by Sybil Bartel
Okay. I could handle this.
I took another deep breath.
All right, I was alive, I could breathe, and I didn’t feel too closed in like I was buried or something else horrific. I could deal. I just had to take stock. Deep breath, don’t panic, I could do this.
I sucked in another breath and let it out slow, then I sat up, measured and deliberate.
That’s when I noticed it.
The sway.
The sway combined with the engine noise.
I wasn’t in a car. I was on a boat.
I looked around, but I couldn’t see anything, so I felt with my hands. Soft, bedding, pillows behind me.
I was below deck.
Swinging my legs around, my hands in front of me, I scooted to the edge of the bunk and began to feel my way around. Handcuffed, unarmed and no phone, I didn’t know what I could do, but I had to at least try.
Just as my feet landed on a solid surface, the boat thumped into something and the sway stopped. The engine cut, and before I could get my wits about me, a galley door flew open.
Bright sunlight filtered in, blinding me.
“Get up,” a deep voice barked.
I STOOD UP. “I DON’T give a shit about the history, or who Dante is to Loic. This is my fault. I’m going in no matter what the fuck her father decides, and I’m getting her out.” I palmed my cell. “I still have some numbers. I’ll find out where they’re taking her.”
“Stop,” Luna barked. “Sit your ass down.”
My nostrils flared, and I glared at him.
Luna glared back, but then he dropped his gaze and scrubbed a hand over his face. “All right, amigo, listen up.” He looked back at me. “There’s a right way to do this and a wrong way. We both know you going back in is gonna come with a host of problems.”
“I’m not going back in.” My ass had already made that mistake post ETS when I got out of the Marines and couldn’t fucking adjust to not having my rifle in my hand twenty-four seven.
I’d taken a job working security for a piece of shit money launderer for the cartel where anything went as long as you didn’t shoot the boss, his woman or his kid. Fucker didn’t give two shits about the women he fucked though. I’d seen more than my fare share of them disappear after he was done working them over with his sick brand of kink. Fucking asshole. If it weren’t for Luna and his employee Collins going after my old boss, I wouldn’t have gotten out clean, or probably alive. “I’ll get in, retrieve her, and get out.” Fuck anyone in my way.
“That won’t be a clean extraction.”
No fucking shit. “There’s not gonna be anything clean about this. You don’t fuck with these assholes unless you’re willing to do to them exactly what they’ll do to you.” He knew that.
Luna’s cell vibrated with a text. Glancing at it, he asked me a question. “How long you been up?”
“What does it matter?” The Marines trained us to deal with this kind of shit. Sleep deprivation was nothing. “You said it yourself. The sooner we move on this, the better our chances.”
Luna tossed his cell on his desk. “You got out once before.”
I didn’t say shit. I knew what he was getting at.
He studied me like that fucking shrink after my last deployment. “You gonna be able to walk away again?”
What the fuck? “You got something to fucking say, say it.” We were wasting time.
“What happens when they offer you more money than I’m paying you?”
Irrational anger piled on top of the rage I was already carrying about what the fuck they could be doing to the brunette right now as we sat on our asses not doing shit. “You took the same goddamn oath I did.”
Luna’s voice quieted. “We’re not in the Marines anymore, brother.”
I wasn’t his goddamn brother any more than I was brothers with my fucking asshole CO on my last deployment that got most of my unit killed. But those men who lost their lives? They were my brothers.
I didn’t say shit to Luna.
“You got your nephew and your sister to think about,” he reminded me.
My jaw ticked, and I regretted filling out his goddamn employee next-of-kin forms. “My personal life is personal.”
“What personal life?” he challenged.
My trigger finger twitched as I leaned forward. “You want to get the girl out? You send me in. You don’t have another option.”
Crossing his arms, Luna didn’t budge. “I got an office full of options. The difference is every one of my men out there knows they’re stronger as a team.”
I called his bluff. “Then send a team in.”
We stared each other down.
Luna caved first. “Where would Dante take her?”
My left fist unclenched. Not that I was going to listen to Luna if he’d told me to stand down. “He has a place here in town, another in Naples, and about half a dozen places in South America, but my bet’s on his island in the keys.”
“Jesucristo,” Luna swore. “He owns an island?”
“A thirty-fucking-acre fortress a mile out from Marathon, boat access only. It’s got a main house and a few cottages on the property, one dock. That’s where I’d take her, assuming he’s playing a long-term hostage-for-blackmail game and not just planning on killing her. What’d he ask her father to do?”
“Launder a cool billion, then he could get his daughter back.”
“Jesus Christ.” Shit must be backing up for them. “He’s not gonna stop there.”
“Agree. Best-case scenario, he finds someone else willing to do his dirty work before Loic finishes cleaning that amount of cash.”
“He won’t. It took my old boss years to build up the kind of network needed to keep the cartel happy.”
“So who was his second-in-command? He had to have someone breathing down his neck for that amount of action.”
“He killed all of his competition.” Or rather, we did it for him. “We all thought his woman was his second.”
Luna glared at me. “She didn’t know anything, and she was never his.”
Right. Until Collins stepped in. What the fuck ever. I pointed out the obvious. “Whatever Loic decides to do, the clock is ticking.”
Luna sighed. “What do you know about the island?”
I shrugged. “I’ve only been there once. It’s self-sustaining. Water purifiers, generators, solar power.”
“Caretakers? Staff?”
I nodded. “Husband and wife, older couple. She cooks and cleans. He maintains everything else. They live in one of the cottages.”
“Supplies?”
“Besides a fucking arsenal on the compound, the husband takes the wife once a week to Marathon for groceries and shit. Depending on who’s in residence, sometimes the security staff will go ashore to some of the bars for an evening.”
“How often is Dante there?”
“Not often. He moves around constantly with no predictability.”
Luna nodded. “So his enemies don’t find him.”
“Or he’s just a paranoid fuck.”
Luna scrubbed his hand over his jaw. “All right. If she’s there, what angle are you thinking?”
“After sundown, scuba approach. Get in, get out.”
“A mile offshore is a long way to swim her in, amigo. You’d be an open target.”
“I wouldn’t swim her back to shore, they’d be expecting that. I’d head toward open waters or one of the other keys.”
Luna nodded. “All right, Christensen has a boat in Largo we could use, or I’ve got a friend with a seaplane out of Key West.”
“Anyone you bring in automatically becomes a target, either as a recruit or a threat.”
“I know, and if I send in a team and anything goes south, I’m just asking for a war with the damn cartel.”
I hadn’t worked for Luna long, but I knew him. He wouldn’t ask that of any of his men. It didn’t matter that all of them would volunteer, he wouldn’t risk them, which was why I wa
s sitting here having this fucking conversation with him. I was already a known entity. None of my old boss’s security team was alive, but there were people still out there who knew my name.
Luna didn’t have a choice if he wanted to keep the rest of his men out of this. “Get me a boat. I’ll go get her.”
“And if there’re casualties when you extract her, who do you think it’ll point back to?”
“I’m not high on the cartel’s watch list, and I’m sure as shit not the only enemy they have.” Fuck Loic’s wish and Luna’s warning. I wasn’t going to leave any assholes alive who could point back at me. “I can protect myself.” I’d been doing it for years. I didn’t survive being a paid gun for hire this long just because I was fucking lucky. I knew what I was doing.
Luna stared out the window. “What about a second option?”
“What are you gonna do? Knock on his door and ask nicely? We don’t even know if she’s on the island.” If that’s where they were taking her, she’d still be en route.
Luna’s office phone rang and he picked it up. “What do you have for me?” He frowned. “No security cameras behind the building?... Copy. Keep trying.” He hung up and looked at me. “The second driver was found dead with a single gunshot wound to the head behind the strip mall he pulled into a few minutes after picking her up from the club. He made one call on his cell to a burner before he was shot. Traffic cameras show an older Explorer pulling behind the strip mall before her Town Car pulled in. Then the Explorer left a couple minutes later. Tyler tracked the SUV using traffic cams but lost it near the marina.”
“Have someone check the cameras at the marina. I bet they’re taking her to the island.”
“Already on it.” Luna’s cell vibrated, and he glanced at it. “This is Loic.” He hit the speaker button to answer. “Luna.”
“Mr. Luna, its Bernard Loic. The police just found my driver Marius shot once in the head in an alley downtown.”
Luna looked at me. “The driver Chuck who picked your daughter up at the club was also just found dead from a single gunshot wound to the head.”
Her old man inhaled sharply.
“You’re out of time, Mr. Loic,” Luna warned. “Make a decision.”
“Find my daughter,” the old man growled.
“Per our discussion earlier regarding the nature of the risk to my men, double my standard rate will apply.”
“I don’t care what it costs,” Loic clipped.
“Understood.” Luna sat at his desk and began typing on his laptop. “Check your email for the contract. We’ll be in touch.” He hung up and leveled me with a look. “You’re going in.”
“GET THE FUCK UP.” THE asshole who’d hit me in the face yanked my arm and dragged me up the steps to the deck of the boat.
Seeing his face for the second time, realizing he wasn’t even trying to hide his identity, I swallowed down panic at what that could mean and concentrated on not tripping.
My feet hit the warm deck, and the hot Florida sun beat down on my hair and shoulders. A random memory of swimming in my parents’ pool last summer with my mom surfaced, and I couldn’t help it, tears welled. I wondered if I would ever see her again.
Pushing the thought down deep where I couldn’t dwell on it, I reached for anger. “Yank my arm again and see if my father pays you one red cent.” I knew this had to be about money.
Dragging me across the deck, his fingers digging into the flesh of my arm, the asshole paused to get in my face. “Make no mistake, princess, I’m paid no matter what condition you’re in.” He shoved me toward the side of the boat that was tied to a dock. “Step the fuck up.”
Stumbling, my hands cuffed in front of me, I reached out for one of the wood pilings so I didn’t fall. The boat rocked, and a splinter bit into my palm, but I managed to step on to the dock just as the boat swayed back from the pilings.
My captor followed, and his hand went right back to the already bruised flesh of my arm.
Trying to jerk out of his hold, my heart sank as I took in my surroundings. Water all around us, I couldn’t see land past the edge of the island we were on. “Where are we?”
The asshole smirked. “Wouldn’t you like to know.”
I didn’t even know if we were still in the States. Sucking in a breath, then another, I tried not to panic. “I have a right to know.”
“A right?” He scoffed, but he didn’t say anything else as he dragged me down the dock and across a small beach.
Desperate, craning my neck, I tried to take in every possible inch of my surroundings and any potential way to get out of this. But with every turn of my head, my stomach sank further. We were surrounded on all sides by water, and to my right it looked like nothing except ocean. There were a few spoil islands I could swim to on either side of us, but none of them looked inhabited, and the land I saw in the distance looked too far away to swim to without encountering sharks—that was, if I could manage to get out of the handcuffs and make a run for it.
Because with handcuffs on, I wasn’t going to be able to swim any kind of distance.
Panicked and angry, I tried to jerk out of the asshole’s grasp again. “What makes you think my father is going to pay you anything if he doesn’t even know where I am?”
Passing the smaller cottages, my captor led us toward a large house. “Like I said, princess, I get paid no matter what. My job is to deliver you. After that, I don’t give a shit what happens.”
The slider door on the second-story deck opened and a dark-haired man with a huge rifle and mirrored sunglasses stepped out. “You’re late.”
“Traffic,” my captor clipped, irritated.
The man in sunglasses with the gun stared down at me but spoke to the asshole. “Where’s her phone?”
“Destroyed.” My captor shoved me toward a staircase leading up to the deck.
My toe stubbed on a small rock in the sand, and I saw an opening.
Pretending to trip from his push, I stumbled forward, bounced off the railing, then fell to the ground. “Ow!” My knees hit the sand, and I let momentum take me all the way down, my chest falling on my handcuffed wrists. “You jerk!” Sand got in my face. “You don’t push someone in handcuffs!” I rolled halfway and held up my wrists. “That hurt. They dug into my skin.”
The asshole looked like he couldn’t care less, but the man on the deck scowled.
I played into it. Still holding my arms up, I shook my hands. “Take these off if you don’t want me to get hurt worse.”
“No.” The asshole grabbed my arm and yanked me up.
I pretended to twist in pain. “Ow!” Crumpling, I fell back down. “Now my knee’s twisted because of you.”
“Get the fuck up,” the asshole bit out.
I didn’t relent. “Uncuff me if you want me to make it up those stairs.”
Without even blinking, my captor backhanded me.
My head whipped to the side and blood pooled in my mouth a split second before pain lanced across my face. Rage like I’d never felt burst from every molecule of my being, and I kicked the asshole.
Anticipating my move, he grabbed my ankle and jerked my leg up.
My hands cuffed in front of me, no way to break my fall, my body flew back and my arm caught the splintered wood banister before my head slammed into the bottom step.
I saw stars.
Trying to shake it off as something oozed from the back of my arm, I kicked out at the asshole. “You touch me again, and I’ll scream.”
Sweating, his face twisted in anger, he leaned over me and spit out words. “Go ahead, bitch. Who the fuck’s gonna hear you?”
“Screw you,” I spat back, my head spinning.
Unfazed, he grabbed me by the waist, yanked me up, and threw me over his shoulder.
My hands caught under me, they dug into his shoulder and my stomach. He jogged up the stairs, every step knocking the wind right out of me. At the top of the landing, he dumped me on my feet in front of a glass slider.
The man in the sunglasses raked his gaze over me, or at least I thought he did, but I couldn’t see his eyes, only the slight dip then lift of his head.
His focus shifted to my captor, and his voice came out with no emotion. “She’s bleeding.”
My captor reached for the slider door. “Women fucking bleed every goddamn month.”
Oh God.
Remembering I was toward the end of my period and I still had a tampon in, I pressed my legs together.
Holding his rifle up with his finger on the trigger, the guy in sunglasses put his free hand on the slider door. “Clean her up first,” he clipped.
The asshole looked at the guy in sunglasses. “With what? Your shirt?”
I glanced at Mr. Sunglasses’s shirt. It was a perfectly pressed, perfectly clean dark gray polo.
“You take her in looking like that, it’s your funeral,” Mr. Sunglasses warned.
“I wasn’t paid to play fucking beauty shop,” the asshole snapped. “She’s fine.”
Not responding, not moving, presumably staring at the asshole, the guy in sunglasses stood perfectly still.
“Fucker,” the asshole muttered under his breath before yanking the slider door open and grabbing me.
The second his fingers dug into my arm, I yelped in pain.
“Shut the fuck up, bitch.” The asshole dragged me into the cold air-conditioned house.
I stumbled over the threshold, and when I looked up, shock stole my breath.
Sitting on a leather couch was a man with honeyed skin, dark eyes and inky-black hair. Wearing a crisp white dress shirt and custom-fitted dress pants, he stood up.
“Ludeviene.” He smiled as two bodyguards flanked him.
I barely found my voice. “Uncle Dante?”
LUNA HAD TOLD ME TO go home and grab two hours sleep before coming back in, because it’d take a few hours for them to transport her to Dante’s island in the keys by boat.