by Elle Kennedy
Ash didn’t need Ethan to tell him. He already knew that. That’s why he’d spent the past year keeping his thoughts to himself. All those dirty, inappropriate thoughts about how fucking pretty she was. How her lower lip was fuller than her upper one, how her hair was shinier than the one nice piece of furniture his granny diligently polished every Sunday. How her unbound breasts swayed under those infuriatingly thin tank tops she liked to wear.
He swallowed another groan. Fuck. What was wrong with him? He was eight years older than she was. He couldn’t keep lusting after this girl, and not just because of her age.
He looked beyond Cate toward Morgan. The big man grinding his boot heels into the dirt had given Ash a new purpose in life after he’d left the corps. Morgan had taken him in. Mentored him, welcomed him into the fold. Morgan trusted him. But although Ash was good enough to watch Morgan’s back, he’d never be good enough for Cate, at least not in her father’s eyes.
He knew that. He respected that.
But that didn’t mean he had to like it.
Chapter 3
Present day
Ash strode into the briefing room and closed the door behind him. He didn’t miss the tension in Morgan’s jaw or the way the man was glaring daggers at his wife.
“Did you know she was going to Guatana?” Morgan growled.
“No.” Noelle rolled her eyes. “We were both at the same dinner, if you remember, when she told us that she was getting a travel assignment to Africa, and then the two of you argued about whether she’d be safe enough without a contingent of bodyguards. I distinctly remember some raised voices and a visit from the maître d’, who told us that if we didn’t use our inside voices, he was going to have to ask us to leave.”
Morgan shoved a phone at his wife. “Then if she’s supposed to be in Africa, why is she taking pictures of Mateo Rivera in Guatana?”
Ash nearly trampled his boss in an effort to see what was on the screen. When he did, his stomach plummeted to his feet. What the fuck? Mateo Rivera was dead. He’d been killed in a car bombing that was televised for three days on all the major news networks. The president of Guatana had stood in front of a pile of confiscated loot—cash, drugs, and guns weighing down a room full of tables. Look here, the headlines had screamed, the war on drugs won!
Yet the picture on Morgan’s phone showed the round-faced, mustached South American looking fat and happy. Okay, maybe not happy, but sure as hell alive.
“Where’d she get that?” he demanded.
Noelle hid a smirk, but Morgan was too agitated to notice the panic in Ash’s voice. “She said she took it yesterday in the city. Claims she was following up on rumors that a bottling plant was being shut down, but she’s full of shit because this photo was clearly taken in the market.”
“The plant thing isn’t a rumor,” Ash replied. His heart began to thud overtime. “It was just on CNN. Carbon Cola is ceasing production.”
“Damn, conditions down there must be terrible.”
Ash nodded grimly. Even in Iraq, in the middle of the war, soda trucks could be spotted everywhere. Bottling plants only shut down when a country was on the verge of collapse. When a water source was compromised, it was often better to drink the sugary, carbonated soda than anything running out of a tap.
“Is she on her way home?” Ash asked.
Morgan shot him a harried look. “She won’t answer the damn phone.”
Of course she wouldn’t. Ever since Morgan had discovered and extricated Cate four years ago from a luxurious prison, he’d tried pushing her into a normal life—one filled with fraternity boys, college parties, and Starbucks. He’d even bought a house in Providence so Cate could have somewhere closer than Costa Rica to visit when she wasn’t at Brown.
Cate, however, swore she hated coffee and college boys and dropped out of Brown to take photographs all over the world. Her initial assignments had been travel photography, and she’d taken spectacular, award-winning images of the cotton castles in Turkey, rice paddies in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, the wild animals in Chobe National Park, Botswana. With each award and each starkly beautiful image, Morgan’s ability to dictate his daughter’s future became less and less. And with the loss of control came increased agitation. The two of them fought more than they got along.
The mood around the Costa Rica compound was always dark after a Cate visit. The last one was four months ago. Ash had left the compound that night, got stupid drunk, and had his first—and only—episode of limp dick. He’d sworn off women since then.
“What’s the last update we have on Rivera?” Morgan asked.
Noelle shrugged. “Other than he’s supposed to have died in a car bombing? Not much. My people stopped tracking him. The power structure in Guatana splintered after his death, so I directed my resources to track the other cartels that are clawing for power.”
“That was a mistake,” Morgan snapped.
Noelle arched an eyebrow. “She’s going to be fine.”
Her husband’s expression gleamed with accusation. “You always encouraged her to do this work.”
“Because she’s your daughter, Jim. She was never going to be happy sitting in your armed compound knitting scarves and taking pictures of the local flora and fauna.” Unfazed by his icy glare, Noelle grabbed a burner phone and threw it on the table.
“Maybe if she’d spent less time around us, she’d have turned out different.” Morgan ignored the phone and started pacing. “Instead, she spent day after day watching us practice hand-to-hand combat, shoot guns, and try to kill each other.”
“And because of that, she can take care of herself,” Noelle tried to soothe him.
Ash needed some soothing himself. His nuts were crawling inside his body with fear over Cate’s safety. He wanted Jim to summon a chopper so that they could be in the air and in Guatana within two hours.
“She’s a single girl. Alone.” Morgan turned his angry eyes at Ash. “Did she tell you she was going to Guatana? I know she talks to you.”
The boss definitely didn’t know everything. Cate had stopped talking to Ash a long time ago. “She doesn’t talk to me.”
“Since when?”
Since you said you’d string any mercenary up by his gonads if he looked sideways at her.
Since I told her that I didn’t want a little girl like her with her embarrassing inexperience.
Since I tore out her heart and trampled all over it.
It took effort, but he managed a careless shrug. “Sorry, boss, I don’t know. We just grew apart.”
“Shit.” Morgan stopped pacing, a determined glint lighting his dark blue eyes. “Get your gear and let’s be ready to go wheels up in thirty.”
“On it. Who’s coming with?”
“We’ll take Kane, Ethan, and D.”
Noelle made a disgusted sound in the back of her throat.
“What?” Morgan swung around. “You can come. I wasn’t gonna leave you out.”
“Cate’s not going to be happy if you and your band of merry men go rushing in.”
“So?” Ash said impatiently. “She’d be alive. That’s what’s important.”
Noelle ignored him, directing her efforts on Morgan. “Your relationship with her is already touch and go. Let’s call your contact at the DEA and get some more information first.”
Ash didn’t like that at all. “That country is on the verge of an all-out revolution,” he protested. “It’s Poland in the eighties. Hungary after World War Two. Leaving her alone with a journalist is ridiculous.”
Morgan’s indecision was evident until Noelle placed a hand on his arm. “If you go in and pull her out—ruining whatever story she’s working on—then it’ll be a long, cold day in hell before she willingly comes back here to spend any off time with you.”
The blunt words struck home, because Morgan nodded abruptly. “Let’s g
et Greg Tripley on the line and find out what they know about Rivera. We can assess our risks then.”
“Christ,” Ash muttered. This was a mess. They should be on the first flight out of Costa Rica. Instead they were going to call some pencil pusher in DC?
Both Noelle and Jim ignored him. Noelle picked up the burner phone, typed something in, and then tossed the phone back on the table.
Ash crossed his arms and watched Morgan pace again as they all waited for this Tripley asshole to call them.
Five minutes later, after Ash’s boss had nearly worn a channel into the tile floor, the phone finally rang. Morgan lunged forward and put the call on speaker.
“Morgan?” A nasal voice rang out in the room. “It’s been a while.”
As always, Morgan got right down to business. “Tripley,” he barked, “I have a picture of Mateo Rivera looking like the picture of health, and if it wasn’t for the fact that I know the photographer, I’d say this picture is bullshit. You gonna tell me that this is fake or Rivera’s doppelganger?”
“The kids are great, Jim. Thanks for asking. Little Sara is taking ballet now and Cameron is playing football with pads for the first year,” Tripley said sarcastically.
“I don’t give a damn if little Sara is in line to get the Nobel Peace Prize. We had solid intel that Rivera was dead and we pulled resources off him because of it. So is he dead or not?”
Tripley sighed. “Shit. We’re not sure. At the time, the death info looked solid. The son—Adrián—is running the show now. But lately we’ve had reports of sightings of the old man. Initially we brushed them off as an Elvis phenomenon, but now we’re thinking he might’ve faked his death.”
“Why the fuck would he do that?”
“No idea. But in his absence, the drug trade in South America is now in upheaval. Maybe he’s staging a dramatic reappearance.”
“Is this dramatic reappearance going to coincide with a military coup and a lot of bloodshed?” Morgan asked grimly.
Ash’s mouth turned dry as dust even before Tripley responded, because they all knew what the man was going to say.
“Yeah . . . if you have anyone you care about in Guatana, they should get out now.”
* * *
It was nearing midnight. Despite the fact that she’d been up since dawn, Cate wasn’t tired. Her brain was too busy replaying her last conversation with Morgan, in which he’d not so politely ordered her to come home.
“Get on the fucking plane, Catarina.”
Ha. That’s how he thought he’d win her over? By barking out commands and full-naming her? No dice, Dad, she thought as she angrily paced the hardwood floor of her hotel room. Technically, it was Riya’s room, but the two women had switched because this one neighbored a suite whose occupants liked to get in screaming fights every night, which kept Riya up. Cate, on the other hand, could sleep through anything, so the switch hadn’t been a hardship for her.
No, the only hardship at the moment was that her obstinate, sailor-mouthed father refused to respect her or her work.
She got it—he was protective of her. But that didn’t give him the right to treat her like an idiot or undermine her abilities. Morgan had spent hours with her to ensure she could take care of herself. Target shooting, tracking, self-defense. Why had he bothered with all that if he was determined to lock her up in a cage like a helpless little bird?
On the small night table, her phone began to buzz.
Cate ignored it and kept pacing. She didn’t need any more threatening texts from Morgan. She wasn’t leaving Guatana no matter how many times he ordered her to “get on the fucking plane.”
Mateo Rivera was alive, damn it. The facial recognition program Morgan’s contact had run the photograph through had returned a perfect match. The most savage and feared drug lord on the globe hadn’t died in a car bombing as the news had announced to the world. It didn’t matter if his “death” had been staged or if the charred remains in that car had been misidentified. Either way, Cate and Riya’s story was suddenly a million times larger in scope.
They were already reevaluating their plans for tomorrow. Rather than go up north, they’d discussed visiting Meldina instead, the village where Rivera’s wife had grown up. There was a slim chance he was hiding out there while he . . . while he what? Ran his empire from the supposed grave?
Cate didn’t know what the bastard was up to, but whatever it was, it couldn’t be good. Nothing in this country was good.
Sighing, she finally went to check her phone. Sure enough, a text from her father, demanding to know why she was ignoring his texts. She set the cell down and headed for the mini-fridge to grab a bottle of water.
She was just twisting off the cap when she heard the footsteps.
No, not footsteps. More like loud stomping. Even louder male voices were calling out to each other in Spanish, unconcerned that everyone on the floor was probably sound asleep.
With an annoyed curse, Cate stalked over to the door at the same time a horrified shriek pierced the air . . . followed by a gunshot that damn near vibrated in the walls.
She didn’t have time to think. No time to panic. The adrenaline hit her hard, injecting into her bloodstream and surging through her veins, propelling her toward the dresser where she’d stashed her gun. She had the Glock in one hand and her phone in the other before the gunfire had even faded to silence.
But the silence didn’t last long. It was rapidly replaced by more shouts, and though her Spanish wasn’t as good as her French or German, she made out three unmistakable words.
“It’s not her.”
The voices were right next door. Oh fuck. Oh fucking fuck. They were coming from Riya’s room.
A jolt of fear shot up Cate’s spine. She flattened herself against the wall beside the door, her mind running a million miles a second. Those men were next door. They’d fired a gun at someone . . . that scream . . . Riya.
Had they shot Riya?
In the hall, a man continued to bark orders.
“She couldn’t have gone far.”
“Search every room on this floor.”
“Don’t let her get away.”
“Kill anything that moves.”
Cate’s entire body grew icy with horror. Her. They were talking about her. She didn’t know why she was so certain of it, but there was no doubt in her mind that the men out in the hall had come here for her.
Another scream echoed in the bowels of the hotel, along with another wave of gunfire. Muffled, but no less terrifying. Those bastards were shooting people. Killing people. Footsteps thumped up and down the hall, one set nearing her door. As her heart thudded wildly against her ribs, she dove across the room toward the other door—the one to Riya’s adjoining suite.
They might still be in there! an internal voice warned.
Maybe, but any second they would be in here. Cate’s gaze darted to the main door, her heart stopping when she saw a dark shadow fall over the light spilling infrom the hall. Without a second’s thought, she twisted the doorknob, raised her gun, and stepped into Riya’s room.
The suite was empty.
No. No, it wasn’t empty.
“No,” Cate choked out.
Riya was half sitting, half lying on the king-size bed. The covers were gathered haphazardly around her waist, as if she’d been in the process of sitting abruptly before . . .
Before someone blew her head off.
Cate almost keeled over at the sight of her friend’s brains painting the pillow crimson. Riya’s dark hair was loose. Her eyes were wide open.
The top of her head was gone.
Bile coated Cate’s throat, making it hard to breathe. She stood frozen for a moment. She was going to be sick. She was going—
Later! a voice snapped. Morgan’s voice, she realized. Her father was in her head, commanding her, spurring he
r to action.
She frantically looked at the half-open door. Dark-clad figures raced past it, a blur of motion that sent her pulse careening. The gunfire was still going strong, mingling with the frightened yelps, pleas, and screams reverberating through the hall like a gruesome symphony. People were dying. Those men out there weren’t even stopping to check who they were shooting. They were armed with machine guns; she recognized the familiar rat-tat-tat of bullets being sprayed into the walls. Into flesh.
Move! her father’s voice commanded.
Move. She needed to move. Run. But where? Her gaze landed on the door leading out to the small second-floor balcony. Half a second later, she was pushing it open and stepping into the humid night air. She studied the drop to the street below—eight feet, at least. No fire escape. No hand- or footholds. But . . . her heart jumped when she spotted the drainpipe running alongside the balcony all the way to the pavement.
There was a chance it wouldn’t hold her weight.
There was an even bigger chance those killers back there would return to Riya’s room and—
Cate cried out when something shattered behind her. The light fixture by the balcony door. Shit! Someone was in the room again and they were fucking shooting at her.
Without a single thought to what she was doing, she tucked her gun in her waistband, shoved her phone between her teeth, and heaved herself over the far edge of the balcony.
The pipe creaked in protest when her hands wrapped around it. She dug her bare feet into the rust-covered metal and slid down a few inches, then an entire foot. The slow and steady descent was cut short when she heard footsteps above her.
She didn’t dare look up—she simply shimmied down as fast as she could. Her feet slapped the dirty pavement just as a bullet took out a piece of the wall right above her head. The bricks splintered, crumbled chunks raining down on her. A jagged shard scraped the side of her face but she ignored it. She was already running, zigzagging down the sidewalk the way her father had taught her.
Never give them a target, sweetheart. Keep moving. Make it hard for them to kill you.