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That made sense. “Leland, tell Dada to get her ass in here.”
“I am here, abrasive one.”
Dada, wearing a cream gown with black brocade and capped sleeves that showed off her toned arms, strolled through the double doors. Justice stood. Wet noodles had more strength than her legs, but she pushed past the chair.
The doors opened again as Tony and Gracie entered. Tony had undone his bow tie so that it hung around his neck like a loosened noose.
“No.” Leland waved a hand at them. “We need to have actual family members out there entertaining.”
Tony spread his hands in an are-you-serious gesture. “Trust me, we got an extra twenty or so.” He came up to Justice, put his arm around her. “I’m sorry, kid.”
She shrugged him off. “Sorry is something you tell someone when they have no choice but to deal with something. I’ve got a choice, Tony. I’m going after him.”
He nodded. “I’m with you. Remember that.”
Justice could feel the twitch in her eye and the tremble of her lip. She looked away, toward Dada. Dada clasped her hands around her cell and let them fall protectively in front of her.
Justice would not take it easy on her. “You know things. You have a contact there. Find out where they fucking took Sandesh.”
Dada held up her cell. “I just texted Juan.”
The doors swung open again. Momma entered. She took one look around the room and made the only play that would’ve calmed Justice down. “I don’t think they would hurt him.”
She didn’t add what they all knew. Yet. Eventually, they’d take him to Walid. And the torture would begin.
The thought hollowed her stomach. She had to get out of here. Do something.
Dada’s phone chirped. Justice fisted her hands to keep from grabbing it. Dada looked down, cleared her throat. “He’s on his way to Mexico. My source.” She paused, lowered her eyes. “Juan confirms this is so.”
“I don’t trust this guy,” Gracie said. Despite the fact that she was so much shorter than Dada, Gracie still commanded attention when standing beside her.
Dada stiffened, looked down at Gracie. “He has proven himself by getting us this information. And when he could have run, should have run, when another man was tortured and killed in his place. But he hasn’t. And, more important, you can trust him because we have his son.”
Dada put a hand on her belly.
Gracie gasped, literally gasped. Then her mouth tightened. Her eyes grew hard.
Shit. Dada was pregnant. And though she’d suspected it before, now that she took a good look, she could see the swell of Dada’s belly. Gracie looked sick to her stomach.
The room went silent. After a moment, Tony said, “’Bout time you admitted it.”
Bridget let out a breath. “Strategically, considering the League’s goals, the secrecy, this is good news.”
Everyone turned to look at her. “Not the pregnancy. I mean, that’s good. Congrats and all. But I meant Mexico is good. Doable for our government. By now they know Sandesh has been taken. I saw some agents scurrying out of here. We’ll find a way to pass on the information of where. They’ll go after him. They’ll assume it’s all related to his work with the IPT.”
She had to be kidding. “We are not leaving Sandesh in the hands of that sick bastard while the government makes up its mind whether or not to go in there.”
“She’s right,” Leland said. “Even if the authorities did get him out, there would still be the issue of Walid and what he knows of us. We need to get him before that happens. Which means we have less, not more, time.”
Cold dread lined Justice’s bones. She felt brittle and frozen.
A memory of she and Sandesh in that small room in Israel, of him holding her, his warmth, and her telling him that she didn’t believe there was such a thing as a real hero.
What she hadn’t told him, what she’d kept to herself, was that she respected the men in the League, but in her mind, all the heroes were heroines. Women. And to find that decency in a man, someone outside the League, a soldier, it had shaken her to her very core.
She hadn’t recognized before what Gracie had been trying to tell her, about how many preconceived notions she had. About the world. About men. Now, she wanted to go back in time and erase them all, replacing them with the strength and warmth that was Sandesh.
She wrung her hands, looked around. She wouldn’t ask them without telling them the truth. Crap. How had this happened to her? “I love Sandesh.”
She heard the whisper of disbelief from her siblings but kept her eyes on Momma. She’d never felt more vulnerable. “I’m going after him. But I’m not willing to make that choice for anyone but me.”
Gracie raised a hand and a devilish eyebrow. “I’m in. I like Sandesh. Apparently not as much as you.”
“You know I’m in,” Tony said.
Dada shook her head. “Juan can get you inside using the plan he and Tony devised.”
“I can help,” Bridget said. “I can—”
Justice held up a hand, stopped her from talking. “Not you. Traitor.”
“We’ll have to revise the plan,” Leland said. “It never called for a rescue.”
Momma touched her niqab, nodded. She gazed around at the others in the room. “And if I’m not mistaken, the original plan called for a second man. Justice, you’ll have to choose someone from internal, unless you have another idea.”
Chapter 62
Sandesh woke up with the half-lidded gaze of a man drugged. He blinked repeatedly. Didn’t help. Total darkness. He had a pounding headache. He could feel dried blood on his forehead. It pinched his skin every time he blinked.
The thin materials of his tuxedo shirt and pants weren’t enough. The stone floor was ice cold. Stone cold. He sat up. Promptly slammed his head into the ceiling.
Mother…
That explained the blood on his forehead and the pounding headache. Although either could have come from the fight. He doubted it. He had a feeling that had happened days ago.
But right now, that wasn’t the thing that really had his attention. The manacles did. He raised his hands. He couldn’t see them. Couldn’t see anything. But he heard the clink of metal and felt the cold weight of steel. The pressure grated his wrists and ached against his bare ankles and ice-cold feet.
He looped his hands around the chains and pulled.
Sharp coils of pain, twisted into wrist, skin, bones. He pulled. Again and again. The manacles clanked. Pain jolted up his arms.
Shivering all the way down to his ass bone, he felt along the gritty stone and traced the outline of a ring. It was embedded deep into cement.
He lifted a hand so frigid his knuckles felt arthritic. He traced along the chips and flakes of the stone ceiling. Cold. Rough. Pitted. A stone coffin. Or if you happened to be a prisoner in France during the Middle Ages, an oubliette, a place of forgetting.
Forgotten would not be his fate. No. They’d brought him here to torture him.
They thought he was the one who’d organized the Jordan hit.
That meant pain. Lots of pain. They might even ask him a question or two. But mostly, they’d want to hurt him as badly and for as long as they could.
“You’re quiet.”
Sandesh jumped. His head slapped stone again. Fuck.
The voice had sounded as gritty as sandpaper. He peered into the darkness. “Who’s there?”
“The one you sentenced here.”
A Russian. He’d sentenced a Russian here? Great. The guy was a nutjob. He hoped his hands were manacled too.
“Sorry, buddy. You’ve got the wrong guy.” Maybe the wrong century. How long could someone stay alive down here? Or was he speaking with a ghost?
The man shifted in the dark. Metal scraped against metal. Not a ghost. And chained too. Good.
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“Liar. The woman you sent to kill my bosses caused this.”
Sandesh laughed. It was that damn funny. Funny enough to overcome his pounding head, the rough tongue, dried throat, and manacled hands. That damn funny.
“Like I said, wrong guy.” Hell, wrong gender. Still, keeping him talking might get answers. Like where they were. And if this guy was any kind of threat. Or a plant. “But we’ve got time. Tell me about it. How long have you been here?”
The Russian gave a humorless laugh, dull and pitiful. His laughter dissolved into tears. His tears broke into coughing. Gunshot-loud, hacking coughs ricocheted off the stone. The man was close. The space was small. Maybe ten by ten. Sounded like he was across from him.
The man stopped coughing. He wheezed, took a few wet, careful breaths.
Sandesh waited for him to catch his breath. And then softly, soft enough to evoke a response, said, “I’m Sandesh. What’s your name?”
“Dmitri.”
Dmitri. The man had obviously been one of the guards for the sex-slavers. The brothers Justice had called the Brothers Grim. Well, at least one of them deserved to be imprisoned and tortured here. Best not to mention that. “Where are we, Dmitri?”
“Mexico. The woman”—he coughed and made a wheezing sound—“Justice.” He practically twisted the word on his tongue. “I find her name ironic.”
Girl was getting a reputation. “You and a lot of other people.”
He moaned. A deep, pained sound. His every breath was laced with moisture. “I’m dying. It hurts.”
