Dark Nights Dangerous Men

by Elisabeth Naughton, Cynthia Eden, Katie Reus, Alexandra Ivy, Laura Wright, Joan Swan

  Tomás turned his head. “No way—”

  Rio shoved his partner’s wrist between his shoulder blades. “That’s an order. And you owe me.”

  Alvarado appeared. He pried Rio’s fingers from Tomás’s arm and shoved the two of them apart with more impatience than anger.

  “Enough of the show.” He passed a look between Rio and Tomás. “It’s not getting any cooler out here. Can we just shut this baby down and go home, please?”

  Rio’s focus sharpened on Alvarado, but movement beyond his shoulder pulled at Rio’s attention. In the distance, a fleet of four black SUVs crawled toward them through the low desert brush, creating dust clouds in their wake.

  “Right on time.” Saul graced them all with one of his rare sincere smiles. “Now get your act together and pretend you’re professionals?”

  Pedro waved four young men to the front of the truck, and Rio got his first good look at their cargo. Each could easily pass as Mexican. Dark skin, straight dark hair. Two had light eyes, two had dark. All were clean-cut, dressed in jeans and polo shirts, and would fit in anywhere. They stuffed their hands in pockets or crossed them over their chests and leaned against the truck’s grill.

  Their casual body language contrasted with an underlying intensity. Their sharp gazes took in the surroundings and their hosts with quick, focused glances. While they studied the ground at their feet or the local terrain, their ears remained perked to catch every word. After years of living undercover, even more years in law enforcement, Rio knew exactly what they were processing beneath the easy layering.

  Tomás pulled his weapons from the truck. Alvarado and Pedro took up positions on either side of the four men, feet planted wide, chins tilted up. Tomás wiped his face and joined them. All three dressed in black, shoulder to toe, all sporting a shoulder holster with their choice of weapon, a Glock for Tomás and Alvarado, a Beretta for Pedro. Tomás had adorned his leg holster with a second weapon; Pedro and Alvarado held automatic rifles pointed toward the ground.

  The SUVs pulled up and parked twenty yards away. Rio cast covert glances around the area, alert for additional surprises, but nothing stood out. Silence fell for an extended moment as they waited for the client to emerge from behind the tinted windows of his vehicle. The air crackled with anticipation.

  Cassie hovered in the back of Rio’s mind, keeping him strong and focused.

  I’m coming, Cass. Hang on.

  The passenger door on one SUV opened, and a man stuck his head over the door. “Thirty-six, twenty-six, north. Thirty-six, fifty-seven, east.”

  Rio let out a breath. The latitude and longitude of the city in Syria where the terrorists had originated—the operation’s code. Kollman was here, and those SUVs were filled with the best law enforcement personnel in southern California.

  “Thirty-one, zero, north.” Rio called their current coordinates in response. “One-hundred-fifteen, forty-four, west.”

  All the doors of the SUVs opened, like crows spreading their wings. Men emerged in a sweeping offensive wave. Rio’s hands clenched at his sides. He felt naked without a weapon.

  Senior Special Agent Karl Kollman angled from an SUV in full military camouflage. Rio recognized all six feet five inches of the man and started toward his lifeline. If he could reach Kollman out of earshot, he could pass on Cassie’s location—

  Saul grabbed his arm. “We do this together.”

  Rio gritted his teeth and stepped back into place beside Saul. “Fine, but keep your mouth shut. They expect to deal with me.”

  Kollman’s soldiers, also decked out in desert fatigues, set up a perimeter. Each carried a compact assault rifle. Tension radiated around Saul. Damned fool was so out of his league. But that didn’t matter anymore. All that mattered was getting through this and getting to Cassie.

  Kollman strode forward with the proud gait of a man in charge. He stopped, clasped his hands behind his back, and surveyed the terrorists before turning his gaze toward Rio. “Identify yourselves.”

  “Rio Santana, your point man.” Rio gestured toward Saul. “Saul Flores, proprietor.” He lifted a hand to the others. “Tomás Hernandez, Pedro Montoya, Xavier Alvarado, security.”

  Kollman pointed one finger toward the trucks. Two soldiers on his right broke away from the group to investigate the vehicles. Once they signaled an all clear, Kollman advanced. His men inched forward in a wall of camouflage, creaking boots, and clicking guns.

  One of Kollman’s army approached the leader’s side and handed him a small, electronic device.

  “For identification purposes,” Kollman said.

  Rio nodded and waved over the first terrorist. The man strode up, jaw tight, green gaze sharp with intelligence and caution. In Arabic, Rio instructed the man to place his thumb and forefinger on the small pad. When the unit beeped, he instructed the man to take three steps back. Kollman took a digital photo and ran it through the biological identity scanner’s face-recognition program.

  The man passed on both counts, and the process continued with each of the four men.

  Kollman glanced over his shoulder and nodded toward the SUVs. A man wearing a suit and sunglasses strode forward with a hard-shell suitcase and set it at Kollman’s feet.

  He handed the electronic unit to his soldier and addressed Saul. “Eight-hundred-fifty-thousand dollars, US, including the additional one hundred thousand, as agreed.”

  Saul gave a curt nod.

  Tomás came forward, knelt, cracked the lid, made a quick count. “Looks good.”

  Kollman extended his hand to Rio. “We look forward to a long and profitable relationship.”

  Rio nodded, attempting to penetrate Kollman’s sunglasses and convey he had an urgent message to impart. While eight of his soldiers came forward, two each escorting a terrorist to one of the vehicles, the remainder of his men hustled back to load up.

  Kollman observed the transfer. “We’ve got your back,” he whispered, his lips barely moving.

  Abruptly, Kollman turned and strode back to the SUV. Rio had to grip his thigh to keep from reaching out to grab his boss’s arm.

  He didn’t want them watching his back. He wanted them watching Cassie’s.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Pain brought Cassie awake. The kind of pain so complex, so complete, there was no beginning, no end, no source, no relief. The kind of pain she’d never experienced but only witnessed in the worst trauma patients drifting through her ER. Some screaming, some writhing, but the ones with the most traumatic injuries seemed trapped in agonizing silence because even breathing sent shards of stabbing sensations across tissues and nerves.

  She pried her lids open but experienced no change in vision. None. Not a flicker, not a shadow. An earlier fear grew deeper roots and choked her. That blow to the head had most likely rendered her blind. Otherwise, at least some level of vision would have returned by now.

  Blind. Blind. She couldn’t practice medicine blind. Her whole career, a decade of grueling work and study, wasted. Somewhere in her head, she realized the absurdity of that concern when she was facing death or when the pain grew so deep, so all-encompassing that she wished she’d die.

  Her mind wavered like heat off asphalt, and there were moments when she couldn’t recall her name, her age, where she was, where she lived, or even what she’d studied so long and hard to accomplish.

  But now she actually felt semi-coherent as she wet her lips with a barely damp tongue and forced air past her throat to say, “Hello?”

  Her rasp dissipated into the darkness, unanswered. And that was when she knew she’d only been deluding herself. That while she may have believed she’d found solid ground, her mind was truly gone, because the truth was, she’d expected, okay, maybe only hoped, someone would answer.

  There had been moments earlier…she didn’t know how long ago because she had no sense of time…when she’d sworn there’d been someone in here with her. Someone tending to her. Compressing her wounds. Giving her water. Providing hope.
Her imagination? Hallucinations? Suddenly, it felt so important to know.

  Cassie tested her body with tiny movements. Found her left side the main source of her pain—torso, arm, and God almighty, her head. With her right hand, she skimmed the floor, felt the stickiness of her own blood. Reached, touched the cargo hold’s wall, groped as far as she could but found nothing. No supplies, no water jugs. Yes, she’d been hallucinating.

  She eased back down, the effort making pressure build in her head until she thought it would explode. The encompassing darkness added to her disorientation, and her stomach rolled with nausea. She clenched her teeth against her need to vomit. The putrid air in the truck intensified the suspicions she’d had before unconsciousness had taken her earlier—that she was in the same truck where those three women had died alongside the highway during her first night in Mexico. If not those women in that location, other women, or other people, in another location. She could smell the blood, the lingering tang of urine and feces. And while, yes, she had lost a lot of her own blood here, she’d experienced the smell of old and new enough in the ER to know the difference.

  The odor had intensified with the increasing heat, and now, with the interior of the metal box reaching well over one hundred degrees, Cassie was convinced the stench would be baked into her forever. Which, under these circumstances, might not be very long.

  And it could have been the heat or the dehydration or the loss of blood or the terror playing with her mind, but she thought she could almost feel the women there. Just…there. Just…staying by her side. Which might be who she’d thought had been caring for her earlier. This gave Cassie both an eerie certainty of lying at death’s door and a strange sense of comfort to know she wasn’t alone.

  She supposed no one wanted to die alone.

  The heat sucked at her body like a vampire. The pain wrapped her in a sickening cocoon. Cassie laid her head back and thought of Rio as unconsciousness tugged at her. But his image kept slipping out of reach. She had complex feelings toward him but couldn’t remember why. She knew they’d fought but had no idea what about. Still, she wanted him. Wanted him worse than she wanted water or air.

  Nothing made sense, and with every hour, her brain grew mushier.

  Something nudged the edge of her fading consciousness. She tried to ignore it, to push it away and succumb to the inner darkness, but the noise got louder. The drone of a vehicle. The crunch of tires.

  A new fireball of fear ignited in the pit of her stomach. Flames with teeth gnawed their way down her limbs. She started to shake, and anguishing pain twisted through her body. She wanted to hope—hope Rio had found her—but her fear the other man had come back to finish what he’d started overshadowed that hope.

  She kept her broken arm tight to her side and used the other to push herself into a semi-sitting position. Pain ripped through the entire left side of her body, and she made strange mewls in an attempt to keep herself from screaming.

  Doors slammed. Cassie closed her throat around a sob. Footsteps crunched. Too slow. Dammit, they were too slow. Rio would be running. Rio would be frantic. She didn’t know why she believed that, but she did.

  Metal rattled at the door. Then a clank. A screech. A thunderous roar as the door rolled skyward. And light seared Cassie’s closed eyelids. Light. She wasn’t blind. But the realization held little excitement. All she wanted was Rio.

  She squeezed her eyes against the bright lights shining on her and managed to prop herself against the side of the truck. Her head swam. She breathed shallow and quick, even though she wanted to suck in lungfuls of the fresh air, sure one of her broken ribs would puncture a lung.

  She blinked, trying to open her eyes to the light. To identify who’d come for her. But before she could see any more than backlit silhouettes, the truck rocked under someone’s weight. A hand fell on her arm and hauled her to her feet.

  Cassie screamed—high-pitched and pathetic with the minimal air she could inhale. Pain speared across her ribs, up her shoulder, down her arm.

  “Shit. I’m sorry,” the man lifting her whispered. His voice deep, gravelly. Familiar, but not Rio. Cassie’s stomach fell. “We’ll get you out of this. Just keep your mouth shut.”

  “Rio.” She breathed his name, leaning against the man’s chest, reveling in the solid wall of strength holding her up even though she didn’t know if he was friend or foe.

  “He’s here. Now shut up unless you want us all to die right now.”

  He supported her waist for several steps, and she decided then he was friend. His hands were careful, his assistance considerate. But just as soon as they reached the edge of the cargo space, he let go, fisted the back of her shirt, and pulled her down that one giant step from the truck without a trace of consideration for her injuries.

  Cassie groaned but bit her lip against crying out again. Her mind was playing tricks on her, telling her she could trust because she so badly wanted to. But she’d been yanked and released and yanked back so many times, she didn’t even understand the concept of trust anymore. Something inside her shut down.

  Rio had been holding his breath as he waited for Tomás to bring Cassie from the truck. Praying he didn’t carry out her corpse. But neither had he been prepared for what his partner had dragged out. Rio’s entire body flashed red-hot, then went ice-cold at the sight of her.

  Badly injured had definitely been one of Tomás’s classic understatements. Cassie could barely stand. Tomás was holding her up with an arm around her waist and his hand fisted in the waistband of her bloody shorts. But there wasn’t just blood on her shorts. There was blood everywhere. It drenched her face, her shirt, her arm, her leg. Her hair, those luxurious silky strands, was now matted with it. But Rio could not pull his eyes off the gleaming white bone jutting from Cassie’s upper arm.

  His heart beat so fast his breathing labored. His stomach turned inside out. Regret and shame as thick as the desert heat clogged his throat and wet his eyes. His jaw burned from the pressure of his gritted teeth. He flexed and released both hands over and over to keep from lunging for Pedro’s throat. Focus. Control. Getting himself killed would not get Cassie out of here.

  “Jesus, Montoya.” Rio could barely lift his voice above a ragged whisper. “You defy description.”

  “What?” Pedro said, all innocence. “I just wanted a taste. She went all ballistic on me.”

  Rio did turn on Pedro then. He clamped not one hand but both around the animal’s neck and squeezed. Watched Pedro’s eyes bug out and growled. “You don’t ever touch what’s mine. Ever. Do you understand?”

  He tried to nod against Rio’s hands, but his eyes rolled back in his head. Rio shoved Pedro backward, where he stumbled and landed in the dirt, gasping and clawing at his throat.

  Saul eyed Rio, then strode past him. He gripped Cassie’s chin and lifted it, forcing her gaze to meet his. “Puta, you cause too much trouble. Just like your mother. We had to get rid of her too.”

  A knife stabbed Rio’s chest. He wanted to take Saul’s head off. He wanted to scream denial, take Cassie in his arms, and explain it wasn’t true. But he couldn’t. Not now.

  Cassie’s glassy expression sharpened. Rio’s stomach shook at the look in her eye. If she had a weapon, Rio had no doubt she would have murdered the man, right there, in cold blood, without a care to consequence, without a thought to her Hippocratic oath.

  She pursed her lips, worked her mouth as if she was going to say something, then spat in Saul’s face. Saul reeled, stumbling back. He lifted his hand, slowly, to wipe his cheek, then swung out and smacked her hard with the back of his hand. Her head snapped, and her body swayed. Tomás kept her on her feet.

  Fury erupted along Rio’s veins and infused him with hatred so fierce it drove him forward. He gripped Saul’s arm, brought their faces nose to nose, and growled around clenched teeth. “We agreed she’s mine.”

  Saul wrenched his arm from Rio’s grip. “Then kill the bitch now. Or I will.”

  He couldn’
t look at Cassie. Couldn’t bear to see all the lies she believed about him now swimming in her eyes. He threw an arm toward her. “Montoya already had all the fun. I’d rather take a run at him.”

  “More fun to be had, amigo.” Saul slapped a weapon into Rio’s hand. “There are fifteen bullets in your clip.”

  Rio stared down at the gun in his hand. His own weapon. And had to focus. Had to remember that putting every damn one of those fifteen bullets into Saul’s head was not as important as getting Cassie and Tomás out of this alive. On his own. Because there was no rush of departmental muscle coming. So much for Kollman having his back. So much for the spies’ involvement in the takedown. And where the hell was that so-called friend of hers, Mike?

  “Back off,” Rio said. “At least give me some privacy.”

  He took a breath, walked toward Cassie slowly, making note of everyone else’s position. Saul and Pedro had retreated a few yards behind him, Alvarado to the left of the open truck. This could work—at least for Cassie and Tomás. And they were all that mattered to him now.

  He stopped two feet from Cassie.

  Tomás held his hand out to Alvarado. “Give me the keys to the truck.”

  “What for?”

  “So I can go dump the body after. You can ride back with the others.”

  Rio’s stomach folded. But when Alvarado handed over the keys, Rio lifted his gaze to Cassie’s. They were dry. Flat. God, she was going to make this easy for him?

  Rio curled his fingers into the torn, bloodied shirt at her chest, and Tomás let her go, moving off toward the driver’s side. A soft shuffle sounded on the opposite side of the truck. Rio focused that direction. Listened. Nothing more came. What the hell did he expect? An onslaught of military with assault rifles? Swooping Blackhawks? Seriously?

  Rio refocused on Cassie. He was alone in this. Her only hope.

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I sh-shouldn’t have f-followed you. I was sc-scared.”