Warrior Mine: A Base Branch novel Read online

  Wise man that he was, the commander maintained his post. He had crossed his legs at the ankle, assuming a leisurely pose. From comfort or empathy, she wondered, but didn’t dwell on the matter long. Raising the pistol in the air again, she prepared to strike.

  “No more,” Carlos moaned.

  Wham!

  When he could breathe he heaved deep and ragged. Again she levered back. This time, wrenching sobs shook him. Were it not for the manacles he would have crumbled into a heap on the floor. What a complete and total shame. How different things could have been. Carmen found herself shaking her head in a slow back and forth, and stopped.

  She’d used up all her prayers, all her breath, and all her tears on this man. None of it had helped. They only seemed to drive him further in the opposite direction.

  “I will continue until your penis is a pile of bloody tissue, unless you give me the coordinates.”

  Carlos’s eyes widened, as she’d known they would. It took a few moments more for his weeping to cease. “Carmen?”

  “Yes, brother.” She removed the suffocating balaclava, combed the hair from her face that had worked free of its loose tie during her efforts in the yards of duct, and glared.

  Tucker straightened, his fists balling at his sides.

  Smack. She dealt Carlos another shot to the nether region to bring the realization full circle.

  “Don’t move,” she warned the commander.

  His thick chest filled out his white button-down and he released a deep growl. Every muscle in her body tingled with awareness. Not the kind she welcomed. She moved her hand over the gun and willed the wildness away. A matter of life and death. No place for the faint of heart. No time for the flutter of appreciation. Carmen stood, ignoring the throb in her knees.

  Tucker wedged himself in the corner with a scowl.

  “The coordinates,” she reminded.

  A ball of spit sailed from the prisoner’s mouth, but it lacked the velocity to meet its target. The glob flopped onto his bare foot. “You would attack me? While I’m unable to defend myself? I should make her pay in kind for your disrespect.”

  The words were choked and low, but he may as well have yelled them through a megaphone directly into her ear canal. Carmen’s vision tunneled. The surroundings grew dark with a halo of red circling Carlos. She envisioned her sweet Sophia at the hands of his lackeys, as she had been for the last two weeks. The only difference was now she had an outlet for her fury.

  She holstered the gun without realizing it and sank her fist into his soft belly. The hot breath she forced from his body wet her cheek. Her right hook plowed his jaw. She longed to uppercut the bastard into oblivion. With the pounding of her knuckles, the haze of hatred dissipated. Reason crept in. If she killed him or even knocked him unconscious, she wouldn’t get the information she needed.

  He spat again. This time something hard hit her cheek. She wiped the spit away with her glove and looked at his tooth on the floor. She stared at the jagged, bloody bit for far too long.

  “How did we come to this?” she whispered. “I protected you from the monsters under your bed. Cleaned your cuts when you fell. Held a rag to your head when you were sick.” Her stomach twisted like a wrung washcloth. “You should have told me when you found out about Father. I would have protected you still. We could have set out on our own. We had money from Mother, and we had our training.”

  A raw chuckle vibrated up his throat. “If you think he’d have let us go, you’re dumber than I thought.” He tongued the gap where his left canine used to fit in a row of straight white teeth.

  “You never had faith in us. You. Me. You signed on with him and look at what it’s gotten you.” Her gaze flashed to Tucker, who leaned on the wall observing the drama. “You can have my inheritance. Give me Sophia and you’ll never have to worry about us again.”

  He smiled, but winced. A faint bruise already stained his cheek.

  “Why take her in the first place? We were home just like you wanted.”

  “Carmen, you really shouldn’t buy fake identification from someone I own.”

  She tried to quiet her reaction, but he may as well have taken a sledgehammer to her chest. He knew she’d been planning to take Sophia and run away. In an effort to save her daughter from the ugliness of her brother’s work, she’d placed her in greater danger.

  “I want your loyalty. After all, sister, isn’t that what family is about?”

  Carmen pulled the Beretta from the holster, flipped off the safety, slid one into the chamber, and leveled it between her brother’s eyes. Tears clouded her vision, but she refused to set them free by blinking.

  “You will never have my loyalty. But I will have Sophia. You will tell me, if with your last breath, brother.”

  He didn’t look at the gun, which froze her heart. His gaze trained on hers. “If I die, they have instructions to kill her. If you don’t return in one month’s time from the day you left in your futile search, they have instructions to sever a piece of her each day until you return or she dies. Whichever comes first.”

  Dread slashed her belly and threatened to drag her back to her knees. How had this gone so wrong… This family. This fight for freedom. This search for the only person in the world she loved. How had he turned the table when his balls were almost literally in her hands?

  Leverage.

  He had nothing to lose. She had everything. And one way or the cursed other she would keep it.

  Her tears fell, plopping in the puddle of her soaked shirt. “I hate you.”

  “And I love you. If only you’d see that I’m trying to protect you. The world is a cruel place for a woman.”

  “And I stare into the face of the merciless.”

  “Hurry home now. By my estimation you don’t have long. I’d say take me with you, but Tucker doesn’t have the key and I’m fond of my limbs. Fond of my dick too. If it doesn't work right, you’ll pay.” He gestured as though brushing her away with his gnarled fingers. “Go, run things in my absence. Prove your loyalty. Then I’ll send her to you. But…if my men even think you’re leaving, they’ll end you both. Tell Javier to go ahead with the deal. And I’ll be home soon.”

  4

  “The fuck you say,” Vail barked. “Where you’re going from here, they don’t make daylight.”

  He’d held his tongue way longer than he could stand. The shit spewing from Carlos Ruez’s mouth made him sick—and it took a damn lot to goad him. And, maybe, it wasn’t the bastard’s words so much as it was the woman’s gut-rending reaction to them.

  As if she’d know he was thinking of her, she scored him with her gaze. Her wide, wet eyes begged his words to be true. He could plainly see the thought of Carlos free terrified her almost as much as the thought of losing Sophia. Their sister? Her daughter? Her lover? He didn’t yet know. He had boxes of files on Carlos and his associates, but his blood relations had been thought dead.

  Apparently not. One was alive and kicking. Or punching and hammering, as the case may be.

  Vail’s arms were crossed. His fists wedged in the crook of tensed muscles. And despite everything—his unwilling detainment, her relation to Ruez—he nodded his promise to keep that piece of shit locked up for all eternity. Not that the man would live long in the prison where he was headed.

  A token of relief settled her shoulders. She wiped the stream of tears from her face and swatted back the long, dark tendrils crowding her brow. He would keep his word, just as she had to him. An accord among strangers with a common enemy seeking justice. The woman hadn’t gotten what she wanted. Not even close. The least he could give her was that pledge. The reassurance.

  She turned her gaze on Carlos. Her thick lips pressed in a line of rage and her head shook once. “Goodbye, brother.”

  Something about her resignation, like a fine animal beaten into submission, seared his insides in a way nothing had in a very long time. He’d give her case a closer look, use his considerable resources to track this Sophia. If for
no other reason than it would annoy the hell out of Carlos. Then again, he could always drink that coffee he’d sent Rhonda for and continue the man’s torture. It was all a matter of leverage. And now he had a bit more than he’d had an hour ago.

  It didn’t matter how tough the bastard was, if he didn’t receive medical treatment shortly, he’d walk with a permanent limp and never get off again. When faced with the decision of forever-defective goods or a little information dump, any man would cave.

  Carmen swiped the detonator from the floor, flipped the rubber band around her left wrist, and glanced back at him. He couldn’t discern the expression in her round, lash-rimmed eyes. Regret? Appreciation? She’d planned this little fiasco beautifully, knowing she’d have to threaten more than just his life to get his compliance. He had no doubt that she’d find a way out from under her brother’s thumb. With or without his help. She’d chosen the perfect spot in the room to make him completely worthless and unable to strike an attack.

  They bowed their heads toward one another. A bit of a truce. She spun on her heels to go and he let her.

  “Before you leave…” The tone of Carlos’s choked voice razed Vail’s nerve endings and pulled Carmen to a stop.

  “What?” She regarded him over her shoulder, her eyes narrowing to slits.

  The son of a bitch’s mouth spread wide and curled at the edge, despite the swollen part he could see. “Show me you mean to run the family business. Kill him.” The thumb he’d pried the nail from earlier hitched in his direction, as if there were any question to which him he referred.

  Son of a fucking cock-sucking whore! Screw torture. This guy needed killing.

  Carmen’s gaze darted from Vail to her brother and back. The thin line of her mouth morphed into a snarl. She yanked the compact gun from the holster. The barrel rammed the side of Carlos’s head. Her jaw flexed. “So help me, brother, you’ll die before he does.”

  “I’m surprised you’d give his life for Sophia’s,” the scum provoked.

  “He’s innocent,” she retorted.

  “Please, he’s killed more people than I have.”

  “Your causes are very different,” Carmen ground out.

  “Make your choice, sister. Who deserves to live? Him or sweet Sophia?”

  A scream, feral and pained, ripped from her throat. She bore down on the grip. Her arms shook. The shriek pitched high then rumbled into a growl. “One day, brother, your sins will come for their retribution.”

  She lifted the barrel, aimed at Vail’s middle, and fired once.

  5

  Carmen dropped to the ground, happy to leave the blackness of the ducts. She just couldn’t escape the blackness of her mind. She sprinted toward the vacant building where she’d left the rented sedan. Though the standing water in the pitted alleys she fled through crystallized in the chill, the flames of hell licked her cheeks. Sweat suctioned the front of the black shirt to her stomach. In the dark of night and the gleam from the street light it looked like blood. She smacked the moisture from her eyes with the hand she’d used to pull a trigger. She imagined Vail Tucker clutching his abdomen, fighting to stem the flow of blood as futilely as she tried to dam her tears.

  “Damn you, Carlos. And damn me too.”

  Up two flights of stairs she found the white car she’d left four hours earlier. Retrieving a key from a lower cargo pocket, she unlocked the indistinct wheels, opened the door, and tossed herself into the back seat. She hurled the detonator in the small confines and released her disgust in a yell so loud her throat burned and her ears rang. With a limited wind-up the dummy mechanism did little more than tink off the dashboard and then plummet to the floorboard.

  “Fuck!”

  Her brother hurt people. She didn’t. She hadn’t intended to harm anyone, only learn where Carlos’s men held her daughter.

  In her search for Sophia through the family’s Mexican holdings, she’d heard murmurs about her brother’s capture in the States and little more than a whisper about the organization that had taken him. Not FBI. Not CIA. Similar, but much more shadowed with a much broader reach.

  Carmen pulled civilian clothes from the duffel on the seat next to her. She peeled the wet and all too conspicuous clothing from her body, slamming it into the bag with vicious slaps of her fist. One week. They had been one week from leaving. She’d gone for her five a.m. run as usual and returned to find her daughter missing. Sophia’s sheets spilled from her bed, her closet was ransacked, and a note lay in the middle of the floor.

  One way or another, I will have your loyalty.

  Your adoring brother,

  Carlos

  She’d been so high on the thought of holding Sophia in her arms again. So wrapped up in the nearly impossible job of breaking into a building so heavily secured she half-expected to be tossed into a cell with her brother for the attempt. So stupid. She’d been so stupid to overlook the possibility that Carlos had planned for his capture on his first border crossing into the US as leader of the cartel. Floundering these days, the Arellano-Félix Organization had maintained its status on federal alert systems thanks to the early work of her treacherous extended family and father.

  And now it seemed she’d never be free of her cursed family.

  She climbed into the driver’s seat, stuffed the Beretta into the center console, turned the car on, and headed for the exit. At the street level, she stared at the empty road, unable to move. West to the interstate. East to the tall dark building with a man bleeding to death inside.

  So help her, she couldn’t leave him to the worms. Not him, of all people. The sadness, heat, and depth in his eyes deserved life. Deserved happiness. She’d pulled the shot as far right as she could and still hit him. But the building had been deserted. That made her entrance and escape easier. It would make his dying all the more probable.

  If he died, he couldn’t plaster her face on the Most Wanted list.

  Rubber burned onto the parking garage floor as she turned right—back to the scene of the crime.

  6

  “Home at last,” Oliver yawned from the back row of the Tahoe.

  “You live in the parking garage? Ah, it explains your perma-stench,” Hunter prodded from the middle.

  From the rearview mirror Khani Slaughter watched Oli whack Hunter’s yolk. Curses and laughter filled the vehicle and rocked it on its wheels. She smiled in spite of the hour and the number of hours strung together she’d been awake. By now it crept toward the fifty mark.

  “All right, ladies,” Tyler’s voice rumbled from the passenger seat, “let’s thank our LTC for getting our sorry asses back in one piece.”

  “Ever grateful, Lieutenant Commander,” Hunter said, tightening his hold on Oliver’s throat.

  She slid the SUV into the parking space, shifted to park, and turned to regard the overgrown children in the back seat.

  Oli—still restrained, but making headway with a twisting grip on Hunter’s ear—winked and flashed a wide grin. “Thanks, LTC.”

  “Get your gear and get out of my sight. I’m tired of staring at your ugly mugs,” she ordered.

  “Yes, ma’am’s” rained all around and they—some of the most ruggedly beautiful and extremely capable men of her elite Base Branch team—hustled out of the Tahoe.

  Tyler opened his door, but turned and offered his hand across the console. “An honor, Lieutenant Commander.”

  “My duty and pleasure to return you to your misfit lives.” Khani accepted the large hand with her equally firm grip, shook, and released his hand. Only, her subordinate’s fingers remained wrapped around her slight hand, detaining her with gentle pressure. “Release my hand or lose yours, Tyler.”

  Her English accent thickened along with her anger. She’d crossed an ocean to get away from this kind of puppy-love shit, and she wasn’t about to move again. Last time it had been her bad judgment, and the puppy in question. Now she was older, wiser, and a hell of a lot meaner.

  “Sorry, ma’am. I just—”

/>   “Get your gear and go home.” A little more loudly she added, “It’s been a long few days for us all. Right, guys?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Oli and Hunter called from the back hatch.

  The men scattered to their respective vehicles, but Khani sat staring ahead. The level sat full of Base Branch transportation. Commercial grade utility vehicles. Police cars. An ambulance. A hearse. Beater cars. Fancy cars. Blacked-out SUV’s like this one they’d had at the airfield at the edge of the county. You never knew what you’d need to complete a mission.

  Khani dragged her sorry arse from the seat, collected her gear, and trudged halfway up the ramp to her dark-grey Benz. The sight of the prowling little car eased the weight of her load and her bone-deep weariness. It was just like the one she’d had back home. Sleek. Fast. Ticketed?

  “What the hell?”

  A rectangular piece of paper lay pinched between the clean windshield and wiper blade. The parking level wasn’t impenetrable, but it was blocked by a thick lift gate, a pass code, and spikes. Automatically on alert, Khani’s gaze swung left and right. She catalogued the classic Chevy in the space to the right of hers—Tucker’s truck—the empty space to the left—Rhonda’s spot. Nothing stirred in the otherwise deserted section.

  She dropped her gear and herself to the ground looking for trip wires, bombs, or boogiemen, but found none. Maybe it was no more than a note placed there by a member of her team. Tyler. If the paper pimped that man’s signature, his next mission impossible would be cleaning the locker-room johns for the next six months.

  On her feet with a hop, Khani neared. Still watchful, she plucked the small sheet from the car and read.

  Your commander is shot and bleeding out in the interrogation room with Carlos Ruez. Help him. If he lives, make certain Carlos believes he is dead.