Broken Honor (14 page)

Ignoring his outstretched hand, she stood and followed him across the yard, her feet numbing inside her tennis shoes with every step. The house that came into view as they circled around the barn was bigger than she would’ve guessed, two stories tall and painted with absurdly cheerful colors.

Zaryanko led her up the porch steps and opened the front door. It was warm inside, and the front foyer looked the same as any country cottage found in the United States. The clash of her expectations versus reality gave her an instant headache.

Nikolai motioned her inside. “In.”

Despite the warmth spilling from the house, beckoning her inside, she hesitated. “Are you really going to sell me?” The question popped out before her brain weighed the pros and cons of asking it, and she expected him to hit her like he had Olesea, but he merely shrugged.

“Would you rather I kill you?” He asked the question casually, like it was one he posed every day.

She recoiled. “No.”

“Nothing to do with you,” he repeated. “Just business. All of this? Just business. I have a family to care for.”

“What about my family?”

He said nothing more and gestured to the house.

Trembling from the cold, she walked inside and then climbed the stairs when he motioned for her to go up. On the second floor, he unlocked a door and pushed it open. It was dark inside and the stale air stank of unwashed humans. She swallowed hard, prayed to her dad for strength, and stepped over the threshold, but turned around to meet his gaze before he shut the door.

In that instant, she thought of her mother. Would Rosa Escareno miss her if she disappeared forever? Would Rosa even know? Ramon had such a firm grip on her, she might not even find out Mara was gone. Her brother, Matt, would notice. Jesse and his parents definitely would, and they’d all miss her. Her throat closed up at the thought of never seeing any of them again. “My family needs me, too, Nikolai.”

He cocked his head slightly as if giving real consideration to her words. “Hmm, yes. But in this world, some people are…sheep. You are sheep. Others are like wolf.”

“And you’re the wolf?”

“No.” He gave a toothy smile. “I am a businessman, nothing more. I simply sell the sheep to any wolf willing to pay.”

Her body froze down to the bone as the door shut in her face. The soft
thunk
of the lock sliding into place sounded very final.

She released a breath in a shudder. She wouldn’t cry. It would only exhaust her, and if Travis found her—no,
when
he found her—she’d need her strength. Because he would come for her. She had to hang on to that hope or go insane.

A scrape of a footstep sounded behind her. She whirled and groped for a light switch, but her hand slid along nothing but bare wall.

“You will not find a light,” a soft female voice said in Russian.

Mara froze. It took her a moment to translate and then another to find the words she needed to communicate. “Who are you?”

“Dasia.” Movement in the darkness, and then a curtain opened to let in a pale square of yellow light from outside. A woman stood near the window, a hand resting on her hugely pregnant belly. She was so big she must have been having twins.

Two more women stepped into the light, both little more than girls and both pregnant. Mara touched her own belly as a swell of nausea rolled through her. These women—girls—were here to be sold. Did they know that? She scanned their faces and saw exhaustion and resignation in each.

Yes, they knew.

She swallowed back the lump of sorrow blocking her throat. “How long…uh, have you been here?”

Dasia winced. “You are not from here. Your Russian is bad.”

Mara shook her head. “American,” she said in English. “Do any of you know English?
Español
?
”

She received nothing but blank looks in return. Okay. They’d just have to suffer with her mangled Russian. “How long have you been here?” she repeated, trying to enunciate clearly and make sure her tone and inflections were correct. She must have still bungled it, though, because it took several moments of soft discussion among the women before they figured out what she meant.

“A week for me,” Dasia said. She motioned to the youngest looking of the group, a small blonde who was maybe halfway through her pregnancy. “Lizabeta arrived three days ago. Oxana”—she indicated the short brunette who was also very pregnant—“yesterday.”

“Do you know why you’re here?”

Again, the three murmured among themselves, then Dasia nodded. “We’re going abroad to sell our babies.”

“You want to?”

All three nodded enthusiastically. “It will pay off our debt to Nikolai,” Dasia explained, “and we’ll be free to go home. It’s a good thing.”

Oh, God. They truly thought Zaryanko would let them go if they sold their children.

Mara remembered in vivid detail how Zaryanko had so coldly ordered the execution of a woman on that runway in New Mexico because she was too ugly and how he’d originally planned to kill Mara herself for being too fat. She pressed a hand over her mouth to hold back a sob. These women would have baby weight after they delivered. Would Zaryanko consider them too fat to be of use then?

How could she make them understand they’d never be free unless they escaped? She didn’t have a good enough command of the language to tell them the information she knew from Travis or about the brutality she’d seen. But she had to try. “Dasia—”

The doorknob rattled, and the three women scattered like frightened woodland creatures as the door swung open.

Mara turned to face Zaryanko again, but it was that nasty woman Olesea this time. She snapped out a command Mara didn’t catch and the other women darted from the room. Mara didn’t move. She didn’t know what Zaryanko had said to Olesea by the shed outside, but she had little doubt it was something along the lines of “don’t damage the merchandise.”

“You won’t harm me,” Mara said in English. “You’re as afraid of Zaryanko as the rest of us.”

Olesea’s sunken eyes widened. She stalked forward and grabbed a handful of Mara’s hair, twisting hard. Pain exploded across Mara’s scalp, and she dropped to her knees.

“I will harm you,” Olesea said in heavily accent English. “I leave no marks. Nikolai never knows.” She shoved Mara out of the room. “In my house, you work for the roof over your head. Now go.”

Chapter Fifteen

“Here’s what we have.” As the van bumped over an unpaved road an hour later, Quinn briefed the team. “The last message Mara sent me pinged off this cell phone tower here.” He marked an X on a topography map, then braced himself against the wall when the van hit a pothole that nearly sent it airborne.

“Sorry,” Harvard said.

“Fuck, where’d you learn to drive?” Ian asked.

“Do you think you can do better?” Harvard demand
ed. “This road doesn’t have ruts. It has canyons.”

“Don’t listen to them,” Lanie said from the passenger seat. “Just get us there in one piece.”

Once the van evened out, Quinn returned to the briefing. “Based on the topography, the cell tower’s range, and the low population density of the area, the call originated from this village of about fifty people.” He called up satellite images of the area on Harvard’s laptop and turned the screen toward the guys. He zoomed in on a blue two-story house seated just outside the village. “This place is our target. The property is gated, and we have no intel on security. It’s on a hill, and the land around it is flat, with only these trees here”—he drew a circle with his finger around the tree line at the back of the property—“for cover.”

“It’s a logistical nightmare,” Seth muttered.

“Pretty much,” Gabe said.

“The house is owned by a fifty-one-year-old woman named Olesea Alistratova,” Quinn continued. “Which matches the name Mara gave us, so it’s a safe bet this is the right place.”

Lanie glanced back. “Why would this woman help Zaryanko?”

“She was probably once trafficked herself,” Marcus explained. “That’s how these rings work. They’ll trick a woman into going with them by offering her employment abroad, then addict her to drugs and make her work off some arbitrarily assigned debt that she’ll never be able to pay back. If the women survive that, many of them are so broken they can’t return to their lives before they were taken and end up as recruiters for the traffickers. It allows them to continue paying off their debt and even make a living without being forced to prostitute themselves.”

“Jesus,” Lanie breathed.

Stomach knotted, Quinn met each of the guys’ gazes in turn, finally settling on Jesse. “This might be our best chance to rescue her before Zaryanko ships her to Dubai. We can’t fail. We—” His voice cracked, but he didn’t bother clearing the emotion from his throat. He needed Jesse to know how sorry he was for all of this. Needed the medic to know that if it came to it, he’d give his life to make sure Mara made it home safe. “We can’t fail,” he repeated softly.

Jesse glanced away and sucked in a choppy breath.

Gabe grasped each of their shoulders. “We won’t fail. We’ll get her back.”

A beat of heavy silence passed. Quinn knew if anyone could do it, it was this group of men bouncing around with him in a van going way too fast on the rutted road. But fear still ate at him with jagged teeth. He had to lock that shit down and concentrate.

Finally, he straightened and pointed to the map again. “There’s about a foot of snow on the ground around Olesea’s house, which is going to make a covert attack hard to pull off. I’m open to ideas here, guys.”

They pored over the maps and satellite images for several bumpy miles.

“Looks like the biggest area of weakness is the back of the house,” Jean-Luc finally said. “More cover for us.”

Quinn shook his head. “We don’t want to be fighting uphill. Nothing drains you faster.”

“So we sniper crawl in,” Seth said. “We have our snow camo. If we take it easy enough, we can be on their back porch before they realize it.”

“They’re not expectin’ us,” Jesse said with a nod of agreement. “We have that to our advantage, and the slow crawl in will give us time to scope out the opposition force.”

“If there is one,” Ian said.

“Yeah. If.” Quinn rubbed his hands over his face. There were too many fucking ifs for his liking and only two certainties: Mara was in that house, and he wanted her back.

…

As darkness fell, Mara stopped scrubbing the living room floor to peek out the windows whenever Olesea wasn’t looking. Ever since she’d sent that text to Travis’s phone, she’d hoped…

But maybe he hadn’t gotten the messages. Or maybe he had received them, but her blind typing made no sense. There were so many ways her plan, as feeble as it was, could have gone wrong, and with each passing hour, she grew more and more desperate.

She couldn’t stay here and wait for
Zaryanko to whisk her off to Dubai. But without help, she didn’t see how she could possibly—

“Psst.”

She glanced over at Dasia, who made a scrubbing motion with her hands and whispered in Russian, “Work.”

Mara shook her head and searched for the words she needed. “Four of us. One of her.”

Dasia’s blue eyes rounded, huge in her too-thin face. “No. Keep working! We’ll all be punished.”

Didn’t Dasia realize that breathing was a punishable offense in this place? Olesea enjoyed hurting them. And if she was going to be punished anyway, simply for existing, she might as well attempt an escape. She shook her head again and stood.

“What are you doing?” Olesea stalked across the room and backhanded Mara so hard she drew blood. “Get back to work,
cyka
!”

Mara straightened from the blow and tasted copper on her lips. Realizing she clenched the sponge so hard her nails dug half moons into her palm, she loosened her fingers until it fell out of her hand and hit the floor with a wet slap. “
Nyet.
”

Olesea’s mouth dropped open. Apparently, she was so used to blind compliance from the women she housed, she hadn’t expected a rebellion. “Excuse me?”

“
Nyet. Ya ne tvoy rab,
” Mara said, struggling to make sure the Russian came out clearly.

Olesea laughed. Actually laughed, and the skeletal fingers of fear scraped down Mara’s spine, but she held her ground. The other three women recoiled in terror.

“
Ya ne tvoy rab,
” she repeated, and even though her voice trembled, she lifted her chin in defiance. “I am not your slave, you bitch.”

“Not my slave?” Olesea’s hand whipped out again, striking Mara across her cheek so hard she stumbled sideways. “We shall see.”

…

“Cajun to Achilles.” Jean-Luc’s voice crackled through Quinn’s earpiece, loud in the muffled winter evening as he lay, belly to the snow, still fifty yards from the house. He stopped crawling and flattened himself out on the snow as much as he could, scanning the area around him for any immediate threats before he answered the radio call. “Cajun, Achilles. Go ahead.”

“Be advised, there is movement in the house. Looks and sounds like a fight in there. How do you copy?”

“Good copy. D
o you have eyes on any tangos?”

“Negative.”

Damn. “Anyone have eyes on?”

“Ace to Achilles,” Seth said. “I count one female tango in the house and one female hotel. Three female unknowns. I have visual confirmation of hotel’s identity. Over.”

Visual confirmation of the hotel—hostage. Of Mara. Quinn rested his forehead on his arm for a moment and gave himself a chance to recover from the explosion of pure joy that sang through him at the words. He had to stay focused. Think like an operative. Just because he now knew Mara was inside didn’t mean he could let down his guard until she was safe in friendly territory. This was always the most dangerous part of any snatch-and-grab mission.

The radio crackled again. “Harvard to Achilles. Be advised, I have a car headed toward your position. ETA three mikes.”

Quinn lifted his head and squinted toward the house. Harvard waited in the van a mile down the road, but Quinn could already hear the incoming car. Hard not to when the struts squeaked with every bump on the road. “Copy that. How many passengers?”

“Four,” Harvard said. “Driver looks like Nikolai Zaryanko. Over.”

“Copy that.” All ideas of doing this covertly just went to hell. They had made a tactical mistake, wasting too much time trying to sneak up on a house that was barely guarded, and now they had four likely armed men bearing down on them. Quinn would kick himself for it later. Right now, he needed to get Mara out of that fucking house.

“Achilles to team,” he said into his mic. “You have permission to engage. Go in hot.”