Secret Maneuvers (27 page)

There were a lot of things that fell under the ‘too’ category for the girl. Too skinny. I could count every bone in her chest all the way down to her jutting hip bones. The only spare flesh she seemed to have on her body was the little bit of fat that consisted of her breasts and buttocks.

Too scarred. Bright, fresh, red scars overlapped older pink or white ones all over her body. Some were raised and puckered, as if she’d been cut too many times to count by a knife and then poorly sewn up. Other scars were finer and almost strategically placed, as if done in a pattern by a whip or flogger.

Too broken. Those green eyes of hers were dead and empty as she looked back at me. She might be sobbing, but it was a practiced reaction to whatever it was that she knew was coming. The heart and soul of the woman had long since died and fled its capture. All that was left was the physical shell that hadn’t weakened enough to die yet, but wasn’t far from it.

It didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that this girl was proof that Miguel Rivera had, in fact, expanded into the human trafficking business in some manner. It also didn’t take a genius to know that whatever she’d somehow managed to survive, I didn’t want to go through.

Rivera stepped into my view of the girl. “Let’s see if you are still willing to stay silent when it’s an innocent person being harmed for your lack of answers, eh? Or will you play the hero to save her?”

Rivera went to stand in front of the girl, but maneuvered himself, the girl and Luis so that the three of them stood in profile in front of me. He unbuckled his belt and unfastened his pants, barking something at Luis as the girl tried to struggle against the hands holding her. Pushing his pants over his hips, the exotically beautiful drug lord transformed into the hideous beast he truly was by taking his dick in hand, using his other hand to pry the struggling redhead’s lips apart, and then shoving himself so far down her throat that she was forced to gag as her airway was cut off.

Repulsed and horrified by what was taking place, I turned my head and closed my eyes to block it out, but the monster wouldn’t let me.

“Ah, ah, ah, little agent.” His words grunt-like from his ongoing actions. “If you do not keep your eyes on us, then I will give her a new cut for every minute that you look away.”

Reluctantly pulling my eyes upwards, I forced myself to watch the atrocity being performed in front of me. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t watch this poor girl be abused for the sake of keeping my mouth shut. The sounds of her choking, being used, were going to haunt me until the day I died. Opening my mouth to shout my name and stop this, I didn’t get the first syllable out before the room’s door slammed open behind the trio.

Please God, let that be help.

Help hadn’t arrived, though. Another form of hell apparently had.

Rivera and his thug took one look at the amazon beauty that stood glaring at them from the doorway, hands fisted on her shapely hips, and then dismissed her. It seemed surreal to have her standing there, looking like she’d just come from a lady’s luncheon, when in reality she was interrupting the type of brutal assault that probably took place here every day.

The woman seemed furious as she rattled something off in Spanish that I’d never have a hope in hell of understanding. Her hands were waving around in the air as she yelled at Rivera, pointing at him and Luis with the poor girl still struggling between them. The two men were still blatantly ignoring her and, since I’d decided to focus on the dark haired brunette woman dressed in a finely tailored navy blue sheath dress instead of the atrocity, I caught the look flash across the woman’s face as she looked at all of us before her. Despair. She might be furious at Rivera, but she was more upset about the girl being used and the two men were oblivious to it.

She yelled something at Rivera again and he seemed to snap. He lunged for her, grabbing her by the hair roughly, and she started to struggle as he dragged her over towards me. All of this felt like a scene from some horror movie I would cover my eyes from, but the horror in the room wouldn’t let me look away or close my eyes. He pushed the once perfectly coifed woman to her knees just inches from me and laughed. His pants were still hanging carelessly around his hips, but the look on his face as he pulled the woman’s head back as far as it could bend said this was business as usual for him. He could care less about exposing himself in front of us like this because he held the power and obviously that power got him off.

“What will it be, little American agent? Shall I start with this one now, too, or will you tell me what I want to know?” He cranked the woman’s head back farther, laughing when she cried out in pain.

Unable to stomach anymore of the nightmare, a tear slipped down my face. My mind and body were numb from what I’d seen so far and probably from the blood loss, too. Going through interrogation training in a classroom and living through it were two different things. Slice me up like a piece of meat, I didn’t care, but what they were doing to these women, I couldn’t take it anymore.

“Annabelle Roberts. My name is Annabelle Roberts.” My breath hitched as I pleaded, “Please stop hurting them now.”

Rivera smirked. Shaking the woman he was holding, he snarled at me, “Do you know who this is Annabelle? This puta is mi esposa. My wife. The mama of one of my hijos.” He wrapped his free hand around the front of her throat and squeezed, cutting off her airway and screams. “She thinks that just because she birthed me a son, she has the power to tell me what to do.” Looking from his wife to me, he asked, “Do you think that I care about my wife enough to let her boss me around like I’m some weak, little, errand boy?”

I shook my head as I watched his fingers tighten on her skin. Digging into the fragile windpipe brutally. At this point, I would do almost anything to make it all stop. Between what they’d done to the tiny redhead, who was now softly weeping in the background, and Rivera’s wife, I couldn’t handle anymore. Sitting here, tied down and defenseless, bleeding from my cuts, and unable to help them in any way, was killing me.

“Such a smart woman you are, Annabelle.” He moved his hand from her throat where an angry red mark was left behind and used that hand to grab her chin. “In fact, I grow tired of this wife. She forgets how easily a woman can be replaced to give me sons.”

His hands jerked her head quickly in two directions, as a loud pop filled the room, and then he let go of his wife, whose limp body fell sideways to the floor. He’d snapped her neck. His own fucking wife and the mother of one of his children, and he’d snapped her neck like he was a spoiled, little boy who was tired of playing with a toy. Fresh despair washed over me as I stared down at her body in a state of shock. Her body had fallen so close to me that her face was now laying in a small pool of my blood and the sight of it turned my stomach, causing me to gag.

A sharp slap to the face brought my attention back to Rivera who was now standing next to me, staring down with a cold, deadly smile on his face. “We go back to our game, Annabelle. You will watch what Luis and I do to our juguete, or I will start carving her up in small pieces to feed to my guard dogs. Once we are finished, you will finish answering my questions or I will continue carving on you.”

Then I watched in a numb state of terror as the two men did things to that young woman that will scar me for the rest of my life, much worse than the cuts on my body ever would.

Chapter Eighteen

Bobby

“The signal had stopped and held position for the last hour just south of Monterrey. It looks like we’re heading into an area just outside of the Cumbres de Monterrey. It’s a national park outside of the city. I have a hard time believing, though, that they’d keep guns or drugs stashed so close to an area with high civilian traffic.” Chase scratched his chin as he looked up from his laptop screen. It was his tell when he was in deep think mode. “You think they’re just making a temporary stop?”

Riley didn’t bother to look up from where he was concentrating on double checking his weapons and gear to make sure he was ready when the chopper arrived to pick them up, which should be any minute. The man was basically OCD about checking, rechecking and quadruple checking anything and everything on his person before he left for a mission. “I agree. Rivera may be ballsy, but he’s not going to stash his merchandise that close to a national park, or the city of Monterrey for that matter. Even if he’s bought some people off on the local Police Force, there’s no way he could buy off the entire department. It’s the second richest city in Mexico. They’re not desperate for drug money and more interested in making a name in big busts. A bust on Rivera would be the stuff dreams are made of for those guys.”

Belle had been missing now for seven hours. I’d had to call Sheriff Jenkins to track down Seth so that I could stay with the team as we started planning her extraction. It grated my nerves to have to ask the man for help when it didn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that he’d be more than willing to do anything to lure Belle away from me, but Teagan wasn’t here and I didn’t know who else to turn to for help. There was also the seriously sad fact that that man knew my son better than I did. All feelings aside, the facts were that I knew I could trust the man to find Seth and keep him safe until I could bring his mother home.

Not much planning had been done since we were flying blind with little to no information about Rivera’s personal home or life. Also, given the nature of his business, plus his fanatical obsession of staying one step ahead of law enforcement, the information on his Cartel probably covered only a fraction of what he truly had going on. Which was frustrating as fuck since the thought of my girl in the hands of those sadistic bastards was driving me completely insane.

Chase pulled up satellite imagery of the signal’s location as the other seven men of the Ex Ops Team voiced their thoughts on what they thought Rivera and his men may, or may not, be doing while Jaxon stood there analyzing each of us. I didn’t have anything useful to say, so I stood there silently plotting Miguel Rivera’s slow and extremely painful death in my head as I stared at those satellite images. Looking for the perimeter’s weak spots, pin-pointing the area’s best to avoid due to a break in coverage by the trees; scrutinizing every single pixel dot on that screen, looking for the thing that could help me get my girl back.

Though, there wasn’t much to see other than a sprawling house with a smaller guest house a couple of hundred feet away from the main residence, presumably for his personal guards and house staff, and then trees. Lots and lots of trees. Those trees would help give us cover as we snuck up on the house, but it would also help conceal any of Rivera’s men who were guarding the house.

At least the pictures gave us proof that this wasn’t a worst case scenario. This was no compound for the Cartel. There were no high walls to scale or guard towers for lookouts. If anything, it looked like one of Rivera’s private homes. So, on the plus side, we wouldn’t likely be dealing with a hundred or more armed, thug-like soldiers attempting to play G.I. Joe while we were trying to get Belle out alive. On the down side, we would more than likely be dealing with Rivera’s best men because those would be the ones he kept closest to himself for protection. Depending on how well those men were trained, going up against the wannabe army the Cartel had, might have been the easier option.

I was so anxious to get going and get the hell out of there that I was damn near twitching from my toes to my trigger finger. The need to do something, anything, to go get Belle and bring her home safely was riding me so hard it was a miracle I hadn’t gone ballistic on everybody yet. I didn’t want to hear their theories right now on what they might think may, or may not, be happening outside of Monterrey. I wanted to hop on the chopper, fly down to Mexico, put a hole in the center of Rivera’s head, maybe chop him up into a billion tiny pieces to make a point to any other man who thought they could take what was mine, and bring Belle home in the safety of my arms where she belonged.

Fuck everyone’s theories on whether or not they thought this was a temporary stop at the signal’s location. That’s where the trackers stopped and my gut told me that was where Belle was. Fuck their worries about what would or would not be there when we arrived. I’d blow a hole through every man in Rivera’s army if it got me Belle back. I didn’t want to hear their bitching. I wanted to leave. Like right fucking now.

How the hell could I have watched the truck with my woman in it drive away and do nothing to stop it? The very soul that belonged to her should have screamed at me that something was wrong. I should have known she was in that truck and in trouble. Self-loathing and rage were boiling like an acid underneath my skin.

“You paying attention, Baker?” Jaxon barked. I looked over to where he was standing by the private hanger at the airport that Uncle Sam had rented out for us to rendezvous at in case of an emergency. Thank God for Uncle Sam and his never ending back up plans. “We need your head in the game here. I know you’re worried about her, but you’re more of a risk than an asset if you can’t concentrate on what’s going on.”

I glared at my Commander. Did he think he could hold me back from going with the team when it was, in essence, my life that was on the line here? Belle may be the one who’s being held hostage, but if anything happened to her, I would cease to exist. Reverting back to that shell of a human being that had been walking around for the last fifteen years without her. No way was the team going to leave me behind.