gone into the shower, his restlessness had won over his confidence that his first sweep of the area had been enough. He’d grabbed his gun and slipped away to take a second look around the hotel, determined to return before Brynn came out of the shower.

  Once he’d reached the lobby, however, he’d opted for a quick trip to the restaurant where they’d ordered their meal. He wanted to see the creep who’d freaked Brynn out for himself.

  One look at the guy had convinced him to stick around.

  Sean may have not known Brynn for long, but he’d learned enough to trust that if the delivery guy from the restaurant had set off her spidey senses and his initial recon had turned up nothing, then he needed to take a second look. If that meant standing in sludge and breathing in toxic fumes while rats climbed across the toes of his shoes, then so be it.

  If nothing else, it kept him from the close quarters of the hotel room. Thinking about her stripped naked in the shower, he’d become wound as tight as a switchblade. With the slightest touch, he’d strike. They would have made love again, losing themselves in erotic madness, forgetting the potential dangers that lurked nearby.

  They’d done it once.

  They’d do it again.

  And despite the risk, he still couldn’t help calculating how, if he left the dank alley in the next ten minutes, the stench from the restaurant’s garbage might not have permanently leeched onto him. When he returned, he could climb into bed where he fantasized Brynn might be, slide his hand between her legs or suckle the spot beneath her ear that seemed to be her “on” button so they could make love until morning.

  He could feast on her sweet flesh as the sun rose or maybe meet the dawn with her lips wrapped around his cock.

  God, those lips. That mouth. That body.

  But it was only a fantasy. A delicious, diverting dream. He wasn’t going anywhere until he figured out if the man who’d spooked Brynn was a real threat.

  Sean watched a pair of low-level kitchen workers drag another pile of refuse to an overflowing bin. He listened to their conversation, glad his brief interactions with Brynn’s associate, Marisela Morales, had renewed the unused pathways to his scant knowledge of Spanish.

  Apparently, the chef was a bastard. This information lent nothing to Sean’s reconnaissance, but neither had the maître d’s smoke break, the waitress’s quickie with the line cook in the alley or the bartender’s trip to his car with a case of port the owner would probably never miss. So far, the only thing Sean’s surveillance had revealed was that since the storefront entrance had been locked at the end of service, the delivery guy had remained inside, helping one of the busboys clear the glasses from behind the bar by tossing back the leftovers.

  As disgusting as this sounded, Sean considered it valuable intel. A guy who’d swallow down the dregs of a stranger’s drink was desperate for a buzz and probably desperate for money, too. This was a dangerous combination. If someone offered him enough cash, he’d give up information on his own mother. If he had recognized Brynn from her previous trips to this town, he was a potential problem.

  Or an asset—depending on who had the bigger wad of cash to throw around. Luckily for Sean, Brynn always traveled with a generous supply of euros.

  It wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that someone in San Sebastían knew who Brynn was. If she’d been a frequent client of the sought-after document forger who lived here, then so might a lot of other people in need of that type of service—precisely the same kind of people who’d be on the lookout for a wayward ex-CIA agent and the head of one of Europe’s preeminent security firms, particularly one whose founder had been a charter member of the shadow group, T-45.

  Of all the things he’d learned about Brynn, that scrap of intel had caused Sean the most concern. As an organization, T-45’s reach extended to the highest echelons of international relations. No one knew the precise number of assets under T-45 control, but the CIA had estimated a scant one hundred spies and specialists who’d sworn their loyalty to profit and danger over code and country. They’d been a concentrated pain in the ass to legitimate agencies since their inception.

  The fact that Jayda, Dante and Brynn were all connected through a mercenary covert ops consortium could be no coincidence.

  Sean waited another half hour. One by one, the employees of the restaurant left. By the time the delivery guy finally came out, Sean had the shakes from a combination of secondhand smoke and lack of movement. Cold and in no mood to fuck around, he watched the guy stumble toward the street, slurring assurances to the waitress he’d followed out that she wouldn’t be sorry if she took him home for the night.

  “Go on home, Liam,” the waitress snapped. “You’re drunk.”

  “Ju
st got a buzz on,” the man argued. “Won’t stop me from performing to your liking, lass. That’s a promise.”

  “One you’ve made before, and all I got for my trouble was a bad reputation. Go home.”

  Sean kept to the shadows, following the pair down the block, blending into the shadows of a storefront while the waitress unlocked the door of a two-seater coupe.

  “Give me a lift at least?”

  She snorted. “You live around the corner. Or did your landlord lock you out again?”

  Liam continued to harass his co-worker even after she rolled up her window and drove away. The guy wasn’t Sean’s idea of a criminal mastermind. He was a drunk opportunist, but Sean saw no evidence that his chance meeting with Brynn had in any way altered the course of his evening.

  He was a dead end.

  Sean turned, intending to slip into the nearest alley and backtrack to the hotel when another car, this one long, sleek and black, cruised onto the main thoroughfare.

  The driver’s speed was no more than ten miles an hour. Ample parking existed on both sides of the street, and all the shops were long shuttered for the night, yet the sedan continued at a crawl. When Liam strolled to the corner and lit a cigarette, the car surged forward. Tires squealed when it braked by the curb.

  This was interesting.

  Sean remained out of sight, cocking his head in hopes of hearing the conversation that ensued. Unfortunately, Liam had practically leaned all the way into the window.

  Then Liam stood straight, jerked his arm in the direction of his and Brynn’s hotel and said, “I swear to God, she’s there.”

  Crap.

  Sean dug into his pocket, retrieved the burner cell Brynn had packed and sent the text he’d prepped in case of emergency.

  Get out.

  The car tore off. Sean dashed into the middle of the street, gun aimed at the back windshield, when the vehicle swerved suddenly—moving away from the hotel.

  Sean blinked. What the hell?

  He spun. Liam was frozen in his spot. The minute his watery gaze lifted from Sean’s gun to Sean’s face, he snapped out of his fugue and darted in the opposite direction, stumbling at first then taking off like a bullet.

  “Fucking A,” Sean muttered, dashing after the son of a bitch before he disappeared.

  The guy was intoxicated, but the cockroach knew the nooks and crannies of this town in ways Sean did not. He shot past a nearly hidden alcove before his brain registered that the door tucked into the shadows hadn’t been entirely closed. Sean backtracked, leading with his gun, fully aware that the guy, witnessing Sean’s unexpected appearance with a weapon, had a legitimate reason to run that might have nothing to do with the strangers in the car.

  But he wasn’t taking any chances.

  “Hey, Liam,” Sean shouted, attempting to sound friendly. “Sorry about the piece, man. Thought those guys were going to rough you up. I had your back, right? Come on out. I’ve got an opportunity for you.”

  With his hearing unreliable, Sean chanced shutting his eyes for a couple of seconds, hoping to pick up sounds that might elude him as he gazed through the darkness. He heard a scuffle from his left, spun to meet it then waited for confirmation that he’d focused in the right direction.

  He heard nothing.

  “Seriously, man,” he said, holstering his gun and holding his hands up. Liam was a snitch, but Sean doubted he was armed. “I’m just looking for some information. I’m willing to pay. Unless your friends in the black sedan beat me to it. I’ll double what they gave you. I’ve got cash.”

  Sean’s brain registered a presence behind him, but unless Liam had showered in vanilla-laced lotion in the few moments since he’d vanished, it wasn’t him.

  Brynn emerged from around a corner, her index finger pressed against her mouth. How she’d gotten here so fast—hell, how she’d gotten here at all—was a mystery he’d solve later. For now, he considered only the upside. One, he didn’t have to worry that she was in danger at the hotel. Two, he had backup.

  He signaled for her to go in the other direction. Light flashed off her 9mm, and his chest, seized with tension, unclenched enough for his breathing to regulate. He walked farther into the cavernous room. Every inch of the space was filled with furniture, shelves and tables of varying shapes and sizes. From the smells of baked clay and acrylic paint, he guessed they were in an artist’s studio.

  Not exactly an ideal place to be sneaking around in the dark.

  He slid toward the wall and spotted the light switch. He signaled for Brynn to duck under cover then flipped on the overheads.

  The momentary brightness blinded him, but with his quarry’s reaction slowed by drink, Sean caught sight of Liam a split second before he scurried to the door. Sean darted around a table of figurines, vaulted over a waist-high stack of packing boxes and nearly caught Liam’s ankle with a head-first dive, but Brynn had appeared from behind a shelf of colorful teacups and clotheslined Liam with her outstretched arm. He dropped hard to the ground.

  With her heel on his neck and her gun to his temple, she warned, “Don’t move.”

  Liam protested his innocence of anything and everything. Sean dragged him to his feet and jabbed his pistol beneath his chin.

  “Why’d you run, Liam?”

  “Saw your gun,” the man choked out.

  Sean dug the barrel in a bit deeper. “Who were you talking to in that car?”

  “What? Who?”

  “Don’t play stupid,” Brynn said, affecting an accent that caught Sean unaware until he remembered that she’d pretended to be a German honeymooner when she’d first encountered the man. It was smart for her to keep up her cover, just in case this interrogation gave them nothing useful.

  “Tell him who you were talking to.”

  “Weren’t nothing. Local chappies. Want to know what’s going on in their town is all.”

  “Why did you point them toward our hotel?”

  “What? I wasn’t—”

  Sean jammed harder, and Liam stopped lying.

  “I didn’t know she was with someone. I mean, she said she was with someone, but I didn’t believe her.”

  Brynn slinked forward, drawing her finger lovingly over Liam’s slackened jaw. “I told you I was on my flitterwochen. Hard to do without a husband.”

  Liam’s grin was gap-toothed and foul. “Aw, what does he got that I don’t, lass? Bet if you ditch ‘im, I could make your night one for the record books.”

  Sean hadn’t planned on punching him. In any other circumstance, scum like Liam wouldn’t have been worth his time. But before his brain re-engaged, Brynn had yelped, Liam was sliding to the floor, unconscious, and Sean’s hand hurt like a motherfucker.

  “Well, that was brilliant,” Brynn said, her fingers digging through Liam’s tangle of beard for a pulse.

  “He insulted you,” Sean argued.

  “No, he insulted you,” she said with an exaggerated smile. “Oh, never mind. He’s coming around.”

  “Wha—” Liam said, struggling to sit up.

  Brynn placed her hand gently but firmly on the man’s chest. “You tripped. Bad fall. Stay put for a minute. Tell us about these men who like to keep tabs on the tourists.”

  Liam’s grin was lopsided, and his head wobbled as if Sean’s punch had loosened the tendons that connected his neck to the base of his skull. “Not all tourists, lass. Just the pretty ones who steal their business.”

  “Steal their…what?” Brynn asked.

  Alcohol, the punch to his jaw and vertical position combined so that when he opened his mouth to speak again, he let off an odiferous belch then passed out.

  Brynn jumped to her feet. “He’s disgusting.”

  Sean had no argument, so he wrapped his hand around Brynn’s upper arm, pulled her toward the door and doused the lights. Hopefully, when Liam came to, he’d think the whole situation had been a drunken dream.

  “Care to tell me what exactly you did the last time you were here in San Sebastían?
” he asked Brynn.

  “I’d have to consult my case files. I can’t imagine it would be anything that would put me on the radar of local crime bosses.”

  “Well, imagine harder, cher, because from where I’m standing, I can see you pinging bright and clear.”

  Five

  The man might have been drunk, but he had not lied. Brynn and Sean backtracked to the hotel, and in an alley parallel to the service entrance, they spotted the black sedan.

  Bollocks.

  Brynn had no idea why anyone in this Spanish coastal town would have her on his watch list. Her last visit had been brief. Despite what she’d told Sean, she remembered her last case perfectly. She’d called on her favorite forger to provide an untraceable passport for the daughter of a Danish judge who had hired Titan to liberate the twenty-something from an abusive boyfriend with criminal connections in Madrid.

  San Sebastían had been a blip in that operation. She hadn’t even stayed overnight. Using a photograph from the girl’s social media account, she’d arranged for the papers ahead of the actual extraction, sending her agents to do surveillance in the capital while she waited in el Creador’s kitchen, sipping coffee and tossing colorful pom-poms around for his cats while the forger worked in another room.

  Unless the junior mobster who got his jollies off of beating up his girlfriend had had a wider net of felonious influence than her intel had indicated, Brynn’s case should not have brought her to the attention of the local crime bosses.

  And yet here she was, crouching in a dark alley, watching a man in a tailored leather coat with a telltale bulge at his hip stand sentry beside the sedan, his face a stone monument to the perfect scowl. Behind him, the back entrance to their hotel had been jimmied. No doubt, his cohorts were inside, probably tearing through Brynn and Sean’s room for evidence of where they’d gone.