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Knuckles aching, body bruised, mouth bleeding and lungs heaving, Taz prepped for the next attack.
It never came.
Weaving more than a bit, he did a three-sixty as fear poisoned his gut. Besides the five unconscious men littering the stone path, there wasn’t anyone else around. Each of the four paths leading off from the scene was as silent and still as an abandoned city.
They were gone.
Bianca was gone.
In half a heartbeat, all of his aches and pains evaporated. He spit out a mouthful of blood and started running toward the rendezvous point where the team and all their firepower would be waiting.
Even if Yasmin had everything in place for a quick disappearance, she wasn’t going to make it off this island. No matter what it took, no matter what he had to sacrifice, he would save Bianca.
Chapter 14
Taz
Aboard the Sutherland Family Yacht…
The floor rocked under Taz’s bare feet and his stomach pitched adding to his already black-as-midnight mood. God, he fucking hated boats—especially when he was being forced to cool his heels on the Sutherland family yacht, waiting for the DEA agents to arrive while Bianca was still out there.
“Fucking DEA,” he mumbled.
Blackfish promised he’d be on the beach with his agents in ten minutes. Taz wasn’t giving him a second more.
“Take this.” Vivi held out her hand, holding two small pills. “You look like you’re about to puke, and these,” she pointed down to her combat boots, “are brand-new.”
The former DEA agent was always such a touchy-feely one. Considering two of her best friends were being held hostage, she could come off as a cold-hearted bitch. But look a little closer and it was easy to spot her tells. The chewed up bottom lip. The strands of loose hair freed from her normally perfectly tied-back hair. And—most obvious—the way she’d failed to nail Keir to the wall with a snarky comment the moment he walked into the yacht’s makeshift command center.
Not that he had room to talk. He was so hyped-up right now, itching to use whatever firepower was at his disposal to get to Bianca. If only he could, but he needed Blackfish’s agents to ensure Bianca and Gidget made it out alive. Yasmin was expecting everyone from the B-Squad but she wasn’t expecting the DEA, and they needed every advantage they could get while Bianca’s life hung in the balance. One of the agents would make the perfect distraction to get them in the door.
He swiped the motion-sickness pills from Vivi’s palm and downed them dry. “Where are we on the background on Yasmin?”
“Done,” Duke said before slipping his phone back in his pocket. He’d been working his contacts since the team had seen shit go sideways on the surveillance feed. “Yasmin Romanow is wanted by a whole slew of alphabet agencies across the globe. She is the only child of Yanni Romanow, a low-level money manager for a group of Armenian gangsters based on the East Coast. St. Bernadette’s, which young Yasmin attended, was a front for laundering the dirty money. The school administrators were all getting a cut of the cash, which would explain her ties to Walsh. No one had ever done much digging into the school because all the rich people who sent their daughters there were mainly doing so just to get them out of their hair.” He glanced up at Lexie, Vivi and Elisa. “No offense.”
“None taken.” Lexie shrugged. “It was either St. B’s or juvie for a very long time after the whole Pentagon thing, so it was a good trade for me.”
Elisa peeked over Lexie’s shoulder at the image of Yasmin on her laptop. “I don’t remember this chick at all, do you guys?”
The other women shook their heads.
Duke went on. “That’s because she dropped off the grid after a trip to a cosmetic surgeon in Brazil who specialized in facial reconstruction when she was eighteen—exactly three days after her father was killed in police custody by a low-level Armenian gang soldier. It seems that someone called in the feds after a group of girls committed suicide at the school, the feds investigated, and the money-laundering scheme was exposed. The government seized sixteen-point-eight million in dirty money and traced it back to an additional twenty-five more.”
“Shit,” Vivi gasped. “We made that call to the feds.”
“That’s right,” Elisa said. “I was in “the closet” and you guys had snuck in to see me. On the way back, Bianca had overheard the administrators talking about making the girls’ deaths look like a suicide. Lexie recovered the surveillance footage. The three of us created a distraction so Bianca could make the call.”
“That explains why she kidnapped Gidget, set up Bianca and targeted the rest of your three,” Keir said.
“But how did she know we were here?” Marko asked from his spot at the far end of the room—that just happened to give him the perfect sight line to watch Elisa.
“Easy.” Lexie spun her laptop around so it faced the rest of the group.
A report from the Phoenix Police Department took up most of the screen. It was the crime techs’ final report about the house the B-Squad had raided after just missing Yasmin, Walsh and Gidget. She’d highlighted one section. It described a high-end video camera with a powerful, long-range wireless link to an undetermined offsite location. The crime-scene techs had found it hidden inside a clock on the fireplace mantel. That explained the fake bomb they’d found in the hearth. It was the perfect sleight-of-hand maneuver to keep their attention away from the real prize.
Taz’s gut lurched. The bitch had probably been on to them since Bisu Manor. And he’d missed it. Guilt knotted his lungs.
Since there wasn’t anything he could do about it now except correct his fuck up, he paced the small space available in the yacht’s below-decks living room, crowded as it was with eight people. “Okay, let’s go over the plan one more time to make sure we haven’t missed anything.”
