by Karen Anders
Daniel was at the bar downing what looked like a beer. “Stay close,” Beau murmured in her ear so she could hear him. He approached Daniel, who gave Beau a disgruntled look.
Damn. He sat down on a stool and said, “Get your act together, Wescott. This isn’t the time or the place.”
Daniel’s shoulders stiffened then relaxed. He cut a look to Kinley and closed his eyes. “Noted,” he growled.
Daniel finished the rest of his drink, but Beau was relieved when he turned around on the bar stool so he could scan the dance floor.
“There he is,” Daniel said. “Hang back. Kinley, come with me.”
He took her hand and spun her out to the dance floor, making his way across to a tall, dark-haired man. Every cell in Beau’s body was primed.
Keeping Daniel and Kinley in his sights, he quickly scanned the area and froze. He saw the tattoo before the contact pulled out a gun and shoved it into Daniel’s stomach, just as the guy with the tattoo came up behind Kinley, grabbed her and dragged her toward the back.
There was so much noise and it was so dim that no one even noticed. Beau was already moving, but he was hampered by the dancers, crashing into the wall of bodies. He was immediately aware that they’d been compromised but also knew that Las Espadas were not aware that there was a third operative, namely him.
Reaching a hand to his waist, he unsnapped the guard holding the 45C in place. By the time he got to the back door, Daniel, Kinley and the two men were nowhere to be found. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a group of people spilled out of the doorway and headed to a small opening in the fence just beyond the patio, the noise of their ascent masked by music. He tensed and left his weapon where it was, down and right against his leg. There were a group of them and Beau felt impatient as they started funneling through the gap in the fence, impeding his progress.
All of them looked too young to be up and out this late at night. As he followed them, he noticed that some of their clothes looked painted on and all of them had painted faces. They were tipsy and laughing.
He was jangling with the need to just push them aside and bulldoze his way through the fence, but he didn’t want to cause a scene and draw attention to himself. He surveyed the hole as one of the girls caught a sleeve on the chain link. A guy with blue glitter in his hair helped her get free. Beau’s blood pumped hard through him.
The next guy got caught on the same piece of fencing and they all started to laugh.
He heard the guy say it might be too dangerous for them to dance if they couldn’t navigate through a damn fence. Beau thought that if they didn’t get their butts through the fence, he was going through them like a wrecking ball. That is where the men had to have taken Kinley and Daniel.
As soon as the group went through, he turned sideways and slipped through the fence. Running on pure instinct and adrenaline, Beau started toward the ten-story ramshackle apartments. It’d be a good place to take them for questioning. He heard music coming out of the place as he got closer. What the hell?
This was another club, only it was one that was piggybacking on the Luna. The music was punk. Definitely not as melodious and spicy. He heard a scream and recognized Kinley’s voice. It was cut off suddenly. He didn’t hesitate this time. He pushed his way through and headed down a darkened stairwell, following the hard beat of the music down into pandemonium.
He kept close to the wall all the way down the stairs. On the landing, he strode past a group of kids shucking their clothes, revealing body art beneath. Looked like some kind of painted-on latex. This must be some kind of new craze.
At the top of the last flight of stairs, he saw the body-painted kids lit up as they hit the black light of the pitch-black club below. There were bright cobras in orange and black, and butterfly masks in a myriad of pinks and blues, and some sugar skulls. There was even a full-body skellie, along with Aztec designs, devils, moons, and some celestial stars motifs. As he descended into the dark, he found himself faced with a jam-packed, whirling mass of neon art. Hundreds of kids with brilliant hair, some multiple colors, others with glitter. The crush of so many bodies made it hard to move. All of them clueless. A tank could roll through here and they would still be dancing.
He surveyed the room, his gaze running over the crowd. There was too much movement, too much shifting, screwing with his attempt to make sense of all that fluctuating humanity. It was impossible to discern faces among all those people and the dark was hampering his ability to find Kinley and Daniel. They were as invisible as he was.
They could be right in front of him and because they weren’t neon, he would never see them.
They could be anywhere...but he spied a light way in the back of the room. Must be some kind of security light. It illuminated what looked like a stairwell.
He plunged into the crowd after them. They might be invisible, but so was he. They wouldn’t know what hit them.
He kept his eyes on the stairwell as he worked his way through the crush, reaching back and pulling the HK from his holster, keeping it close to his leg, thumbing off the safety and chambering a round.
No one saw the deadly firepower in his hand as he shoved his way through the brightly lit writhing bodies.
As he reached the edge of the crowd and the stairwell, his heart stuttered when he saw the light illuminated an exit. Did they go out this way?
Kinley. The anguished cry echoed in his head. He had to find her and Daniel. Cold fury took over.
Which way had they taken her?
He looked up the stairs and back at the door. He had a split second to make a decision that could mean life or death for them all.
They wouldn’t kill them, not right off, he told himself. The cartel was probably searching for information about Montoya just like they were, but he was sure they wouldn’t be gentle with her in any way.
He took off running, taking the stairs two and three at a time. At the first landing, there was a hallway and several doors, some open, others just hanging by the hinges. He checked every apartment, all gutted and trashed, except for the last one that had some dilapidated sofa in it and an intact coffee table where kids were doing drugs.
He swore under his breath, finished checking the other doors and went back to the stairs—knowing he had nine more floors to go and that every minute she was out of his sight put her deeper in danger.
He had no choice but to endure from one minute to the next.
He might have been discharged. But once a SEAL, always a SEAL. SEALs never gave up and he was a frogman to the core, a SEAL with mayhem in mind. Murder and mayhem. He was trained in the art of stealth and killing. He had a warrior’s soul. All in, all the time, and he wasn’t losing her. No goddamn way was he losing her. The men who had taken Kinley were going to die.
* * *
Kinley’s cheek stung where one of the men had slapped her in the club to get her moving. He shoved her in the middle of the back and Daniel looked mutinous for a moment, but she shook her head.
She still had her gun in the holster concealed beneath her skirt. The one thing about men would always remain true. They constantly underestimated a woman.
She stumbled, going down to one knee, reaching for her weapon.
The guy that looked Middle Eastern grabbed her by the hair and hauled her up. She elbowed him in the ribs and turned, but the contact grabbed her wrist and twisted. She tried to counter, ducking a punch and stepping down hard with the heel of her shoe. Daniel realized what was happening and lunged at the Middle Eastern thug. They tussled, both of them fighting frantically for their lives. A shot rang out. It was loud in the hallway. For a minute Kinley couldn’t breathe.
The Middle Eastern man grabbed her around the middle and hauled her back against his body. Immobilized by the goon, the contact easily ripped the gun out of her grip. Then the man who held her tightly spoke, his accent not Span
ish, the language unmistakably Arabic.
She was in the fog again; those men speaking to each other, the gunfire making her run like a scared rabbit, getting turned around. The freezing fog wrapping around her like a blanket. The everyday, familiar sights of the street lay mysterious, hiding, looming out at her in the whitened haze at the last minute like images from some half-forgotten dream. Her lungs stung from the cold, wet air. The fog and fear became one, settling coldly, chilling deep to the bone.
It was the same dialect. She was sure of it. Panic, stark and razor sharp, skittered across every nerve ending she had.
Beau would be coming for them. She had no doubt. None. All she and Daniel had to do was survive.
Music coming up from below, subdued but still discordant, made the building hum around her, telling her she was still near that underground club they’d dragged them through until she’d started to struggle and that goon had hit her.
Beau couldn’t be far behind, a few minutes at most.
Daniel rammed the man holding her, jarring her loose. She scrambled to her feet and took off running down the hallway. She got all of ten feet before she was hit from behind.
The contact landed on her, taking her down, and she cried out.
“Leave her alone,” Daniel shouted and there were the sounds of a struggle. Then he had her by the hair again and when he jerked her up, she saw Daniel lying in the hallway, the blood stain growing, his eyes stricken and his lungs pumping for oxygen. The thug stood over him with a knife.
Kinley realized they were as good as dead unless Beau got here soon. They were now helpless, Daniel in critical condition.
The man screamed at the contact in Arabic, Kinley had no idea what he was saying, but the contact went pale, very, very pale.
Then she caught it, the name—el Ajeer.
Nausea coursed through her, and she had to fight being sick.
She’d never forget that day, or the man who had murdered her father, trashed their town house and taken his trident. That meant this man who was holding her wasn’t just a member of Las Espadas, he was part of el Ajeer’s Sons of the Republic. She had no illusions about what they were capable of. Drug lords were predictable and brutal, but el Ajeer’s men were butchers and cold-blooded killers with very little respect for Americans and even less for women.
Oh, God! The man responsible for her father’s murder was in Cuba?
Was he coming here?
The Middle Eastern roughly pulled Daniel up and he stumbled against the man. She tried to go to him, but the contact tightened his hold in her hair.
They dragged her out of the hallway and slammed her into a chair inside one of the trashed apartments. She didn’t know what floor she was on.
She did know she was losing the feeling in her arms. They’d jerked them behind the back of the chair and tied her with a plastic flex cuff. They’d also tied her around the waist and secured both her ankles to the legs of the chair. Like the rest of the building, the apartment had been ransacked, with its few shabby contents in pieces and the walls broken through.
Tall and with mean eyes, the contact had propped Daniel against the wall. The bloodstain had spread and dripped, and it was pooling beneath his hip. She was shaking as she met his eyes, and she saw that he knew he wasn’t going to make it.
“I’m sorry.”
“Hang in there,” she said firmly.
The goon who had been carrying her paced about. If he meant to scare her, it was working. She was gasping too hard and too fast, and she made a conscious effort to slow her breathing before she passed out. Her mouth had dried up from the fear, a distinctly metallic taste on her tongue.
Beau would find her. He was coming. She knew it. All she had to do was stall. Hopefully it would be quickly enough to save Daniel. He looked gray, his eyes glassy, sweat running off him in rivulets.
She’d never been in this situation, this helpless. She couldn’t move, and no amount of pleading was going to get her out of this, not with the thug throwing the knife to the contact.
Oh, God. Oh, God.
The contact smiled, his lips thinning cruelly. The blade in his hand gleamed, the edges looking lethally sharp. His rest of his face was just as malicious as the look in his eyes. Cold-blooded killer. She shivered hard and he laughed low and vicious. The goon smiled as he slapped the blackjack menacingly. Both men were sweating like Daniel.
She was drenched. The only sound in the room was Daniel’s harsh breathing and the sound of her own frantic heartbeat in her ears.
“You will tell me what I want to know. If you do not, I will cut you. Be a shame to disfigure that beautiful face. You’re going to need those lips to smile.”
His voice was cold and flat and as he spoke. The goon used the blackjack to give her stinging slaps on either side of her face.
“Who are you?”
She looked at Daniel, but he was staring into space. She could barely contain her panic. He was dying and there was nothing she could do for him. She was on her own. Stall. She had to stall. “Special Agent Kinley Cooper, Petty Officer Second Class. United States Coast Guard.”
The contact snorted and turned to look at the goon. “You don’t look like no agent to me. What the hell is the Coast Guard doing in Cuba?” He slid his hand against her knee and pushed up her skirt.
“I’m telling the truth,” she hissed, trying and failing to move away from him. She was immobile.
“Maybe I don’t need to cut you after all. I can think of something much more interesting.”
“No!” The shout came from Daniel as he lunged up from the floor and slammed into the contact, who lost his balance and in turn stumbled into her, knocking her over. Her head hit the floor, stunning her. The breath was knocked out of her. She’d landed hard on her shoulder. Daniel was fighting like a madman, his fists punishing.
The goon went to him and dragged Daniel off and shoved him back, then shot him point blank.
The two men disappeared from her view. Tears filled her eyes at the horror of watching the life drain out of Daniel’s eyes, made it hard for her to breathe as fear clutched her by the throat. “No,” she sobbed.
The contact materialized, cutting off her view of Daniel. He grabbed her by the hair dragging her face close to his. “What are you looking for?”
“Diego Montoya,” she rasped out between sobs. “We’re looking for a picture of him to identify him. We think he’s in the US after hijacking a Coast Guard cutter,” she said, quickly.
The contact looked up at the goon. “Bastard is a dead man. He’s in the US.”
She tried to breathe, her gaze darting to Daniel, so pale, so still. Just like her father. The blade glinted in the light from the hallway.
The contact shifted the knife to her throat.
And then he wasn’t there.
Two shots sounded in rapid succession, deafening blasts in close quarters. The contact jerked away from her and the knife clattered to the floor in front of her, followed by the splattering of blood and the sound of two bodies falling.
The goon was screaming. Someone else shouted something she couldn’t make out through the ringing in her ears. She couldn’t see anything but the knife, blood and Daniel.
The contact was dead, she had no doubt, and she was trapped. She tried to pull free, then froze as a dark shadow passed overhead.
The goon’s screams turned to gasping sobs. She heard a struggle, heard the loud crack of bone, then the screams were silent.
Shadows moved and a chill went down her spine. Let it be Beau.
Please let it be Beau, she thought, the words bouncing around her brain as every breath became harder to draw. The smell of blood filled the air, and a sob of pure panic broke free from her throat. She couldn’t breathe, and her arm felt like it was breaking with her full weight on it. She
tried to turn her head.
The shadow passed over her again, stealing the faint light, plunging her into utter darkness. A man bent over her. She could feel the weight of his presence, hear his breathing. Oh, God. If it was someone else after information... With a soft grunt, the man shoved the contact farther away. The faint stream of light from the hall returned, and she saw a bent knee and the drape of a blue shirt. She closed her eyes in complete and utter relief even as every muscle in her body hurt.
She wanted to talk, but her mouth was too dry as she watched blood running across the floor, glistening in the low light.
“Chérie, I got you,” he said. “I’ll have you free in a second.” His voice was rough-edged, rock steady.
Beau.
The second wave of relief made her weak. He sliced through her bonds, first her hands, then her waist and each of her ankles. Each cut was a single, swift stroke. She tried not to think about the blood on the floor, about what he’d done to save her.
But it was far too late for Daniel.
He pulled the chair away from her, but she couldn’t move. Her arms and legs were numb. “Come on,” Beau said, hauling her up to a sitting position. She slipped her arms around his neck, hanging on to him.
“You’re safe. Stay put for a minute.”
He went directly to Daniel and pressed his fingers to his neck. He waited for a moment and then sighed heavily. Silently, he closed Daniel’s eyes.
He went and searched each man thoroughly, heedless of the bloody mess. Every movement was controlled, his actions swiftly executed and efficient. He had both men stripped of their possessions and was back by her side in less than a minute.
“You okay?” he asked.
When she didn’t immediately answer, he cupped her chin and looked directly into her eyes. His were steady, warm, so beautifully blue. She nodded, a single, automatic movement.
“Good, that’s my chérie.”
The murmur of voices coming down the hall made him stiffen and spin toward the door. Her adrenaline spiked, and she tried to get to her feet. He grabbed her around the waist and helped her up, guiding her quickly through an opening in the wall where there once had been a door.
