Chapter 32

32

Rogue

“ Y ou didn’t get any sleep,” Griffin observed.

Rogue didn’t bother replying as he made his way straight to the coffee pot. He’d tried to sleep. He’d fucking tried. But the thought that Bea might, even now, be in Emiliano’s clutches again, was more than he could bear.

He’d managed to trace the car, a black SUV that had left the garage around the time of Bea’s disappearance, all the way along the canal, to the east of the city. He’d hacked into every camera, public or private, that he could find, following that damned car. Thorne had seen what he was doing and turned a blind eye.

Smart man.

Then Rogue had lost the car. One moment it’d been there, the next it’d been gone. It’d been Griffin who’d pointed out the obvious. There was only one reason they would be heading east. The Antwerp harbor.

There was a still shot on the office wall of the car as it exited the garage, the sun unfortunately striking the glass in such a way as to obscure the identity of the driver. In the back of the car, he thought he could just about make out Bea’s shape, pressed against the side window. Alive . Or at least, she’d been alive when she was taken out of the building.

“Let’s go back to what we know,” Griffin said, his voice eerily calm. “We know Beatriz Cruz was taken against her will.”

Rogue seethed. There’d never been any doubt in his mind.

“Calm down, Rogue,” Thorne said quietly behind him. Rogue hadn’t even heard him walk in. He looked like he’d aged a decade in the last eighteen hours.

“How’s Dark? Did you see him?” Rogue asked, knowing Thorne had spent the night in the hospital.

“The swelling in his brain wasn’t going down. The doctors have placed him in an induced coma. Slate stayed back with him.”

“Fuck.” That wasn’t good news. For Dark, or for Bea. Their best bet to know what had really happened was for Dark to wake up and tell them what he remembered. Which still hadn’t happened—and wouldn’t happen, if he was in an induced coma.

“Slate will call us the moment there’s any change,” Thorne said. He pointed at the photograph on the wall. “For now, we work the case ourselves.”

“Unless there was someone hiding in the back, there was only one man in the car,” Griffin observed. “Caucasian, if we look at his hands.”

“One man who managed to overpower Dark,” Rogue observed.

Griffin rubbed his jaw. It was the first time Rogue saw his friend with more than a five-o'clock shadow, but then, none of them had wanted to waste time going back to the hotel the night before, so they’d simply taken over the office space the Chimera Force had rented in the outskirts of town. They’d each taken over one of the smaller offices, grabbing what sleep they could on the couch.

Thorne looked at the map on the wall in front of them. “The harbor is the obvious landmark running to the east of town, but we’ll get Ash to look into other possibilities and split up to investigate.”

Rogue nodded. He knew Ash had wanted to come to Antwerp as well, but somebody had to stay behind with Alexia and Reka. As safe as their Zurich headquarters were, in the short months they’d been active the Chimera Force team had made enemies.

“Where are Rahmer and Roberts? They should be here by now,” Thorne said impatiently, as if only just realizing they weren’t there. “Those two have been on our ass every minute of every day, and now that we need them, they’re nowhere to be found.”

Bea

The SUV stopped so suddenly that Bea, whose wrists were handcuffed to the passenger side door handle this time, couldn’t stop her head from hitting the window.

She bit her lip to stop herself from shouting out loud. The last thing she wanted was to call any more attention to herself.

“What the hell, Roberts?” Emiliano shouted from the third row of the vehicle, his voice muffled by the blankets Roberts had piled on top of him.

“Keep quiet. There are cop cars up ahead. Something’s going on,” Roberts said in a tense voice. His hands were white on the steering wheel.

Beside him on the passenger seat, Bea held herself very still, but every cell in her body vibrated with nervous energy. Whatever was going on, this might be her chance. If she could get someone to look at her, they would see her hands, and realize?—

“You sit there and look pretty,” Roberts muttered, his voice threatening. “Remember, Emiliano has a gun trained on you. If you so much as open your mouth, he will shoot you in the back. And believe me, it’s not a pretty death.”

Maybe not, but it’s preferable to the alternative. Even so, Bea knew she didn’t want to die. Not if she could avoid it. She’d been doing a lot of thinking in the last hours—not so much about the things she’d missed out on, but about the things that made life worth living.

Freedom made life worth living. Rogue made life worth living. And it wasn’t just because she was—and yes, she’d finally allowed herself to put words to it—falling in love with him. It was also that spending time with him and his team had made her realize that there were people out there in the world willing to help others. People who weren’t out there for their own self-interest, and who didn’t even talk about the good they did, or what they risked to help others.

If she survived—and that was still a big if at this point—she wanted to become one of those people. But first, she had to get away from Roberts and Emiliano. Stay alert.

The flashing blue lights grew closer. Finally, Bea saw the two police cars, positioned so there was only enough space between them for a single car to drive through.

The word Politie was printed on the side in large letters.

A young, blond policeman stood between the cars. He raised his hands. Bea’s heart soared—then fell to her feet a second later, as he waved them through. No. Please, no.

“Yes. That’s right,” Roberts muttered, his lips barely moving against his mouth. He looked more like a wax figure than a live man. “Don’t even think about it,” Roberts reminded her. “Remember the gun.”

In her mind, she begged the policeman to raise his eyes and look at her.

Please look this way. I’m here.

But his attention was already on the vehicle behind theirs.

Despair filled her, then. She didn’t stand a chance against Emiliano and Roberts on her own. If they got to the harbor, if they got her on a boat, it would all be over for her.

Suddenly, the van slowed down again. Bea looked up. The policeman was long gone, but there was another man on the road in front of them. Unlike the young policeman, this man wasn’t wearing a uniform. He wore dark pants and a blue shirt with the sleeves rolled up his arms. He looked like someone in authority—not like the type of man who’d be out monitoring traffic. His eyes, so dark they looked almost black, stopped on their van for a long instant, then widened.

“Fuck me,” Roberts said angrily.

“What’s going on now?” Emiliano asked angrily.

Again, Roberts’s lips barely moved when he replied. “That’s Thorne. He’s ex-Interpol. He works with Rogue. Stay down. Let me deal with this. And you,” he said, looking sideways at Bea, “shut the fuck up if you want to live.”

Thorne. The famous Thorne. She hadn’t yet met him in person, but he was the one who’d suggested to Rogue that he bring her back to the hacienda, back when they were in the jungle. She wasn’t likely to forget that. Roberts braked and rolled down the window.

“Thorne.”

“Hey. Roberts,” Thorne said, his voice much more affable than his somber expression seemed to imply.

Bea’s heart skipped a beat. This man might provide her the distraction she needed to escape. But he worked with Rogue. Could she leave him here? Could she leave, knowing she’d be signing his death warrant? She didn’t think she could.

Thorne leaned his upper body into the van. He still hadn’t even looked in her direction. “I’m so glad to see you, ” Thorne said. “Could you give me a lift back into town?”

Roberts nodded, his expression friendly. “Of course. Climb into the back.”

Bea glared at him, trying to catch his eye, but the man didn’t look up as he opened the SUV door.

It was only once he was inside the vehicle, sitting behind Roberts, that he looked up at her. “So. Are you going to introduce me to your friend, Roberts?”

Roberts took off slowly, engaging the lock as he did so. “How long have we known each other, Thorne?”

“Many years.”

“Many years,” Roberts nodded. “And in all that time, I’ve never known you to be stupid. So stop pretending to be stupid now. You know perfectly well who this is.”

Thorne nodded, relaxing back into his seat as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

“Okay. Cards on the table, then. I know this is Beatriz Cruz. What I don’t know is, where are you taking her?”

“I don’t think that’s any of your business,” Emiliano’s voice said, coming up from between the seats in the third row.

If Thorne was surprised, he didn’t let on. “Ah, Emiliano Cruz. How interesting.”

Roberts’s hands tightened on the steering wheel. He drove fast now that they were past the police. “Keep the gun trained on him, Emiliano. Shoot both of them if he moves.”

Bea turned her head to look at Thorne, expecting to see fear, concern. Instead, he winked at her, then looked away. “So that’s how it is,” he said, addressing Roberts once again. “I always knew there was something wrong with you, Roberts. The story around the office was, your family was very rich, and that’s how you could afford those fancy holidays, those nicer than normal suits, all those little extras.”

Roberts smiled. “That’s good to hear. I spent a lot of time and effort spreading those rumors. After all, what’s money for, if not to make life more enjoyable?” He shook his head. “Alas, now you’re going to have to die.” Thorne shrugged, as if it was all the same to him.

From the back of the car, Emiliano’s voice came loud and clear. He was no longer under the blankets. “Say goodnight, asshole.”

“Wait,” Roberts said. “We may still need him.” He tossed Thorne a pair of handcuffs. “Handcuff yourself to the door. And you, look forward.”

The metallic clack of the handcuffs sliding shut still resonated in Bea’s ears by the time the harbor came into sight.