After waiting for Rocco to slip into the Range Rover behind me, I slide into the driver’s seat of the prototype vehicle we affectionally call The Tank. I’m not taking her for a spin because I’m afraid of a little bullet, I want to ensure if the warehouse doors are locked, I’ll have no issues going through them.
With our group on radio silence, I have to hand signal for my men to move. There’s an eeriness associated with our ghost-like approach. Hearing Smith’s breaths in my ear has been such the norm the past two years, the ones raging in my chest sound foreign.
One by one, the vehicles following me peel off until I’m the lone soldier on a bumpy gravel road. While shifting down the gears, bringing The Tank’s revs down to half of what they were, I scan my chest, anticipating the dots of a sniper’s rifle to be lighting it up.
Unease melds through my veins when not a single speck is found. My chest remains clear of any visible markings when I pull The Tank up to the side of the cracked-open door, and not a dot highlights any part of my body when I make my way into the dusty space with my gun held high and my wish to kill even higher than it.
I jackknife to my left when a familiar voice says, “Has Smith always been this pedantic with protocol? Or did he become this way after we parted ways?”
My grip on my gun tightens when the pretty hazel eyes of Special Agent Ellie Gould lock with mine. She smiles like I won’t kill her where she stands, unaware Smith has desired doing the same thing many times the past two years.
It isn’t every day you find out your girlfriend is a federal agent, so I won’t mention the fact he unearthed the truth while perusing tapes of her schmoozing with the enemy, or you might tempt me into killing her.
One less agent won’t hurt anyone, except perhaps Smith. From what I’ve been told, you don’t get over your first love. I’ve not yet had the chance to test the theory. That could change depending on the outcome of Ellie’s resurrection. As the saying goes, ‘stare at the dark so long, you’ll eventually see what isn’t there,’ it fails to mention what you’re striving not to see—a smile hidden under locks of bleached hair and a mascara-stained face. Nothing scares me, but the thought of never seeing them again is a nightmare I refuse to live.
I’ll burn down this entire fucking hellhole before I ever let Rimi Castro beat me again, and I’ll take Roxanne down with me because despite how many times I’ve told her otherwise, I want her. I want her more than anything, and I will have her. No fear.
6
Roxanne
“Out, now. This one is out of gas.”
The goon with thick biceps and a bad attitude doesn’t wait for me to respond, he just yanks on my arm until I fall out of the trunk of a light-colored sedan for the fourth time today. I had wondered if the churns of my stomach the past couple of hours were from hunger or fear. From the low hang of the sun, I’m confident it’s a bit of both.
I understand this is part of the plan, I’m playing my part of a kidnap victim well, but I’m also worried. We’ve been on the road for hours. I’ve not been given any water or food. Even my numerous kicks on the roof of the trunk advising I needed to pee went unanswered.
This man doesn’t care about meat all.It honestly seems as if my pregnancy is more an annoyance to him than an incentive for a big cash bonus. Every time I use it with the hope it will see him issuing leniency, he becomes more aggressive.
Take now, for example. I barely murmur about the pain tearing me in two from his brutal yank on my arm, yet he acts as if I asked him to purchase me a box of tampons. “Quit your grumbling. I told you we were in for a long trip.”
The briefest moment of reprieve smacks into me when he tosses open the front passenger door of a truck parked in the middle of a road to nowhere. He has to be working with someone because cars aren’t left in the middle of the boonies waiting to be hotwired. He drives each vehicle until the gas tank hits E, then we swap rides. That reveals our trip was methodically planned. It just seems as if my being pregnant didn’t factor into the equation.
“Can I please have some water?” I ask half a mile down the dusty road.
The stranger with gleaming black eyes peers at me over the bottle he’s guzzling down like he hasn’t had a drink in hours before he shakes his head. The brutal crossing of my arms seems to humor him as much as my stink eye.
Although pissed he finds my dehydration entertaining, I’m glad it also sees him switching things up. “All right, I’m sure I can spare a couple of drops.”
His tone already has me on the back foot, let alone the way he swishes the water around his mouth before he tilts his head to my side of the cabin.
“Open up,” he talks through the slop in his mouth.
He almost chokes on the water he’s gargling in the back of his throat when my eagerness to get away from him has my arm getting cozy with the steel panel of the door. It isn’t just tender like every other region of my body. It’s also bleeding.
What the hell?
As my head rolls through snippets of my first drugging, my hand shoots up to caress the implant site where Smith placed my tracker. It feels like the world closes in on me when my probing fingers fail to discover anything but a wound that appears to have been inflicted hours ago.
There’s no bead-size device.
No implant.
Nothing.
I’m all alone, and Dimitri isn’t one step behind me.
Fuck.
