Full Throttle (Black Knights Inc. #7)(4)
This time her voice actually had some volume behind it. Still, no one answered her. And her fear quickly turned into panic. She began to struggle.
“Shh, Abby,” Carlos’s low baritone sounded in her ear, his hot breath fanning her cheek. “Stay still until the agents tell us it’s okay to move.”
“What is it?” she begged him, a strange sense of foreboding tickling the back of her brain. There was something… “What’s going on?”
“I can’t tell,” he said. “There was some sort of blast and—”
The squeal of tires on asphalt echoed a second before the big knobby wheels of a black, government-issue SUV bounced over the curb not five feet from her head.
“Okay, let’s go!” Agent Mitchell shouted as two of her bodyguards grabbed Carlos’s arms to haul him off her. The next instant she was plucked from the pavement as easily as she and her mother plucked the bad buds from the rose bushes planted around the beech tree back home.
And it was strange she should make that comparison. Because as the agents wrestled her toward the open door of the waiting SUV, she was finally able to take in the scene around her. Glass and debris littered the sidewalk and street. Smoke and flames billowed from somewhere up the way. People were darting wildly this way and that or else huddled together in tight packs on the ground. And speckling everything, the road, the people, the wreckage, was a slick crimson substance the exact color of the roses on those bushes.
Blood. That was blood. Jesus…
She struggled against the agents, that sense of foreboding having morphed into a terrible, sickening dread. “Stop it!” she shouted at them, needing to get to Carlos. He was standing on the sidewalk, staring straight ahead. And the look on his face was indescribable, some sort of horrible mix of terror, disbelief, and denial. “Let me go! I need to—”
“Abby?” He turned to her, his voice raspy and barely audible above the turmoil around them. “Was Rosa in the coffee shop?”
The coffee shop? Had the blast come from there? No. No! It couldn’t have. But she couldn’t see to assure herself of that, not with agents and the SUV’s door blocking her view. Her heart was poised to explode inside her chest. “P-probably. I was running l-late,” she told him.
She barely finished the sentence before he took off up the sidewalk, screaming Rosa’s name over and over again in a voice she was sure to hear in her nightmares. The very next instant she was shoved inside the SUV, agents piling in all around her and pinning her arms and legs when she fought them with everything she had, biting, hissing, scratching.
Rosa! Oh God, no! The phrase blasted over and over again inside the confines of her skull, and with each repetition the very fabric of her soul ripped anew. “Let me go!” she yelled at her security detail. “I have to see! I have to find Rosa! I have to help Carlos! I have to—”
“Abby!” Agent Mitchell bellowed from beside her, slapping his wide palm over her mouth. “There’s nothing you can do! We’re getting you out of here!”
On that cue, the driver threw the vehicle into gear. She could feel the big tires spin violently before their tread gripped the pavement, shooting the SUV forward. Thrown back into the bucket seat with head-whipping force, she wailed, “No, no, no!” when Agent Mitchell’s hand fell away. Panic and shock had turned her into a wild animal that bucked and heaved and desperately fought for freedom. That is, until the gaping, charred hole that used to be the coffee shop buzzed by outside the window. She stilled as the full measure of what had happened dawned on her. And an awful, horrifying thought slipped through her mind.
This is my fault…
With that, she began to scream in earnest. Scream until her vocal cords shredded. Scream until a blood vessel in her right eye burst…
Chapter One
Hotel Novotel
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia
Present day…
Carlos Soto, known to everyone in the spec-ops community as “Steady,” lounged at the end of the ritzy hotel bar, casually watching his best friend, Ethan “Ozzie” Sykes, work his masculine wiles on the cute off-duty Secret Service agent seated at a nearby table.
“Ozzie is a serial seducer,” Dan Currington observed from the barstool beside him. Dan was the third and final member of Black Knights Inc. to accompany him on this mission. BKI being the covert government defense firm that operated under the guise of a custom motorcycle shop—okay, and sometimes Steady still had trouble believing such an entity actually existed; it was like something out of a bad spy novel.
“Sí,” he admitted with an affectionate chuckle, smiling as Ozzie leaned over to whisper something into the shell of the agent’s ear. The woman blushed and giggled, and Steady could only shake his head. “But the ladies never seem to mind. I don’t know how he pulls it off time after time.”
“You don’t?” Dan turned to lift a dubious brow as he took a leisurely sip of seltzer water. “I thought you two were neck and neck in that whole notches-on-the-bedpost race.”
Steady frowned at the bottle of Tiger beer in his hand. It was true. For a couple of years there, he’d given Ozzie a run for the money in the bedding of bar bunnies. But recently the…er…hunt had lost its allure.
“I think I’m about done with all that, hermano. It just seems so…” He twisted his lips, searching for the word. “Superficial, I guess. Unfulfilling? I don’t know.” He shrugged. “And besides, I was never as good at it as Ozzie.” He tipped his beer toward the table where the unrefuted king of casual relationships was now fiddling with the agent’s fingers. Julia Ledbetter. That was her name. And she resembled a Secret Service agent about as much as a Chihuahua resembled a Doberman. But Steady supposed that was part of it. Protection through subterfuge and meek-but-mighty camouflage. Although, if you asked him, there was something to be said for the fierce, bulldog demeanor that good ol’ Agent Mitchell had sported.