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Santiago’s face rested lightly alongside mine. I could feel the rough texture of his sexy stubble. Smell his delicious, musky scent.
“But no, we won’t need money today,” he finished. “Not for this.”
“We will owe him a favor, though,” sighed Cody.
Behind me, Santiago’s fingers spread possessively over my abdomen. “For sure.”
We glided to the other side of the bay in relative silence, each of us staring through a window and into the darkness. I wondered absently what the guys were thinking. I also wondered whether their collective thoughts were as unified as they were.
“You ever take on a kidnapping before?” I asked abruptly.
It was a question that hadn’t occurred to me before now. I’d thought about their military lives, the missions they’d been on. Even the jobs they’d undertaken once they were civilians again. But not this.
“Yes,” Silas eventually muttered. “With him, actually.”
I sat up a little straighter. “Who? Murphy?”
His grip on the steering wheel didn’t seem as loose or casual as before.
“Yes.”
“And what happened?”
The guys were all a little stiffer in their seats now. I caught them exchanging furtive glances as well.
“It, uh… it didn’t turn out so well,” Cody stumbled.
The silence that followed was so total it was almost painful. With each second that ticked by, the sinking feeling in my stomach grew worse.
“Through no fault of our own though,” Santiago added, from behind me. “It was just a bad situation. Bad people.”
“Evil fucking people,” Silas growled.
Silas wore a discomforting expression I hadn’t seen before. Cody was glassy eyed. Whatever had happened, it hadn’t been good. The person they’d tried to help was obviously gone.
All of a sudden my throat felt tight. I tried to swallow but couldn’t.
For some reason though, I had to know more.
“So you never found the people who did it?” I ventured. “Even if you couldn’t recover the—”
“Oh, we found them,” Silas said acidly.
My stomach felt like it was in my feet now. I was suddenly cold, too.
“And what did you do?”
All three men looked straight ahead. They didn’t move. Didn’t answer. There was a distinct change in them, though. An almost imperceptible shift that charged the air around us with danger and foreboding.
I didn’t ask anything else for the rest of the ride.
Thirty-Three
BRYNNE
“And you’re absolutely sure you want to find Mathias?” Bryan Murphy asked skeptically. His eyes shifted specifically to me. “I mean, most of the time you run into someone like him, Mathias is looking for you.”
The mercenary rocked back in his chair, crossing his arms in front of him. He was on his third drink already. And each one was a double.
