Chapter 42
I jolted awake to the burnished glow of sunrise peeking through the leafy stalks as water splashed in a puddle and hushed voices snuck closer.
My grip firmed around Cillian’s knife as I slid down the driver’s seat.
Outlines of people approached from the dirty back windows and crept forward.
By the time they reached the front doors, I was contorted beneath the steering wheel, knife poised to strike the first man to open them.
A shadow obscured the light from the passenger window, and I braced for attack.
“She’s here.”
It didn’t hit me that it was French-accented English, not Spanish, until after the driver’s door opened and I leaped at my attacker, spiders and vipers be damned.
The knife stopped a finger’s width away from one of Cillian’s midnight-blue eyes.
Against the vibrant green of the banana plantation, his dark-ginger hair flared bright, streaked with highlights.
I blinked hard, not sure if I was hallucinating.
“You…” My throat was so dry, words croaked out of me. “Are you real?”
“Someone pass me water,” he called, cradling my sweaty head to his chest.
“You’re really here,” I whispered against the press of his body. “How?”
“I thought I’d lost you.” He squeezed me tighter. “Going off on your own, woman. What were you thinking? You shaved ten years off my life, if not more.”
“I was thinking,” I rasped against his shirt, “I had the best shot at neutralizing the sniper.”
It seemed a little counterintuitive to mention that I hadn’t accounted for the assassins having sedatives.
“Feck it, I’m just happy you’re alive. You’re not hurt, are you? Did they do anything to you?”
The panic in his touch as he checked me over left me shell-shocked. How long was I out for, for him to be so worried? A few hours? A day? More than that?
“Come on, lovebirds,” Liam cut in with a tap of his boot to Cillian’s arm. “Let’s get you up before her brother throws a fit.”
My brother?
A water bottle landed in my hands as I stood, and I glanced down at it in a daze. Cillian cracked it open and gave it a little push up to my mouth.
My head spun toward all the people huddled around us.
At least fifteen, if not more. Liam, with his signature wink.
Arthur, Big Charlie, and at least half a dozen more of Cillian’s men, their shoulders and necks marked with the O’Leary clan’s shamrock and skull tattoo.
Then there was Erel, serious and unruffled as ever, surrounded by men in tactical attire that I’d spotted on my brother’s estate over the years.
Lastly, and probably most surprisingly, there was my brother himself.
“Alizé,” Adrien De Villier said with a sharp nod in greeting.
Yep, that was my brother all right. Cold and to the point, with only a few rare niceties sprinkled in on rare occasions—except for his wife. She got everything no one else did. Good thing I wasn’t dying, or I’d keel over without receiving so much as a glint of concern, never mind a hug.
“You really know how to steal the attention,” he added in French.
I ignored the reprimand with a tired smile. Getting shipped to Colombia might not have been my end goal, but forcing his hand into getting involved…yeah, that was all me. His own fault, really. He and Erel should have taken me seriously when I first requested the hit on Sosa.
“So you’re working together?” I asked between gulps of cool, fresh water. If only I could bathe in it.
Sweat stains decorated what remained of my thermal outfit, and my hair clung to my face in patches. I felt like a petri dish cultured specifically for mosquitoes.
Just in case, I checked for spiders on the ground, the stalks, and clusters of bananas.
Nothing. Nevertheless, I stayed close to my husband, knife tight in my grip, in case one of them came at me.
Against men with guns, I hated being treated like a damsel in distress, but against spiders and critters, I’d play that role as if my life depended on it.
“Someone got herself kidnapped. There wasn’t much of a choice,” my brother snarked.
“Don’t lie. You’re enjoying being away from your desk right now.”
“Maybe,” he grumbled.
“How is Tessa’s pregnancy going?”
The crowd around me thinned considerably. Actually, come to think of it, none of the Irish, other than Cillian, lingered around anymore, not even his brother. I then caught sight of some of Endgame’s tactical team jogging in the direction of the road. What was going on?
“She’s wishing for her first trimester to end. So am I. I can’t deal with her being sick.”
“Uh huh,” I muttered absently, taking a step toward whatever commotion everyone was headed toward. “I heard that doesn’t last forever.”
He blocked my path, arms crossed, fists tucked beneath his armpits, and I grunted with annoyance at his stance.
“What?”
“Later, you and I”—he pointed between us with harsh gestures—“we need to talk.”
Granted, a lack of food was leaving me a bit woozy, and this heat was killing me, but I couldn’t find a single reason, aside from the Urabá cartel and our family’s alliance with the O’Learys, for us to pick up a conversation when we’d done swimmingly avoiding practically all discussions in months.
“What in the devil about?”
He cut the little distance between us with two strides, each one charged with his blustering need to always dominate the conversation.
Cillian made to step between us, but I held him back.
Adrien was all bark and no bite when it came to family.
His intimidation tactics had long ago stopped working on me. He just hadn’t figured that out yet.
“You’ll need to explain why my second announced to me on the plane here that he’s planning on leading an expansion branch in the US and wants my blessing.”
“Ah.” I scratched my cheek, half thrilled that Erel was finally willing to make Maeve his priority and move to the States as I’d suggested, and half pleased at how much it irked my younger brother. “What can I say? Feel the love and go with it.”
“Erel? In love?” My brother blew a raspberry.
The man in question pivoted around at the sound of his name, phone to his ear. He stood in the middle of the dirt road offshoot I had turned into last night before crashing into the grove of bananas. With his typical grouchy frown plastered on, he headed our way.
“Are we talking about the same man?” Adrien joked.
I shrugged as I finished the last drop of my water. “Maybe. Just maybe, his heart is as gooey on the inside as anyone else who’s found that one person they’re meant to be with. We all fall eventually.”
I gazed up at my husband lovingly. This man was the very definition of that for me.
Not once since he arrived had he left my side.
His hands hovered over my arms, never quite touching, which was a blessing in this sweltering, tropical oven.
It was the reassurance I needed not to crumble under the weight of all the stress I’d felt since waking up in that trunk.
“Alizé.” Erel breached the last few steps between us and extended his phone. Thunder roared overhead, the sky gone murky with clouds. “Maeve wants to talk to you.”
“Well, I’m off,” my brother said as I took the phone. He jogged toward the road and yelled, “Keep the channels open.”
Erel patted his satellite phone clipped to his waistband.
“What’s going on?” I asked my brother’s second-in-command.
“We’re doing exactly what you said you’d pay us for.”
I snorted. “As if. Payment was when you were going to get rid of Sosa as men for hire, but you never okayed it, and I never signed a contract. Guess that means now you’re doing it for free.”
“You sure you want to extort Endgame?”
I flashed him a teethy smile. “I think I’m okay with that.”
He rolled his eyes in a rare show of emotion. “Just answer the phone. Let her hear your voice. She’s flipping out. You know, I’m not sure I’m a big fan of this dependency she has on you.”
“Get used to it. It’s mutual.”
Thunder crashed above. A slight drizzle pattered onto the leaves sheltering us. Overhead, the clouds darkened with flashes of lightning caught within them. We probably had minutes before another violent downpour started.
Erel mimed putting the phone to my ear, and I did so, but there was something I needed to address first.
“Maeve, ma belle. Will you hold on a second?”
“Al, is that you?” The frantic pitch of her voice screeched through the line.
I covered the phone’s microphone and turned to my husband to find him watching Endgame’s team and his crew on a split-screen live video feed on a tablet.
Each group surrounded a compound, centered around a vast mansion, an oasis of palm trees, and a sprawling pool.
This had to be Sosa’s home. Apparently, I’d been a lot closer to it than I thought, and that sent a sudden chill scraping down my spine.
Escaping a car trunk had been one thing.
A locked-down cartel compound would have been a completely different set of circumstances.
Endgame’s team jumped the fenced perimeter and silenced the armed guards patrolling the edges of the estate. Then they advanced on the mansion from the back while the Irish rammed through the front gates, guns blazing, with a crashing boom that bled out from Cillian’s single earphone.
I nudged his arm with my elbow, and his attention flicked up to me, then back at the screen.
“Mari chéri, you should go out there with them. Wouldn’t you prefer to be there to deal with Sosa once and for all?”
“No,” he stated dryly with no room for hesitation. “This is where I belong. With you. They can handle it without me.”
“If you’re certain?”
“I am.”
His lingering kiss to the back of my hand dispelled all my doubts. It was tender and sweet, paired with a rare soft smile.