Heated Pursuit (Alpha Security #1)(43)
“Por favor, se?orita. Please. I insist you open the door.” Two heartbeats passed before he added, “Now.”
She forced her face neutral as she tugged open the door. For all the chills his gaze elicited—and not the good ones—she may as well have been wearing the dental-floss bikini instead of a tank top and shorts.
“As you can see, I’m fine.” She let her voice drip with cool annoyance.
“Very fine indeed, se?orita.” His overt attention slid over her shoulder and into the darkened room. “You’re alone.”
“Well, yeah. When the lights didn’t come back on, Rafael went looking for someone to find out what happened. Do you know when they’re going to come back on? Because I was in the middle of giving myself a pedicure. As it is, I’m probably going to have to start the whole thing over again.”
“It’ll be just a matter of time.”
“The sooner, the better.”
Marco’s eyes took a lazy stroll toward her cleavage before finally looking her square in the face. Seconds felt like hours as she held her breath. He narrowed his eyes, gave her another head-to-toe scan, then nodded. “Good night, se?orita.”
Penny didn’t wait to hear anything else. She closed the door, using it as a crutch to keep herself on her feet. Her heart hammered as she counted to ten and then pushed her ear to the door.
“Raúl!” Marco’s voice barked.
“Sir.”
“Find that bastard Rafael and bring him to me.”
“And your uncle?” Raúl asked. “What would you like me to do with him?”
“He stays where he is for the time being, as does the girl. Once I give her boyfriend a lesson about interfering in Fuentes business, I’ll see to her myself.” Marco’s voice lost all pretense of civility. It was the same tone from the alley, harsh and cruel. “No one makes a fool of me—especially some street-rat puta. Oh, and Raúl? I don’t really give a f*ck what kind of shape Rafael is in when you haul him back. If it suits your needs, drag him in piece by piece and stuffed in a f*cking barrel.”
Penny’s heart rate skyrocketed, and not because he called her a whore, or even because he appeared to recognize her from the alley after all. It was the fear of them getting to Rafe that made her feet move faster than she thought herself capable.
The shit had officially hit the rotating ceiling fan.
With one hard yank, she flipped open their suitcase. On packing, she’d made fun of Logan for slipping a mini-sized bug-out bag into the inside flap. As she shoved the meager clutch into her front pocket and silently shimmied out the patio door, she was no longer laughing.
*
Penny’s gut and Carlotta’s ramblings had been right on the money. About a half mile off the compound’s boundary, Rafe stumbled onto the bunker. But the inch of dust and cluttered debris hinted that it hadn’t been used in a damn long time.
With every step, broken vials crunched beneath his feet. Trash and paper littered the floor, and empty cots were pushed up against each wall, making an eerie aisle toward a purged medicine cabinet. It was a ghost clinic, and as disturbing as it was in its own right, it was nothing compared to the four sets of steel cuffs that adorned each of the twelve beds.
Sick f*cking bastards.
Praising his luck that Penny hadn’t been with him to see the evidence of Fuentes’s warped disposition, Rafe stepped out of the bunker, no sooner covering the vines back over the front door, when the sound of voices drifted through the trees. He flicked off his Maglite and pushed his back flat against a rock.
Two of Diego’s men stalked through the jungle, guns raised as they bitched about the rich American bastard they’d been ordered to haul in at the barrel of a gun—or in pieces. It didn’t take much to figure out that he was the bastard in question.
Too bad for those men that he had no intention of going along with either plan.
But if Fuentes sent his goons looking for him, he worried what they’d already done to Penny. Anger burned a gaping hole through his chest at the thought of anyone touching a hair on her head. Anyone who did would meet an untimely—and painful—end. Hell, he’d take a page out of their own twisted torture handbook and bring them back to Fuentes in the form of a jigsaw puzzle.
He needed to get back to her, and may the devil help the bastards who got in his way.
Footsteps circled the perimeter. The men bitched, their voices slowly fading as they distanced themselves from Rafe’s hiding niche. He anxiously waited for his opening and, when he saw it, dropped low and took his first step toward the mansion.
A second set of footsteps froze him to the spot.
Much lighter than the heavy footfalls from the security staff, this one was buoyant and quick. As if speed were a matter of life and death.
Penny.
Crouched, he moved slow, listening and judging, tracking her route. More than once, she came within close proximity of Diego’s men and had to bunker down into the brush. Rafe used the faint trace of vanilla shampoo to guide him to the imprint trail her tennis shoes left behind.
In a matter of minutes, he found her half-hidden in a cluster of drooping vines as she watched Fuentes’s brood less than ten feet away.
Careful not to make a noise, he slipped one hand over her mouth. Her body arched, prepped to fight him off before he murmured in her ear, “It’s me.”