Honor Avenged

by Tonya Burrows

  Mercedes something.

  “Jesus,” the woman said, a melodious hint of Spanish in her voice. She took Leah’s chin in her hand and turned her head each way. “That’s a shiner, chica. What did they do to you? Did they…” She hesitated, which seemed very unlike her. “Did they hurt you?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not the way you mean, at least. I was drugged until I got here. Have you seen Marcus?”

  “He’s probably dead.”

  The words were a blade. First Danny, and now… If she lost Marcus, too, she’d lose the little bit of sanity she’d managed to preserve over the past year. “He’s not.”

  “You sound so sure.”

  She had to be. The truck hit another bump and pain screamed through her shoulder. “Mercedes, let me go. Please.”

  Mercedes sat back on her heels and just looked at her. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  Leah saw the bag coming and panicked. “No, no. Stop! Please!”

  “Shh,” Mercedes whispered harshly next to her ear. “You tell them I’m here, you won’t like what happens, chica. Keep your mouth shut and everything will be just fine. Trust me.”

  Trust her? Her loyalties seemed to shift with the wind. How the hell was she supposed to trust the woman?

  The truck bumped to a sudden stop and through a worn part in the bag, Leah saw Mercedes’s outline melt away into the shadows near the front of the truck. She should call attention to the woman. Maybe it’d win her favor with Dmitry.

  Her stomach lurched at the thought. She didn’t want the favor of the man who may have killed Marcus. And possibly Danny, too. The two men who meant the world to her.

  No. She wouldn’t rat Mercedes out. For now. But if it came down to her life or the other woman’s she planned to do everything in her power to go home to her kids.

  One of her captors crawled into the back of the truck. Leah held her breath, wondering if Mercedes’s plan was to attack while the guy was busy unhooking Leah from the bar. But nothing happened. The woman didn’t appear with a gun to save the day.

  God. She was sick of waiting for others to save the day. She should’ve let Danny teach her self-defense. He’d always wanted to, but she’d always found excuses to put it off. She always told him she was too much of a flower child, having been raised by a hippie, to feel comfortable with learning how to hurt another human being. How naive she’d been. Her naiveté must have kept her poor husband awake at night with worry. No wonder Danny had swaddled her from the horrors of the outside world, shielding her from the worst aspects of his job. If she lived through this, she was signing up for the first available class when she got home.

  Leah’s arms fell away from the bar and collapsed like lead weights in her lap. There was something wrong with her shoulder. It screamed with every small jostle, and she didn’t seem to have any control over that arm. Dislocated. She’d first done it as a teenager during gymnastics practice and now it happened at least once every few years. It hurt like hell to pop back in, but while out, it just felt…useless. Except maybe it wasn’t. She could manipulate her arm in ways she couldn’t while it was properly attached to her shoulder.

  Her captors yanked her out into the rain and mud. She didn’t fight. She shuffled along, keeping her head down so she could see a sliver of the ground through the gap at the bottom of the bag. They led her inside a building, and only then did they pull off the hood. Except for the lack of a desk, this room looked the same as the one she’d just left—mud brick walls, dirt floor, and corrugated tin roof. For all she knew, they’d driven her in circles, removed the desk, and brought her right back to where she started. There were a couple of ragged chairs strewn around the edges of the room, and in the center of it all was a bound man, his head covered. Dried splotches of red in the hard-packed dirt floor underneath him showed they hadn’t been kind to him.

  Bile burned her throat. “Marcus?”

  He looked up sharply at the sound of her voice. No, it wasn’t Marcus. His coloring was too pale, and his muscle tone was all wrong.

  “Who’s there?” he asked in a British accent.

  One of her captors strode forward and yanked off the man’s hood. His dark hair stood up on end. His left eye was swollen shut, and his nose dripped with fresh blood. Still, she recognized him instantly.

  Alexander Cabot.

  The whole reason she’d gotten dragged into this mess in the first place. Part of her wanted to rail at him. The other part—the mother, she supposed—wanted to rush to his side and make sure he was okay. Yes, he’d gotten her involved in this mess. But he’d also saved her life back in Malibu.

  Cabot’s one good eye widened when he spotted her, but he recovered quickly and dismissed her like she wasn’t important. “Who is she?”

  Dmitry walked in then, shaking off an umbrella. He grinned at Cabot. “Don’t play stupid, Cabot. Of course you recognize her.”

  “I don’t,” he said in a tone of tired resignation. “I swear I don’t know this woman.”

  Dmitry motioned one of his men forward with the tilt of his head. The brute slammed a fist into Cabot’s face with all the concern of swatting a fly.

  Cabot’s head snapped back, then lolled forward as more blood dripped down his chin to splatter on his clothes. He gurgled a laugh. “Hitting me won’t improve my memory, mate.”

  The brute wound up again and, this time, something crunched under his fist with the blow. Cabot fell silent, obviously unconscious, but the brute pulled back to hit him again.

  Leah didn’t think he could handle another punch like that. Not in the state he was in. She should follow his lead, pretend she didn’t know him, but she wasn’t about to watch him get beaten to death. “Wait.”

  Dmitry held up a hand in a halt gesture. The brute backed off, though he didn’t seem pleased about it. He enjoyed causing pain.

  “Do you have something to say?” Dmitry asked her.

  “Don’t hurt him anymore,” she said softly. Was this the right thing to do? She had no idea. She just knew she couldn’t watch him die when he’d saved her life once. “He does know me, but like I said, I met him only the one time. That day in Malibu at the house I was showing.”

  “When he killed my men.”

  She swallowed hard and nodded. “I honestly don’t know anything about anything. He just showed up and so did your men. I don’t know what’s happening or why you think I’m involved. Until this week, I hadn’t even set foot outside the U.S. since my honeymoon. That’s the truth.”

  Dmitry studied her for a long moment. Finally, he inclined his head. “I believe you, Mrs. Giancarelli.”

  “Then, please, let me go.”

  “Mm. We’ll see.”

  Dammit, she was beginning to hate that phrase and promised right then she’d never again use it on her kids.

  “Did Cabot give you anything?” Dmitry asked.

  “A flash drive.” She saw no reason to lie now.

  “And where is it?”

  She again saw it sliding from her hand, disappearing into the koi pond. “It’s gone. Destroyed. But I didn’t look at it. I didn’t want to know what was on it.”

  “You weren’t curious?”

  “It got me into this mess. I wanted nothing to do with it.”

  Again, he studied her face as if searching for deception. What did he think, she was a spy, a master manipulator? Jesus fucking Christ, she was a real estate agent. She could spin a good tale to sell an ugly house, but that was as far as her manipulation skills went.

  Dmitry finally nodded at his men and they strode forward to scoop up Cabot’s listless body.

  Oh God, was he already dead? She couldn’t tell.

  Had they done this to Marcus?

  Her stomach lurched and she had to swallow hard to keep anything from coming up. “Where are you taking him?”

  “
Don’t worry.” Dmitry tossed a smile over his shoulder before locking her into the windowless room. “He’s going to hospital.”

  Something in the way he said the word hospital raised goose bumps of fear along her skin. They were going to kill him. She was sure of it. And they weren’t going to release her. That had been wishful thinking on her part.

  Overwhelmed, she sank to her knees and stared at the bloodstains on the floor.

  Would they torture her as well or did they have even worse things in mind? She’d noticed the way the brute leered at her bare legs, all but slobbering over her like a dog with a steak.

  Either way, she wasn’t going home.

  She’d never see her babies again.

  They’d lost their father and now their mother. Would they think she ran away and abandoned them? Would they grow up hating her?

  No.

  No!

  She wasn’t just going to lie down and give up. If she didn’t make it home, Maya and the boys would at least know she fought like hell to get back to them.

  She climbed to her feet and tested her dislocated shoulder by tugging on the cuffs. Pain blazed through the joint, but it was nothing she hadn’t felt before. She sat on her butt and very carefully folded herself in half until she could slip her cuffed hands past her feet and bring them to the front.

  Thank you, yoga. When she got home, she had to send her therapist a gift basket for suggesting it. Despite all of her years of gymnastics as a teenager, she never would have been able to contort herself like that without the past year of yoga classes.

  She was relieved to see her captors hadn’t used actual handcuffs, but zip ties. Although she’d never accepted self-defense lessons from Danny, she did remember the one thing he told her about zip ties…

  They break.

  It was going to hurt, but not as much as waiting here for rape and/or death. She sucked in a sharp breath through her nostrils and held it as she staggered back to her feet. She raised her arms over her head and brought her forearms down hard toward her hipbones.

  Nothing happened. Other than the ties gouging into her skin.

  Damn shoulder. With it out of socket, she couldn’t get enough leverage to snap the plastic. And it was starting to tighten up. She glanced around, looking for something—anything—that could help. She had to snap her shoulder back into place or else she had no chance of escaping.

  The edge of the doorframe was her only option. She pressed her shoulder to it and leaned in. The joint groaned and protested but then—pop!

  Tears filled her eyes and she gave herself a moment to breathe through the pain. She couldn’t take more. There was no telling when Dmitry or the brute would be back.

  She tested her shoulder. It burned with each roll, but it worked. For now. It was going to lock up eventually and she’d need a handful of painkillers and a sling for a week or so, but that was a worry for later. She again lifted her bound hands above her head and used all her strength when she slammed her arms down.

  The zip ties broke.

  She was free.

  Now what?

  Chapter Fifteen

  How did a man’s biggest concern go from catching the best wave to…well, this shit? Why the fuck had he let himself get pulled back into this world?

  Marcus was ready to be done with it. No more death, no more blood staining his hands, no more lives depending on his ability to talk down a psycho.

  But that was before Leah came to him, needing help.

  She was the only person on the planet able to drag him back to his life. The only one who could make him stay.

  She was in danger. If she was even still alive.

  Marcus leaned back against the wall of his prison cell and closed his eyes. His brain wasn’t functioning at 100 percent, still fuzzy from the drugs Volkov had pumped into him back in Indonesia, and his head thundered. Unwashed bodies teemed all around him, all of them dark skinned, malnourished. He didn’t have the same ear for language as Jean-Luc, but it sounded like at least some of them were speaking French. So, if he had to take a wild guess, he was somewhere in Africa.

  Why Volkov brought him here was still a mystery. Probably something to do with that damn flash drive. Not to mention, it was easy to make people disappear in a war-torn country, and Africa had more than its share.

  His fellow prisoners kept their distance from him so even if he could question them, they wouldn’t let him. They were terrified. He got that much.

  The prison smelled like warmed-over shit and was stiflingly hot. His throat ached with the need for water, but he didn’t dare touch the bucket placed to catch rainwater in the center of the room. That was a one-way ticket to dehydration by diarrhea. No thanks.

  All right. Time to get the old brain working again and come up with a plan. He had no doubt his teammates were on the hunt, but they were in Indonesia and the world was a big-ass place. The chances they’d find him and Leah in time were nil.

  It was up to him.

  With a groan, he pushed to his feet and wandered along the perimeter of the round room. No windows. Only one door that was, of course, locked. The other prisoners surged back every time he took a step forward. Jesus. These poor people. What the hell was Volkov doing to them? He held out his hands in a peacemaking gesture, hopefully showing them he meant no harm.

  They surged toward the other side of the room anyway.

  Oh. Shit.

  He lowered his hands slowly as realization dawned in his fuzzy brain. Of course they were scared of him. They probably thought he was one of Volkov’s men, either put in there to spy on them or because he’d done something bad enough to warrant imprisonment. Either way, they wanted nothing to do with him.

  “I’m not here to hurt you,” he told them. “I’m trapped, just like you. We need to escape.” He tried to think back to high school French class and came up with nothing. He’d slept through most of it. “Escape.” He made his fingers into a pair of running legs. “Run away. Escape.”

  “No, they will kill you,” a voice said in halting English at the back of the group. “We stay. We work off our debt. We go home to our family.”

  Ah. So that’s what this was. Forced labor. “Work where? Where do they make you work?”

  “The mines.” The speaker moved forward. He was young, no more than sixteen, thin and covered in splotches of red mud. “We dig for diamonds.” He said something more in French that Marcus had no hope of translating.

  “Okay, okay. No escape. I get it.” He blew out a breath, trying to think. These men didn’t see themselves as prisoners and didn’t want to escape. They weren’t going to help him. He had to come up with a plan on his own, but first… “What country are we in?”

  “Central African Republic,” the English speaker said.

  Well, shit. That was not good news. The landlocked country in the middle of the continent was consistently ranked in the world’s poorest, despite its wealth of mineral resources, and had been engaged in a civil war between Muslim and Christian factions since 2012. Hundreds of thousands of people had been displaced by the constant violence, and the country was now teetering on the brink of famine. Even if he got out of here, he’d have to dodge bullets from trigger-happy fanatics using religion as an excuse to kill whoever crossed their path. The lack of infrastructure meant that even if he escaped, he’d have a hell of a time finding a way to contact the team for exfil.

  And he still had to locate Leah.

  He turned back to the English speaker. “Are there women here?”

  The boy stared at him blankly.

  “Do women work in the mines?”

  After a hesitant moment, he shook his head.

  “Okay.” He was not liking these answers. If the men were forced to work the mines to pay off supposed debts, he had a bad feeling he knew how the women were working to pay off those same debts. HORNET
had dealt with sex traffickers before, and it still haunted him.

  Please, if there is a God, don’t let Leah be in that situation.

  “Are there any women here at all?” he asked.

  “Doctoresse.”

  “A doctor. There’s a woman doctor?”

  “Oui.”

  “Where is she?”

  The boy shrugged.

  “When do you see her?”

  The boy muttered something. Marcus had never been more frustrated that he didn’t speak any other languages. Where was the Cajun when you needed him?

  Indonesia. Right. Exactly where he and Leah would still be if he hadn’t let down his guard.

  Fuck.

  He continued to pace, looking for weaknesses in the wall. Anything, but the structure appeared frustratingly solid.

  A woman doctor. Women were generally more sympathetic than men. If he could get to her, appeal to those sympathies, he’d have a shot at finding Leah. But how to get to her?

  Frustrated, he stopped pacing, locked his hands behind his head, and stared up at the ceiling.

  The ceiling.

  He watched rainwater pour through the biggest of the holes in the roof. It wasn’t quite at the highest point in the dome and, with some help, would be big enough for a man his size to squeeze through. A plan started to take shape. That was his escape.

  He looked around, spotted the buckets and troughs collecting rainwater. A ripple of unease went through the prisoners when he kicked the first one over. He held a finger to his lips, telling them to be quiet. They settled but he didn’t think it would last. One or all of these guys could decide to rat him out in hopes of reducing their sentences.

  He flipped the trough over and stood on it. The metal groaned under his weight but held.

  Damn. Not high enough.

  He got down and looked for another bucket. The only one that looked sturdy enough was one of the overflowing latrine buckets.

  Figured.

  He held his breath as he kicked it over, but the stench still hit him like a punch. It obviously hadn’t been emptied in a long time and had been left to ferment in the heat. He bent over, braced his hands on his knees, and gagged, the whole time berating himself for his weak stomach. Vomiting would not help the smell.