Hearing Rafe’s name fall from the man’s lips brought the fire in her gut straight out her mouth. “Go to hell.”
Bells chimed with the impact of a second slap, and with it came the metallic taste of blood. Penny didn’t care. She spat into his face.
Marco didn’t so much as flinch as he calmly wiped the offending spittle away. And then he was in her face, close enough for her to gag on the stench of his cologne. “You are going to pay both for your interference and for that of your little boyfriend. Now that my father’s out of the way, I’ll make everyone pay and pay dearly.”
At her look of confusion, Marco’s lips slid into a ruthless smile. “Didn’t see the family resemblance until now? Being the son of one of Diego’s whores didn’t warrant me climbing too high in his esteem, but look at me now. Now I’m the one in control. I’m the one with all the power.”
When a nearby door buzzed open, he shoved her through it. “You’ll stay here until I can deal with you appropriately. I suggest you use your time wisely because I haven’t figured how much of it you have left.”
The door slammed shut, leaving her with nothing but a dim light from somewhere in the corner of the room. But it wasn’t until she heard the loud clank of the lock slipping into place that Penny’s resolve turned liquid.
Rafe’s scent still clung to her clothes. His touch still warmed her skin. But he was gone. Forever. Fat tears poured down her cheeks, and the more she pictured his face, the more that dropped in a torrential downpour.
He’d believed in her. He’d taken a chance on her. He’d shown her that some risks were worth taking—no matter the cost. And she wasn’t going to let him down. Fuentes—either of them—would not break her. Lifting her shoulders, she wiped the dampness from her cheeks and took a deep, fortifying breath.
“P-Penny?”
At the soft whimper, Penny’s attention whipped to the back of the room. Shadows clung to the corners, but even in the faint light, the bodies were impossible to miss. Ranging in ages from midteens to younger adults, nearly a dozen women stared back at her. Rumpled and dirtied, their clothes hung off their frames like rags on a hanger, and they all looked to be of Miskito heritage.
Except one.
Red hair, slightly more muted than Penny’s own, stood out from the mass of brunettes. Rachel’s lean runner’s body was gone, leaving behind paper-thin skin and protruding bones that couldn’t have weighed an ounce over a hundred pounds.
“R-Rachel?” Penny stared in disbelief.
Tear streaks marred Rachel’s dirt-encrusted face. She stepped forward on spindly legs, and they gave way, crumpling her slight frame to the floor. “Is that really you? Or am I imagining you?”
Rachel’s tears spurred Penny from her frozen state. She flew across the room. A few of the women scattered nervously in all directions as she dropped to her knees in front of her niece. “I’m here, Rach. You’re not imagining me. I’m here. For you.”
Penny brushed a lock of auburn hair from Rachel’s face. At the sight of her once vibrant, jubilant eyes turned dull and blank, Penny’s heart shattered into a million pieces.
“You shouldn’t have come,” Rachel’s soft voice murmured. “You should’ve left me here, Penn. Now we’re both dead.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Militia guards stalked the periphery of Fuentes’s real warehouse, badass submachine guns propped on their shoulders. They worked in pairs, monitoring the comings and goings of the worker bees loading and unloading supplies to and from a line of waiting cargo jeeps.
Furious didn’t begin to describe how Rafe had felt when he and the team returned to the Mocoron base to find Collins and Penny gone and Logan just coming out of a foggy stupor. Murderous maybe, not simply furious.
The only thing that had kept Rafe from flattening the former sniper to the ground a second time was that Logan was beating himself up good enough for the both of them—and that he’d had the foresight to place a GPS tracker on Collins when the bastard hadn’t been looking.
Thanks to Logan’s quick thinking, the team was able to follow Collins’s and Penny’s footsteps, despite their three-hour head start. Three fucking hours. A lot of shit could happen in that amount of time, but Rafe couldn’t let his mind drift in that direction. He was going to get Penny back—safely—and nothing and no one could help the fucking bastards who got in his way.
No one had ever believed in him like she did. No one had ever challenged his thoughts and beliefs, or his actions, like she did. A five-foot-two-inch temperamental sprite single-handedly made him realize that everything he thought he didn’t want or wasn’t worthy of was his for the asking—and that he deserved it.
And then he walked the fuck away.