Chapter 20

January 19th

2:41 P.M.

How couldthis be happening to her again?

Scarlett lifted her fuzzy head and scrunched her eyes tightly closed as the room spun in sickeningly fast circles all around her.

It wasn't just the lingering drugs in her system that had her head swimming, it was the mass of overwhelming emotions mixed in along with it.

Fear of course, that was topping the list.

Hopelessness, too.

Betrayal. By everyone and everything.

But there was anger there as well.

A whole lot of it.

She was sick of feeling like she wasn't good enough. She was sick of being ignored or shoved aside. She was sick of allowing her self-worth to depend on other people. And most of all, she was sick of people playing games with her life.

There was no way she was going to give Raul Castillo what he wanted.

On principle alone, she'd keep her mouth shut. No matter what he did, she wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of breaking her.

She wasn't breakable.

If life had proved anything to her it had proved that.

Crackable, yes. Bendable, scratchable, chipable, sure. But after everything she had been through, she was still standing, and like Tate had said, she was still willing to put her heart on the line in the hopes of finding what she wanted, what she craved above all else.

So, Raul didn"t get to change that. He didn"t get to break her.

"Whatever happens you can do this, Scar. Believe in yourself. Just because nobody else ever has doesn't mean that you can"t. Doesn't mean you haven't. You got yourself this far. And even though your emotions are telling you to feel betrayed, you know your Prey family loves you. Whatever is going on they're doing their best to save you. Hold onto that."

Pep talk done, she forced away her fear enough that she could open her eyes. The room still felt like it was spinning, but it had slowed down enough that she no longer felt like she was going to throw up.

Blinking her eyes to try to clear her vision, she planted her hands on a wall—which felt like scratchy concrete—and pushed to her feet. As she looked around, she saw her accommodations were even worse than last time. The room was tiny, barely six feet by six feet, the floor was torn linoleum and the walls concrete. There were metal shelves on the walls above her, and she assumed she was in some sort of pantry or storage shed.

The door was wood, and while she was sure it was locked it didn"t look all that sturdy. Still a little wobbly, Scarlett took the two steps to it and immediately reached for the handle. It was indeed locked, but she gathered all her strength and rammed her shoulder into the wood.

Jarring pain speared through her body, and the impact sent her stumbling back, but she was sure she felt a little give in the door.

Not allowing herself to think ahead, of how she'd get out of wherever she'd been taken even if she got through the door, of how she'd find her way back home, because if she did then she'd get so overwhelmed she'd just sit in the corner and shake and cry.

No.

That wasn't what she was going to do.

If she was going to die there then she was going to go down fighting.

Lining up, she slammed her shoulder into the door again.

This time, since she was prepared for the impact, she managed to absorb most of it, and quickly regained her balance, then hit it again and again.

The final time she was rewarded with the door groaning and splintering slightly.

Just as hope began to soar inside her, the door was yanked open and an irritated man stood there glaring down at her. "Did you really think you would get out of Mr. Castillo's house?"

"He knew I was going to try," she shot back. No more was she going to cower. Just because she was terrified out of her mind didn"t mean she had to give in to those feelings. "If he didn"t want me to try to escape, he shouldn't have put me inside such a pathetic excuse for a prison cell."

Shooting her another glare, the man grabbed her bicep and began to drag her along with him. Turned out they were in the back corner of a large garage, big enough to hold at least six cars. There was no time for her to try to get a glimpse of outside or anything that might help her identify where she was being held because she was pulled along to an interior door that led into a laundry room, and then through a house. It was nice, expensively furnished, but not quite as big as the mansion in Mexico.

They ended up in a bedroom, so she guessed this place wasn't kitted out as well as the Mexican mansion and didn"t have its own dungeon and torture room. Of course, it occurred to her to fight, to try to escape, but the man was armed and wasn't alone. Another three had been waiting along with him in the garage, and there was no way she could get away from that many armed and trained men.

After all, she wasn't a superhero.

She wasn't Tate.

Could he find a way to get away from these men?

Probably.

But he was a SEAL, and she was just a scientist with some training that had been forced on her.

Quickly, she shoved away thoughts of Tate. They were not what she needed right now. Since she knew that Raul had already changed his mind about keeping her alive and forcing her to give up the formula, she knew she didn"t have much time. Probably not even enough for Prey to find wherever she was and mount a rescue.

If they even knew she was missing.

Which meant her best bet at making sure she couldn't be forced to talk was to find a way to take herself out of the equation.

That was her plan.

And as she glanced around, she spotted the huge glass doors opening up onto a balcony.

Perfect.

While the four guards were still in the room, no one held on to her, and she knew she might not get another chance.

This was not how she figured on her life ending. She was only in her twenties, she wasn't thinking about death at all. But the bottom line was, she had no intention of giving up the information Raul wanted and she knew she might be forced into it against her will.

Before she could run, the door opened again and Raul stalked in.

Unlike last time, he wasn't all cool and calm and in control. The opposite, he was every bit the menacing weapons dealer he was.

"I"ve had enough of you," he snapped like this was all her fault. But he was the one who had set this in motion by kidnapping her in the first place. "I lost the home I had specially built because of you, and you've been nothing but trouble since. I should just kill you and be done with it, but I"ve invested too much time and money in this, and I don't like to lose. So, you get one more chance to tell me what I want to know or I"m just going to kill you and be done with it."

Yeah …

No.

If she was dying today it was going to be at her own hand.

"I"m not telling you anything, and I"m not going to give you the pleasure of getting to kill me." With that, Scarlett ran toward the door, prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice rather than risk something she and her friends had created for good to be used against them.

As her hands reached the doorknob arms circled her body, dragging her back, away from the only freedom she would find.

"I won"t tell you," she screamed, kicking and thrashing in the man's grip as she was carried toward the bed.

"Then the last few hours of your life won"t be very pleasant," Raul sneered. "You"re going to be injected with the same drug you had the pleasure of trying out last time, only this time my men are going to listen to your pleas. They"re going to give you everything you beg for and more. And if you"re still stupid enough not to tell me what I want to know then they're going to keep injecting you, keep taking you until there"s nothing left. I should warn you, Ms. Madden, that my men won"t be gentle, and you won"t survive it."

At the bed, she was held down by one man as another prepared a vial of the drug that haunted her dreams.

The syringe delivered the drug into her body, and almost immediately, she began to heat inside as arousal took hold. Scarlett wished she had made it to the balcony so she could have ended her life on her own terms and spared herself this horrific death.

January 19th

3:39 P.M.

"I'm not waitingto go in." For Tate it was as simple as that.

Scarlett was in there.

She needed him.

Already she had been through so much. There was no way he was going to wait until nightfall before mounting a rescue op.

Not when he knew that she was already living on borrowed time.

Just because her body hadn"t been found at Walter Gunnerman's house along with his and those of his family didn"t mean that she was even still alive.

They knew that Raul had ordered her death because the bomb the other day was supposed to kill her, and anyone with her. The only other option was that the mole had gone rogue. Not an impossibility, but even if that was true and it was no longer Raul Castillo who was calling the shots, it hardly put Scarlett in a better position.

She was a loose end that needed tying up.

"We don't know how many men are in there, what they're armed with, or even if Scarlett is in there," Rocco said, far too calmly considering the frantic way Tate's heart was hammering in his chest.

"Walter said she would be here," he reminded the man of what they'd found when they had searched a mountain cabin owned by the man and his wife. They'd found Walter's dead body, executed with a simple bullet to the back of the head. Evidence on the bodies of his wife, and three kids, including the daughter Prey and Rocco's team had rescued years ago, suggested that the wife and kids had been held and tortured before being executed along with Walter.

Marks on their wrists and ankles similar to those Scarlett had from being bound, bruising on top of bruising going back several days at the least, wounds that had partially healed along with fresher ones. Their theory was that Walter wasn't the mole but another scapegoat to keep the attention off whoever the true mole was.

This theory was backed up by the fact there was a tiny scrap of paper in Walter's pocket with Scarlett's name on it and an address.

Since there was no way Tate was wasting time trying to figure out if Walter was the mole, and if he intended to lead them into a trap, he had insisted they go and check out the location immediately.

So they were back in Mexico, outside a house in the remote jungles. This one much smaller than the one they'd rescued Scarlett from last time, but just as grand. From their hiding spot in the trees outside the fence, there didn"t appear to be any cars in the driveway, and there were no lights on inside the house.

But this was where the last person to see Scarlett said she was, and he wasn't leaving until he searched it from top to bottom.

"I"m going in with or without you," he told the others. If it cost him his job, so be it, if he wound up court-martialed then he'd deal with it. Whatever consequences he had to suffer he would gladly accept so long as he knew that Scarlett was safe. "Come on, man, you should get me even if they don't," he said to Phantom. "You went off on your own to Timor-Leste to go after Kalee. How can you ask me to do anything less than you did when we're talking about the woman I could fall in love with?"

While in his head he kept telling himself Scarlett was just the woman he could fall in love with, he knew it was more than that.

He was already falling.

Hard and fast.

Knowing that the landing might not be the softness and safety of love, acceptance, and belonging, and instead could be cold, lonely, and unforgiving was terrifying.

But knowing he could lose Scarlett was worse.

This was a leap of faith he had to take. Like it was already written in the stars, Scarlett had consumed him since that very first second, and no matter what had happened, or where things would end, he had to try.

Had to let himself fall.

There was no time to worry about what the landing would be like.

His girl was counting on him.

"We should go in," Phantom agreed, his dark eyes so full of understanding that there was no way Tate couldn't nod in acceptance of his support.

"If it was Caite in there, you'd risk it all," Rex reminded Rocco, whose brown eyes seemed to darken at the thought.

"All right, let's do this," Rocco agreed.

Adrenalin was pumping through his bloodstream, the only thing keeping him on his feet after several days of not more than a couple of snatched hours of sleep here and there. Still, that and fear for Scarlett were the only things he needed to function as he and the rest of his team, and Rocco's team gained entrance to the property.

Unlike last time when bullets had been flying in all directions, this time, it was silent as they breached the perimeter and headed across the manicured gardens toward the house.

Deadly silent.

The kind of silence that had his skin crawling and the hairs standing up on the back of his neck.

That silence continued as they entered the house. It was obvious it had been recently inhabited. A stack of dirty dishes sat on the counter above the dishwasher, the fridge was fully stocked, there was a book, open and upside down, on the table, and a TV was on.

"Blood in a storage room off the garage," Bubba's voice came through the comms.

While there was no way to know for sure that it was Scarlett's blood, his gut told him that it was.

"Sounds coming from upstairs," Ace said moments later.

The only signs of life in the entire house. From the looks of things, it seemed like everyone had left in a hurry, and he couldn't help but wonder whether once again, something had tipped off Raul Castillo that his place was about to be raided.

If he'd fled in a hurry, he had no reason to leave Scarlett alive. He wanted her dead and she wasn't going to give him the intel he wanted.

No matter what he did.

His stomach muscles clenched and twisted at the thought of what Raul would most likely do to her to try to get her to talk before he counted her a loss and eliminated her.

Heading for the stairs, he took them three at a time, no longer concerned that someone was going to start shooting at them or launch any kind of attack. For whatever reason, Raul was gone, and while he was praying that it was Scarlett making the sounds Ace had heard there was every chance it wasn't.

"Tate, get in here. Now," Ace's urgent voice came through the comms.

The tone amped up his fear several notches. "What"s wrong?" he demanded, quickening his pace.

"It's Scarlett," Ace replied.

He could hardly make himself say the words. "Is she …?"

"She's alive. But she's … look I can"t explain, just hurry up," Ace ordered.

Panicking was the last thing he should be doing right now, but it was exactly what he was doing as he reached the top of the grand staircase and headed in the direction of the whimpers and moans he could now hear clearly.

Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw when he located the room where Ace and Scarlett were.

In the middle of the bed was Scarlett. Her skin was flushed, her hair a tangled mess of thick brown waves around her head, her eyes wild.

Ace was trying to approach her and calm her down, but it only made things worse.

It was clear something was wrong with Scarlett, and because she'd confided in him about what Raul had done to her last time he feared he knew exactly what it was.

"Back off," he whispered to Ace as he approached the bed.

"Tate, she has?—"

"I know. I see it," he gritted out as he held his hands out, palms up, and continued slowly approaching the bed. "Scarlett, baby, it's Tate," he said gently, drawing her wild gaze in his direction.

Her hands clawed low on her stomach, and he could only imagine the horror of her current situation. Because not only had she been given a drug to induce an arousal so powerful it was painful for her, but there was a suicide vest strapped to her chest.

"It's going to be okay," he soothed.

"N-no, it's n-not," she stammered, then moaned and pressed her thighs together as her eyes scrunched closed and she began to rock back and forth.

"It is," he countered as he carefully eased one knee onto the bed.

"He wants to blow us all up," Scarlett said through clenched teeth. "You have to leave. Now. All of you." Her eyes opened and latched onto his, pleading with him, but he had no intention of doing as she said.

If Scarlett was blown up in this room today, he was going out with her.

"Like hell, I"m leaving you here. Nothing is going to make me leave your side. Not ever again."