Broken Honor (8 page)

“Don’t move.” Without taking his gun off her, he reached for his phone. He’d prefer not to answer it now, but only a select few had his number, or even knew he was alive. “Miller.”

“I need your help.”

Liam smiled and sat up. Well, now. Hell must be frozen over if his American associates were reaching out to him. Especially since it was the big man in charge himself, the brains behind the whole black market operation, and not one of his underlings or his nitwit son. “What can I do for you, mate?”

“Your pal Zaryanko just fucked us over.”

And that surprised them? Nikolai Zaryanko was a right dodgy bastard even on his best days. “And what do you expect me to do about it?”

Silence. Then, “He has Quinn.”

Bloody hell. Liam dropped his weapon and waved the whore away. This conversation was far more interesting than anything she could do for him. “Does he now? In Transnistria?”

“We assume so. Zaryanko was only supposed to lure Quinn out of the country so we could dispose of him without raising too many eyebrows. Instead, I have a dead operative in New Mexico and Zaryanko is trying to ransom Quinn back to us.”

Liam swung his legs over the edge of the mattress and watched the whore gather her clothes, his stomach fluttering with a sensation he couldn’t name. Not nerves. Anticipation, maybe? He’d been stewing in boredom for the last seven months as he healed from the fucking chest wound that had very nearly killed him in Colombia—courtesy of Quinn’s fucking team—and it’d been too long since he’d anticipated anything. He grabbed his jeans from the floor. “Quinn is
mine
.”

“Fine,” his caller said with a superciliousness Liam would love to beat out of the man. “I’m sending you a team. If you can convince Zaryanko to turn Quinn over, you can do whatever you want with him. As long as he ends up in a body bag by the time you’re done.”

Quinn in a body bag.

It was the stuff of wet dreams. To have this opportunity fall into his lap now was almost too good to be true. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch. I’m letting you off your leash. Quinn can’t walk away from this alive.”

Liam sneered at the phone as the line went dead. A leash? That arsehole couldn’t be serious. He had never been
leashed
. He didn’t answer to them. Never had, never would. If anything,
he
owned
them
. He’d lost everything to keep their operation running—his wife, his career, every-bloody-thing—and he’d only gone to ground after the fiasco in Colombia to give himself time to heal, not because they had insisted he should.

Fuck keeping a low profile now. It was time to show HORNET he was still alive and kicking.

And well past time to get his revenge.

Chapter Eight

The jolt of the landing gear thunking into place snapped Quinn out of the kind of dead-to-the-world sleep only exhaustion brought on. And for a moment, despite all of his training, he didn’t know where he was. Or even who he
was. He scrambled through his memory for a sliver of identity—a name, a place, something to latch onto and kick-start his stalled brain—but all he found was darkness, a void of nothingness, and he was falling deeper into it.

His heart hitched, and pain speared through his head. He squeezed his eyes shut and breathed in ragged pants, suddenly needing more oxygen than he could draw in.

Why couldn’t he remember anything?

Someone moved beside him, and a terrified murmur near his ear sliced through the worst of his panic. “Travis?”

Yes, that was his name. Travis Benjamin Quinn. He lived in Baltimore, used to be a SEAL until a car accident ended his career two years ago, and he was now the executive officer of HumInt Consulting, Inc.’s Hostage Rescue and Negotiation Team, better known as HORNET.

Okay. That was a start. At least he wasn’t amnesic.

“Travis, are you okay?”

And that voice was Mara, the woman he’d dreamed about far too often. The woman who was now pregnant with his child. The woman he had to protect no matter what. The sound of her saying his name settled him like nothing else could have. He had to get his shit together and keep it there, because she needed him.

Mara. Needed. Him.

He opened his eyes again and took stock of his condition. His fingers were numb, his arms tingling, and his back ached from the odd angle he’d had to maintain to keep the handcuffs from completely cutting off his circulation.

“Travis!” Her voice picked up a panic-induced shrillness.

“It’s okay,” he rasped. His throat felt like sandpaper and clearing it did nothing to help the problem. “I’m good. Fell asleep for a moment, that’s all.”

A beat of silence. “No,” Mara said slowly, “you were just singing to me and then you stopped.”

Panic lanced through him. Oh, hell. Had he blacked out on her? “I don’t sing.”

“But…you were.” She started humming a melody he hadn’t heard in years, then sang softly, “Too-ra-loo-ra-loo-ral, too-ra-loo-ra-li, that’s an Irish lullaby.”

“I—” His voice caught. He hadn’t thought about that song since he’d lost his adopted mother. She used to sing it to him when he was ten years old, fighting for his life in an unfamiliar hospital, surrounded by the kindness of strangers.

He cleared his throat. “I don’t sing.”

“How can you not remember—”

“We’re landing.” The words came out like a whip, and she flinched back. Fuck. He hadn’t meant to lash out at her like that, but he’d be damned before he talked about that song or admitted to her that he did not remember singing it.

He took a second to gentle his voice before speaking again. “How are you doing? Okay?”

“I’m…” She swallowed audibly. “Yes. A-are you?”

“Yeah, I’m good.”
Not even close.
He lifted his head and glanced around, the nerve in his neck pinching at the movement. In the cloying darkness, he picked out the shapes of the other abducted women huddled together in clumps along the plane’s walls. The acrid stench of sweat-soaked fear and urine saturated the air.

He had no way of knowing the time, but his internal clock told him they’d been in the plane for damn near twenty-four hours. They could be anywhere in the world and his phone—with its lifesaving GPS tracker—was lying on the floor of the hangar in New Mexico. He’d managed to type out one word before Zaryanko’s men attacked him, and although he’d never sent the text, he had no doubt Gabe and the team would find it. And, hopefully, find them.

The plane touched down with a jolt, shocking gasps out of several of the women, and after a few minutes of taxiing, it finally came to a stop.

“Where do you think we are?” Mara whispered.

He winced. “If I had to guess, Zaryanko’s base of operations.”

“Are we in Russia?”

“No. Transnistria. It’s—”

The cargo door dropped open, flooding the interior with blinding white light. Mara winced and huddled closer, hiding her face against his side. After so many hours of darkness, the light was disorientating, even for him, and he’d had training to fortify himself against these kinds of torture techniques. But the women didn’t have his training, and many of them panicked, scattering like mice to the darker corners of the plane.

At his side, Mara trembled. He held her as best as he could with his hands cuffed and blinked until his eyes adjusted.

Zaryanko’s two thugs, Alexei and Pyotr, started plucking the women out one by one and separating them into two groups. One group was hustled through the swirling snow onto another waiting plane. The other into the back of a van.

Then they came for Mara.

Alexei grabbed her arm and yanked her to her feet.

“No!” She hauled off and punched him. It didn’t do much, damage-wise, but after the docile compliance from the other women, it surprised the asshole enough that he let go of her. She tried to get back to Quinn’s side, but Pyotr rushed up the ramp to help his buddy and grabbed her around the waist. She screamed and kicked, and it got her nowhere. Pyotr clamped a hand over her mouth, and her frightened eyes locked on Quinn.

Oh, no. She couldn’t give up now. He yanked on the handcuffs, but nothing happened. Fuck.

“Mara!” He held his hand next to his mouth and pretended to chomp down. Her eyes widened with realization and a second later, Pyotr shouted with pain as her teeth sank into his hand. He dropped her hard to the floor. She crawled over and tucked herself into Quinn’s side. He felt her shudder with sobs and wanted to hold her more than anything, but there was no give at all in the fucking handcuffs. All he could do was scoot his body in front of hers and shield her against the wall. If they really wanted her, they would have to go through him first, and since he was Zaryanko’s golden goose, he was about 80 percent certain they wouldn’t kill him.

Pyotr shook out his hand—he was bleeding from her teeth marks in the fleshy part between his thumb and forefinger—and unsheathed a wicked-looking blade from his belt.

Okay, so maybe the percentage was more like sixty-five, because that fucker had murder in his eyes.

“Stay behind me,” he said for Mara’s ears only. “No matter what.”

Her fingers curled into his shirt, and she nodded against his back.

Pyotr lunged, and Quinn swept out a leg, taking his knees out from under him. The thug went down hard, but not before a gash opened up on Quinn’s thigh from the knife. He didn’t feel the pain. Yet. He would once the adrenaline in his system ebbed, and he needed to be in a more defensible position when it happened. He kicked out again, knocking the knife from Pyotr’s hand.

Alexei snapped it up from the floor and took a step forward but was halted by a sharp command from the bottom of the plane’s ramp.

“That’s quite enough. We’re wasting time.” Zaryanko shook his head in disgust and turned away. He added something else over his shoulder in Russian, and Quinn’s gut bottomed out. He didn’t speak a word of the language, but Zaryanko’s tone made it clear that had been kill order.

Behind him, Mara whimpered. “They’re going to kill me.”

Holy shit. She understood Russian?

He didn’t have time to process that fact, though, because the two thugs moved forward as one hulking entity, the knife glinting with blood in Alexei’s hand. They were going to use that on Mara, and he couldn’t do a fucking thing to—

Wait. Yes, he could.

“Zaryanko!” he shouted. “Killing her is a mistake!”

Zaryanko stopped moving, the wind whipping his coat around his legs, but he didn’t turn back. “How so?”

Quinn schooled his face into a mask so as not to let the fragile spark of hope show. “She’s the stepdaughter of a U.S. senator. She’s worth twice what you’ll get for me in ransom.”

“Ah, yes.” Zaryanko waved a dismissive hand. “That would be true if Senator Escareno hadn’t already flatly refused to pay for her return. He told me in no uncertain terms that she was to never come home. So she’s no use to me now.”

Mara gasped. “Oh, God.”

Quinn could practically hear her heart shattering at the news, and his broke right along with hers. Fucking Ramon Escareno. All she’d ever wanted from the man was acceptance, maybe a bit of affection, and instead he abandoned her to the whims of a human trafficker?

Yeah, when they got out of this, he was going to pay the crooked senator a visit, and Escareno would be lucky if he limped away from the encounter.

But that had to wait until later. Right now, he needed leverage or she wasn’t going to live through the next few minutes. And Mara was going to hate him for what he said next, but it was the only thing he could think of that would catch Zaryanko’s attention. “She’s pregnant.”

Mara jerked like he’d hit her with a Taser. “Travis…”

“I’m sorry. It’s the only way.”

This time, Zaryanko turned. His eyes narrowed and he studied her for several endless moments. Finally, he snapped out a command to his minions.

Quinn twisted enough that he could see Mara’s face. She’d gone white and her chapped lips stood out in bright red contrast against her complexion. “What did he say?”

“Um, I—I think…” She swallowed hard, shook her head.

“Mara, what did he say?”

“H-he told them not to hurt me.”

“Okay.” He released the breath caught in his lungs and willed his heart to slow. She was safe. For now. At least until Zaryanko confirmed that yes, she was pregnant.

Then both she and the baby would be in grave danger.

…

El Paso, Texas

“So,” Gabe said, drawing the word out.

Jesse clenched his jaw but didn’t look away from the rental car’s passenger side window. “I’m not in the mood to chat, boss.”

“Yeah, I got that.” Gabe sent him a questioning sideways glance. “But I never pegged you as a brooder.”

“I’m not brooding.”

“Uh-
huh.” Silence. One beat. Two. “How about you tell me what’s up with you?”

Jesse finally looked over at his boss. The occasional streetlight illuminated Gabe’s hard, square-jawed profile as he navigated the car through the empty streets. Funny how you could have so much respect for a man and yet still want to punch that knowing expression off his face. “What? You want to share a warm fuzzy Oprah moment? ’Cuz I gotta warn you, it’s goin’ to look more like Jerry Springer.”

Gabe blew out a long breath. “C’mon, man. You can’t blame Quinn when she—”

“I’ll blame whoever the hell I want.”

“She was just as involved,” Gabe finished, his tone full of reason. “It takes two to make a baby, and you know damn well Quinn never would have laid a hand on her if she didn’t want him to.”

“Still, he shouldn’t have touched her. Shouldn’t have even
thought
about her like that. She’s family.”

“Yeah,
your
family. Not his. He’s not gonna see your baby cousin when he looks at her. He’s just going to see a gorgeous woman, because she’s exactly the type he goes for. Curvy, smart, sweet, a little bit shy—I hate to tell you, but if you had asked me to describe the perfect woman for Quinn, Mara would be pretty damn close.”

“Doesn’t matter. I told him she was off-limits.”

Gabe smacked his forehead with an open palm as if he’d just had an epiphany. “That’s right. You’re Saint Jesse, who’s never once had an impure thought about an off-limits woman.”

Jesse growled. There was one woman who popped instantly to mind—Lanie, Mara’s best friend from high school—and it pissed him off. “I’d never act on it.”

“Bet you’d never have a one-night stand, either.”

“Fuck you.”

“Sorry, I’m married.” He held up his left hand, wiggled his ring finger, then flipped the bird before replacing his hand on the steering wheel. “So, tell me, Saint Jesse. You call up every woman you’ve ever slept with to make sure you didn’t have an oops? Can you say with 100 percent certainty there are no other little Jesses wreaking havoc somewhere out there? No? Huh, imagine that. And, wait. If I remember your dossier correctly, your son came along a few months before you married your ex. Some saint you are.”

“That’s different.”

“Because we’re talking about Mara,” Gabe concluded.

“Yes.” And, yes, he realized how ridiculous that double standard was, but he’d always felt more like her big brother than her cousin and had done his best to keep her safe. “Mara’s always been…fragile, especially after her father died and her mother married Ramon. She was cut off from our family, made to change her last name, and she just went along with it all. She doesn’t have the courage to stand up for herself, and before my uncle died, her brother and I promised to look out for her. I kept that promise as best I could right up until I invited Quinn—” He stopped, shook his head. “Goddammit. I can’t even say his name now without wantin’ to punch somethin’. I invited him and all of his fucked-up issues into her life.”

Gabe stayed silent for three long minutes until Jesse instructed him to turn down Mara’s street. He pulled to the curb several houses down from Mara’s, shut off the car, and turned in his seat.

“Okay, listen up, Warrick. I get you. I get why you’re pissed off at Quinn. But you need to pull your shit together, because even as angry as you are you know Quinn is not the kind of guy to shirk his responsibilities. Am I right?”

Jesse wanted to say no. He wanted to remain silent and stubborn on principle alone, but he knew better. Gabe could read people like the Sunday funnies.