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When I neared the site, I slowed, taking in my surroundings. An abandoned car, three hangars, two empty planes on the tarmac and an admin office on the other side. I rounded the airstrip and pulled in behind the third hangar.
Michael was there. His car was nowhere in sight, but the sun caught the steel of his gun from in the brush. He stood once I’d shifted the car into park, telling me there’d been no sign of Mateo or his men yet. I waited with bated breath, hoping Scar would stand up beside him.
She didn’t. She wasn’t here. Where the hell was she?
“I’m sorry, Derek,” Michael said as he approached. Either the wind had blown sand into his eyes, or he was feeling rather choked up over what had happened too.
What was I supposed to do?—say it was OK? No worries? Yeah, fucking right. Of course, this was all my fault, but things weren’t OK and I was more than a little worried. So, I just nodded and turned my attention to the hangars. There didn’t seem to be any movement in any of them, but my gaze kept shifting back to the abandoned car. Fifteen yards from the first hangar. It was out of place. It didn’t belong in this scene. So, why was it here? It was obviously empty—the driver’s side door had been left wide open.
Scar. It was the only logical explanation. But if she was already here, where the fuck was she? I wanted to go charging through every hangar searching for her, but I resisted the urge. Something wasn’t right.
“She’s here,” I told Michael, who’d come to stand beside me and his gaze focused on the same abandoned car. Not abandoned. She hadn’t left it there out in the open. She was too smart for that. She’d been corralled there and dragged out of the car.
I was shaking. I was shaking because I didn’t know if she was alive or dead, or what they were doing to her at this very minute. The scene in the basement where I’d found her before flashed through my mind, and I turned just in time to hurl into the bushes instead of on Michael’s shoes.
I debated swallowing a bullet just to end this because I wasn’t sure I could survive it if she’d been hurt like that again. But I couldn’t do it. If there was any chance she was still alive, I wouldn’t abandon her. Never.
Michael sat down hard on the dirt ground, his knees bent and his trembling hands hanging loosely over them. I remembered him asking me just days ago if it ever ends. “No, it doesn’t,” I’d said, not knowing just how true those words had been.
“Pull your shit together,” I told him, though the message was probably just as much for me since I was the one who’d been puking in the bushes. “We need a plan. Now.”
“I have these pills…cyanide, in case I ever got captured. I’d thought about giving her one…I should have…” he said as his eyes grew brighter with unshed tears.
“Don’t fucking talk like that. Do you understand me?” I was standing over him and my fingers itched for any one of the guns concealed beneath my clothes for what he’d just said. But then...maybe he was less selfish than me. I wanted to find Scar and save her no matter what. He didn’t want her to suffer.
“Let’s just find her and kill every one of those motherfuckers,” I said.
He nodded and got to his feet. “Sweep the buildings?” he asked.
No. If she was here, she was in the first hangar. It was the closest one to the car she’d been dragged out of, and the furthest from the main road, making it most difficult for me to escape with her. But was she still here?
Yes, I decided, not just because I wanted it to be true, but because Mateo would want me to see what he did to her.
He probably knew I was here then, and it was best to assume he knew Michael was here too.
“She’s in the first hangar,” I told him matter-of-factly.
“How can you be so sure?”
How? Because I wasn’t so different from the monsters in there, and it was precisely what I would have recommended to Marcos not that long ago. And maybe, just maybe, because I could feel her. Here. Close. “I just know.”
“We’re going to be outnumbered,” he said.
“Yeah.”
“You still want to go in there?”
“Yeah. You?”
“Fuck, yeah. Let’s go get her back.”—Definitely a man after my own heart.
We moved fast, keeping close to the buildings. We made it to the hangar without interference, and no one was there to intercept outside the door. That meant he wanted me inside.
And I was happy to oblige him.
“Stay here,” I told Michael—there was no sense in giving them two targets. “Take out what you can from here, and then wait until you’re sure you can get to her.”
