He smiled at her gently but couldn’t keep the menace off his face. She shrank before it. “If he thinks I’m going to kill you, he’ll come back for you, no matter what he’s risking.”
“Are you going to kill me?” Still so brave. She asked as if it were a point of curiosity.
“Not if I don’t have to, sweetheart. I think it would be a waste.”
Chapter Sixteen
Pounding on the door seeped into Emily’s consciousness one beat at a time. Slowly, she lifted her head, trying to focus on the noise despite the sight of Javier’s handsome face on the pillow beside her. She nudged him. “Do you hear that?”
He grunted in reply.
“I’m going to go see what it is.” Instinct woke her quickly. Emily slipped out from under the covers and collected the baseball bat she kept under the bed. She lived in a bad neighborhood. She’d never been attacked here before, but she wouldn’t rule out the possibility.
“Emily, wait.” Javier sat up all the way, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. “You’re naked. And you should let me go, in case it’s a robber or something.”
“The robber won’t care that I’m naked when I bash his skull in.”
“Your brother’s right. You’re scary.”
The pounding continued, escalating. Emily flashed Javier a smile, relaxing a little. An attacker would have broken the door in by now. Whoever this was, the person felt obligated to operate within some type of polite protocol. As long as Emily stayed on guard, she should be able to handle whatever would come of this.
Javier settled a blanket over her shoulders and stood at her side in his boxers. “I know you’re tough, but I’m at least coming with you.”
“Fair enough,” Emily said. She finger-combed thick strands of hair out of her eyes and stalked toward the door. She peered through the peephole. The familiarity of the face on the other side unnerved her. She jumped back as if burned.
Javier supported her body immediately, his hands warm and firm on her arms. “What is it?”
Emily swallowed. “It’s your brother.”
His face paled. “What? Here?”
“I don’t understand it either.”
“Let him in.”
She nodded and unlatched the door. Fernando Bonavita stood before her, looking even more like his brother than normal in jeans, a tight-fitting T-shirt and a hoodie. Emily blinked at the mysterious man whose body bore so much resemblance to the one that had recently become intimately familiar to her. Fernando Bonavita blinked in turn, his eyes traveling from Emily to his brother and back again.
Javier collected himself first. “Come inside, Fernando. We can stare at each other in the living room just as well as we can in the hall.”
Fernando nodded and walked in past Emily. She tightened the blanket around her body and shut the door. Javier touched her arm. “Why don’t you put some clothes on? He came here on his own. I don’t think you have to worry about him getting away.” She thought she detected a hint of jealousy from Javier and wondered again about the relationship between the two men.
Emily nodded and went into the bedroom.
“She’s prettier than Terri,” she heard Fernando say as she left.
“No comparison,” Javier responded. She gave a small smile. She’d never had time for pretty. It pleased and amused her that Javier thought of her that way.
Emily dressed efficiently. When she returned to the living room a few minutes later in her workout clothes, the two brothers sat silently across from each other, arms folded. Emily hesitated in the doorway. “Everything all right?”
Javier shrugged. “I told Fernando we had to wait for you. Neither of us is really in the mood for small talk.”
“Understandable.” Emily sat cross-legged on the floor between them. Despite the serious nature of their situation, the position reminded her of Javier’s challenge in the car. She glanced at him and shivered before retrieving her wandering thoughts and focusing on Fernando. “Are you turning yourself in?”
Javier’s brother scowled at Emily. “I need your help.”
“So you came to a person who’s been hired to hunt you down.”
Fernando glanced at Javier. “I came to the only person I know I can trust.”
Emily raised an eyebrow. “You’re worth fifty grand to me. Why don’t I call my boss, let him know you’re here and I’ll help you after I get paid?”
Fernando leaned forward and gripped Emily’s wrist. The desperation in his eyes stopped her from pulling away. “If you help me, I’ll go with you afterward like a lamb to the slaughter.” He addressed Javier. “Someone took Carolina.”
Emily and Javier gasped in unison. Fernando released Emily’s wrist with an expression of disgust. “My brother apparently doesn’t understand the dangers of pillow talk.”
Javier glared at Fernando. He played with a threadbare spot of carpet with one toe. “I haven’t let anything spill inadvertently, Fernando. I told her about Carolina in case you were stupid enough to contact her.”
“So she could protect her?”
“So she could look for you.”
“Someone used Carolina to look for me, all right.” Fernando jumped off the couch and turned his back. “That woman is innocent. She never deserved to be dragged into any of this. If your loose lips are the reason she’s in danger, Javier, I swear I’ll…”
Javier stood slowly from the seat he had taken. His presence chilled enough to make Emily shiver. “You’ll what, Fernando? Kill me? Your brother?”
“I thought I could trust you,” Fernando snapped, turning back to his brother with the precision of a military officer.
The tension between the two men felt unbearable. Emily jumped to her feet and stood between them. “No one’s killing anyone. This is my home, and I’m going to make the decisions about what happens here. Both of you, sit down.” Both men obeyed. “Fernando, tell us what’s going on straight out. We can argue about it later.”
Fernando pursed his lips and nodded at Javier. “Impressive.”
“You can congratulate him later too. Why were you pounding on my door in the middle of the night?”
Fernando sighed and changed his posture. He straightened, then lowered his head to examine a fleck on his jeans. He picked it off and met Emily’s eyes again, and seemed to become a new man in the process. Despite the fear he’d shown initially, within a few seconds he’d transformed himself to appear all business, with no sign that he had any emotional investment in the stakes of their conversation.
“My brother made an encrypted dropbox for me years ago,” Fernando began, his tone appropriate to a military briefing. “The idea was to give us a way to communicate in the event we were ever separated. We both know the login procedure and details by heart. It’s never been written down.” He sighed. “Until recently, when I sent that information to Carolina.”
Javier’s eyes snapped open as wide as they could go. “In a plain-text email?” he burst out. “To a person with no training in security? Hell, she probably wrote that information on a post-it and stuck it to her computer screen.”
Fernando winced. “Something like that, certainly. Because about, oh, six hours ago, I received a message in the dropbox from a person who says he’s got her. He included some pictures of her…” Fernando’s voice cracked, his composure obviously strained. “I know they’re real. He gave me a place to meet him if I want to save her life.”
“How did you know it wasn’t me?” Emily said.
“What?” Javier got riled up again but Fernando stopped him with a raised hand and nodded with approval.
“She’s good. You’re paranoid about computers, but she obviously understands how this works old-school.” He leaned forward to address Emily. “Javier had already contacted me with details about you and your location. He told me that you were holding him. If you were the type to threaten to kill my loved ones, you would have done it already. In fact, you were probably the only person I could be sure wasn’t respon
sible.”
“I didn’t have any way of contacting you. Javier wasn’t going to talk.”
“If you’d been willing to kill, you would have found a way to let me know you were looking for me, even if I had to learn about it on the evening news.” Fernando’s voice held a gruesome certainty that chilled Emily’s blood. She recalled the story of Javier’s scar and shivered. Fernando’s measured tone made the experience seem that much more real.
Emily took a deep breath and sat back. She raised an eyebrow at Javier. “You led me to believe you hadn’t contacted your brother.”
Fernando stroked the air with both hands, as if the room were a beast he could calm with a gesture. “We can argue later, remember? I’m supposed to be at this meeting place tomorrow evening, but I have no idea what’s waiting for me. Machine-gun fire. Police. Gang members. Pieces of Carolina. This guy could have any motivation. He could be working for anyone.”
Again, Fernando’s grim tone shook Emily to the core. He listed the possible horrifying outcomes as if reciting a grocery list.
Javier put a hand on Emily’s shoulder. He seemed to pick up on the discomfort she felt. She shook her head and forced herself to toughen. She still didn’t like it when she seemed vulnerable in front of him. She pulled herself upright. “What do you want us to do?”
“Javier, I’m hoping you can get a little more information about this guy. Can you figure anything out from what he posted to the dropbox?”
Javier sighed and shook his head. “Only if he doesn’t know how to obscure his IP address,” he said hopelessly.
“What’s an IP address?” Emily said.
Fernando cocked his head at Javier. “It’s worth a shot.”
Emily nodded. “Believe it or not, I’ve seen plenty of people who are even worse with the computer than me.”
Javier grinned. “I’ll get on it. It shouldn’t take long, since this is a bit of a binary.”
“English, please,” Fernando said. “Or Spanish, at least.”
“He either covered his tracks or he didn’t. I’ll know pretty quickly if this is worth pursuing.”
Emily cleared her throat loudly.
Javier frowned. “What’s the matter?”
“What about me? I still haven’t agreed to let the warrant slide.”
Javier knelt at her side and leaned in close. “Don’t play games, Emily. Not after what we said to each other in the car. He said that if we help him, you can take him in afterward. He’s good for his word.”
“Like he was for Guy?”
“Please don’t do this.”
She couldn’t hold out in the face of the genuine anguish that wrinkled his forehead. Emily sighed. “All right. But I’d better not be expected to drive the getaway car or something stupid like that.”
Fernando nodded appraisingly. “What can you do?”
Emily lifted her chin. “I’m not going to use a weapon, but I can take a person down if I have to.”
“Good. If we’re dealing with guns, that’s going to change everything anyway. We’ll have to assess the situation from the outside as best we can. Assuming we’re not facing guns, Emily can deal with the kidnapper and I’ll see to Carolina.”
Emily leaned back and stared at Fernando, surprised and pleased. “You just trust that I can?”
“Can’t you? You just told me you can take a person down.”
“Well, sure, but a lot of people don’t believe that.”
“You’re not bragging. You don’t look like the swaggering type. And my brother obviously respects you. I’m trusting you to give me an accurate assessment of your abilities.”
It was Emily’s turn to look impressed and nod at Javier. Her lover rolled his eyes. “Oh my God, will you two stop flirting? I’m glad you like each other, but I don’t need you both smirking at me all the time.”
Emily and Fernando both laughed. They met each other’s eyes, and for a second Emily felt a sense of family togetherness she hadn’t experienced since well before she’d told her father about her career plans. Then she shook herself free of it. Fernando Bonavita was a criminal and her quarry. Agreeing to help him rescue an innocent woman was one thing. Treating him like a family member was another. She couldn’t let herself forget what he was accused of doing.
Javier clicked the computer mouse a few times, then let out a loud cry. “Really? Are you kidding me?”
“What?” Emily said, instant adrenaline coursing through her veins. She jumped up, alarmed.
“Fernando, this is disgusting. You need help, man.”
“You found the kidnapper’s note?”
“No, I found your two hundred obsessive messages before it. If I were a woman I’d file a restraining order after seeing this.”
“It’s not that bad,” Fernando said. He lowered his voice and spoke quickly to Emily. “It’s really not.”
“Dearest Carolina, I fall asleep each night remembering the smell of your shampoo and the shape of your body cradled next to mine.”
“I was sort of using the dropbox as a diary,” Fernando protested. “I didn’t expect her to actually read it.”
“We’re going to need some sort of intervention when this is all over. You can’t write like this. You have to leave something to the imagination.”
“It sounds romantic to me,” Emily put in. Both men stopped their rapid-fire discussion to stare at her. “What? I mean, I guess it is creepy that there are two hundred—”
“There are not two hundred!”
“But one or two letters like that would be romantic.”
“Emily, I am not writing you a letter like this.”
She gave Javier a serene smile. “Did I ask you to?”
“You suggested—”
She sweetened her expression to sarcastic perfection. “We can argue about it later.” Despite the bickering, she could not hold back the joy that came to her face at the sight of Javier.
Fernando noticed with an indulgent smile. “He seems happy with you.”
“Well, it’s only been a couple weeks. Give him time to figure out why I’m irritating.”
Fernando shook his head firmly. “You have a similar sense of humor. That’s good. And he has something you need.”
“Do I ever,” Javier said lewdly from the computer, where he typed rapidly.
Emily rolled her eyes and mimed throwing a baseball at him.
“I meant, he has skills that you don’t,” Fernando continued, without acknowledging the interruption. “Men and women are supposed to complement each other. You two look well together.”
“Um, thanks.”
“Is he lecturing you?” Javier said. “He likes to do that.”
“You’ve never complained before,” Fernando returned.
“I’m a changed man.” Javier waggled his eyebrows suggestively in Emily’s direction. This time she could not help but laugh.
Fernando gestured at Emily with both hands. “You see what I mean.”
Before Emily could say anything else, Javier slapped his palm down on the desk. “We can talk about romantic compatibility later too. News flash. The person who took Carolina did absolutely nothing to obscure his IP address. And he posted to the message board from a smart phone.”
“Which means?” Fernando laced his fingers together and looked attentive. It seemed like a bit of an act, so Emily hid a smile.
“Which means that not only have I got the bastard’s IP address, it’s easy to cross-reference for name and current location, assuming he’s not laying down a purposeful red herring.”
Fernando frowned. “If he wasn’t smart enough to hide his information from you, then—”
“He could be pretending that he can’t hide his information from me,” Javier explained. Fernando opened his mouth to respond, but Emily cut that conversation off too.
“What name have you got? Maybe it’ll tell us something, and then we can spend all the time we want speculating about whether whoever it is revealed himself because he’s
an idiot or because he’s engaged in a complex ploy to trap one or more of us.”
Javier smiled and gave Emily a little bow. “Just a minute, friends.” He pulled up his incredible phone-tracing app. The screen changed several times in response to his input and clicks. Then Javier snatched his hands away from the keyboard and gaped at the screen. “Idiot!”
“Someone you know?” Emily cocked her head.
Javier swiveled the desk chair to face Emily and Fernando. “It’s the original idiot. Her ex. And the other bounty hunter I told you about, Fernando. Matthew Lodi.”
Emily paled. “Kidnapping? Threatening to kill an innocent woman? That’s impossible.”
“Do you think someone would lay a complex red herring to pin this on him?”
Emily shook her head. “That just seems too crazy.”
Javier nodded triumphantly. “Most of the time, you really have to go with the simplest explanation. Which in this case is that your ex is an idiot who deserves to be completely humiliated.”
“More than humiliated,” Fernando said darkly.
Emily took a deep breath. “Let me say this now so no one gets confused. I wanted to help you before we knew who this was. Now that we know it’s Matthew, I want to see him get what he deserves as much as anyone else. But we rescue Carolina Mendes, and we don’t kill anyone. Understood? Or I call Guy Nolf right now, and either of you can try to stop me.”
Emily put on her fiercest expression. Tension stretched in the room.
After a moment, Fernando nodded. “Carolina’s the priority. I won’t do anything to jeopardize that.”
He offered his hand. Emily shook.
Chapter Seventeen
Through the front window of Guy’s Bail Bonds, Neva saw her former boss sitting at her former desk, squinting as he peered at a computer screen. His hands seemed too big for the mouse or the keyboard. In fact, his whole body didn’t look right behind that desk. She should be there, where she belonged.
Tears threatened to start again when she thought of all she had lost. In the days since she’d been fired, Neva had been able to think of little else. She took a deep breath and drew herself up as tall as she could. She had no right to ask for anything to be returned to her. She’d wronged Guy, and Emily for that matter, too much to expect forgiveness. Still, that didn’t free her from needing to make right what she could.
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