Seal of Honor(42)

She gasped and looked at the closed door. “Your men?”

“Don’t think so.”

“Oh God.” Her knees wobbled and she sank to the feedbags, shaky hands covering her face. “When will this nightmare end?”

“Hey.” Gabe slung the AK-47 over his shoulder and gathered her in his arms, securing her against his chest with his chin on the top of her head. “I promised nothing’s going to happen to you and I keep my promises. Stay steady and do what I tell you and we’ll be fine. Okay?

“Audrey?” he said when she didn’t answer, and lifted her chin with the crook of his finger. “Can you stay steady for me?”

Her eyes shimmered with tears, but she nodded. So strong. A lesser woman would be an unstable mess right now. Hell, most Average Joe civilians would be, too. That she kept it together with no training to rely on was amazing to him.

“I won’t fall apart now.” With a watery smile she added, “Can’t make any guarantees for later, though.”

“Now’s all I need.” He pressed a quick kiss to her forehead before releasing her. “When I open the door, be as quiet as you can and run straight to the poppy field. Don’t wait for me. Run until you reach the other side, then hide. I’ll whistle twice when it’s safe.” He whistled softly in one short burst followed by a longer one. “If you don’t hear that, stay put.”

Biting down hard on her lower lip, she nodded again. Gabe turned toward the door, rifle aimed, heart thundering behind his ribs. It should have been steady—this was a cakewalk compared to other situations he’d been in as a SEAL—but Audrey changed the stakes. All that mattered was that she got out alive.

A quick glance at her showed him she was ready. Or as ready as she was going to be. He sucked in a breath, held it until his heart slowed, let it go in a slow exhale, and pushed open the door.

“Go.”

…

Jacinto Rivera’s current flop was three blocks down from the warehouse Ian and Jesse planned to make a crater, which really wasn’t a big surprise. The fact that it was less than a half step up from a shithole, however, was. Knowing what Quinn knew about Angel Rivera’s love of luxury, he’d assumed Jacinto rode on his brother’s coattails, living the good life for nothing. This was not the good life.

After clearing the apartment’s second floor—not that anyone cared who they were or what they were doing; in this kind of neighborhood, people kept out of their neighbor’s business—Quinn had stood lookout while Marcus made short work of the flimsy lock on Jacinto Rivera’s door. The nearly empty apartment smelled like spoiled milk, food gone over, and rotting flesh.

“Ugh.” Marcus raised his brows at the stench and lifted the edge of his shirt to cover his nose as they slipped inside. “Something’s dead.”

Well, wasn’t Deangelo a regular Sherlock Holmes. Quinn scanned the tiny apartment. “Let’s hope it’s not Jacinto Rivera.”

If so, they were back to square one in their search for Bryson Van Amee, and time, that persistent fucker, kept ticking away. Everything that could go wrong so far already had. Harvard was having trouble digging up enough intel on the EPC, which was slowing down their search. The warehouse job was eating up time and manpower, but no way in hell was Quinn leaving all those explosives in the hands of the enemy. Oh, and let’s not forget Gabe was MIA.

Best case, Bryson would resurface unscathed after the ransom, his insurance company sixty-some million dollars poorer. Or, more likely, his captors would kill him and dump his body somewhere it’d never be found and the insurance company would still lose a couple million to his estate. Either way, it’d count as a loss for HumInt Consulting Inc.’s newly minted Hostage Rescue and Negotiation Team, and that was just not acceptable.

“It’s not Rivera,” Marcus called and Quinn turned toward him. He stood in the small kitchenette off the main room, gazing into the open refrigerator. “Not unless he’s small and furry. Stray cat, and it’s been here a while. Looks like it starved to death.”

“In the fridge?”

“Talk about your ironic death.” With his shirt still tucked up over his nose, he lifted his head to study the rest of the apartment. His dark eyes crinkled in disgust. “Nobody lives here. How could they?”

Quinn made a noncommittal sound, not about to admit he’d grown up in an apartment in Baltimore not much better than this, with an alcoholic father that beat him senseless on a daily basis and a mother too stoned to care. It was something he’d never admitted to anyone. Not even Gabe.