Chapter 1
Sheik Omair Al Arif sat in a dark corner of the cantina, sipping the last of his espresso as he watched the woman working the bar. She was the single pleasure he’d been afforded over the past few months as he’d bided his time in this sweltering Colombian rathole along the banks of the Tagua River, watching, waiting, listening for a sign the deal was about to go down.
He’d positioned himself at a round wooden table in the shadows, his back to the wall—an assassin’s habit. From this vantage point he could quietly watch the cantina door, as well as see who ventured in from a deck that tilted drunkenly over a coffee-colored estuary that snaked down through mangrove swamps to the sea.
Outside, monkeys screeched and swung from massive kapok trees that brooded over the building and sent giant roots down into the anaconda-infested waters. Inside, it was strangely empty for a Friday night. An older couple, maybe in their seventies, drank beer from big mugs at a table across the room. At another table a group of men—cacao plantation workers—huddled over drinks and smoked dark tobacco cigarettes, skin glistening. Every now and then one of them would glance furtively toward the door. This was the heart of cartel country—life here was cheap, everyone on the take, and eyes were constantly shadowed with mistrust and fear.
Music played softly from an old jukebox in the corner.
The barmaid was wiping down the counter, her body gleaming with sweat. Omair could see from the way she moved that she was well aware of his appreciative gaze. Tonight she wore her bloodred dress, his favorite. The fabric flowed like liquid over her Latina curves and plunged down the front of her chest to expose a smooth olive-skinned cleavage, along with just a tease of black lace bra. He enjoyed the way her raven hair fell thickly across her cheekbones as she moved, the way she tossed it back over her shoulders, the way her deep brown eyes made him think of sex.
Her name was Liliana. The men who drank at her bar called her Lili, and they were clearly smitten by her sensual aura, her husky laugh, her easy smile. Omair had deduced she was the mistress of the cantina owner, a low-level cartel player himself, and that if any one of these bar patrons actually dared touch Liliana they’d be found floating facedown in the Tagua by sunrise. And no one would even blink.
It was that illicit quality, that promise of danger, that made Lili all the more enticing to Omair. Over the past months she’d become something of an obsession, a heady drug to his system.
Women were Omair’s sole Dionysian weakness and one-night stands his specialty. His lifestyle did not accommodate anything more permanent. And when Omair did indulge he preferred his sex spiked with as much adrenaline and risk as possible because it made him feel truly alive for a few brief moments.
But Lili’s delectable cleavage was decidedly off-limits—a fling with the Hispanic temptress would be a sure ticket to trouble with the local cartel, and that could blow his mission, a duty to which Omair was bound by blood, honor and a fierce code of ancient desert justice.
A mission he could not—would not—fail.
No, he was not here to mess in the business of the malignant cartel that controlled this region of the Colombian jungle. He was here to avenge the murder of his oldest brother, Da’ud, along with the assassinations of his mother and father, the king and queen of Al Na’Jar. Someone was trying to kill off the Al Arif bloodline and overthrow the kingdom. Omair’s sole purpose in life right now was to hunt down and pick off those assassins one by one, then find the man who sent them, and kill him, too.
Only then would he go back to his job with a private army based off the west coast of Africa. Until that point he was a lone wolf, answerable to no one, and no thing, other than his ancient code of honor.
Already he’d meted out justice to two of Da’ud’s assassins. Now he was after the third—the one who’d wielded the ceremonial dagger that had sliced his brother’s neck to the spinal column as Da’ud slept on his yacht anchored off the beaches of Barcelona.