Chapter 2

January 8th

2:14 P.M.

How soon was too soonto lose your mind after being kidnapped?

There was no such thing.

Right?

At least Scarlett hoped so because she was already dangerously close to losing her mind, and she'd only been here for …

Who knew how long.

But it couldn't be all that long.

Or she was praying it hadn"t.

Whatever she'd been drugged with had knocked her out completely, long enough for her to be transported from her home to this dungeon.

Yep.

An actual dungeon.

It was like she had stepped onto the set of a movie. The walls were made of stone as were the floors. There were no windows, and it was simultaneously cold and stuffy. There were dark stains on the stone that she didn"t have to use her imagination to figure out where they'd come from. Three of the four walls of her prison cell were stone, and the fourth—the front one—was made of metal bars that ran from the floor to the ceiling.

Trapped.

No way out.

Panic bubbled up inside her, coming out in a hysterical laugh.

See.

Losing it.

Had to be.

Because all she could think about was her childhood and her parents' "training exercises". While they were both in the military and away on deployments more than they were home, when they were home, they liked to teach their kids how to survive once they joined the military themselves. Which they had believed was a foregone conclusion.

Only she and her twin brother, Zander, hadn"t wanted to join the military.

Living with their grandparents until they died when she and her brother were thirteen, they had then been put in foster care. Their parents weren"t going to give up the careers they loved just because somebody had to raise their kids.

In an effort to finally gain their approval—and by extension, their love—Zander eventually caved in to the pressure and joined the Army. Smart, hardworking, dedicated, and loyal, her brother excelled and became a member of the elite Delta Force.

Eighteen months had passed since her brother had been killed in action.

Leaving her all alone in the world.

Now, she was even more alone.

Imprisoned here without her team, without her Prey family. Neither her parents nor her grandparents would be impressed that she had wound up working with a whole bunch of military types. In their minds, she was just proving how weak she was. All those men and women had served their country, fought to protect the innocent, to eliminate evil, and she sat in a nice, air-conditioned lab doing work they would believe was beneath her.

More light suddenly filled the dimly lit cell she was locked in, and the sound of footsteps told her someone was coming.

Time to face the music.

Scarlett prayed some of what her parents had taught her more than a decade ago had managed to stick.

Because she was going to need every ounce of strength and training she'd ever had if she was going to survive.

You sent the text to Lucy. She knows you"re in trouble. Prey will come for you. They never leave anyone behind. They'll come. All you have to do is stay alive until they get here.

The mental pep talk did little to encourage her, and by the time two men appeared outside her cell, she was shaking so hard that her teeth were chattering.

Way to show you"re not afraid, Scar.

Funnily enough, her rebuking herself rather than encouraging herself calmed her enough to control the worst of the shaking.

She did know that Prey would come for her. They'd scour the world for her. Eagle Oswald himself—retired SEAL and founder and CEO of Prey Security—would call on every single contact he had to find her and bring her home.

That was what family did.

They didn"t abandon you, treat you like you were a nuisance, get angry that you wouldn't live your life according to the plan they had for you, and then disown you. Her Prey family would never turn their backs on her.

Not for anything.

Knowing that meant she could face the two men who had unlocked her cell and stalked toward her. Just because she didn"t work in the field didn"t mean she didn"t recognize the look in their eyes. They were excited to have a prisoner and looking forward to hurting her.

This was the first time she'd seen anyone since she woke up on the floor inside this bare little cell. Now that she got a good look at the men, she realized with a sinking feeling of hopelessness that she knew who they were.

The tattoos.

A gun surrounded by a ring of sticks of dynamite placed in the hollow at the bottom of their throat.

These men were Raul Castillo's men.

Raul Castillo was a notorious weapons trafficker. He had money and power, and he lived deep in the Mexican jungle surrounded by his own army. While he hadn"t specifically been on Prey's radar in an active case, he was wanted, and she knew Eagle would love to add him to one of Prey's success stories.

Why had Raul had her abducted?

Did he intend to use her to force Prey's hand to get something he wanted?

That seemed unlikely.

If the man wanted to blackmail Prey, there were better people to abduct to do it than her. One of the Oswald kids would cause a much bigger wave if they were taken. Then again, if one of the Oswald little ones were taken, the fury of Prey would be ignited much greater than by taking her.

Two meaty hands grabbed her arms, one of them closing around the gunshot wound she'd gotten back at her house.

Pain screamed down from the wound, and Scarlett had to clamp her teeth together to stop the scream from escaping and giving these men exactly what they wanted.

They wanted her in pain. They would relish her suffering. The only leverage she had was to pretend she was unaffected by all of this.

Sure, easy, Scar, you can totally convince these men you"re a tough girl. They'll totally believe it.

Rolling her eyes at herself only reinforced her belief that she was the opposite of tough and had already succumbed to panic and fear and lost her mind.

"Where are you taking me? Why am I here?" she asked, aiming for haughty but failing miserably.

Ignored by the two men confirmed her belief that she was nothing but the weak, pathetic mess her parents had always accused her of being. She couldn't survive whatever they had planned for her.

Turned out she wasn't taken far from her cell, just walked past a few more cells, all of which were empty as far as she could see, into a room at the end of the passageway. A chair sat in the middle of the room, blood stains beneath it. Hanging on the wall was a range of implements designed to torture someone.

Panic got the best of her, and any pretense that she could do this flew out the window as she struggled.

"No, please. Don't put me in the chair. I don't know why I"m here, I don't know anything. Just let me go and I won"t tell anyone you kidnapped me," she begged.

Of course, she was ignored, and despite her desperate struggles, she was easily shoved into the chair. Metal cuffs locked around her wrists and then her ankles, securing her to the torture chair.

Tears streamed down her cheeks. She tried to fight against the cuffs, knowing it was pointless as she continued to plead for her life. "Let me go. Please. I haven't done anything, I don't know anything, I just want to go home. Please. Please. Let me go home."

"I do so love it when a lady cries," a voice spoke, and Scarlett looked through her tears to see Raul Castillo himself standing in the doorway.

Dressed in black suit pants with a crisp white shirt rolled up to his elbows, he looked completely out of place in this torture chamber.

Begging was pointless.

It would only turn him on more.

Still, Scarlett couldn't seem to stop herself. "Please, I just want to go home. I don't know anything, I didn"t do anything, I don't understand why I"m here."

"On the contrary, you know exactly what I"m after," Raul told her as he closed the short distance between them, stopping right in front of her.

That made zero sense.

What could she possibly know that would be useful to a man who dealt in weapons?

She was a lab geek. She ran forensics for Prey, and she and her team worked on various side projects out of pure interest.

"I … I … don't … I don't understand," she said, no longer able to catch her breath as she began to hyperventilate. Panic clawed inside her, squirming and wriggling through her body as it took control of her.

This couldn't be happening to her.

It couldn't.

"You're here because of the Reactivator," Raul told her.

Scarlett froze.

Because of the Reactivator?

That made no sense.

More tears flooded her cheeks. "I don't understand, the Reactivator isn't a weapon." The opposite in fact. It was a drug she and her team had been working on for almost two years. There were several aspects of it, but basically, it was designed to help injured soldiers survive in the field. The drug worked to slow bleeding, encourage faster healing, dull pain, and add extra adrenalin to the patient's system to keep them on their feet.

While nowhere close to being finished and ready for trials, Scarlett was hopeful the drug would indeed end up doing what it was designed to.

Meaning it would be a game-changer.

But it wasn't a weapon.

So why was Raul Castillo interested in it?

"I want that drug, Ms. Madden. Not only is it worth a fortune for those who intend to use it as you had planned, but it could also be engineered in reverse to make a weapon that would inflict unimaginable suffering."

Technically, that was true, but it would take years to create a drug that would do that, it wasn't as easy as Raul was making out, you didn"t just make it in reverse. Even aside from that, there was no way she was going to give this man the formula for the Reactivator. Athena Team had created it to do good, not to be sold to the highest bidder and used against the people they'd wanted to help.

Bad news for her.

She wasn't telling him how to make the drug which meant all those torture devices hanging from the walls were ones she would become intimately acquainted with.

A wicked grin filled Raul's face as he followed her line of sight. "Oh, I'll use every one of those on you if I have to. Sooner or later, you'll talk. Pain is a very powerful motivator."

With that, he reached out toward the ragged hole in her arm and pressed his thumb into it.

Agony burned through her body, and Scarlett couldn't hold back an ear-piercing scream as her body tried instinctively to get away from the pain.

Only there was nowhere to go.

How was she going to do this?

January 10th

7:12 P.M.

His mood had been getting progressively worsesince he walked into the briefing room and found out the woman he hadn"t been able to get out of his head was a traitor to her country.

Like father like son.

Okay, so his father hadn"t fallen for a traitor, but then again, Tate had always had a penchant for outdoing everybody around him.

At first, as a kid, it was because he always felt like he was competing for his parents' attention. As an only child, one would assume all attention would be focused on him, but his parents' love for one another was so big, so deep, so powerful that they had a tendency to get caught up in it and forget about everyone else.

Including their son.

Then, it had been about trying to pull his dad out of the depths of the grief-filled depression he had gotten stuck in after losing his wife. Only eight at the time, little Tate had been afraid of losing the only parent he had left and thought if he was stronger, smarter, more helpful, and more obedient than any other kid around, his dad would have to notice and be a dad again.

After that, it was because he needed the self-reassurance that he was worthy. That just because his parents loved each other more than they loved him, and his dad couldn't get over losing his wife, he still had value.

That determination and single-minded focus had served him well. He'd graduated high school early, then college, then worked hard to make it through training and become a SEAL. Not an easy feat, and one he was proud of.

But all the determination and single-minded focus in the world couldn't stop him from falling for a woman just like the one who had finally pulled his dad out of his hole of depression.

A liar.

A betrayer.

A backstabber.

A selfish, self-absorbed woman who didn"t care who she hurt as long as she got what she wanted and was fully prepared to throw anybody under the bus.

At least his father's ex-wife was nothing but a lowlife drug dealer. After getting his father hooked on drugs, when she got caught dealing, she shoved all the blame onto him. Spending all his time high, his father had been unable to properly defend himself and was now serving a ten-year prison sentence while his scheming, lying, now ex-wife claimed she was nothing but a poor, abused spouse.

Tate wasn't pretending his father didn"t have faults, but he wasn't abusive.

At least his former stepmother had only wiggled her way out of a drug trafficking charge, unlike the woman he hadn"t been able to forget. She was prepared to backstab her own team and sell something that could have been used for good to a weapons dealer who was indirectly responsible for thousands of deaths.

There was not a doubt in his mind that right at this second, Scarlett Madden was currently sitting in Raul Castillo's jungle mansion relaxing and enjoying herself, believing that she had gotten away with it.

Well, she was sadly mistaken.

They would take her down.

Hewould take her down.

And once she was in custody, he would personally take it upon himself to make sure she was punished to the fullest extent of the law.

Although he'd rather she got the punishment all traitors deserved.

Death.

Sitting in a jail cell for the rest of her life was too good for someone who would take a drug that could mean the difference between life and death to soldiers in the field, and sell it to someone who would find a way to use it against her country.

The last two days had been spent trying to get a location on Raul Castillo's jungle mansion. They had an approximate location, but the man was rich, the kind of rich that afforded him the benefits of being able to pay off anyone he liked, including law enforcement and politicians.

When he wasn't buying people off, he was ruling through fear, and no one was willing to give up the man's exact location.

Not that he and his team wouldn't find it.

Prey were helping, too, even if they didn"t seem to want to believe what was right in front of their faces. It wouldn't be the first time they'd had a traitor in their midst. In fact, Fox himself had almost lost his now-wife Evie when a traitor at Prey gave up her location when she was hiding from a mob boss who wanted her dead.

"We might have a lead on Scarlett's location," Spider suddenly announced.

Like a switch had been flipped, the room suddenly went completely silent. Nobody even moved.

"Where is she?" he asked, breaking the spell. He wanted to get the hell out there and start looking for the woman who had fooled them all. Tate wouldn't be able to relax until she was sitting in a jail cell somewhere. Knowing she was out there, had maybe already received her payment from Raul and disappeared to some tiny corner of the world where she thought she would be safe, was eating him alive.

She'd be wrong though.

If it took him the rest of his life, Tate would hunt her down and see that she was made to face the sins she had committed.

While his team never took their eyes off Spider, all the Prey people turned to shoot him glares. He was prepared to take their frustration, he got it. They were upset, they'd been blindsided here, just like he had been when his father had called him from jail. But he wasn't the bad guy. That was Scarlett. And it was the job of all of them to find her and see that she was punished for her choices.

"We compiled all the data we have on Raul Castillo, and we've managed to narrow it down to a fifty-square-mile section of jungle in central Mexico," Spider replied tightly. It was clear he didn"t like this, but like it or not, it was happening.

The cards had already been dealt by Scarlett herself and now they all needed to scramble and play their hands.

That was all he needed to hear.

Now he and his team could get out there. Shouldn't take them all that long to clear an area of jungle that size. Wasn't like he could imagine a man as wealthy as Raul Castillo living in some tiny little hut that would be hard to pick up.

Already pushing back from the table, he nodded. "We'll keep you updated."

"Wait," the brunette he knew was Cassidy said, also shoving away from the table. "You can"t go out there like that, like you"re about to take down a terrorist."

"Scarlett didn"t do what that email implies," the green-eyed blonde, Ella, agreed, also standing up.

"You don't know her like we do. There is zero way she would do this," the blue-eyed blonde, Lucy, quickly added. "Scarlett is good, sweet, and kind. She has the biggest heart ever and truly cares about people."

Looks could be deceiving.

Tate knew that better than most.

He had actively encouraged his father to pursue a relationship with the woman who wound up destroying his life. That was guilt he would have to live with the rest of his life, and if Athena Team tried to get in the middle of this, they, too, would have to live with the guilt of knowing they contributed to what Scarlett had set in motion.

"I get it. You guys are close. But sometimes we don't see what"s right in front of us," Tate said gently because he truly did understand where they were coming from. "But facts are, there is a dead man tattooed with Raul Castillo's mark in her apartment, killed with her weapon, and an email that suggests she's selling the Reactivator to the weapons dealer."

"But she texted me that she needed help," Lucy protested.

"Or she was trying to set up an alibi not knowing about the email that had been found," he suggested. "Likely, she hoped everyone would believe she had just been kidnapped, and while they would look for her they would eventually give up. Maybe she has a whole plan to eventually fake her death. I don't know. None of us do. But what we do know is Scarlett is tangled up with Raul Castillo. That fact is indisputable."

"Scarlett said you were a real jerk," Ella muttered. "She still has no reason to do any of this."

"Actually, she does," he countered. Over the last forty-eight hours, he'd gathered every bit of intel he could about his target. And what he'd learned suggested Scarlett did indeed have reason to sell the drug to the enemy. "Grew up abandoned by her parents who prioritized military careers over her and her brother. Grandparents, also military, were strict and uncompromising. Placed in foster care after their deaths when neither parent would give up their career. Then she lost her brother, who also abandoned her to join the military only a few months after you began working on this drug. I'd say if anyone has a reason to dislike the military and sell a drug that could save the lives of soldiers it would be Scarlett Madden."