Dead Man's Curve

The voices seemed to be floating toward them on the wind, coming from somewhere dead ahead. But all Sin could see in front of them were trees, trees and more trees.

Where were the voices coming from?

“Rest a second,” he whispered, letting Ava go. “I’ll scout ahead. If I run into trouble, you can go for help.”

Her lips pressed to a thin line. “I told you I’m not letting you out of my sight.”

“Damn it, Ava—”

“I’m not letting you out of my sight,” she repeated firmly. “Besides, I’m not sure I could make it back to the motel alone at this point,” she added, her voice softening. “So for better or worse, we stick together.”

“Stay as quiet as you can,” he warned, leading the way forward. He took care with each step, moving heel to toe with deliberation, eyeing the ground ahead of them for any potential pitfalls. The voices ahead grew steadily louder, and he could make out the high, excited pitch of the conversation. Spanish, of course, but he was fluent, so he had no trouble making out the words flying about in agitation.

“How’s your Spanish?” he whispered to Ava, who crept up beside him when he paused to listen.

“A little rusty,” she admitted. “Haven’t had a lot of chances to use it working in the Johnson City resident agency.”

“It’ll come back to you,” he assured her. But he interpreted anyway. “Someone’s taking hell for running from a bear.”

“Do you recognize who’s speaking?”

“Might be Cabrera,” he said, uncertain. “There’s a little echo. Can’t be sure yet.”

Suddenly, a woman’s voice rang in the night, her Spanish rapid-fire but American-accented. Sin’s heart clenched into a hot, hard fist.

Alicia.

“¿Dónde está mi esposo?” Fear battled with rage in her voice.

“She wants to know where her husband is,” he translated for Ava.

“Yeah, I got that,” she whispered grimly. “They probably killed him right off. Got rid of the extra baggage. One less captive to worry about.”

Sin had never met his brother-in-law, but he hoped like hell Ava was wrong. He’d found a lot of comfort in the idea of Alicia happily married to a man she loved, a man who was good to her, who loved her and protected her when Sin couldn’t.

He’d broken his sister’s heart when he’d gone to Sanselmo and joined the rebels. Knowing he was a wanted man, doing things she didn’t approve of for reasons she’d never understood—that kind of notoriety must have been hard for her to live with.

The last time he’d talked to her, he’d tried to explain himself, but even if he’d been able to find words to justify his actions, he couldn’t tell her the whole truth, not over the phone. Maintaining his cover with El Cambio had been crucial to staying alive.

She’d stopped listening anyway. “I hope the next time you set a bomb, you blow yourself up,” she’d told him, her voice raw with anger and pain.

Funny, he supposed, that he’d gone out and done exactly that, as far as she and the rest of the world were concerned.

As he strained to discern more of the verbal exchange between his sister and her captors, the cracking sound of a hand hitting flesh jolted through him, and Alicia’s angry questions ended in a sharp cry. An answering growl rose in Sin’s throat, and he rushed toward the sound of his sister’s cry without thinking, stealth forgotten.

Ava’s hands circled his arm and she dug her heels in, pulling him backward as he rushed forward. He tried to shake off her grip, but her fingers dug in harder, preventing him from dashing through the underbrush.

“Don’t be an idiot!” she growled. “Do you want to get her killed?”

He struggled to control himself, to ease his ragged breathing and hurl cold water on his sudden rage. Ava was right. He knew she was right.

But even as he regained control of his emotions, a white-hot ball of fury festered in the center of his chest, biding its time.

Sinclair would make Cabrera and his men pay for what they’d done to his sister. He was going to find great pleasure in making sure of it.

“They’re not going to do permanent damage to her, not while she’s leverage,” Ava whispered. He wished she sounded more confident.

“She’s right there! We can get her away from them.”

“Not without knowing how many people we have to take out to do it.” Her voice was firmer now, her quiet competence taking some of the edge off his desperation. He grounded himself in her calm gaze, taking a few slow, deep breaths.

“Okay. Okay.” He scanned the dark woods, listening to the sound of murmured conversation, trying to figure out from which direction it came. He pointed north, finally. “I think they’re ahead that way. We need to get close enough to see what’s what, but stay hidden.”

“You were El Cambio. You know more about how they work than I do. How many men would Cabrera bring with him on a mission like this?”

He could only guess. Cabrera had been ruthless, unwilling to risk any sort of mutiny among his underlings. He’d trusted few people. Sin had worked damned hard at being one of those people, and if Cabrera was here, looking for him, it was because he knew just how completely Sin had betrayed that trust.

Cabrera might be keeping Alicia alive now as leverage to get to Sin. But he didn’t kid himself. Cabrera’s only policy was scorched earth. There’d be no witnesses left when he was done.

“It doesn’t matter how many. We have to get her away from him.” The urgency of his fear forced the words from his tight throat.

“We need to get our eyes on that camp first. Know what we’re up against. We need to be smart about it.”

He caught her arm, tugging her around to look at him. Her eyes widened, her lips trembling apart.

The urge to kiss her, untimely and entirely out of the question, surged through him as powerfully as fear had done just a moment before. He had the ridiculous sense that if he could just kiss her, if he could feel her warm, soft body pressed to his, feel her fingers on his skin and breathe her breath into his lungs, everything would be okay.

He tore his gaze away, reminding himself that no matter what happened in the next few hours, everything would never be okay.

Ever.

He let her arm go. “Be very quiet and very careful. We’ll have only one chance to get this right.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw her check the magazine of her Glock. He reached into his pocket, pulled out one of the pistols he’d scavenged from Fuentes and Escalante and checked the magazine to see if there were any rounds left. The pistol, an FNS 9, held seventeen rounds. Fourteen remained.

He kept that one for himself and checked the other pistol. It was also an FN Herstel firearm, a twenty-round FN Five-seveN MK2. Eighteen rounds in that magazine. He offered the MK2 to Ava.

“Eighteen rounds. Use it first.”

She looked up at him, her eyes suddenly widening and her lips curling inward as she nervously licked her lips.

This is her first big challenge, he realized, suddenly feeling deeply sorry for her. Despite her training, despite the FBI credentials in her pocket and the Special Agent in front of her name, she’d probably never been in a situation as dangerous as what they were about to face.

“If you don’t want to do this, go,” he said quietly. “The motel should be due west. Be careful, stay out of sight and you’ll probably be there in a couple of hours. But I have to do this.”

Her nostrils flared. She took the MK2 from his hands, checked the ammo herself, sighted down the barrel to familiarize herself with it and gave a short nod. “Then let’s do this.”

Sin felt a cracking sensation in his chest, as if something had broken open and spilled out courage and fear in equal parts. Swallowing the fear and marshaling the courage, he followed Ava forward through the woods.

* * *

CABRERA AND HIS men had set up camp in a small, sheltered cove just over the edge of a shallow escarpment. Ava had nearly stumbled over the edge of the bluff, as the trees beyond the valley camouflaged the narrow dip between ridges. She pulled up short, grabbing the trunk of a nearby pine to keep from tumbling over the edge.

Ignoring the pain in her hip and the increasing tremble of her aching thigh muscles, she dropped to her belly, seeking and finding a clearer view of the small valley that lay about twenty yards below the ridgeline.

Sin nudged his way next to her, his body warm against hers. She drew strength and determination from the solid heat of him. Crazy, she thought, that I’m colluding with a terrorist to take down his buddies.

But since she’d looked up in the parking lot of the Mountain View Lodge and seen a ghost, insanity had become the least of her problems.

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