On Her Master's Secret Service (41 page)

Not if he had a second’s concern. It twisted him up. The need to avenge her was right there, a fire in his belly, but he had to put her first this time. “I can’t.”

A savage grin crossed Sean’s face. “I think you should let me do it. It’s been a long time since I got to kill someone.”

“You killed a couple of people not an hour ago.”

Sean shrugged. “Fine, it’s been a long time since I killed someone who mattered.”

“Are we killing the fed, too?” Jake asked. “Adam said that sedan was rented by Warren Petty.”

So this was the place. “As much as I hate to say it, we probably need the fed alive.”

To question. For a really long time. He couldn’t even bring himself to call Warren by his name. He was the fed, the man who had sentenced his wife to hell on earth.

“We need to get closer.” Sean studied the scene.

“We need to make sure they don’t take off. Murdoch, can I trust you with what will very likely end up being a suicide mission?”

Murdoch still looked a little pale, but he stepped up. Alex’s first instinct was to shoot the big guy between the eyes, but then he’d actually looked at those eyes. Regret. Hollowness. Alex had seen that look in the mirror every day for five years. Maybe Sean was right and the kid really had been following orders, trying to redeem himself.

Why the hell else would Warren have left him for dead? He’d seen the wound on Murdoch’s chest. That had been a kill shot, one he’d watched Warren take several times before over the course of his career.

“Yeah. Anything you need.” Murdoch had turned into a needy puppy. But he was a needy puppy who seemed to be very comfortable with firearms.

“I need you to make sure that plane can’t lift off.” He couldn’t risk Eve being taken out of the country.

Murdoch nodded. “Do you want me to kill the pilot or blow up the plane? I can do either. I brought some
C4
.”

Of course he had. Sean and Jake’s new puppy was a little deranged. “Don’t blow up anything unless my wife is safe. Then go fucking crazy, man. But I need Evans alive.”

He couldn’t believe he was saying it, but Evans was the only one who could verify what Alex thought he knew—that Petty was dirty and his brother was potentially very dirty. Alex didn’t buy that Petty was the one who had the affair with Carmen. Oh, but he knew Eddie. Eddie had always loved younger women, and Petty had spent most of his life covering for his brother.

This time he’d gone too far. Alex couldn’t allow Eddie to run for the presidency. He had to take him down. For Eve. Because she would want him to do the right thing, and the right thing was to protect their country from a man who would abuse its highest power.

But damn he wanted to kill the fucker.

“Can I kill my boss?” Murdoch asked.

Again, he heard Eve’s gentle voice. She would ask him to do his job, to be the law and not vengeance. Even when vengeance would feel so fucking good. But Eve was all that mattered now. “Not if we can take him alive. I think he’ll look damn good in prison orange.”

And he would likely make some new friends. Very intimate friends. Yes, prison might be better than killing Petty.

Where was his wife? God, he wasn’t going to be able to breathe until he saw that she was alive.

“I can avoid the cameras.” Murdoch said. He pointed to them. They seemed stationary. “I can hit the wheels as they roll out. They can’t take off if I take out a couple of wheels.”

“Do it. Jake, go with him.” No one got a jump on Jake. And Jake could keep track of the puppy. “Use him as a human shield if you need to. And Murdoch, Warren Petty is not your boss anymore.” He used the words the kid would understand. “I’m your commanding officer, and there will be fuck-all hell to pay if you fail in this operation.”

“Yes, sir.” Murdoch’s hand started up as though the salute was ingrained in his very being. He managed to stop, but only just.

He and Jake started off across the field, moving with ease and avoiding the cameras.

“She’s in there.” Sean stood next to him. “She’s alive. I know it. We need to get close enough to figure out how many men he has with him.”

He needed to walk into that hangar and shoot up every single man who came between him and his wife. He brought the binoculars back up to his eyes, searching all around. There was the airplane hangar. It looked like it would hold one, maybe two planes. “Has Adam figured anything out about this place?”

Sean looked at his phone. Alex had asked Adam to text Sean with any information he could come up with. “It’s a reptile farm. It looks like one of Evans’s contacts bought it a couple of years back. They sell alligator skins to make shoes and bags. Along with all the creepy crawlies, they’ve got the airstrip and nine hundred acres of citrus and berry farm. Shit. According to Adam,
Bartwell
isn’t selling fruit anymore, but they have bought a metric shit ton of fertilizer.”

And fertilizer meant something to a man like Evans. It meant bombs and death and destruction. At least they knew what he’d been up to.

“We have to find his stash and figure out what his target was.”

Sean’s eyes widened. “If my math is right, he likely had more than one target. Even if we shut down this site, who knows how many more he has? This is bigger than just you and Eve. We can’t let him get out of the country.”

No. They couldn’t, but he also couldn’t kill him. “They have to have her inside the hangar. We need to sneak in, get her out, and then deal with the rest of the situation. Ian’s calling in his contacts.”

They had to go around the feds because he couldn’t trust that Petty would have friends who could take out Evans before he could talk. Ian was trying to talk to some of his contacts at Homeland Security for backup, but for now they were on their own.

In the distance, he watched Jake and Murdoch approach the hangar. Jake turned around and held up two fingers.
Two cameras.
He clenched his fist.
Stationary.
The cameras only watched the doors, didn’t swing or move to catch what was happening in the parking lot.

“I’m going in. Take a position.” He gripped his SIG, checking the clip.

Sean stepped up beside him. “Uh, I think I should follow you. I’m not sending you in there alone.”

He needed to make some things clear to his friend. “You’re not sending me in there at all. This is my operation and I need you in a sniper position.”

Sean’s jaw firmed stubbornly. “I’ll text Jake and get his ass back here.”

Alex shook his head. There was no time. He needed them both to do the jobs he’d assigned them. “I can’t trust Murdoch. Jake is the last line. I won’t let that fucker leave with Eve. I’m going to try to sneak in and get Eve out. Then the rest of you can do what you need to do. I’ll be taking care of my wife.”

He had no idea what had already been done to her. Had Evans gotten his hands on her again? Had he beaten her? Raped her? His heart ached at the thought of his precious wife brutalized again, but he knew one thing would change this time. This time she would be in his arms and he would do whatever it took to bring her back to life. He would give up anything to hold her and love her again.

“Alex, you don’t want to take down Evans yourself?”

He wanted to eviscerate the fucker. “Eve is the only important thing here.”

Sean put a hand on his arm. “Get your wife. I’ll take care of bringing in Evans and Petty. Alex?”

“Yeah?”

“When everything is out in the open, we can handle them both together.”

A nice, quiet assassination. A little weekend project to share with his brothers. “Yeah.”

He turned to the hangar. There looked to only be the one door on this side and no windows. It was very likely still open on the garage side. He would have to sneak in that way.

“Alex,
uhm
, I think Eve’s already gotten away herself.” Sean pointed to the northern side of the hanger where the field led down to the alligator farm.

Eve was sprinting across the grass still dressed in her pajamas, but her shoes were gone. He looked through the binoculars. She was bleeding, but she was alive.

He had to get to her. Where was she going?

He heard a loud yell and then four men ran out of the hangar, pursuing his wife.

“Take them out, Sean.”

Sean gave him a predatory grin and then hoisted the scoped rifle up. “With pleasure. What the fuck is she doing? Does she know what that is?”

Alex’s heart nearly stopped because his wife ran into the enclosure. She would be surrounded by vicious predators.

Without another thought in his head, Alex took off running.

* * * *

Eve’s hands started to shake as she looked around. Nausea rolled. She really didn’t like reptiles. Why the hell had someone willingly put a freaking pit of goddamn alligators right in the middle of a very nice field? Whoever did it, they were stupid, out-of-their-mind assholes who deserved to die and very slowly.

She held as still as possible as a gargantuan gator moved past her, his wicked looking claws sinking into the mud as it crawled to the pool portion of her own private hell. The late-afternoon sunlight shone on the creature and its pitch-black eyes. Those eyes were dead, nothing like life in them. It was an eating machine that had climbed right out of the dinosaur age.

She’d seen eyes like that before. Michael Evans had dead eyes, too.

“Hey, princess, do you like our little friends?”

Her pursuers stood just outside the enclosure. There were four of them, and now they appeared to be in no hurry to drag her back. These men were obviously Evans’s thugs. They were dressed for work in jeans and T-shirts, one of which had an oil stain on the front. They had likely been pulled away from their mechanical duties to run down the prisoner.

“You know, I heard those gators like to feed at twilight,” one said. He’d holstered his weapon, his hands on his hips as though just waiting for a show. “They get a little aggressive when they scent blood, too.”

She had no idea what alligators would and wouldn’t do. She’d never expected to be close to one.

A scream leapt from her throat as she felt something scaly scratch across the back of her leg. A gator’s tail swished behind her as though she was a fly it was trying to warn away. She jumped, but came down hard on her ankle and fell in the mud, landing right in front of another monster.

A horrible hissing sound filled the air as the gator’s jaws opened, and she could smell fetid, rotten air.

The men outside the enclosure laughed as she scrambled away.

They were everywhere. So many of them. Fear threatened to choke her, but she forced herself up. They weren’t attacking. She tried to remember everything she could. These weren’t wild alligators. They were used to being fed by hand. And they were used to easy meals.

She wasn’t going to be an easy meal. The men sent to get her were betting on how long she would last before she begged them to save her.

She wasn’t going to be an easy meal for any of them.

There had to be another exit. Following the perimeter, she found the primary door across the enclosure. Could she make it? Or would they just run around and grab her on the other side? She was trapped and had no idea what to do.
Think, Eve.

There was a shed close to the door, and then she saw it, the weapon she needed. There was an emergency phone on the wall of the shed, likely in case one of the workers got in trouble.

How fast could the police get out here? She wasn’t sure if it would help, but she wasn’t going down without a fight.

“Eve, my darling, I must say, you look very attractive all broken and bloody. You know it’s my favorite look on you, but it’s time to get cleaned up. We’re leaving in fifteen minutes. You don’t want to make your first appearance in South America all covered in mud, do you? After all, my slave’s hygiene reflects on me.”

Evans stood with his men now, Petty and Carlos beside him. He stared at her with a possessive look on his face.

She had to get to that phone. Fifteen minutes. They might not be able to save her, but at least Alex would know which airstrip the plane had taken off from.

And then the man beside Evans jerked as a loud bang cracked through the air. He fell to his knees as a red stain bloomed next to the oil stain on his shirt.

“Fucking sniper!” Evans screamed and everyone turned, guns in hand.

And that was when she saw him. Alex. He was running around the backside of the enclosure, away from the gunfire likely provided by Sean or Jake. Whoever was in sniper position had the higher ground, and another one of Evans’s thugs went down, blood splattering against the screen of the enclosure.

Rapid gunfire broke out, and the door slammed open.

She wasn’t alone with the gators anymore. She had to move. Evans, Petty, and Carlos were taking refuge in the monster pit. Eve ran, trying to sidestep the gators. One hissed her way, but she kept moving, trying to get to the other door. Alex was running for it, and she had to get to him before they got to her.

“Stop right now, Eve!” Evans screamed her way.

“We have to get the fuck out of here.” Panic sounded in Petty’s voice. “Let her go.”

“We can’t let her go. You get her back or I swear to god, I’ll kill you.” Evans was on the ground, staying out of the line of fire.

Alex made it to the door first, kicking his way in. His big body stood in the doorway, his eyes searching for her. He laid down a couple of rounds, forcing the other men to hit the ground.

A high-pitched scream sounded through the enclosure. She glanced back at Carlos. He’d slipped and fell right into a pit of gators, and one seemed to have taken exception. There was a terrible huffing sound that Eve would have sworn she could feel vibrations from and then a nasty snap. “It’s got my hand!”

He began screaming in rapid-fire Spanish.

Alex seemed to dance around the large reptiles. They were restless now. Even she could smell the blood in the air. Their tails had started to twitch, brushing this way and that. Hisses and growls seemed to permeate the very air around her.

Alex grabbed her hand, hauling her close. “Stay calm. If one gets hold of you, punch, kick, and scream. Go for the snout and the eyes.”