CHAPTER 11
That evening, Ali hid in the depths of the Delos jet. She was the only passenger, with two pilots up in the cockpit. She didn’t want the lights on, and asked that they be turned off. As soon as they reached altitude, she called her parents in Tucson. Emotionally, she wasn’t ready to see them or call them while she was still on the ground, even though it would have been easy enough to do. She was wiped out, feeling numb over Cara’s capture. She knew her parents felt the same way.
She spent twenty minutes on the phone with them, catching them up on what had happened—and hadn’t happened. Her parents were devastated over Cara’s capture, the anxiety eating away at them. They both felt helpless to do anything except pray. Her Yaqui mother was having a special Deer Clan ceremony for Cara. Ali believed all religions did good, whether the ceremony was in a church or out in the open. What counted was the integrity of the peoples’ hearts and the sincerity of their prayers. She praised her mother’s ingenuity, but then, she was her model for thinking outside the box.
Getting off the stressful phone call with her parents, she felt some of the tension dissolve in her shoulders as she tucked the sat phone away in her knapsack. Grateful to be alone, she stared out the round window, seeing the twinkling lights of Tucson looking like a colorful brooch pinned into the surrounding blackness. The city sat out in the middle of the Sonoran Desert—not many people lived outside the city proper.
Rubbing her face, she tried to ignore the constant throb in her wounded arm. A sigh escaped her lips as she lay the seat back, closing her eyes, incredibly exhausted by the day’s unexpected events. She’d called Captain Gomez earlier and he’d reported that Azarola had driven back into his mountain fortress earlier, now safe from capture once more. Gomez and his men would continue to keep watch on Cara and her imprisoned cohorts from Ali’s hideaway up in the pine tree that overlooked the fortress. He had promised that if the bandits took the captives out by vehicle from the fortress, he would immediately notify her. Further, Wyatt Lockwood had already contacted José’s Marine detachment and given him a PDF of the mission plan from Artemis. Again, the captain reassured her that he would work closely with the Artemis team. They all had the same focus: to rescue those women and get them out of Azarola’s clutches.
She could sleep now, albeit lightly and fitfully. Getting shot was a big deal, whether Ali wanted to admit it or not. She had less than forty-eight hours before the Artemis mission was launched and knew she had to suppress her emotions and focus on Cara’s rescue. Her sister needed every bit of her attention now.
Cara was Ali’s exact opposite. She took after her father, who was a Type B, instead of her Type A mother. She was everything Ali wasn’t: patient toward others. She didn’t have a violent bone in her DNA. But Ali did. Her mother came from a line of Yaqui Indian women warriors and she had that same combative, in-your-face personality that matched her mother’s genes to a “T.”
If only Cara had some of their mother’s strength of spirit—but she didn’t. Cara was helpless except when it came to the kindergarten children she taught. Then, she was a fierce mother bear protecting her cubs and Ali saw the warrior come out in her. A slight smile tugged at Ali’s lips as she fell a little more into that netherworld just before sleep would claim her.
Cara wasn’t mechanically minded, she wasn’t pro-active, and she didn’t have much warrior blood in her. She didn’t survive well in the world, still living at home with her parents, never going out on her own to establish an independent life. That would work against Cara in every possible way in her current predicament, and new tears formed behind Ali’s closed eyes. She loved her baby sister, always protecting her and defending her. Ali had once confronted three boys who were bullying Cara when she was in the third grade. They never bothered her again, and word got out that her tough sister, Ali, was her guard dog. From then on, the bullying stopped.
Now, an unhappy, frustrated Ali wiped her eyes with her fingers. She couldn’t start crying because if she did, she’d wail out her terror about being shot. She could have died—Ali wanted to live, not die. But her strong emotions were roiling within her and she couldn’t ignore them. Not this time.
Just thinking of innocent Cara, unable to defend herself, tore Ali up in so many ways. She knew about the exploding sex-trafficking business run by drug lords in Central and South America. She’d even rescued survivors from it and seen the terror in their eyes, seen them cowering like beaten dogs, terrified of doing the wrong thing, of being abused and beaten. It made her sick.
These women and children no longer controlled their own bodies. Some survivors had told her they would service from twenty to thirty men a day in the small, cramped room where they were kept incarcerated.
Ali just couldn’t wrap her mind around it. Turning on her right side, cradling her wounded arm against her body, she tried to go to sleep. Casting around for anything but sex trafficking and Cara’s dangerous predicament, she tried to blank out her mind.
Up popped Ram Torres’s smiling face.
Not him!
Her eyes flew open and she glared into the darkness. Dammit!
Growling, she pushed herself onto her back against the seat, angry with herself. Ram’s amused face, square, a three-day-old growth of dark beard making him look even more sensual, stared back at Ali. He had straight black brows across large, green eyes that missed nothing. Even his spiky black lashes made his hard, ruthless gaze suggest a challenge to her. He was the worst Type-A person she’d ever run into—man or woman. There were times when his brazen confidence oozed out of his pores and oddly, made her feel safe. Most of the time, however, it only increased her resistance to him, and made her compete even more for the gift of “being right.”
Neither of them, she’d finally decided, had ever left a tossed gauntlet lay unnoticed. Instead, they would both seize the challenge and enter the fray with gusto and confidence toward each other—however, some of those activities ceased after Lockwood’s warning to Torres.
Ali hated that he looked for ways to prove her inferiority to the other men. In response, she never gave him an opportunity to do so, and worked hard to be damned good at what she did—and she was as good as any SEAL in a firefight—sometimes better.
But if truth be told, Ali liked seeing Ram’s handsome, hard features. Hard was the right word. There was nothing soft about the man. At least, she’d never seen it, although Lockwood had told her he was a big softy underneath that armor he wore. Ali had scoffed at Wyatt’s observation.
Blowing out a puff of air, Ali opened her eyes, staring sightlessly up at the cabin ceiling. Maybe she needed to ask Ram about his family when she saw him at Artemis. She already knew Wyatt wanted her to bury the hatchet with him.
And she did too, but for other reasons. She wanted her sister back, untouched, unhurt, and safe with her parents again on the US side of the border. Ali would do anything to see that happen—even getting along with her worst nightmare: Ram Torres. She’d make this work between them or die trying. Cara was her focus. She was done with the childish competition that had constantly arisen between them in the SEAL team. But since her talk with Wyatt so long ago, a lot of the vitriol between her and Ram stopped. Ali simply wouldn’t play into Ram’s hands. She knew where his wounding had come from. As a result, it had helped settle the team and more peace and less aggravation reigned in it on her second deployment with them.
But having just been shot by a drug soldier, added to her continuing emotional meltdown. It was bad enough she’d been wounded. But her sister was in a life-and-death situation, too. Both contributed to her vast emotional response and she wrestled to control it. She was irritable, angry, and wanted to cry. She had to rein in her feelings, even if Torres brutally triggered them. There wasn’t a chance in hell she’d tell him she’d been shot. That would get her kicked off his team before she could blink.
Ram wasn’t a mean person by nature, he just reacted without thinking. He reacted swiftly and didn’t realize how he came across to the person in his gunsights. Ali had seen him being kind to the Afghan villagers and especially to their children, so he wasn’t really a bastard—just messed up like most of the human population. Maybe a little more. She didn’t know. And if he knew she’d been shot, she was pretty sure he’d be kinder toward her. But she couldn’t risk anyone—not even Wyatt—knowing what had happened to her earlier this morning. She had to be a team member and not create discord, even if it was he who was really causing it. Feeling trapped, with no way out, Ali knew she was going to have to gut out this mission and make the best of it. There was nowhere to hide, and nowhere to run to get away from Torres this time. He was now, once more, front and center in her life. She was trapped.
As sleep claimed Ali, her last thoughts were that she didn’t know how she was going to make peace with Torres. It had been three years with him out of her life. How would he react to knowing she was on his team for this operation? She’d give anything to see his reaction!