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  Copyright © 2017 Anne Leigh

  This is an e-book property of Anne Leigh. All rights reserved, unless permitted by the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. This cannot be reproduced, stored, transmitted, or copied in any way, shape, or form, without the permission of the author.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to peoples living or deceased is purely coincidental. Names, pigments, and characters are figments of the author’s imagination. The author is NOT affiliated with real life government organizations and entities.

  The author respectfully acknowledges all registered trademarks and owners of trademarked products that may have been included in this work of fiction.

  Cover: Mae I Design

  Editing: KMS Editing

  Formatting: Allusion Graphics, LLC

  ISBN E-BOOK: 9781370326099

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty One

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Acknowledgements

  Books by Anne Leigh

  Today, yesterday, tomorrow -

  To my J, I choose you.

  “How much?” The blood tasted bitter in my mouth, but it was nothing compared to the uneasiness brewing in my gut.

  I couldn’t afford to stay in this interrogation room a minute longer. When I’d sent the text to Liam, I was eighty percent sure that he would get it. The remaining twenty was a gamble that he’d get it on time. We were in an airport where there was a lot of people around, that was a plus. Athena had no one with her until either I or Liam could get to her, that was big a negative.

  Flaherty had been gone for ten minutes. Ten minutes too long.

  My hands were tied behind the metal chair, but the knot was becoming loose. “How much did you get paid?” I repeated, watching as rage crept up Sulligan’s face. He was already in the room when Flaherty pushed me inside. I’d gauged him to be in his late fifties with the greying hair, crow’s feet, and deep wrinkles on his forehead. He was of a mixed ancestry, European and African. He was a couple of inches taller than me, but that didn’t matter.

  “We’re just doing our job,” he said, his gray eyes incongruent with his statement. “We got a tip that you’re carrying nuai.”

  I cooled my body down to a point where I could actually function and not kill this son of a bitch who was not only lying to my face, but was also more stupid than the Brits and Americans who went to war in the 1800s because of a goddamned pig.

  “I’m inbound from Sweden.” My voice was flat even with blood dripping from the inside of my jaw. He’d punched me because obviously that’s what he did to everyone who was being interrogated for possible drug possession without giving them their Miranda rights. Yeah, Sulligan was dumb and dumberer personified.

  “Our source was reliable. Your baggage is being checked by the TSA right now and according to our informant, you’re carrying quite a load.” I’d love to wipe the smirk off of his face, but time was a factor.

  “I’d be happy to sit here all day and tell you how nuai and I got acquainted, but honestly, I don’t care about heroin.” Nuai, in the DEA, was seven hundred grams of highly-addictive opium. “Besides, I’m coming in from Europe.” You dumbshit. “And last time I checked, nuai is pretty popular in Southeast Asia.”

  “It doesn’t matter – drugs are everywhere.” Checking his watch, he muttered, “Nuai, chandu, heroin, geroin, ewoyin – it’s all the same shit.”

  Exactly. But you gotta know where the shit comes from. And how often or how rare it would be for an informant to say nuai was in the baggage of an ex-SEAL flying to LAX from Sweden.

  “Look, I’d love to stay here and chat.” I’d given him the latitude of a punch because I didn’t want the other so-called agents to come in and help. “But I need to get outta here.”

  “There’s no way you’re getting out until we’ve checked your luggage and we’re given the all clear.”

  “Got it.” I nodded, lamenting but not really regretting what I had to do. Why they’d tied my hands with a rope to the chair would remain a mystery to me. But a mystery I wouldn’t be here to solve in three…

  Two.

  One –

  “Fuck! What is wrong with you?” Sulligan howled as the edge of the chair I was sitting on hit his temple. I might have smashed it more vigorously than I intended, but hey, I couldn’t control the impact because I was operating on adrenaline.

  “Where are they taking her?” I growled, and threw the mangled knot to the side. The way Sulligan tied me to the chair was pathetic. A toddler could’ve gotten out of it, but I had to bide my time to assess where I was at. LAX was sitting on 1400 hectares of land which would be quite a huge amount of space to look for a hundred thirty five pound woman in plain clothes. I was quartered in a small interrogation room that didn’t have a camera. The non-existence of a camera meant that this interrogation was a pile of cow shit. It was also of great advantage to me because now that the tables were turned, I could get what I wanted from him.

  He was still slumped on the floor, my chair attack surprised him and had him scrambling for his marbles. “Where is she?”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” The words came out fast and that was how denial worked.

  I bent down, crouching over him since he was still on the floor, and I sure as hell was not going to help him up. A hit to the temple can mess up the head in the literal sense. It was the most vulnerable part of the skull and a major artery sits right by it which could fuck you sideways if you were hit in the right spot.

  “Better remember. Fast.” I grabbed his phone from the floor and turned it around so he could see the screen. “In a few minutes this will be ringing again.” I’d timed it, every two minutes someone called. “Do you want to answer it or do you want me to?”

  The implication was high.

  If I answered it, he’d be a dead man.

  Whoever was on the other line clearly did not want me acting as secretary for Sulligan because he was also an accomplice to the plan that they were rolling out.

  “You won’t get out of here,” he choked out since I was now pressing his phone into the left side of his ribs which would be painful as hell. I knew because I’d been in that position. You didn’t go through SEAL training without being pushed to your physical limits, and you didn’t succeed in war if you were a pansy.

  “Oh I am.” I checked my watch, it had been twenty-two minutes since Athena was warm in my arms. There’s nothing that I’d like more than to leave and look for her, but it would be futile since once I was out of this room, Sulligan would be calling his friends and it would only be a matter of time before the real chase began. “Listen, I’d love to chat but I gotta go. Where are they taking her? Be careful or the number of ribs I’m breaking will depend on it.”

  “I don’t know – fuucK!” The pain from the direct blow I gave his ribs would caution him from giving another answer I didn’t like.

  “Those are connected to your sternum.” I pressed on the vulnerable side of his chest. “Another blow would make it very, very difficult for you to breathe.”

  His face was turning a shade of purple, a different hue from the smug red he was exhibiting when he was upright. His brows were now furrowed in pain and
under his shaky breaths, he was cursing the day my mother gave birth to me.

  I placed two fingers between the space of his possibly bruised ribs, it was never acceptable to curse my mother.

  He could barely lift a hand to wave defeat, his hand trembled as he struggled to say, “Look, I don’t know where they’re taking her.”

  Shit and a double dose of fuck.

  Sulligan was on the payroll, but he wasn’t that high up to know the specifics.

  “So they took her?” I asked, it was difficult to say it and even harder to think of what could happen to her. Minutes ago, I had moderate hope that Liam would get to her in time, but now I wouldn’t be cashing on that. While we were on a sojourn in Sweden, El Padre, Felipe’s men, were busy plotting on how to gain control of the situation.

  The nod of his head was a guillotine to mine.

  My head spun and the breath I took was harder than the first. Athena was out of reach. My woman was somewhere out there, alone and scared, and it was my goddamned fault. I had to get out of here. It was imperative that I find her. I’d seen the pictures and heard the stories of what Felipe’s men did to the captured. And it wasn’t a fate I would subject my sunshine to.

  “What do you know?” I retrieved my phone from the table. One signal bar was cataclysmic at this point, but I had to try so I sent a message to Liam.

  “They’re not going to harm her,” he said quietly as he tried to sit up. “They said they’re not going to touch her. They’ll release her as soon as they get what they want.”

  “Sure.” I flexed my jaw, trying to contain the anger lurking just under the surface. I could be angry, but it didn’t do shit in the situation. “And that’s why all of El Padre’s preys have fairy-tale endings.”

  “El Padre?” The shock in his face wasn’t for show.

  “Who did you think you were working for?” Christ, the dumb shits that the DEA hired were incomparable. “Disney?”

  “No…” He shook his head and moved a hand to get his phone. “Flaherty said it was a routine job, that they wanted the girl for questioning and she’d be released…”

  “Yeah. That worked quite well with me.” I looked at my phone and there wasn’t a response. “What else did they say?”

  He leaned against the wall for support and said, “I heard Flaherty say that they better not hurt her or he’ll blow everything out of the water.”

  So, even when Flaherty was obviously in charge of the ops here at LAX, he also knew the repercussions of what a young American woman’s capture and death would look like for his agency. I didn’t care about his motives. All I cared about was that Athena’s ass was safe right now because of it. I wanted to wring the fuck out of Flaherty and Sulligan’s necks, but I’d do it after I got her back.

  Because there was no question, I would find her.

  And I would make everyone pay.

  “So, El Padre’s the mastermind of all of this?” Sulligan’s eyes clouded with despair. If word got out that he was on El Padre’s payroll, his career would be gone the minute the news went out. I doubted that as dumb as he was, the demise of his career wasn’t something he traded for cash off the side.

  I moved and stepped over the chair. “The thing with free cash is that it’s not always free, Sulligan. Someone else is paying for it, and this time, it looks like you’re working with DEA’s Public Enemy Number One. You better find another job. Quick.”

  “I didn’t think Felipe was involved in this,” he confessed while rubbing the side of his chest. The pain from his injured ribs was infinitesimal to the fallout this would bring to his career.

  And I would bring him down.

  There was no question about it and it wasn’t up for discussion.

  The second Sulligan and Flaherty let those men touch Athena, they were doomed. They were about to face reckoning along with the corrupt agents of the DEA because this operation wasn’t the first of its kind. There might have been smaller ones, but they were the roaches that wreaked havoc in the house that was supposed to protect the public from illegal drugs and trafficking.

  I shook my head and said, “You brought this on yourself. Was it for the money? For the luxury car? For the house in the canyons or the rolling hills? I don’t give a shit. If Athena’s harmed in any way, the fall of your career will be the least of your problems, so if I were you, I’d start praying.”

  I took my jacket from the fallen chair and noticed the Pokemon sticker that Athena must’ve stuck on my jacket during our flight. I hardly noticed it then, but now, it was the biggest thing in my line of sight.

  Wherever you are, Athena, I will find you.

  There’s no way I’d let those motherfuckers steal my life, my sonnenschein, from me.

  By the time I got out of the interrogation room, I knew it’d been way too long.

  The bastards who had Athena would be gunning it out of LAX as soon as they’d grabbed her. If I looked back, I should have –

  But I did not live in retrospect.

  I left her, not by fucking choice, but because it was the best case scenario for her.

  She was safest around a public area, where cameras were around. If she had gone with me into the interrogation room, there’d be less of a chance of eyes on her. Less eyes meant shit could go downhill fast and I’d have no way of getting to her. It took every ounce of my will power to leave her, but I didn’t decide on arbitraries.

  Athena being captured was not arbitrary. It was a direct cause of my actions; my inability to protect her when it counted because I was blindsided. I didn’t foresee that the enemy had the plans ready to be engaged and once such plans were locked, it was too late for me to counterattack.

  I strode out of the long hallway, passing the Authorized Access Only sign. There were no guards in sight, or if there were, they were probably called off by my DEA ‘friends’ who wanted to interrogate me in private for the least amount of blowback.

  My jacket hid the dried blood that had splattered all over my shirt. I could care less about my appearance, but I didn’t want to stand out either. I passed an old couple who were looking at the departures/arrivals screen. The lady, who was holding on to her husband’s arm, asked, “Son, can you tell me what time Cathay Pacific from Singapore arrives? I forgot my glasses and my husband’s eyes are just as useless.”

  I had to go, but I quickly glanced at the screen. “It says fourteen fifty – two fifty five, ma’am.”

  “Thank you, my dear. Our daughter’s arriving and she’s bringing her fiancé whom she met in Asia and we’re so excited.” The older man who had a cane on his left arm, harrumphed, “Excited? Dolly, I don’t know what corn you’ve been eating but I sure as shit ain’t happy to hear that Mary is shacking up with a boy she’s met for three weeks.”

  While I would have stayed for the conversation, I really had to go. Time was ticking, and it bugged the shit out of me that Liam hasn’t answered my texts. Was the phone signal that crappy here?

  Excusing myself from the old couple who were now full-on fighting about the guy their daughter was bringing home, I pressed the green button on my phone.

  Ring.

  Riinggg.

  Dammit.

  On the fifth ring, Liam picked up.

  “Hey. Two minutes at the United Airlines passenger drop-off.” It was his ops voice. We were both fueled by our military blood. The less words spoken, the faster we could achieve our objectives.

  He must’ve scoped out the area because I was standing at the United Airlines checkpoint within a minute.

  I recognized the car whizzing past traffic because it was mine and because the person driving it was a lunatic who I was only too happy to call my friend.

  My car stopped inches away from the curb and I hopped into the passenger seat.

  I spoke up as soon as Liam hit the gas, “Triangulate the area. They can’t be that far. Whoever took her had everything planned. They were waiting for us at arrivals. They’re a bunch of DEA crooks, deep in the pockets of El Pad
re. I should’ve seen it. Anticipated their moves. I can’t do squat about the past, but we gotta get her back, Liam. There’s no other alternative. We gotta get her back.”

  The implication of what could happen to Athena didn’t need to be voiced. Liam and I – we’d seen the depravity of humans, the worst of the worst. We’d been thrown in the deserts of war, in the battlefields where ideologies were lost and the realities of the struggle for survival emerged. Nothing bonded brothers more than braving the horrors of war together. So I didn’t need to tell him that to the men who took Athena, she was merely a casualty. She meant nothing to them and because of that, they could pull the trigger on her without thinking of what a world without her might be like.

  Liam rounded the corner and got on the 405 just as his phone started ringing.

  He pushed the button and Tony was on the speakerphone.

  “You got Webb?” Tony’s question was hurried.

  “Yeah,” Liam responded, maneuvering the car to the left as the traffic started to build up on our right.

  “I’m here, Tony. Any updates on where she’s at?” She is the only she that mattered.

  “Hiya there, boss. Glad you’re out.” Tony sounded off, but I didn’t respond. Now was not the time to be jovial when my girl was somewhere out there, alone and helpless.

  “Liam asked me to check the cameras ASAP and because of it, I’m able to tail the kidnappers. Apparently, L.A. hasn’t taken down all the cameras in the intersections because I’m watching these goons drive their SUV recklessly. I’m sending you the live feeds now….” I heard clicking noises and grunts, “Patching you in three, two, one…”

  On cue, my phone started showing a live video of a Lincoln Navigator speeding through the 710 freeway. At this time, traffic was moderate so the CalTrans freeway cameras revealed that whoever was driving the vehicle was an expert L.A. driver and he was going to be a dead man soon.

  My hands clenched my phone. No visuals of Athena could be seen. She was either drugged or bound and gagged in the back or both.

  “Motherfuckers,” I hissed as I saw the SUV heading for the exit. “They’re heading to the shipyard. Tony, you got eyes on them?”