Hunt could see Anna had a thousand questions for him, so he said, “Leila’s mother, Jasmine, is my ex-wife. She left me after I testified at your father’s trial. She’s married to Chris Moon now.”
Anna nodded but didn’t say anything for a long minute.
“You had a family while we were together.” It wasn’t a question, more like a statement of fact.
Still, Hunt replied, “I did, and for what it’s worth—”
“I don’t want to know, and frankly, I don’t care,” Anna said, even though they both knew it wasn’t true. “Can we focus on getting our girls back?”
Sensing they had reached some kind of uneasy truce, Hunt sat down in an armchair facing Tony. “If the Black Tosca kidnapped our daughters, it makes sense she’s the one who ordered the hit on the motorcade too.”
Tony rubbed his face and said, “She called me half an hour ago.”
Why didn’t you lead with that instead of picking a fight? Hunt wanted to physically shake some sense into Tony, but he willed himself not to give in to his frustration. That would be counterproductive, to say the least. Instead he asked, “What did she say?”
Tony hesitated.
“Tell him, or I will,” Anna prompted.
By the tense look Tony gave Hunt, it was obvious that whatever the Black Tosca had told him made him nervous.
“She wants my head,” Tony finally said, making a cutting gesture across his neck.
“So your head for both our daughters?” That didn’t seem like a bad trade to Hunt. Tony probably disagreed. Or maybe not.
“As much as I fucking hate you, Hunt,” Tony said with a disarming sincerity, “I’d be willing to do it to save them.”
For some reason, Hunt believed him.
“But you don’t think she’ll hold her end of the bargain.”
“Do you?”
Hunt shook his head. There was a chance she would, but it would be stupid to bet his daughter’s life on it.
“There’s more,” added Anna, looking at her brother.
The bulging vein in Tony’s neck was now throbbing at a frantic rate. “If someone doesn’t deliver my severed head to her within the next forty-five hours, our daughters will be burned alive.”
Our. Daughters. Will. Be. Burned. Alive.
Tony’s words were like a sledgehammer, beating him down with every syllable. Hunt’s mind whirled. Images flicked at him with tantalizing clarity. He could see Leila, savagely beaten, with a tire full of gasoline around her neck. Only once before had he felt anything like the intensity of the fury now erupting deep inside his gut.
Gaza, 2007. The kidnapping of Cole Egan.
Hunt remembered vividly the events that followed his friend’s abduction. McMaster had been right: to find his friend, he had left carnage in his wake. In fact, he had committed some truly atrocious acts in order to reach Cole before the Hamas terrorists could kill him. In order to make peace with his past, with the things he had done, he’d sworn to himself he would never kill or torture another person in cold blood again.
The promise.
This was why he had left the military and joined a federal law enforcement agency. With the DEA, the rules of engagement were better defined. It was also his hope that conducting antidrug operations in the United States would be less chaotic than hunting down terrorists overseas. On the contrary, the moral and ethical dilemmas he faced almost every day as a DEA special agent were often tougher than the challenges he had faced fighting terrorists abroad.
The delicate touch of Anna’s hand on his knee brought him back to the present.
“We need your help, Pierce, and I think you need ours.”
He slowly lifted his head to look at her. She must have seen something in his expression because her eyes widened, and she froze. A frown appeared, drawing her eyebrows together. She removed her hand from his knee and sat straighter.
“What?” he asked her.
He saw her shiver. “There’s darkness in you that scares me.”
Hunt felt it too, and he embraced it. Whatever the cost, he would find Leila and Sophia.
“Sometimes you need darkness to see the light,” he said, knowing the next forty hours would be pitch-black.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Stafford, Virginia
Pierce Hunt. Text message.