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I rolled my eyes.
“I’m just looking around for anything we’ve missed, Greta. We’ve got nothing, and you and Brute need to be here in case Valeria somehow manages to make contact. And if Domínguez is at all suspicious about why you’re here, he’s going to have eyes on Deo and Vito.”
Everything he was saying made sense. We’d been careful to make sure Domínguez didn’t even know Gabe Costa was in the country. And I knew Gabe was careful—that he’d had plenty of experience with being careful. But I wasn’t in the mood for his rational arguments to make sense. I was sick of sitting around, getting nowhere. I wanted to be out there doing something more useful than drawing stupid tattoos on my arm.
But since there was no point in arguing with him, I heaved a sigh.
“Fine,” I said, then stormed through the room and up the stairs and slammed the door to my room behind me.
It seemed my childish plan and tattoo were taking me back to my younger self because I’m pretty sure I’d just thrown a temper tantrum.Really mature, Greta.
Okay, so, now what?
I stared at the laptop I’d left on the bed for a minute, but there would be nothing new there. Nothing useful. And I didn’t need to pull up the pictures of the kidnapped victims to see them in my head—the joys of a near-eidetic memory.
Dismissing the laptop, I grabbed my bag of toiletries and headed for the ensuite bathroom. After spending an hour with Domínguez and his scumbag men, I felt the very strong urge to get clean.
But it turned out that a shower, as great as it was for cleaning the body, did little to clean up the mess in my head.
With my hair dripping and my skin still damp, I paced the cramped length of my room in a towel. I could see every one of the kidnapped victims in my head, one after another after another. And the human head I’d watched “hot and twisted” drop in acid. And the girl from the bar.
God, how I wanted to put a bullet in Domínguez’s head and be done with it. But while that might get Leeri out of harm’s way, there was nothing saying if I did that, we’d ever find Domínguez’s victims. Fuck only knew where he had them stashed. So, no quick bullet in the bad guy’s head.
I heaved a sigh, dropped down at the edge of the bed, and pulled my laptop next to me. I’d spent hours searching through missing persons’ databases. It was time for something else. Something new. A new approach.
Now, all I had to do was figure out what that was.
I opened the laptop, but when no brilliant new plan hit me, I pulled up the spreadsheet of faces I’d transferred to my computer but had yet to match in the missing persons databases.
The moment the page loaded up, a knock sounded on the door. It opened up before I could answer, and Brute stuck his ridiculously handsome head in the door.
“Haven’t seen much of you, darling. Just making sure you’re—”
His eyes found me on the edge of the bed, still dressed in just a towel. What we’d started outside my motel room on the gun run flashed through my mind.
“Fuck me,” he muttered under his breath as his gaze roamed over my body from the tip of my toes to my damp brow. But he shook his head after a moment and fixed his gaze directly on my eyes.
Interesting. Apparently, he still thought us fucking was a pretty bad idea. Which was really too bad, in my opinion.
“Something I can do for you, Brute?” I asked, not minding at all the way a little innuendo slipped into the timbre of my voice.
He smiled morosely and shook his head. “You looked frazzled downstairs. Just making sure you’re all right.”
I was pretty sure “all right” was a relative term these days, but I nodded.
And now, he was supposed to make his retreat.
But he didn’t.
“Porn?” he asked, grinning while he nodded at my laptop.
I scoffed. “Definitely not,” I said, spinning it around for him to see the screen. “I’m pretty sure not even sadists could get off on this shit.”
He nodded, now staring intently at the screen, and I followed suit, staring at the damn photos while I scrubbed my hands through my wet hair like I could rub my brain into action.
“Why is this so damn important to you, darling?” Brute asked, taking another step further into my room and closing the door behind him.
I sighed. I wasn’t even sure if I could explain it—at least not in any way that didn’t make me sound like a Looney Tune. But hell, I’d give it a go.
