We loped away from the buildings, letting the darkness swallow us. I heard a muffled sound and glanced over. The woman was pushing against Arsen’s back again to angle herself up so she could see.
The sky was lit up behind us and the building they’d been in was a burning torch in the night. Anguish was written all over her face. There wasn’t time to stop and comfort her. Not that any of us were particularly good at comforting. We were made to kill. It was what we did best.
* * *
It tookus a couple hours to get back to our hideout. I held open the door as Arsen ducked through it. Somewhere along the way the woman had passed out again. It was better that way.
Arsen laid her on his cot and stood staring down at her as I lit a kerosene lamp.
“Why did we take her?” Sig asked, as he stomped through the door. “We damn near got caught.”
“Because I fucking said to,” I growled at him. Our eyes clashed, but he finally looked away with a muttered curse. I was still the ranking member in our little team. It didn’t matter that the three of us had been friends since we were eighteen and had all been trained at the same time. Sig might have pushed the envelope, but eventually he deferred to me.
“She’s gorgeous,” Arsen said, giving me a knowing look.
I made a sound of disgust and dismissed his remark, but he just smirked at me. The man knew me too well. There’d been another woman in their group, so I couldn’t even claim we’d saved her for that reason. No, I’d wanted her, so I took her. It was as simple as that.
“Sig, check her over,” I called out to him. He was by far the best medic of the three of us.
He flung a slew of curses at me, but I ignored his bad mood and watched as he searched the woman for wounds.
“She’s got a nasty cut on her head,” he murmured, as he took her hair from the bun.
It was long and dark. We hadn’t lit more than the bedside lamp, but I could see that it was a deep brown and fell to her waist.
My fingers itched to reach out and curl it around my fist. I didn’t move other than to lean against the wall and continue watching.
Arsen brought over a bowl of water and a rag. He handed it over then picked up his weapon.
“I’ll go do a perimeter sweep to make sure we weren’t followed.”
I nodded at him absently.
“What are we doing here, Rafe?” Sig asked, as he gently dabbed at the woman’s wound.
He didn’t need to clarify; I knew what he meant. He did so anyway.
“We just kidnapped an American Soldier. A female.” His blue eyes met mine. “There will be hell to pay. They’re not going to care who we are if they find out what we did.”
Our team had been assembled shortly after we’d turned eighteen, almost seventeen years ago. We had fit a certain profile, physically superior to our peers, but more importantly, a certain psychological profile. We were not the type to have lasting relationships, or be needy of family and ‘traditional’ lifestyles.
Arsen was the oldest of us, but only by a few months. The agency we’d worked for had taken us from our home countries, and molded us into warriors. I hadn’t been back to Italy in over ten years now and the last time I was there it was a brief visit. My parents didn’t know whether I was alive or dead. Same with the others. Two years ago Arsen had gone home to Bosnia to attend his father’s funeral, but Sig hadn’t been home to Sweden since he’d left at eighteen. Arsen had attended from a distance, no one knew he had gone.
We were warriors and it was easier to keep to ourselves. Families were ties we couldn’t afford to have. At some point they’d become a weakness for us if our enemies figured out who we were.
We’d split from our original company and struck out on our own when we were twenty-five. Now we sold our talents to the highest bidder. It was less about the money and more what the money allowed us to do. The higher paying the contract, the more serious the job. The more serious the job, the more fun we had. We rarely stayed in one place for too long. Being in Iraq for more than a year was going to make it the place we’d put down roots the longest in quite some time.
Sig was still griping about keeping the American. I gave him a dismissive snort. “They’ll think she died with the rest of her team. By the time they figure out—if they ever do—that she wasn’t in the building when it blew, we’ll be long gone.”
“And we’re just what...going to drag her along with us on our missions? We have four years out here before we can leave Iraq,” he reminded me. “And even then, we’ll be moving on to another mission.”
As if I needed his reminders. I shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Sheisbeautiful,” he said, agreeing with Arsen. His voice softened slightly. “All the more reason we should drop her off at the nearest American base and get the fuck back to our mission.”
He wasn’t wrong. I studied her face as she slept. She wasn’t what you would call traditionally beautiful. She was better than that, something that sparked a dark need inside of me. My friends’ reaction told me she’d had the same impact on them. She had high cheekbones, a pert nose, and rosy luscious lips. Those lips made me think wicked, dirty thoughts. When she’d been awake her hazel eyes had sparked with fury at me, especially after I’d bound and gagged her.
She’d been lucky we were running for our lives, otherwise I might have gagged her with something else. I wasn’t a civilized man. If she thought there would be some sort of code of conduct out here she’d soon learn differently. The four of us were now wraiths, swallowed up by the wilds of Iraq. No one would come looking for her. If they did, I’d make sure they wouldn’t find her. She was mine. Ours.