by Delta James
If she wasn’t, he didn’t have a clue where Fariq might have taken her. It wouldn’t matter, anyway. Once the Mustangs got here, their promise to help be damned, he already knew they’d take him captive again for sure.
He wasn’t going to get another chance.
Fariq sat low in the cigarette boat, his American baseball cap pulled low over his eyes, watching the impressive aerial display above him. Hmm… he had underestimated the beautiful, golden-haired pilot of the Wild Mustang Security Firm. Had he known about her prowess in the skies earlier, he might have recruited the curvy blonde. His cock had hardened the first time he had been introduced to her. It would have been interesting to have a woman with her lethal skill set underneath him as he plowed what he was sure was a nice, tight, American pussy.
Allah be damned, the girl had cost him a bundle this afternoon.
He had watched as her Sikorsky helicopter had fired on his own smaller one, sending it and his body double into the Mediterranean in a ball of fire. She probably knew how expensive the machinery was, but he wondered if she had a clue the cost of having a lackey surgically altered to look like him. It had been expensive but well worth it if it bought him even a few weeks to regroup and rebuild.
Fariq thought with the immediate threat of the helicopter negated, the American pilot would turn tail and head back for safety. When she turned her guns on his yacht, his beautiful floating fortress, it was as though he could hear his Swiss accounts being robbed. The crew, instead of staying to protect his property, scrambled into lifeboats. He would see that they, and their loved ones, were all put to death.
The pilot fired mid-ship, and he could do nothing but watch as the yacht and the last of his organization was destroyed. Circling the wreckage, Avery made sure both the yacht and the chopper were sinking to the bottom of the sea.
No doubt about it, Christian Reid had cost him dearly—his helicopter, his yacht, and his sister’s innocence. Fariq meant to see him pay and had the only bait he needed to lure Reid out of the safety of the shadows. Both Reid and Aliya would rue the day they had betrayed him.
Aliya fought for her life with everything she had. The problem was she didn’t have anything left to fight with—no weapons, no strength. She could barely keep her eyes open, much less her unfocused gaze on the hands that held her down. There were two she could see—Fariq’s men both, holding down her arms, cutting the clothes off her back, while a third watched, appalled while she was held facedown on a wooden table in a dining room she didn’t recognize.
“Jesus,” the third man said, his eyes roving over her in naked pity.
“Just fix it,” her brother said, his cold tone washing over her from somewhere she couldn’t see. All she had to do was lift and turn her head, and she could change that, but she didn’t have the strength even for that.
“Let me go.” Her teeth kept chattering. She burned, hot pain igniting in her back when the man moved in close enough to touch her, cold scalding her everywhere else. “Let me go!”
“She’s gone septic. This woman needs a hospital.”
“Can you treat her?” Fariq asked.
“With what I have?”
She screamed when he prodded her back, scalding her with fire with every touch. Over the violent chattering of her teeth, she heard and recognized the metallic click of a handgun being cocked. The man froze mid-torture.
“I said,” Fariq repeated, “can you treat her, Doctor? Or was bringing you here a waste of my time?”
“I can disinfect the wounds, set her up on an IV drip, and give her antibiotics.” Even over her pain, Aliya heard the steely undertone in the doctor’s voice when he bravely—stupidly—stared her brother down and said, “But if she doesn’t get proper treatment at a hospital, I don’t give her even a fifty percent chance of surviving what you’ve done.”
Weakly twisting her arm, she tried to pull from the grip of the man holding her hands pinned to the table. “Let me… let me go…”
Her eyes began to drift shut. Hearing the gun uncock startled her awake again.
“Fifty percent is better than none,” her brother replied. “Do what you can. She can take the IV drip while she’s tied up in the courtyard. If she dies… well, he’ll still come the minute he sees her. It’s Reid I want, and I don’t care what it takes. You take him alive. Oh, and Doctor? No sedatives or painkillers. She’s earned every agonizing minute. I want her to feel it.”
Clenching his jaw, the doctor said, “I’ll need my bag.”
The heat in her back was already dying into dull throbs now that he was no longer touching her. Aliya was helpless to look away as Fariq brought the doctor his kit. Taking it from him, the doctor pulled a chair up to the table and set it on the seat. It might have been the fever, but when he bent to check the pupils of her eyes, for just a moment, she thought he caressed her hair.
What minute comfort that gave her vanished when the first thing he pulled from his bag was a syringe. After sorting through his supplies, he filled it from a labeled vial.
“Antibiotic,” he told Fariq. “One of two she’ll need.”
“Stick her as many times as you like,” her brother replied. “You don’t even need to be gentle.”
Except the doctor was gentle. She barely felt the pinch as the needle went in.
“Second antibiotic,” he said, filling a second syringe.
“How very sterile of you.”
Again, when the doctor touched her for a moment, Aliya could have sworn he gave her shoulder a comforting squeeze just before she felt the prick, and a warm rush swept through her, dulling the pain away to nothing.
She caught her breath at the sudden weighted heaviness that pulled at her, followed by blessed relief.
“I am not a torturer,” the doctor said flatly, dropping the now empty syringe on the table. “If you want me to treat her, fine, but I won’t help you hurt anyone.”
Realizing what had happened, Fariq tsked first, then laughed. “Goddamn it,” he said mildly. “I do so hate being disobeyed.”
Drifting in a haze of drug-induced euphoria, Aliya didn’t even jump when she heard the gunshot or the heavy thump when the doctor hit the floor.
This was too easy.
The thought kept running through Reid’s head as he made his second circle of the villa. All the lights were on—inside though, the house looked dark as a tomb. Someone was definitely home, but it wasn’t until he glimpsed the flick of a lighter igniting the cherry tip on a cigarette in a dark corner of the porch, he knew for certain Fariq was here. For just a second, as the man had inhaled, he’d caught enough of his features to recognize him before the front door opened, and two more men came out, dragging a third by the wrists.
After so many years, Reid knew a corpse when he saw it. The man was dumped in a corner of the courtyard, then the other two went back into the house, leaving the man hidden in the shadows to smoke his cigarette while, supposedly, keeping a lookout for intruders.
One man in the courtyard, two in the house, plus Fariq, Aliya, and anyone else he didn’t know about. So far, that gave him potential five-to-one odds.
Failure wasn’t an option, but potential four-to-one was markedly better. That’s what he got when he crept into the villa behind the smoker, who stood with his back propped against the doorway. Where were the motion detectors and security cameras? Obviously, this place had never been outfitted to be an even halfway effective safehouse, which worked in his favor. Reid got within six feet of the smoker before the other noticed him. Six feet wasn’t ideal, but close enough, the other didn’t have time to shout or to get his gun up before Reid had him in a chokehold.
It wasn’t quick and only got quiet once the kicking stopped, but no one came out to investigate. Not even after the smoker kicked the side of the house twice. He didn’t particularly want to kill the man, but the smoker would have shot him if he’d had the chance, and Reid couldn’t afford to have him waking up to join with Fariq against him in the fight yet to come. He d
idn’t relax his grip on the smoker until the man went limp against him.
Leaving the body where it fell, he didn’t go in through the front door. He found a second-floor balcony to scale and entered the villa through what might have been a bedroom, though there was no furniture.
His steps made little sound as he crept into the hall beyond. He hadn’t been able to see any interior lights due to a combination of heavy drapes and boards on the windows, and the only well-lit room was on the ground level, tucked up under the stairs and down another hall.
“I don’t suppose either of you gentlemen knows how to insert a saline drip?”
That was Fariq, and there were at least two other men with him. Why the hell did he need a saline drip?
He’d never felt the urge to run hit him stronger. It hurt—physically hurt, a punch through his gut that stabbed up into his chest—not to get to her right now. He moved along the wall toward the stairs, craning to see into the foyer below him. Every nerve on edge, straining to hear just a whisper of her voice, but she didn’t say anything, not a single protest or hint of a struggle. He couldn’t even hear her moan, but he did hear the sudden crash of something heavy being thrown and scattered across the floor.
“Do you want me to find another doctor?”
“Oh, I doubt you’ll make it to the car,” Fariq scoffed. “Enough time has passed. I expect our guest will be here any minute.”
Furious intent moved through Reid, twisting around the cold left inside him from that punch-stab of his own wayward emotions. He never should have touched her. Everything that had happened to her was because of him. Yet the idea of not having touched her or not knowing the sweet, sensual peace to be found between her thighs was unthinkable.
Lie down with dogs, and you’ll wake up with fleas, or so his grandmother used to say. Well, he’d been ‘lying down’ with Fariq for years now, but never had he felt the biting of all his misdeeds as he did now. He wasn’t a good man. Even his own people at NATO wanted nothing more to do with him. Aliya was paying the price, but not for much longer.
He crept past a darkened doorway, his eyes locked on the foyer, making his way to the head of the stairs as quickly as absolute silence would allow. His gun was in his hand, and his thoughts were solely on what he had to do.
He was a bad man. He was going to do whatever it took to get her out of here, and when the Wild Mustang boys arrived, finally—finally—she would be taken somewhere she would be safe. He didn’t care about prison. He didn’t care if they hanged him. Bad men deserved bad endings, but not Aliya. She’d been through enough. Finn wouldn’t care. He was her brother, and she would ensure Aliya’s safety.
He edged slightly out from the wall to pass a decorative table and was just feet from the top of the stairs when the floor creaked. He looked down, but that sound had not come out from under his foot.
Shit.
Snapping his head around to look toward the doorway of the dark room, he’d been too stupidly distracted to check out, he had just enough time to make out the shadowy figures of two men and the butt of a rifle coming right at him before it hit him in the face.
Chapter 16
Aliya cut her face, first with her own scrabbling fingernails and again with the hard edge of the leather collar. Unable to get through the lock on the buckle, she was reduced to pulling, heaving, stretching—anything to pry the collar off over her head. She was small, and Fariq had been both overconfident of her inabilities and preoccupied with getting Christian secured. Of the two of them, Christian was the bigger threat. She was milk toast in comparison—weak, mewling, ineffective. She was also small, and when he’d buckled the collar on her, he’d used the smallest pre-drilled hole instead of taking the time to poke another to tighten the leather down around her neck. It wasn’t exactly loose, but it wasn’t snug, either.
She pried, hooking her fingers into it as she strained to get it up over her lower jaw. It hurt. The collar was stiff, and the edge of it cuttingly sharp. It scratched her chin, she scratched her cheeks, and she had no idea which cut her lip, but she got the collar into her mouth, turning it into a gag.
Christian screamed through tightly clenched teeth, every muscle in his body jerking and spasming as the electricity from the wands coursed through him as her brother tortured him, stroking him ribs to hip. The sound cut her worse than any of her other wounds. Closing her eyes, unable to bear the sight, she pushed and strained, letting the collar cut into the corners of her mouth and her cheeks as she pried for every nuance of give the leather had to get it over her ears. The edges cut beneath each earlobe before she got them through, and the collar became both a gag and an earmuff, muffling his bellows of agony before they abruptly stopped.
“Did you fuck my sister?” she heard Fariq ask him.
She burst into tears. This was her fault. She loved him, and he was being tortured because of it.
“I loved every minute of it,” Christian rasped in reply.
His screams and her determination renewed with the next burning sizzle as the wands made contact with his flesh.
Grabbing the back of the buckle, she pried with all her might, straining to pull the collar over the back of her head. Every breath was tainted by the smell of Christian’s flesh as Fariq etched a burning lover’s path up the inside of his thigh toward his crotch.
She clawed. The buckle cut into her fingertips and tore her nails, but the collar was moving, millimeter by millimeter, ripping out strands of hair as it went. With a pop of swift movement, it came off. A cut on her cheek was its parting gift, then she was free.
The knot of the rope that bound her ankles was easy in comparison. She pried with raw, cut fingertips, working the rough rope loose, then she was up. Her legs didn’t want to hold her, so she crawled, grabbing onto the back of her brother’s abandoned stool to help heave herself to her shaky feet.
She wasn’t strong. She was pathetic, and her brother knew it. That was why when she slapped the machine off and grabbed the gun out of the halter on Fariq’s hip as he jerked around, the first thing he did when he saw her was laugh.
Aliya’s hand shook every bit as badly as her legs. The morphine the doctor had sacrificed his life to give her had worn off. She was feverish and could feel it ravaging in her back and in her head. Her vision kept swimming. It was everything she could do to keep Fariq and the gun pointed at his head in focus.
Was it loaded? Would it even fire if she pulled the trigger? She had no idea. She didn’t know a damn thing about guns, except everyone around her had always had them. She’d never fired one before, had never even held one before now.
Pathetic.
Fariq’s smile broadened, his face softening with the old familiar affection. The one she had always strived to win from her big brother by constantly striving for the level of obedience he required.
She’d loved him once.
She’d feared him for far, far longer.
“Do you remember all the times I was there to save you?” he asked. “From the beatings, from our father.”
“Yes,” she whispered, breaking down in a brief flurry of tears that just as quickly devolved into anger. “I remember your punishments, too. I remember your belt. I remember the men you killed right in front of me, and I’ll remember that you did this—all of this—until the day I die.”
“As it should be. You’re mine to—”
She shot him.
The recoil knocked her over, and they hit the ground at the same time. Only one of them was alive to feel it or to feel the tidal wave of regret that swept through her, crushing her under the storm of emotions no sane person would have felt after all he’d done.
Loss.
It was blinding, crippling, but it only lasted until she heard the heavy whump of something hitting the wall just outside the room.
“Get me down, Princess,” Christian rasped, heaving at the ropes that bound his arms, but she couldn’t. She simply didn’t have the strength or the will to pick herself up off the floo
r a second time. All she could do was heave the gun up, barely in time to aim at the door before it was kicked in by two men in full black flack gear.
“Shit!” the leader said. They jumped back behind opposite walls as she opened fire, systematically emptying the gun. The top half of the gun cut the tender webbing of her hand when it snapped back over her thumb. Hurting in so many places, she barely noticed the pain, but there was no ignoring that she had failed.
Dissolving into exhaustion and useless tears, she threw the gun at them, but she couldn’t even do that right. Missing the gap of the open doorway, it hit the threshold and bounced back into the room, clattering across the floor almost back to her foot.
Hanging from his bonds behind her, Christian finally said, “You can come in now.”
Gasping and hiccupping, she looked at him in surprise, then to the open doorway.
“I don’t know,” a man drawled from behind the cover of the wall. “Are you done fucking shooting at us?”
“No kidding,” the other grumbled. “Next time you don’t want to be rescued, just don’t ask us to come. I am getting married, asshole, and she just asked for an extra thousand on the budget. I could be getting laid right now.”
“Please cut me down,” Christian said, ignoring their wisecracks. He sounded every bit as tired as she felt.
Cautiously poking his head around the corner, the leader of the flak men took one assessing look at them both and dropped the jokes.
“Cut him down,” she told the four men who filed into the room, already putting their guns away. Of the two of them, she didn’t see where she ranked in importance, but the rescue party seemed to disagree. It took two of them to support Christian while a third cut him down. Wrapping her in a dusty sheet, the fourth picked her up off the floor, carrying her out of the room and out of sight of everything within. She craned her head, thin panic wending its icy way under her skin when she lost sight of both Christian and her brother.