“Not much, I’m afraid,” Harvard said and fumbled to find his glasses in the mass of papers strewn across the table. “Quinn wanted me to trace his phone like we did yours in Colombia,” he said to Gabe. “And as long as he has it on him and the battery holds out…no biggie. The phone doesn’t even have to be turned on for my program to work. Thing is, the phone is still at the airfield in New Mexico, and that’s not sitting right with me because I’ve been monitoring the area via satellite and I saw a plane land shortly after I last spoke to Quinn. It took off again about an hour later.”
“What about Mara?” Jesse asked.
“Quinn said he’d stay with her, no matter what.” He met Jesse’s gaze with deep regret in his own. “I’m sorry. At this point, all we can do is hope that’s true. But I don’t believe either of them is in New Mexico anymore.”
“Do we suspect the Juarez Syndicate is behind this?” Marcus asked the room. “The FBI only got a couple low-level Syndicate punks this summer. Maybe they came back, figured instead of trying for another hit on Senator Escareno, they’d kidnap his stepdaughter and get some money out of him.”
“No.” Harvard finally found his glasses and rubbed his eyes before putting them on. He looked paler than usual, had lost some of the muscle weight he’d packed on during training this summer. The medic in Jesse sat up and took notice. The man had been severely wounded just over a month ago, after all, and he was still healing. He shouldn’t be involved in any of this. At the same time, if they had any hope of finding Quinn and Mara, he had to be.
“I wondered if it was El Sindicato at first, too,” Harvard admitted. “But this doesn’t fit their modus operandi.”
Jace Garcia spoke up. “He’s right. I know El Sindicato. If they kidnapped the woman for ransom, they would have disappeared over the border into Mexico. It’s not them.”
Unease slipped through Jesse’s gut as he studied the pilot. “How do you know El Sindicato?”
Garcia raised a brow. “How do you think? I grew up in Laredo, Texas, and everyone in the border states knows them.”
Jesse made a noncommittal sound. Sure, everyone in Texas was aware of the threat El Sindicato posed, but the way Garcia talked…
Something more there.
Garcia pushed away from the wall. “Are you implying something, Warrick? ’Cause that, esé, is textbook racial profiling. I’m a Mexican immigrant so I must be corrupt, is that it?”
Jesse winced. Shit, he really must be tired. “That’s not what I meant. I’m not—I don’t think like that.”
“I’d hope not, since your pretty little missing cousin looks to have some Mexican blood in her, too.” He nodded toward the photo of Mara among Harvard’s papers, then scowled at the rest of the group. “Way I see it, you cabrones need me far more than I need you, so I’d appreciate some respect. I can easily walk out that door and you can find yourselves a new pilot. No skin off my ass.”
Gabe waved a hand toward the door. “I told you you’re under no obligation here, Garcia. If you want to leave, leave. But if you’re going to stay, I need you 100 percent committed to this mission.”
“Hey, man,” Jesse added. “I apologize. I’m…freaked out. Mara’s like a sister to me.”
Garcia scratched his jaw but otherwise didn’t move. “Like I said, I have nowhere better to be.” He glanced toward the photo again, and his lips tightened. “And I don’t like seeing women hurt.”
“All right,” Gabe said after a moment of silence. “Marcus, I want you and Ian to check out the airfield in New Mexico. We need to know who we’re dealing with. Harvard will give you the directions. Take Tank, see if he can pick up Mara’s scent. I want confirmation that they are together and we aren’t dooming her by chasing after Quinn.”
Jesse’s gut tightened. As angry as he was at Quinn for fucking around with his baby cousin, he needed the guy to be with Mara right now.
God, please let him be with Mara.
“We’re on it.” Marcus nodded and got up from the couch to gather his gear from the pile near the door.
Ian followed, whistling to Tank. “If her scent’s there, we’ll find it.”
Gabe continued, “I’m going over to Mara’s place to take a look inside—”
“I’m goin’ with you,” Jesse said, leaving no room in his tone for argument. He had to do something. Couldn’t stand the thought of pacing around this suite with nothing to occupy his time except worry.
Gabe studied him for a long second, then gave an abrupt nod. “Good idea. Harvard, keep working the computers. And, Marcus, I do want you to call Giancarelli and see what he can do, if anything, to help. Everyone else, rest up and be ready to go. As soon as we know where Quinn and Mara are, we’re going after them.”
…
Istanbul, Turkey
The whore was a useless waste of air. Her mouth was so dry he’d get more pleasure out of rubbing his cock with sandpaper, so when his cell phone rang, Liam Miller was more than happy to kick her skinny ass out of his bed. She landed on the floor with an unseemly shriek.
He rolled over and grabbed his phone from the nightstand. “Get out.”
“What about my money?”
“I don’t pay for whores who can’t do their jobs right. Get out.”
“But—”
He grabbed his gun from its spot next to his phone and pointed it at her. She gasped and backed up a slow step, hands raised. But she showed no real fear in her dark eyes. In fact, her nipples puckered and that…was interesting. Was she turned on by the threat? His cock stirred from the slumber her untalented mouth had put it in. Yes, he liked that thought. Maybe she wasn’t so useless after all.
“Don’t move.” Without taking his gun off her, he reached for his phone. He’d prefer not to answer it now, but only a select few had his number, or even knew he was alive. “Miller.”
“I need your help.”
Liam smiled and sat up. Well, now. Hell must be frozen over if his American associates were reaching out to him. Especially since it was the big man in charge himself, the brains behind the whole black market operation, and not one of his underlings or his nitwit son. “What can I do for you, mate?”
“Your pal Zaryanko just fucked us over.”
And that surprised them? Nikolai Zaryanko was a right dodgy bastard even on his best days. “And what do you expect me to do about it?”
Silence. Then, “He has Quinn.”
Bloody hell. Liam dropped his weapon and waved the whore away. This conversation was far more interesting than anything she could do for him. “Does he now? In Transnistria?”
“We assume so. Zaryanko was only supposed to lure Quinn out of the country so we could dispose of him without raising too many eyebrows. Instead, I have a dead operative in New Mexico and Zaryanko is trying to ransom Quinn back to us.”
Liam swung his legs over the edge of the mattress and watched the whore gather her clothes, his stomach fluttering with a sensation he couldn’t name. Not nerves. Anticipation, maybe? He’d been stewing in boredom for the last seven months as he healed from the fucking chest wound that had very nearly killed him in Colombia—courtesy of Quinn’s fucking team—and it’d been too long since he’d anticipated anything. He grabbed his jeans from the floor. “Quinn is mine.”
“Fine,” his caller said with a superciliousness Liam would love to beat out of the man. “I’m sending you a team. If you can convince Zaryanko to turn Quinn over, you can do whatever you want with him. As long as he ends up in a body bag by the time you’re done.”
Quinn in a body bag.
It was the stuff of wet dreams. To have this opportunity fall into his lap now was almost too good to be true. “What’s the catch?”
“No catch. I’m letting you off your leash. Quinn can’t walk away from this alive.”
Liam sneered at the phone as the line went dead. A leash? That arsehole couldn’t be serious. He had never been leashed. He didn’t answer to them. Never had, never would. If anything, he owned th
em. He’d lost everything to keep their operation running—his wife, his career, every-bloody-thing—and he’d only gone to ground after the fiasco in Colombia to give himself time to heal, not because they had insisted he should.
Fuck keeping a low profile now. It was time to show HORNET he was still alive and kicking.
And well past time to get his revenge.
Chapter Eight
The jolt of the landing gear thunking into place snapped Quinn out of the kind of dead-to-the-world sleep only exhaustion brought on. And for a moment, despite all of his training, he didn’t know where he was. Or even who he was. He scrambled through his memory for a sliver of identity—a name, a place, something to latch onto and kick-start his stalled brain—but all he found was darkness, a void of nothingness, and he was falling deeper into it.
His heart hitched, and pain speared through his head. He squeezed his eyes shut and breathed in ragged pants, suddenly needing more oxygen than he could draw in.
Why couldn’t he remember anything?
Someone moved beside him, and a terrified murmur near his ear sliced through the worst of his panic. “Travis?”
Yes, that was his name. Travis Benjamin Quinn. He lived in Baltimore, used to be a SEAL until a car accident ended his career two years ago, and he was now the executive officer of HumInt Consulting, Inc.’s Hostage Rescue and Negotiation Team, better known as HORNET.
Okay. That was a start. At least he wasn’t amnesic.
“Travis, are you okay?”
And that voice was Mara, the woman he’d dreamed about far too often. The woman who was now pregnant with his child. The woman he had to protect no matter what. The sound of her saying his name settled him like nothing else could have. He had to get his shit together and keep it there, because she needed him.
Mara. Needed. Him.
He opened his eyes again and took stock of his condition. His fingers were numb, his arms tingling, and his back ached from the odd angle he’d had to maintain to keep the handcuffs from completely cutting off his circulation.
“Travis!” Her voice picked up a panic-induced shrillness.
“It’s okay,” he rasped. His throat felt like sandpaper and clearing it did nothing to help the problem. “I’m good. Fell asleep for a moment, that’s all.”
A beat of silence. “No,” Mara said slowly, “you were just singing to me and then you stopped.”
Panic lanced through him. Oh, hell. Had he blacked out on her? “I don’t sing.”
“But…you were.” She started humming a melody he hadn’t heard in years, then sang softly, “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, too-ra-loo-ra-li, that’s an Irish lullaby.”
“I—” His voice caught. He hadn’t thought about that song since he’d lost his adopted mother. She used to sing it to him when he was ten years old, fighting for his life in an unfamiliar hospital, surrounded by the kindness of strangers.
He cleared his throat. “I don’t sing.”
“How can you not remember—”
“We’re landing.” The words came out like a whip, and she flinched back. Fuck. He hadn’t meant to lash out at her like that, but he’d be damned before he talked about that song or admitted to her that he did not remember singing it.
He took a second to gentle his voice before speaking again. “How are you doing? Okay?”
“I’m…” She swallowed audibly. “Yes. A-are you?”
“Yeah, I’m good.” Not even close. He lifted his head and glanced around, the nerve in his neck pinching at the movement. In the cloying darkness, he picked out the shapes of the other abducted women huddled together in clumps along the plane’s walls. The acrid stench of sweat-soaked fear and urine saturated the air.
He had no way of knowing the time, but his internal clock told him they’d been in the plane for damn near twenty-four hours. They could be anywhere in the world and his phone—with its lifesaving GPS tracker—was lying on the floor of the hangar in New Mexico. He’d managed to type out one word before Zaryanko’s men attacked him, and although he’d never sent the text, he had no doubt Gabe and the team would find it. And, hopefully, find them.
The plane touched down with a jolt, shocking gasps out of several of the women, and after a few minutes of taxiing, it finally came to a stop.
“Where do you think we are?” Mara whispered.
He winced. “If I had to guess, Zaryanko’s base of operations.”
“Are we in Russia?”
“No. Transnistria. It’s—”
The cargo door dropped open, flooding the interior with blinding white light. Mara winced and huddled closer, hiding her face against his side. After so many hours of darkness, the light was disorientating, even for him, and he’d had training to fortify himself against these kinds of torture techniques. But the women didn’t have his training, and many of them panicked, scattering like mice to the darker corners of the plane.
At his side, Mara trembled. He held her as best as he could with his hands cuffed and blinked until his eyes adjusted.
Zaryanko’s two thugs, Alexei and Pyotr, started plucking the women out one by one and separating them into two groups. One group was hustled through the swirling snow onto another waiting plane. The other into the back of a van.
Then they came for Mara.
Alexei grabbed her arm and yanked her to her feet.
“No!” She hauled off and punched him. It didn’t do much, damage-wise, but after the docile compliance from the other women, it surprised the asshole enough that he let go of her. She tried to get back to Quinn’s side, but Pyotr rushed up the ramp to help his buddy and grabbed her around the waist. She screamed and kicked, and it got her nowhere. Pyotr clamped a hand over her mouth, and her frightened eyes locked on Quinn.
Oh, no. She couldn’t give up now. He yanked on the handcuffs, but nothing happened. Fuck.
“Mara!” He held his hand next to his mouth and pretended to chomp down. Her eyes widened with realization and a second later, Pyotr shouted with pain as her teeth sank into his hand. He dropped her hard to the floor. She crawled over and tucked herself into Quinn’s side. He felt her shudder with sobs and wanted to hold her more than anything, but there was no give at all in the fucking handcuffs. All he could do was scoot his body in front of hers and shield her against the wall. If they really wanted her, they would have to go through him first, and since he was Zaryanko’s golden goose, he was about 80 percent certain they wouldn’t kill him.
Pyotr shook out his hand—he was bleeding from her teeth marks in the fleshy part between his thumb and forefinger—and unsheathed a wicked-looking blade from his belt.
Okay, so maybe the percentage was more like sixty-five, because that fucker had murder in his eyes.
“Stay behind me,” he said for Mara’s ears only. “No matter what.”
Her fingers curled into his shirt, and she nodded against his back.
Pyotr lunged, and Quinn swept out a leg, taking his knees out from under him. The thug went down hard, but not before a gash opened up on Quinn’s thigh from the knife. He didn’t feel the pain. Yet. He would once the adrenaline in his system ebbed, and he needed to be in a more defensible position when it happened. He kicked out again, knocking the knife from Pyotr’s hand.
Alexei snapped it up from the floor and took a step forward but was halted by a sharp command from the bottom of the plane’s ramp.
“That’s quite enough. We’re wasting time.” Zaryanko shook his head in disgust and turned away. He added something else over his shoulder in Russian, and Quinn’s gut bottomed out. He didn’t speak a word of the language, but Zaryanko’s tone made it clear that had been kill order.
Behind him, Mara whimpered. “They’re going to kill me.”
Holy shit. She understood Russian?
He didn’t have time to process that fact, though, because the two thugs moved forward as one hulking entity, the knife glinting with blood in Alexei’s hand. They were going to use that on Mara, and he couldn’t do a fucking thing
to—
Wait. Yes, he could.
“Zaryanko!” he shouted. “Killing her is a mistake!”
Zaryanko stopped moving, the wind whipping his coat around his legs, but he didn’t turn back. “How so?”
Quinn schooled his face into a mask so as not to let the fragile spark of hope show. “She’s the stepdaughter of a U.S. senator. She’s worth twice what you’ll get for me in ransom.”
“Ah, yes.” Zaryanko waved a dismissive hand. “That would be true if Senator Escareno hadn’t already flatly refused to pay for her return. He told me in no uncertain terms that she was to never come home. So she’s no use to me now.”
Mara gasped. “Oh, God.”
Quinn could practically hear her heart shattering at the news, and his broke right along with hers. Fucking Ramon Escareno. All she’d ever wanted from the man was acceptance, maybe a bit of affection, and instead he abandoned her to the whims of a human trafficker?
Yeah, when they got out of this, he was going to pay the crooked senator a visit, and Escareno would be lucky if he limped away from the encounter.
But that had to wait until later. Right now, he needed leverage or she wasn’t going to live through the next few minutes. And Mara was going to hate him for what he said next, but it was the only thing he could think of that would catch Zaryanko’s attention. “She’s pregnant.”
Mara jerked like he’d hit her with a Taser. “Travis…”
“I’m sorry. It’s the only way.”
This time, Zaryanko turned. His eyes narrowed and he studied her for several endless moments. Finally, he snapped out a command to his minions.
Quinn twisted enough that he could see Mara’s face. She’d gone white and her chapped lips stood out in bright red contrast against her complexion. “What did he say?”
“Um, I—I think…” She swallowed hard, shook her head.
“Mara, what did he say?”
“H-he told them not to hurt me.”
“Okay.” He released the breath caught in his lungs and willed his heart to slow. She was safe. For now. At least until Zaryanko confirmed that yes, she was pregnant.
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