She’d rather have a clean shot to the head than be turned over to Soledad’s men. Death before dishonor—she laughed at the stupid idea. She could survive anything, would survive anything. There was only one question. If Matthew Ryder was dead, did she want to survive?
She could still feel him inside her body. She could still feel his steady, solid heartbeat beneath her as she slept in his arms, safe in a world full of danger. She wanted to be back in bed with him, hiding her face against his shoulder as she came down from what his clever hands, his mouth, his body could do to her.
She brought her wrists up to her teeth, trying to tear at the cable ties, but they were too strong, and she dropped them back in her lap. The room had been stripped, and the small toilet and sink off to one side would provide nothing to cut through the tough plastic that was digging into her wrists. She could try to kick out the window, enough to get a piece of glass that could cut the bond, but then Soledad’s men would hear her, and she didn’t want to think what would happen next.
What had she meant—that Billy had told her about the phone? Why would Billy have anything to do with that monstrous woman now that he knew exactly what he’d gotten himself into?
Unless her stupidity and blind faith had been monumental, and Billy had lied to her. Was it possible? Had she been wrong all this time, shielding her brother when he was a worse criminal than her older brothers? She wanted to bang her head against the wall, scream and cry and rail at her misguided trust. How could she have been such an idiot?
Still, she only had Soledad’s word for it, and Soledad could have fooled Billy as she fooled her. Anything was possible, but for the first time she was going to look at things with clear eyes and no emotion. Whether she wanted to believe it or not, Billy could have played her. And it was up to her to right the wrong.
If she ever got out of there. In that dark, awful room everything seemed completely hopeless, and all she could do was curl in on herself. She needed to sleep—it was the only way she’d be able to face Soledad the next day, face the threats and the baseball bat. Whether she could face the possibility of Ryder’s death was unthinkable.
For now, though, she had every intention of crying herself to sleep.
Chapter Twenty
Matthew Ryder was in a thoroughly savage mood. There were seven men guarding the ridiculously upscale house perched above the ravine that served as temporary headquarters for La Luz, and he’d killed three of them, incapacitated another, and one more might or might not make it. He didn’t care. He had a job to do, and he’d learned long ago not to let things get to him, at least not until long afterward, when the nightmares would come. That left two men, and the ones he’d killed weren’t equipped with radios. It would be a close call whether the dead men were discovered before he made his way out of here, but he figured he had till daylight at the very least.
It was easy enough to tell which room held Parker—only one had chains looped around the handles on the sliding door. He wasn’t crazy about dangling over the ravine, but he’d always been good at picking locks, and he disposed of it in record time, dropping the chain silently onto the deck.
He could see her on the floor, huddled on a mattress, and he took a deep breath to keep rage from blinding him. He couldn’t tell whether she was hurt or not, but he slid the door open silently, slipping into the room and closing the door behind him.
Christ, it was freezing in there! This ridiculous palace of glass and steel came equipped with air-conditioning, unheard of in this part of Calliveria, and someone had turned it on high. Parker had a thin blanket around her, but she was shivering in her sleep. He was going to kill Soledad—Madsen had given him his orders, and even without official sanction he wanted to rip her throat out and actually enjoy doing it. She was deliberately freezing Parker, and he could see where the cable ties cut into her wrists, and his rage grew hotter. Pulling out his knife, he knelt down beside her sleeping body, ready to slice through the bonds.
She erupted like a crazy woman, and it took all his control to keep her from cutting herself on his knife. She fought him, all silent fury, but he subdued her quickly, grabbing her bound wrists and holding them above her head as he covered her body with his. “It’s me,” he hissed in her ear, barely a whisper of sound, but she’d already recognized the feel of him, and she collapsed beneath him, panting slightly, her eyes gleaming in the darkness as she stared up at him.
“Hold still,” he said unnecessarily, and reached up to cut her wrists free. He could see the pain wash over her as the blood began to flow back through her arms, and he rubbed them, slowly, carefully, kneading the painful stiffness out of them.
“What are you doing here?” she whispered.
“Saving your ass,” he mouthed back.
“It’s a trap. They know you’re coming. There are men out there looking for . . .”
“They’re dead,” he said flatly. “The ones who are still alive are patrolling the outer edges of the property—they won’t find the bodies till tomorrow.”
She tried to sit up. “Then let’s go . . .” But he pushed her back down again.
“We’re not going anywhere until I finish my mission.”
“The smartphone,” she said wearily.
He didn’t answer. “We’ll stay in here until they unlock you tomorrow morning. As soon as you’re out of the way, I’ll take out the guards. Where’s the fucking smartphone?”
“On a table in the living room. I tried to talk Soledad into letting me work on it during the night but she refused.” She swallowed. “You were right about Soledad.”
He didn’t bother replying to the obvious. “What was she having you
do?”
“She wanted me to break the password, but none of the logical ones worked.”
He didn’t believe her. It had taken Jack less than forty-five minutes to hack into the phone once they’d found it beneath Parker’s mattress, and the password was the name of Billy’s pit bull. There was no way she wouldn’t have tried it during the time she had the phone, no way she could have missed the obvious. So she was lying to him as well as to Soledad.
It pissed him off, big-time. He caught her wrists in one hand and hauled them back over her head. “Feel like telling me the truth for once?”
She glared at him, and despite his annoyance he was glad she hadn’t lost her attitude. “If you’re not getting me out of here then go away,” she snapped, a little louder.